The Unknowns Read Online Free Page B

girl will be displayed like a piece of jewelry. But I’ve come to think it works more like money, something to be judiciously invested for maximum returns. If I’m right, Maya doesn’t necessarily know about my, what, my
Oedipal thing
. Let’s say she doesn’t. Let’s say she thinks I’m just some guy she met at a party, and I sit down and eat a burrito with her and her friend. The next time Maya sees Lauren she says,
Guess who I ran into at El Submarino the other night
? and when Lauren hears this she smiles cryptically and says,
Oh, what was
that
like
? in a funny tone of voice that prompts Maya to start saying
What? What
? until, after demurring for a suitable interval, Lauren tells Maya what I told her about ejaculating and the voice in my head and
I love you, Mom
, and first shock and disgust ensue, and then eventually hilarity, and by the end of the conversation I have become an anecdote to them, a strange, sad boy-man they once met who disguises his creepy little perversion behind reflexive flirting, and just imagining that makes me want to kill myself.
    So while I wait for the line cook to assemble the burrito I stare fixedly at the refrigerators full of soda and beer. The sodas areimported from Mexico; they are made with cane sugar rather than corn syrup and bear stickers warning that they’re not to be sold in the U.S. Finally the cook calls out, “Forty-four,
cuarenta y cuatro
!” and I’m clutching my burrito and chips and heading for the door. And then there’s that business of pretending you haven’t seen the person without making it look like you’re ignoring her. It’s impossible to know how successful this deception ever is. You don’t know if she genuinely doesn’t know you’re there, or if she sees you but thinks you don’t see her and prefers not to announce herself, or if the two of you are collaborating on a little play in which you pretend not to notice each other. Accurate data is almost impossible to come by, and in its absence I have the feeling of flying blind into a whirlwind. Of course, I could just talk to her. Even if she knows. I could say hello and introduce myself to her friend and start talking to her and see what happens, and if she gives me a knowing look and says,
I heard you and Lauren had quite a time the other week
, I could smile and say,
Yeah, we had a time
. My eyes are fixed dead ahead and I’m standing too straight, in a way that feels unnatural and probably looks stupid. I could just sit down next to her. Instead I walk past her, through the door, out to the sidewalk, and think,
I’ve made it
.

2
    If they’re so smart, why don’t they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?
    —Paul Graham, “Why Nerds Are Unpopular”
    NICKY BOONT AND I were making an adventure game: lines of text on the screen that said things like
You are in a dungeon filled with skulls. There is a door to the north and one to the east
. Together we made elaborate maps of underground architecture, wrote adjective-studded descriptions of caverns and weapons and monsters, cultivated the pseudomythological backstory. Every school day we met at lunch in the computer room, an L-shaped cubicle that had been freed up when the office supplies were moved to larger quarters. There we catalogued each object the player might find in the dungeon—weapons, keys, potions—and every action he might perform.
    When I walked in, Nicky’s chair was turned away from the Commodore 128 toward the door, his legs crossed professorially. His pale hair was cut in a perfect bowl that made him look like a mushroom. “We need a hide command,” he said by way of a greeting. Theoretically we’d finished the actions two weeks earlier.
    “You mean like hide yourself, or hide an object?” I asked. It’s hard to develop an entire syntax when you don’t know words like
transitive
and
intransitive
, but that was the project we had assigned ourselves.
    “Both,