by Barry Lyga
“Now what?” Brian asked, arms folded over his chest. “Stealing lunch tickets?”
Jay shook his head and crooked his finger in a Come here gesture. Together they walked down the short corridor until they came to the door with a nameplate reading MARSHA TOOMBS, VICE PRINCIPAL. It took only a minute or two to locate the right key, and soon they were in.
“I didn’t know Mrs. Toombs had one of those,” Brian said, pointing.
Jay grinned and strode over to the desk, upon which lay the object of Brian’s attention: an almost-new Apple IIe computer, sleek and snowy white. “The school board approved it a couple of months ago.”
Jay’s dad nominally ran the board of education, but like most parents, he knew absolutely nothing about computers. Jay had been obsessed with them since playing his first video game. He scrounged junk shops and yard sales for components and boards and cases. He had a copy of Newsweek with a guy named Steve Jobs on the cover.
So when the school had requested a computer for the administration to use, Dad had come to Jay for advice.
“Is this just them trying to squeeze more money out of us?” he’d asked. “Or is there actually a use for one of these things in a school?”
Jay had enthusiastically endorsed the idea and had even tried to persuade Dad to buy one of the amazing new computers he’d read about in Byte: a Macintosh. But his father had been scandalized by the thought of spending two thousand dollars for something useless like a computer. So Mrs. Toombs ended up with an Apple IIe.
The screen came to life. The board hadn’t sprung for the color monitor, so it was just black and white.
“Shall-we-play-a-game?” Jay asked in his very best robotic voice.
Now Brian got it. He’d been leaning with casual exasperation against the doorjamb, but now he jerked upright and dashed around the desk to join Jay.
“Do they keep grades on it?” he asked. “Like in WarGames?”
“Yeah. That’s why they got it for her in the first place.” Jay flipped through the box of floppy diskettes he’d discovered in her desk drawer. One had a label that read GRADE BOOK. He fed it into the disk drive and he and Brian waited, breathing quietly into the grinding noises coming from the drive.
Eventually the program booted up. Press any key to continue, said the screen, so he did. After a little while, the application came up, asking him how many disk drives were attached and reminding him that unauthorized copies of the software might not work. Soon the main menu came up and he chose option three, to see the current grades.
Loading main grade-book program, the screen flashed at him. Jay grinned.
“Here we go! What class is giving you the most trouble these days?”
1986: MARCUS
The gym doors—all of them—were locked. Marcus fiddled with his own set of keys, swapping them out in the thready light that bled through the windows to the parking lot. Eventually he found the one that turned the lock.
“Got it!” he whispered excitedly, and turned to find…
Dean and Antoine were gone. They’d stolen away while he’d been focused on the keys.
And taken the flashlight with them.
Marcus swore under his breath. He could use a good dose of that fabled twin telepathy right about now. He would use it curse out his twin for disappearing on him.
Fortunately, the gymnasium had big, wide windows up near its ceiling, across from the bleachers. They let in enough light from the parking lot that he could see once he got inside. His breath and his footsteps echoed hugely in a way they never did during phys ed class, when bodies packed the room.
Wandering almost at random, he began checking the edges where the floor abutted the walls, the bleachers. He had never seen a retractable floor before, but he imagined such a thing would look different from an ordinary floor. Gaps or hinges or rollers, tucked just out of casual view.
None of these appeared during a cursory examination of the floor, nor during his more focused search, down on hands and knees, crawling along the bleachers, blowing and brushing dust out of the way as he sought evidence that the floor could roll away to reveal a pool beneath.
The gym was a bust.
He slipped out into the corridor, careful to lock the door behind him. A light stabbed out of a nearby cross corridor, the one that led toward what was officially called the Health Suite, but known to all and sundry as the Sex-Ed Room. Stashed down here near the gym, as though all bodily functions—no matter their origin or intent—must be relegated to one corner of the building.
Once his eyes adjusted again to the darkness, he strode down to the cross corridor, turned. Nothing. Even darker down here. One hand outstretched to maintain contact with the wall, he progressed slowly until his hand encountered empty space.
As he turned this new corner, a flashlight’s beam threw a glow in his direction. Antoine lay on the floor, reaching up for Dean’s outstretched hand.
“You all right?” Marcus asked, jogging over to them. If one-half of Black Lightning was out of commission, the school’s chances in track this year would be dim, and the twins’ odds of getting into the University of Houston would drop precipitously. He scooped up the flashlight, which had dropped to the floor and rolled back and forth, twisting and turning shadows on the walls like psychotic marionettes.
“Get that light out of our faces,” Dean snapped, holding up a hand to shield his eyes.
Fuming, Marcus jerked the light back and forth from his twin to Dean. “What the hell, you guys? You just ditched me.”
“You were taking forever with the gym keys,” Dean complained, “so we went to check out the basement.”
“And?”
Antoine merely shrugged.
“Nothing. You?” Dean asked.
“Nope. I’m starting to think there’s no pool.”
Dean snorted. “I bet there isn’t. That was just Jay’s way of getting us to go along with this.”
Marcus frowned. “Really?” But he knew, deep down, that Dean was right. “What’s the point?”
