by Oli White
“They’re into the stuff I’m into, this crowd,” I said instead. “Making videos, tech stuff. They all seem pretty intelligent, even though a couple of them are a bit weird. There’s this one girl, Ava—”
“A girl already, eh?” Dad chimed in. “You don’t waste much time, do you, son?”
“Well he’s a nice-looking boy, Paul, of course he’s going to have girls flocking round him,” Mum said.
She’s always been my biggest fan.
“No, I was about to say that this girl, Ava . . . she was a bit wacky, but yeah, very pretty. Then there was this other girl . . .”
I stopped mid-sentence, as I was about to veer into TMI territory. They didn’t need to know that I’d already developed a crush on my very first day at St. Joe’s, did they? That would just give them more to talk about, and sometimes with my mum and dad, much as I loved them, less was most definitely more, you know?
Up in my room, I began to think about my time at Charlton Academy. That place had been a total nightmare. In fact I couldn’t fathom how I’d survived it for five whole years. An all-boys comprehensive, it was well known all over Hertfordshire as being a tough school, but for the first few years I kept my head down and held my own pretty well. Most of the students in my form seemed happiest when they were coming up with new ways to disrupt a class, and the only time half of them concentrated was when they were on the football field or during rugby practice. Look, it’s not like I’m trying to big myself up—I wasn’t bloody Einstein or anything, but I wanted to learn, and in that environment it was next to impossible. Feeling like I was ahead of the pack in English, math and history was one thing, but in the technical classes—computer science and graphics, which were important to me—I felt like I was in a different postcode to everyone else, including a couple of the teachers. You see, ever since my seventh birthday, the day I got my first proper computer from my mum and dad, technology and how it works had been my utter passion. It started off with games—and yes, like most kids, I loved playing them—but as time went on it went deeper than that. I wanted to know what made those babies tick: how they worked and how it was possible to make all those amazing things happen at the mere touch of a button or the flick of a lever.
Originally I’d gone to Charlton because of their so-called excellent technical departments, but that turned out to be a joke. By the time I was fourteen, I was writing code, making programs and inserting virtual weapons, tools and all manner of other stuff into games: things that didn’t even exist in the game until I put them there. Eventually I became known as “GODLYM0DZ” in gaming circles online—M0DZ being slang for modifications. It was like being a bit of a celebrity, with people writing about me on forums, desperately trying to find out my real identity like some crazy internet version of Batman. You know what, it felt good . . . for a time. Meanwhile, in my computer science class we were still covering the basics.
I guess that was when the trouble started. The other boys could see I was bored; they watched me rolling my eyes and slumping forward on my desk while the poor bloke teaching the class tried to explain the rudiments of something I’d known how to do since I was ten. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: I was probably too big-headed, a know-it-all who deserved to be taken down a peg or two. Maybe that was true. I mean, it’s all very well being GODLYM0DZ when you’re sitting in the safety of your bedroom, fighting your enemies with a fast flick of your wrist, but out on the streets, things weren’t quite as neatly tied up as that. In real life I was seen as an outsider by the other boys in my class, and maybe they were right—I certainly felt like a bit of a freak, being one of the few kids who seemed eager to learn something and to get somewhere in life. OK, so I’m not exactly what you’d call a straight-A student, but I sometimes felt like I was the only one in the class knuckling down to study for exams.
Some of the boys in my form even took the piss out of me because I had a paper round in the week, and before my revision schedule started to get really heavy, I worked in a local clothes shop on a Saturday and Sunday. To be honest, I didn’t really care what they thought; I wanted to earn my own money so I could have a bit of independence and buy my own things. It wasn’t like my mum and dad were super rich, so anything new I wanted I worked for and bought myself.
