Look around and what’s school? It is the long line. It’s Crystal and her friends laughing raggedy-ass. School SOs with the contraband box straight-up full of beanies and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Hear: arms up for the detector. No baggies, no hats, no gum. Hands out. Of. Your. Pockets. They say that one, he likes patty-cake on the jeans a little too much.
“Don’t even think about it, Mr. Brinkley.”
Tyrell was thinking.
There is staying in line for the metal detector, and there is turn around. Don’t go in, you never left. Absent: a term for a good day. What are the calculations?
Must be three hundred of us. Rate of what a minute through the doors?
“So long Tank Top gonna have a dick time we get to homeroom.”
Tyrell looked to the left. He had $11.30 saved. He had his subway pass. Mr. Pence was smiling by his collection of confiscated fitteds, a big, stupid grin on his big, stupid face like a cereal leprechaun, head too big for any kind of headgear and how many times has he said the word disruption? Tyrell had an idea to distribute the numbers. Eleven-thirty is four bacon-egg-and-cheeses and three knockoff Gobstoppers. Suck and they last twenty-seven minutes. It is basic as swiveling out of the line.
And why not? He is involved with huge things, and they have no idea. No one, not his mother, not Mr. Jordan, not Crystal, or Derek, or anyone, none of them had any idea. Epic. Outside the IRC they wouldn’t even believe. He was learning beyond cheats, learning into making whole new games. He was learning how to run a world like no one else seemed to know he could.
Excel.
So he turned chill and easy. Head down. Walk away. One Jordan past another eventually gets you home, whole place quiet, you and a soda tickling clean down the throat, a member of a big-time kind of group. They were going places.
“The fuck,” he heard. But it was not about him. For a big boy, he was good at being a person no one noticed.
And before he knew it, he was screen-center and killing it all legendary. Some point, he will take a break to chat. There are plans. There are things to learn can’t be taught in his PS.
There are things to worry about too. Later, he’d leave the apartment. He’d come home the come-home time. It’s spaghetti night. The drill: no seconds until broccoli, all of it. Fuck broccoli. Fuck carrots. He had gotten no TV for a week recently for saying that.
Sip the cola. No need for quiet now. Just power up and slay this RPG. But somehow, the big-breeze feeling was going cold in his stomach. Somehow, a wedge grew between brain and screen, and that wedge was his mother’s voice in the deep-down of him. He looked at the clock, and he thought of the minutes left before he was caught.