by Gabriel Roth
“Oh, Molly, you want to hear yours?” asked Michelle.
“What did you write about me?” Molly asked me. I began to jiggle my leg rhythmically, counting the beats in groups of four and sets of sixteen.
“Yours is short,” Michelle said. “Molly Clarke: Quiet, shy. Went to Japan on vacation—interested in Japan.” I had thought it might be useful to know that, for some reason.
“Did he really call you a user?” asked Allison Ketcham, who had been omitted from the notebook for her strange pockmarked face and the frizzy hair that exploded from her scrunchie.
“Yeah, yeah, you wanna hear mine?” said Michelle. “OK: Michelle Kessel—smart, pretty. Nice legs—” and here she paused dramatically “—or just short skirts?” There was laughter, maybe more than she would have liked. “Likes to be in charge. Doesn’t laugh much. Lots of makeup. Popular. User.” She stepped on the last word hard, as though killing a bug. She skipped the next sentence: Switches best friends a lot: Beth Gillman/Vicki Gordon/Liz Anderman/Louise Treadwell. I caught her eye and realized that she wasn’t just having fun—I’d made an enemy.
To Louise, in a stage whisper, she said, “Can I read yours?” There was no way the crowd would have let her skip Louise’s entry once she’d announced its existence.
“Louise Treadwell,” Michelle read. “Pretty, blond (dyed?), sexy clothes. Kind of dumb.” She enunciated this last very clearly, looking straight at me. “Always turns in work late, says she left it at home. Mean.” She omitted Always with Michelle.
“I think that’s all the people in this class,” said Michelle. She had left out Tara’s entry, in which I had recorded Michelle and Louise’s corruption of Tara’s innocent love for her My Little Ponies. “You guys want to hear some of the others? You want to hear Vicki Gordon?”
It was in the middle of this speech that McCallum walked in. The room got quiet—McC. was not a teacher to fuck with—but Michelle was already looking through the pages. He hovered behind her for a moment, then reached down and snatched the notebook out of her hands.
Michelle was unflustered. “Sorry, Mr. McCallum,” she said, sticking out her chin like a tiny prizefighter. “But that’s not mine, the notebook, it’s Eric Muller’s.” I admired the way she was careful to distinguish me from Eric Auerbach.
McCallum sighed—he hadn’t even begun teaching and already he was faced with a distracting mess. He gestured with the book as though he was going to throw it at me, then opened it to a random page. After a few seconds he looked up at Abigail Slott and chuckled.
“Mr. McCallum,” Michelle said, raising her hand perfunctorily, “there’s some really disgusting stuff in there. Some of the girls think it’s really inappropriate.”
McCallum raised his eyebrows at me sardonically. Then he took the notebook’s corner between two fingers, as though it were a kitten he was feeding to a tank of piranhas, and dropped it onto Michelle’s desk.
“Put it away,” he told her brusquely. “Now: photosynthesis.”
As far as I could tell, Michelle never allowed the notebook into general circulation. (There were, after all, passages that she didn’t want people to read.) Thus it became a collective fantasy object for the student body, more thrilling than the real artifact could ever have been. Besides the girl profiles, most of what I’d recorded was mundane—who talked to whom, who ate where, who whispered in class. In the school’s dreamlife it was transformed into a deranged epic of perversion and lust. Over the next three weeks I was asked to confirm the following: that I had made a list of girls I wanted to have sex with; that I had spied on girls through their windows and taken photographs of them in the nude; that I intended to drug Angela Martin and force myself on her in the cafeteria; that I had collected and catalogued my masturbatory effluvia and planned to present every girl in the school with the relevant portion, in a Ziploc bag, on Valentine’s Day. I denied each rumor with the kind of embarrassment that looks very much like guilt.
