I couldn’t see out past the circle of orange-yellow lights that shone down on the granite steps and a few yards out along the asphalt, just to the edge of the grass. Beyond that there was only blackness out to where the quad ended and the trees began. I heard a car pass on the main road, too far off to see.
I wasn’t ready to sleep. It would be the first time I had ever slept away from home. I slipped out a side door and circled the building, trailing one hand along the rough brick. I heard Darren’s voice mingled with the others, but I wasn’t ready to join them. I walked straight out onto the quad, into the darkness. The stars got visible really fast out there. I couldn’t see my own body and it made me dizzy. I ran a little ways. I was the only one out there—was that strange? Why was I different? I spun around, the stars whirling above me, then lay on my back in the grass. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be comfortable. Nobody knew me here except the Realms gang, and they didn’t care who I was. I was starting to feel, maybe for the first time in my life, that I had arrived where I was supposed to be.
I listened to the others back in the circle of light behind me. “What group are you in?” they called out to each newcomer. “B Group,” a male voice answered, followed by two or three cheers. Introductions. There were already rumors of a hookup but nobody knew exactly who; and they said a few people had broken into Main and hacked the phone switchboard to call—depending on the version told—Anchorage, the camp office, Hong Kong, and/or NORAD. Tomorrow, classes would start, and the whole summer’s saga, but this is what I would remember. The crickets were incredibly loud. It was summer; there would be weeks of this before I had to go back. Oceans of time. I’d be a different person. I couldn’t wait.
All the next day, we were trying to figure out who exactly everybody was, who we were, who showed up to this. Who exactly likes computers? We picked our way barefoot along the dirt and pine-needled track to the lake, where, two at a time, we lowered ourselves off the dock and swam the length of the roped-off section of chill dark water and then back. A full dozen of us mustered signed medical exemptions and stood off to the side, arms folded against the cold, watching the spectacle. The others floundered, heaving, to the finish line or turned in smoothly athletic performances.
Who likes computers? The skinny mantislike kid with the bowl-cut hair; the one girl out of twenty who wore a bikini instead of a one-piece bathing suit; the seventeen-year-old boy with noticeable abdominal muscles and an almost-mustache; the kid who just froze at the end of the dock for a full minute before being let off the hook by the bewildered swimming counselor.
The programming classes were no less brutal. Most of the campers were self-educated in different languages, BASIC and FORTRAN and LISP and C, and now they were all expected to pick up and use Pascal whether or not they’d seen it before. Kids talked over each other, and insufficiently brilliant questions could be punished with an eye roll and an audible “Tch!” from the back row. Nerds could be bullies, too, and the usual targets were poorer kids who hadn’t had much computer access and, unfortunately, girls. Maybe this was part of why Realms II took hold. It was both an arena for people to prove themselves and a collective goal bigger than any one person’s test scores.
It was the first time Simon had been thrown into the larger population of kids who programmed, up against kids whose parents had money and bought them Sinclair ZX81s the moment they started to be available. This was how he must have learned he was good at programming. As the summer went on he fidgeted more often in class, or asked questions that jumped ahead of the curriculum or out of it altogether.
There were two or three kids marked out that way, and a dozen others who pretended they were, but for some reason genius is terribly conspicuous in computer programming. As is mediocrity—I knew that no matter how hard I worked I wasn’t one of them. I wrote code that merely did what it was