Antoine shrugged again. His favored mode of communication these days.
“Jay always has some ulterior motive. I bet he’s doing something like sneaking into the girls’ locker room. I could have been hanging out with Kim tonight,” Dean said with some asperity, “instead of wasting my time here.”
Antoine seemed just as upset as Dean. Marcus thought about it and decided that he, too, was angry on behalf of his buddy. He could have been making out with Dinah. He saw her little enough as it was. Wasting an entire night on a wild-goose chase made it even worse.
He opened his mouth to commiserate, but just then the PA system exploded to life with a too-loud crackle and a brief burst of feedback.
“Attention all skulkers and those who are breaking and entering,” Jay’s voice boomed, echoing down the empty halls, “please report to Admin.” Then, in his best Valley girl voice: “Like, totally now, totally.”
DEAN
Dean insisted they all run. The twins easily outpaced him, even in the dark. He followed their forms with the bouncing beam of his flashlight.
It seemed ridiculous, but some part of him was afraid that the PA was loud enough to be heard outside the school, that Canterstown’s still night air would carry the broadcast past the Wantzler factory store (closed and empty this late at night), over the nearby crest, through the copse of trees, and down into town itself. And then there would be a rush of police and parents. He wasn’t sure which of those would be worse.
Antoine and Marcus pulled up outside Admin before Dean had even finished scampering up the nearest staircase. They waited for him at the door, arms folded over chests, chiseled, sculpted out of the darkness around them.
They weren’t even breathing hard. Dean’s forehead was dotted with sweat.
“Join us, won’t you?” Jay leaned out into the corridor. “We have something to show you.”
Soon they were all arrayed around Mrs. Toombs’s desk, studying the grade book on t
he computer.
“Computers are gay,” Marcus said. “You can tell because they always start with ‘see colon enter.’”
Brian and Dean chuckled. Jay sniffed in something akin to offense. “This is an Apple, not an IBM. There’s no C: prompt.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “Fine.”
Jay flounced into Mrs. Toombs’s chair with a little more drama than the moment called for. “Guys. This is big, okay? I’m offering you the promised land. Moses never had it so good. I can switch up your grades and make your lives a whole lot better. And easier.”
“They’ll notice,” Brian said.
“He’s right,” Marcus put in. “I have a C in chemistry right now. If you change it to something else, Mr. Chisholm will definitely notice.”
Jay shook his head. “Jism won’t notice a thing. Not if we wait until right at the end of the semester. Once Toombs has Mrs. Wistern enter the final grades in, the computer does all the work, figures out your average, and has the report cards printed. The teachers never even see them again.”
“So you’re saying we have to come back at the end of the semester?” Marcus sounded incredulous. “What was the point of coming here now if we have to come back in a few months?”
Jay shrugged. “To be sure we could do it. To be sure I could get into the computer.”
“You’re gonna start a nuclear war,” Brian warned him.
“I’m not gonna start a nuclear war,” Jay batted back.
Dean had been watching Antoine the whole time the others had been speaking. Antoine was the only one not even looking at the computer monitor. Instead, he leaned against the wall, arms folded, gazing steadily back at Dean, an expression of quiet exasperation on his face. Dean knew the look well. Antoine communicated mostly without words, as though he and his twin had been allotted a joint vocabulary stipend in the womb and Marcus was using up the verbiage too quickly for Antoine to use his share.
“I’m not sure they’ll be happy with this when you apply to the police academy,” Dean pointed out.
Jay spun around in Mrs. Toombs’s chair. “What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?”
“Breaking and entering. Cheating. That doesn’t sound like a great cop to me.”
With a wave of his hand, Jay dismissed the idea like a bad smell. “I want to be a cop because other people need to follow the rules. I’m okay on my own. So are you. All of us. We’re all smart enough to keep it together and keep ourselves in line.” He arched an eyebrow. “Marcus’s C in chem notwithstanding. But most people aren’t. Most people need discipline.”
“It’s just that damn stoichiometry,” Marcus grumbled.
“So we’re the elite that gets to cheat?” Dean asked.
“Are you serious?” Jay launched himself out of the chair and planted his fists on his hips. “You act like this matters. I can get straight As without cheating at all. You all know that.”
It was true. They were all—modesty aside—smart. Marcus was struggling with chem, yeah, but they had solid grades. Jay was the smartest… probably.
“I do know that. So why do we need to change our grades? They’re already good enough.”
“Wouldn’t you rather get As without having to do so much work? Cruise along senior year with steady Bs or even Cs, then we jack them up right when college applications go out at the end of the semester. Stop wasting so much time on school stuff and work on other things.”
“What other things?” Marcus asked. “What have you got going on that’s so important?”
Jay laughed. “Pretty much anything. School is just a means to an end. The only reason you go to high school is to go to college, right? The only reason you go to college is to get a job. School doesn’t actually mean anything in and of itself. Just get through it and move on to the real world.”
Tempting and persuasive, Dean had to admit. Schoolwork wasn’t that hard, but he would enjoy taking it easy and dropping some of the anxiety of getting good-enough grades to attract a topflight college. His family was comfortable, but not wealthy. If he wanted to go anywhere other than a state school or avoid joining Jenny at community college, he needed exceptional grades.