The ordeal was interrupted by a tedious, anxious vacation. I spent it in my room, working through a compendium of programming exercises and reading comic books about superpowered mutants, endowed with genetic gifts far beyond those of their parents, shunned by the fearful and the bigoted. We had Christmas dinner with my father, who announced over turkey cutlets and Stove Top stuffing that he was investing everything he had and everything he earned in the beverage company, divorce settlement be damned, and that the returns from this venture would soon enable him to fulfill his responsibilities to us in lavish style, and that my mother’s failure to support him in his ambitions was the reason he’d left her in the first place, and that apparently even divorce couldn’t free him of her carping and negativity. He finished this speech with the satisfied look of a man who has gotten something off his chest, then took a second helping of instant mashed potatoes. He stayed through dessert.
For New Year’s my mom and I went to a party at the Oberfells’: grown-ups standing around drinking, listening to Bruce Hornsby and the Range, talking about whatever grown-ups talk about. Bronwen was at a high school party, probably making out with somebody. “Stacey’s going to ask Bronwen if you can go with her!” my mom had said that afternoon, but I quashed the idea, for obvious reasons. And so I wandered among the knots of chatting adults, drinking Pepsi, trying to avoid my mother and her sympathetic looks. Eventually I began hunting for a quiet place to reread X-Men issues 129 to 138, in which Marvel Girl, made omnipotent and insane by lust, destroys an entire planetary system.
Pete was in his room, identifiable by the stickers on the door: Garbage Pail Kids, skateboard companies, Ninja Turtles. He was kneeling on the floor with a curly-haired friend, surrounded by an elaborate arrangement of G.I. Joes. Pete was bigger than I remembered, and this made me feel like I was making insufficient progress, but I was glad to see him. Here was a person who might have some minimal respect for me, if only because I was older than him.
“What are you guys doing?” I said. I could imagine spending the evening playing G.I. Joe with a couple of ten-year-olds, justifying it to myself as a kind of charity work. He didn’t answer.
“Cobra 3 to Squadron Leader,” his friend said. “Preparing to execute Mission Danger Bomb.”
“Hypersquadron activated,” Pete said.
“OK, cool,” I said, and ducked out into the hallway, where a tall man in a blue blazer was saying, “So the guy says because of the soil composition, just to excavate is gonna be twenty grand, and then it’s another five to ten before anyone’s swimming.” Across the hall, unadorned, was another door: Bronwen’s. It was impossible not to slip inside.
Because what happens in a girl’s room, anyway? By what alchemy does this space incubate a child’s body and generate breasts and ovaries and beauty? These rooms have a lot of work to do, and that’s why they’re so ornately decorated, as though with the ingredients for a spell. Bronwen’s bed had a canopy of rough tulle, like a gauzy purple mist. Every inch of the opposite wall was covered with photographs: celebrities and models, friends in bathing suits or evening gowns. A collage compiled images of Bronwen and a skinny, dark-haired girl, accompanied by the legend BRONWEN AND KATIE spelled in letters clipped from magazines ransom-note style, along with the slogans, extracted from ad pages or pull quotes, WHY CAN’T I HAVE EVERYTHING I WANT? and IT’S ALL ABOUT BOYS! I looked for actual boys, but apart from Tom Cruise and the Beatles they were few and far between.
On the surfaces of the dresser and the nightstand were jewelry boxes and nail polish and hand mirrors and lipstick, more than I could believe. In the small attached bathroom I peeked at the shampoos and bath oils and skin creams, opened the cabinet to survey the contact lens solution and Q-Tips and Tampax. Everything smelled of fruit or flowers. Whenever I had thought about Bronwen over the past year, cringing embarrassment had burned away any other feeling, but here, surrounded by the paraphernalia of her self-invention, something tender began to stir. I felt as though I was backstage in the dressing room during a performance. In
the bedroom closet I found the shoe tree, the nice dresses, the jackets. I tried the little top drawer of the dresser, and although I knew what was inside I was still startled by the profusion of underwear, a surprising amount of it in colors other than white. She had red underwear, gray, lots of purple. Like the bed: purple was a theme, it meant something. There were only a couple of bras—she didn’t really need bras. I listened for footsteps at the door, but I wasn’t confident I’d hear them over the party. I pulled out underpants one pair at a time, inspected the cotton panels and the soft gussets, tried to infer Bronwen’s body from their shape. I felt like the scholar-hero in the adventure movie, alone in the library at night, combing the leather-bound tomes for the clue he needs. The pair I was looking for wasn’t in this drawer, it was with Bronwen as she laughed with her friends, took sips from an older girl’s flask, positioned herself close to some boy at midnight, while I was stuck here with her underwear and her leggings and her sweet-smelling lotions, all the props she used to create the sublime fantasy of her girlhood. Though I was far from the performance, I was closer to the truth than I had ever been. And that’s when Pete Oberfell opened the door and said, “What are you doing?”