During break times and lunchtimes I sat in the computer room trying out new stuff, discovering something great and then trying to work out how to do it myself. I withdrew more and more from the other kids until it seemed like nobody ever saw me outside during school hours because I was always shut in a classroom in front of a screen. I ignored the name-calling when it was just some idiot shouting “Freak!” at me in the playground, but when it came into the classroom, that was a different matter. There’s nothing worse than being insulted and belittled in front of a roomful of your peers, especially when you’re trapped and there’s nowhere to run.
There were two kids, Dillon and David, or Dim and Dimmer, as I like to remember them, who did this kind of thing on a regular basis. After months of making my life a misery, I eventually got my revenge by hacking into their Facebook accounts and locking them out so they couldn’t post anything, use Messenger, or even look at their own pages. It drove them nuts, and for a while they didn’t have a clue it was me. After a few weeks, however, there was more and more online speculation about who this GODLYM0DZ character might be. I was pretty horrified to see my name come up on a few of the forums, and even more horrified when Dim and Dimmer turned up at school one day begging me to stop attacking their accounts. So was my secret out at last? I wasn’t certain, but I wasn’t taking any chances, so I told them both to . . . Well, you can guess what I told them both to do.
It’s funny, all the rest of that day I felt like I had a little bit of power, and I thought maybe some of the other kids might even have some respect for me after they found out what I was capable of. Maybe things would turn around and get better at Charlton. That feeling didn’t last long. On the bus home from school that night, Dim and Dimmer plus a load of their mates cornered me. I was sitting upstairs on the back seat, nose in a magazine, and before I knew it they’d all bombed up the stairs and gathered around me. I was pretty much trapped. I tried to look past them to see if there might be anyone else on the top deck who could help me, but there were just a couple of other kids and an old lady who disappeared as soon as she realized there was going to be trouble.
“Think you’re funny, messing with my Facebook page?” Dillon said through gritted teeth. “You’re lucky I haven’t got a blade on me.”
Before he’d even finished the sentence, I felt a punch to the side of my head, then my face hitting the window, and then pain shooting up my legs as they put the boot in. After the fourth or fifth punch I sort of went numb. I could still feel it, but it didn’t really hurt anymore, you know? In the end it just became a blur of fists and kicks, cussing and name-calling, and then finally there was a ringing in my ears and I think I must have blacked out. The driver stopped the bus in the end and came up the stairs, but they’d all legged it. He found me sort of half crushed between the back seat and the seat in front of it.
“You got a lot of blood on you, man,” was all he said.
I remember Mum’s face when she arrived at the hospital where they were patching me up; she was utterly horrified.
“It’s not too serious, Mrs. Penman,” the nurse assured her. “Just surface mess and a few bruises. Nothing’s broken; he’ll be fine.”
Mum looked relieved there was no permanent damage, but she still cried a bit. I did too.
“I’m not going back there,” I told her, barely able to open my mouth. “I’m not a coward but I’m not going back. There’s nothing for me there.”
She just nodded and hugged me, causing me to wince with the pain. Then I felt her tears fall on my shoulder, so I told her not to worry, and promised her I’d be OK and that things would be different from now on.
“Jack, your lasagna’s ready!”
It was her voice tha
t shook me out of the unhappy memories of that day two months earlier, and as I jumped up off my bed, my heart thumping in my chest, I told myself that I would never, ever let anything like that happen again.
THE TEAM
My first week at the new school went by in a blur. I spent most of it trying to learn the ropes, getting to grips with some of the study projects I was going to have to tackle and listening to the teachers banging on about revision and AS exams. Apart from the odd “How are you getting on, new boy?” and a few short bursts of small talk with people whose names I never really got to know, I drifted through the corridors like a ghost for most of that week. It was only when I bumped into Austin or one of his mates that I got into any serious conversation.