“You could spend that extra time studying for the SAT,” Jay said suddenly. “Think about it.”
And that, Dean acknowledged, made a lot of sense. If grades were one component of getting into, say, Princeton (his dream school), then the SAT was the other big chunk.
“We can’t fake our lives like you can,” Marcus said, interrupting Dean’s internal calculations. “We can’t just show people a piece of paper that says we can run the two hundred under twenty. We gotta actually do it if we want to go to college.”
Jay arched an eyebrow. “Do you? Straight As in every class? Two Black kids? Affirmative action? You’re a shoo-in.”
Marcus’s jaw tightened. Jay didn’t notice—Jay was ever oblivious to such cues—but Brian and Dean exchanged a glance.
“Maybe there’s more to it,” Marcus said very, very evenly after a long pause.
“You guys just don’t get it,” Jay complained. “Fine. Screw you. I’ll just fix my grades.”
With that, he stomped out of the office.
The four of them stared around at one another. Antoine still hadn’t spoken.
“We have to go get him,” Brian said quietly.
“He’ll calm down,” Dean assured him.
“Not that.” Brian indicated the computer. “He’s the one who knows how to shut this thing down.”
1986: MARCUS
True to Dean’s prediction, Jay had calmed down and broken through his sulk by the time they made sure all the lights were out and the doors were relocked before leaving. As he slid behind the wheel of his Chevette, Jay looked over his shoulder at Marcus, who had lost the coin toss and sat in the middle of the back seat, between Brian and Antoine. He was pinned on both sides, his knees practically to his chest.
“You’ll come around,” Jay prophesied with that ineffable sense of confidence he always projected. “I bet by homecoming you’ll be begging me to change your grades.”
Not for the first time in his life and—he knew—not for the last, Marcus considered how different the rules were for white kids. Jay could break into school, break into the principal’s office. He could go jogging in a white neighborhood any time of day or night. He could tell off a teacher.
He could do all these things and get a slap on the wrist, at most. Marcus would be lucky to get away with a slap across the face.
Jay was—as Dean had once said—“all balls and no dick.” He had zero impulse control, zero sense of self-preservation, and because he seemed like a nice white kid from the right part of town, he never had to suffer the consequences. And there was no one who would ever say precisely that to his face.
There weren’t many Black folks in Canterstown proper. Most lived on the outskirts of town, closer to the factory. And of those who did live in town, very few had kids in their teens. Marcus and Antoine made up an amazing 13 percent of the high school’s Black population. There were even fewer kids of other colors.
And the truth, Marcus acknowledged, was that most of those white kids were pretty cool to them. Polite. He knew his athletic prowess buttressed him against some of the more overt expression of racism; school pride trumped racial animus, it seemed. He’d learned that lesson early, in elementary school. Chosen last for a game of Smear the Queer at recess, he’d wowed everyone with his stamina and evasive maneuvers. Suddenly he was chosen first any time anything athletic was involved. Which was almost as bad, really, because suddenly everyone thought all he was good for was sports.
Good or bad, it stuck. He and Antoine became the first and second picks each and every time, and the two became legendary. Then Dean dubbed them Black Lightning, and it was as though the nickname solidified the legend, made it something fated.
That was good enough for now, he supposed. But he couldn’t rely on the sufferance of white people for his whole life.
So he and Antoine were going to relay-race their way to University of Houston, home of Kirk Baptiste and Carl Lewis. And they would keep having each other’s backs, and they would make sure that if one of them got up one more rung on the ladder, then he’d lean back and give the other one a hand up.
All of that occupied him so much that he didn’t speak to Antoine at all after Jay dropped them off on the corner. They walked in silence to the middle of the block, then up the driveway to the house.
“Man, you were quieter than usual tonight,” he told his twin as they unlocked the front door and slipped inside. Mom and Pops had already gone to bed, even though it was only ten. Pops had early shift this month, and Mom tried to sleep on his schedule.
Antoine just shrugged. Sometimes Marcus wanted to punch some words into his twin’s mouth. At first, the silence hadn’t bothered Marcus. He and ’Toine had always communicated mostly nonverbally anyway, able to read each other glances, moues, and eye rolls as easily as other people read comic books. When ’Toine pared back on his talking, Marcus just picked up the slack. It felt natural, almost instinctual.
Which meant that Antoine’s silence went on much longer than Marcus realized before he really even noticed it.
And lately, his twin’s moods and thoughts had become undefinable even to Marcus. He knew it was past time to broach the topic with his twin, but they’d never needed to have that sort of serious conversation before. Now Marcus felt as though he had a low-grade headache all the time, as though something were constantly nagging at his brain, worrying at the neurons and delicate cradle of blood vessels surrounding it.
He brushed his teeth. Wiped foam from his mouth. Enough was enough. It was time to tell Antoine to knock off the silent treatment. He would just do it. Rip off the Band-Aid.
He marched into their room. Antoine sat quietly on his bed, hands clasped before him, and lifted his gaze to his brother’s.