“Nothing!” I said much too loudly. “Nothing. Just looking around.” I tried to slip Bronwen’s underwear into my pocket, but it got snagged and dangled halfway out.
He peered at me narrowly. Over his shoulder, his friend strained to see what was going on.
“Are you guys done playing G.I. Joe?” I said.
“We’re in the middle,” he said suspiciously.
“All right!” I said. “I just came in here to use the bathroom. Is this it over here?”
“Yeah,” Pete said.
“Thanks,” I said, and headed into the bathroom, leaving Bronwen’s underwear drawer open behind me.
We left right after the ball dropped over Times Square. My mom had had a few drinks, and although she was a seasoned drinker she had a little trouble unlocking the car door. “So,” she said as we pulled away from Stacey and Gary’s house. “Did you have a good time?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Eric,” she said, making a left turn, “do you wish you had friends?”
I had imagined that my mother was somehow oblivious to my loneliness, that by splitting my time between school and her house and my dad’s I gave the impression of a full and busy life. Of course, we lived together in a small bungalow where I’d just spent winter break teaching myself C and reading Chris Claremont’s run on X-Men from the beginning.
“Yeah, sometimes,” I said. “But, you know, I really like programming.”
“I know,” she said. “And that’s great. But—” There were sirens, and she pulled over to let a cop car pass. The flashing lights turned her hands on the wheel red and blue. As she glanced over her shoulder and pulled out, she said, “You just don’t seem very happy.”
Graham Neale noticed me sitting at the back of the classroom and wandered over. “Hey Eric!” he said. “You have a good vacation, dude?” It was the first thing anyone had said to me since we’d arrived back at school that morning. He put a soft hand on my shoulder and squeezed. I knew this was a trap, but my heart reflexively opened a few degrees anyway.
“Pretty good,” I said, looking up at him from my chair.
“Cool, cool,” he said. “Something I wanted to ask you, OK?”
“OK,” I said.
“What’s it like to be such a loser?”
“Good one,” I said, trying to pull my shoulder away. Graham held on.
“No, I asked you a question,” he said, sounding offended. “What’s it like?” He was going to watch me squirm on the point of this unanswerable presumptive question. I stared past him at the classroom door, the fire extinguisher, the map showing the emergency evacuation route, until Mrs. Blankenship came in with a stack of copies of To Kill a Mockingbird.
As soon as class was done I hurried out of the room and down to the basement, wanting only the warm, stale air of the bathroom. I would wait out the lunch period with the comics I had slipped into my backpack that morning: hundreds of pages of anti-mutant prejudice, terrifying possible futures, and psychic struggles against mind-controlling sadists, protected by Mylar bags and stiff sheets of cardboard. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, though, the door, with its ancient wooden BOYS sign, was propped open by a yellow cone, and a heavy Mexican woman in a smock was pushing an industrial mop across the floor. From above I heard the throb of footsteps, the buzz of voices, the entire school heading toward the cafeteria over our heads. Farther down the scruffy hallway, past the huge room where cafeteria workers fed plates and trays into massive dishwashers, was the computer room. Keeping the promise I had made to myself at Wilson, I had never been inside. But things had changed, and a girlfriend was not on the horizon, and computer nerd was a more appealing identity than kid who hangs out in the toilets in the basement, barely.
