Attach ments(11)

“Mom never had a bong,” he’d protest.

“Oh yes, she did. It was made out of a Dr Pepper bottle, and she kept it on the coffee table.”

“Now I know you’re lying. Mom would never drink Dr Pepper.”

WHEN LINCOLN GOT to work the next afternoon, Greg was arguing with someone on the phone. He’d hired an outside consultant to take care of the newspaper’s Y2K issues, and now the consultant was saying he wouldn’t be able to get to The Courier until early February. Greg called the guy a charlatan and a one-eyed gypsy, and hung up on him.

“I can help with the Y2K stuff,” Lincoln said. “I’ve done some programming.”

“Yeah,” Greg said, “we’ll have you, me …a couple of eighth-grade magnet students …I’m sure it’ll be fine …” He turned off his computer by yanking the power cord from the surge strip. Lincoln cringed. “‘Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage,’” Greg said, gathering up his papers and jacket. “See you tomorrow, Senator.”

Huh. Programming. Debugging. It wasn’t Lincoln’s favorite, but it beat archiving and compressing.

At least it was a problem to solve. And it would only be for a few months, maybe less.

He checked the WebFence folder. There were only two red flags. Which meant Lincoln had anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes of actual work to get him through the night. He’d already decided to save it for after dinner.

Tonight, he had a plan.

Well …a plan to make a plan. He’d gotten up early that day, at noon, and gone to the library to check out that parachute book Eve had mentioned. It was in his backpack right now with a copy of today’s want ads, a yellow highlighter, a ten-year-old Mead notebook, an Entertainment Weekly, and a turkey sandwich that smelled so good he was having a hard time thinking about anything else.

He was done with the sandwich and the magazine by seven.

He thought about looking at the want ads next or cracking What Color Is Your Parachute? —but reached for the notebook instead. He laid it on the desk and carefully leafed through the pages, through notes on the Revolutionary War and the rough draft of an essay on Brave New World.

Lincoln knew what he was looking for; somewhere near the middle, there it was …Sam’s handwriting. Purple ink. Too many capital letters.

“THINGS LINCOLN IS GOOD AT.”

SHE’D MADE THIS list for him senior year when he was trying to choose his major. Lincoln had already known where he was going to college—wherever Sam was going.

His mother had wanted him to stay close to home. He’d been offered a regent’s scholarship at the state universityjust forty-five minutes away. But Sam would never go there. Sam wanted to go somewhere big and important and FAR AWAY. And Lincoln wanted to go with her. Whenever his mom brought up the scholarship, how nice the state campus was, how he could come home to do his laundry …Lincoln would think of Sam loading her things into her dad’s minivan and heading west like the last sunset. He could do his own laundry.

So he let Sam do all the school shopping. She sent away for brochures and went on weekend trips to see campuses. “I want to be near the ocean, Lincoln, the ocean! I want to feel the tides. I want to look like one of those girls who live by the ocean, with the windblown hair and the color in their cheeks.

And I want mountains, too, at least one mountain. Is that too much to ask? And trees. Not a whole forest, necessarily. I’d settle for a thicket. Scenery. I want scenery!” Something to chew on, Lincoln thought.

Sam picked a college in California—not too far from the ocean, not too far from the mountains— with a tree-lined campus and a robust theater program. Lincoln was accepted, too, and offered half a dozen scholarships.

Technically, he said to his mother, it’s the same amount of scholarship money the state school is offering. “Yes,” she said, “but the tuition is four times as much.”

“You’re not paying for it,” he said.

“What a mean thing to say.”

“I didn’t mean it to be mean.” He didn’t.

He knew she felt bad that she couldn’t pay for college. Well, he knew that she felt bad sometimes.

College was his thing. She expected him to pay for it the same way she had expected him to pay for his own Nintendo. “You can have it if you want it, if you’re willing to pay for it. Save your money.”

“I don’t have any money,” he’d said in the ninth grade.

“Be thankful, Lincoln. Money is a cruel thing. It’s the thing that stands between you and the things you want and the people you love.”