The one bright spot in the week was seeing the incredible Ella Foster in the media production class on Monday. The downside of that was that Mr. Allen forced us to sit through several cringingly arty film clips to give us ideas for our upcoming project, which, he kept reminding us, was worth a massive chunk of credit for the AS level. So apart from a quick chat at the start of the class, Ella and I didn’t get to talk much. To be honest, I didn’t see half of what was happening on the screen anyway, as I spent most of the lesson just looking across at her, sort of mesmerized. I know, it sounds a bit lame, but as I watched the light from the screen flickering across her beautiful face, I wondered . . . well, mainly I wondered if a girl like that could be interested in somebody like me. And no, it wasn’t just the way she looked, either. Ella seemed to have a kind of self-assurance about her that I could only dream of having, and in the brief moments when we did speak that morning, she looked me in the face and I felt like she meant every word she said. OK, so it was only small talk about the weekend and the mountains of homework we both had, but there was an honesty about her that fascinated me. She most definitely wasn’t a girl who just spouted words for the sake of it, and I liked that. As the week went on, I spotted her around a few times, just hanging out between lessons or at lunch, and I wasn’t surprised to discover that most of her friends seemed to be of the popular variety. Still, she always waved or smiled and said, “Hey, Jack Penman,” whenever she saw me, and that was good enough for now.
Later that week I panicked slightly when Ella didn’t turn up for Thursday’s media production lesson and I was left without a study partner for the start of the filming project we’d been assigned. When I heard one of the popular girls say that she was home in bed with mild tonsillitis, I reassured myself that since it was unlikely you could still die from mild tonsillitis in this day and age, she would eventually be back in class and I could continue getting to know her better. Then I spent ten minutes googling and reading about tonsillitis, just to make sure that you couldn’t die from it.
Before I knew it, Austin’s gaming night was on, and with no better offers for that Friday evening, I went along, hoping it might be at least a little more exciting than I’d imagined. Look, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t as if I was unhappy about making friends—jeez, I needed to after the disaster of my last school—but a bunch of nerdy tech kids playing computer games wasn’t exactly out of my comfort zone, you know? And the evening that lay ahead certainly couldn’t be put into the category of trying something new.
As it turned out, Austin and his mates weren’t what I was expecting at all, and I was pleasantly surprised when I walked into his house and his chatty, smiling mum directed me downstairs to where they were all hanging out in a converted cellar. Ducking my head under the low ceiling above the steps, I could hear laughter and music, and once inside I was greeted by three faces who all looked happy to see me.
“You came.” Austin sounded more than a little surprised. “Come in and get comfy, man.”
Over by a large TV at one end of the room, Austin’s fourteen-year-old brother Miles was engaged in an intense World of Warcraft battle, while Sai and Ava were hunched in a corner over a MacBook, messing about with what looked like a serious graphics program.
“So what skulduggery goes on down here?” I asked, looking around at Austin’s neat set-up.
The whole room was white, including the concrete floor, which had been smoothed over and painted, and there were LED spotlights on the ceiling as well as two or three lava lamps dotted around and a mini-fridge stocked with Diet Cokes, bottled water and cartons of juice. The room was also kitted out with a Sonos speaker system, currently playing Justin Bieber, and there was a desktop with a thirty-two-inch monitor sitting on a table plus several laptops of varying brands and a couple of iPads lying about. This was a pretty sweet den and I was slightly envious that I’d never had a headquarters as cool as this to work and play in.
“What do you want to do?” Austin said. “These nights were just gaming get-togethers at one stage, a laugh, but now we mostly hang out and work on stuff.”
“What stuff?” I asked, heading over to see exactly what kind of program Sai and Ava were working with.
“Well, er . . . if we’ve got school projects to do, we get together and help one another out, and we, er . . . we’ve been trying to come up with ideas for our own project, too.”
“What kind of project?” I asked.
“That’s the problem, man,” Sai said, turning around. “We haven’t decided yet.”
“We promised ourselves last term that we’d come up with something serious,” Ava explained. “It might be a game or a website or even an app, but it has to be something that makes use of all our individual talents.”