I peered through the narrow window in the door. Guy Learmont, who was tiny and in my Spanish class, was watching a kid I didn’t know play Toxic Ravine at a terminal on the far side of the room. In the months before I’d started at MLK I had imagined the inside of the building, the other students, the adult life I would finally achieve there. This fantasy, vague as to details but emotionally vivid and specific, had withdrawn from my consciousness the minute I stepped through the doors of the real place. But it had survived, undiminished, as though sealed in an airtight compartment in my brain, and now, in a gust of nostalgia for a world that would never exist, it returned. I mourned it for a second, and then I said goodbye and pushed open the door to the computer room.
“Fuck, it’s Muller,” Guy Learmont said as I walked in. Near the beginning of the year, Learmont had made the mistake of confiding in Jerry Osteen, and now the entire school knew he had only one testicle. Bill Fleig, typing rapidly at a terminal in the corner, didn’t look up.
Brilliant white paint coated the walls, the pipes, the light fixtures, thick enough to give the room an alkaline scent. There were seven free computers, each with twelve times as much memory as the Packard Bell in my bedroom. Learmont’s friend’s machine emitted happy music and occasional shouts of “I’m hungry!” Thickets of code ran down Bill Fleig’s screen.
“It’s a test generator,” Bill said, although I hadn’t asked. “People were cheating in Gestetner’s class, copying each other’s homework and stuff, so he asked me to write a program that generates a different test for everybody. It just varies up the quantities and shuffles the order of the questions, and then it generates an answer key for each one.”
“Gestetner couldn’t do this himself?” I asked.
“No, he could,” Bill said. “But he has to give me some kind of homework if I’m going to get AP credit for learning C++.” Then he stopped typing and turned to look at me. “Is it true you were keeping a notebook on girls?” If the story had made it to Bill, who was earning extra credit constructing cheat-proof tests for a math teacher, everyone in the school had heard it.
“Fuck you,” I said. Bill observed this display of emotion curiously. “OK, yes. Yeah, it’s true. I was keeping a notebook.”
“I was just wondering,” Bill said. “I can see why you might do that.”
Something hateful in my gut rose up against him: of course the only person in the school with any sympathy for me was Bill Fleig, he of the overbite and the giant calculator. “I’m really glad I’ve got your support,” I said.
A muffled stampede shook the ceiling: lunch was over. Bill saved his program to a floppy disk, Learmont and his friend shut down their game, and I followed them out. In the first-floor hallway, on my way to world history, someone called my name and started to cheer. It spread, and soon dozens of kids had turned from their lockers and started to applaud, as though I was the hero at a parade. It wasn’t about anything, just the crowd enjoying its capacity for spontaneous mass irony. I tried to play along, raising my hand to acknowledge the tribute, until someone behind me
gave me a shove and I went down, stinging my palms on the linoleum.
I went back to the computer room the next day, and Bill showed me how the test generator worked. Then he announced that he’d started building a spreadsheet program. “Every few years a new one comes along and demolishes the old one,” he said. “VisiCalc got creamed by Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus got eaten by Excel, now I’m going to beat Excel.”
I looked at his designs: he had some clever ideas for macro functions that Excel wouldn’t have for three or four years, but he hadn’t thought much about user experience. I made some tentative suggestions, careful to show respect for the work he’d put in. Like most people who are confident of their genius, Bill accepts thoughtful criticism eagerly, and so I spent a few days thinking through the interface for him, mapping it out on paper in classes and at night. I could already tell it was the only area in which I might improve on Bill’s work. Most software makes people struggle, and so when they notice it they see it as an enemy. But if the designer can anticipate not only the user’s goals but the user’s instincts and assumptions, users will feel that the software cares about them, pays attention to their needs—loves them. And they’ll start to love the software back. All feelings of love toward technology are this kind of reciprocal love, I think.
I designed the user experience model and most of the front end for the spreadsheet program, and watched as Bill built it. That’s how I learned how good Bill Fleig was. Faced with a troublesome bug, he didn’t scroll through the program’s text to follow a variable’s path but stared blankly ahead, nodding, unspooling hundreds of lines of code in his mind, as though the only processor he needed was his own cerebral cortex. At the lowest point in my life I had found a friend to explore this new territory with, although it wasn’t the friend or the territory I would have chosen.