“Are you lot nuts?” I laughed. “Haven’t you got enough going on revising for exams?” They all glared back at me as if I were the crazy person in the room. “Of course,” I said, “you guys are all such geeks, you probably don’t even need to revise. Anyway, what exactly are your individual talents?”
“Well, Ava is brilliant at anything film- and video-related: shooting, editing, sound editing—all that kind of stuff,” Austin said.
“Sounds good. I’m pretty handy with a camera, too,” I said.
Austin went on, getting more animated as he spoke. “Sai is a master at graphics, web design, layouts and anything arty, and I’m pretty fearsome when it comes to coding and technical jargon.”
“And what about him?” I said, nodding toward Miles.
“My little brother comes in handy for running errands sometimes, but mostly he just hangs out playing World of Warcraft,” Austin laughed.
“Look, we’ve got all the bases covered,” Sai said. “Trouble is, we spend most of our time together looking at the brilliant stuff other people are doing and not doing anything ourselves because . . . Well, because we haven’t had any good ideas of our own yet, I suppose.”
Sai looked at me hopefully, as if he thought I might say some magic word to make something amazing happen right then and there. His stare was intense, as if he was trying to figure out my entire character just by looking at me. Then Ava stood up and headed toward me, her forehead knotted in a frown.
“And what about you, Penman? What are you good at?”
I pondered the question for a moment; what exactly was I good at? Then, as if a cartoon lightbulb had flashed above my head, it dawned on me that I might be just what they were looking for.
“Actually,” I said, “I’m a bit of an ideas man. I s’pose that’s what I’m really good at. Ideas.”
“So have you got any?” Ava said, laughing. “’Cause I can only spend so many weeks locked in a small space wasting time with these two idiots before I go psycho with Austin’s mum’s bread knife.”
“Er . . . could you at least let me have a minute or two? I’ve only just walked in the door. You need to give me a few clues about what sort of thing you want to do,” I said.
“That’s the problem, man, we haven’t got any direction,” Sai said, shaking his head.
Out of the blue, Miles looked up from his game and shouted over his shoulder from the sofa.
“Yeah, man, you’re GODLYM0DZ, you can help us.”
“What did he say? GO
DLYM0DZ? How the hell . . . ?”
My blood ran cold and I looked at my new mates one by one, all staring at me as if I was about to sprout horns or wings or something. Then my heart sank as the penny dropped. Austin looked guilty. They all looked guilty.
“Miles has been online gaming since he was nine,” Austin mumbled. “He reads all the forums.”
“So is that why I’m here? Is that the only reason you called me over and befriended me the other day, because you knew who I was and you thought . . . ?”
I didn’t know whether to feel angry or flattered or . . . No, what I actually felt was hurt. I’d stupidly thought this smart, quirky little group had reached out and invited me into their inner sanctum because they thought I was a decent bloke; that I was worth befriending. Turns out it was because of some stupid online persona I’d shaken off ages ago. Turns out they wanted something.
“How?” I asked. “How did you know it was me?”
“I wasn’t sure at first, but a bit of fishing around on some online forums and it seemed pretty clear that GODLYM0DZ was Jack Penman,” Austin said.
“So you targeted me when I arrived at St. Joe’s just so I could help you out with your non-starter of a project,” I said.
“No, it wasn’t like that, Jack. Not targeted, just—”
“Do you know how much crap that stupid name got me into? Do you know how much I’ve tried to move on and forget it?”
“You sound really angry,” Ava said.
“Too right I’m angry. You could have been upfront about it. You’ve had all week. You could have . . . Oh, you know what, I’m out of here.”
After I slammed Austin’s front door behind me, I stood there for a good three or four minutes before I walked up the path into the night. Just as I got near to the front gate, a massive shudder shot down my spine. What the hell had just happened? OK, so when I thought about it rationally, I knew Austin and his crew weren’t trying to be devious or nasty, scoping me out like that, but they couldn’t possibly understand how much I wanted to get away from the way my life was before. Even the thought of it made me feel sick.