Definitely big. In high school, the football coach was always trying to recruit him, but Lincoln’s mother had forbidden it. “No, you’re not joining the head-injury team,” she’d say. He laid his hand on his stomach. You’d call it a beer gut if Lincoln drank beer more often than once a month. Massive.
But cute, she’d said. Handsome, she’d said. Crinkly eyes.
He leaned his forehead against the mirror and closed his eyes. It was embarrassing to see himself smile like that.
THE NEXT MORNING, Lincoln joined a gym. The person on the treadmill next to him was already watching Quantum Leap on one of the big televisions. It felt like a sign.
On his way home he stopped by the bank where Eve worked. She had one of those offices in the lobby with the glass cubicle walls.
“Hey,” she said, “do you need to open a savings account? Yuck. Why are you all sweaty?”
“I joined a gym.”
“You did? Well, good for you. Does that mean you’re listening to my advice now? I wish I would have told you to get your own apartment. Get your own apartment!”
“Can I ask you a weird question?”
“If you make it quick,” she said. “All those people sitting over there on the couches actually do want to open savings accounts.”
“Do I look like Jason Bateman?”
“Who’s Jason Bateman?”
“The actor. He was on Silver Spoons and The Hogan Family.”
“The guy who played Teen Wolf?”
“That’s Michael J. Fox,” Lincoln said. “Never mind. This wasn’t supposed to be a whole conversation.”
“The guy who played Teen Wolf in Teen Wolf Too?”
“Yes,” Lincoln said. “Him.”
Eve squinted.
“Yeah,” she said. “Actually, you do kind of look like him. Now that you mention it, yeah.”
Lincoln smiled. He hadn’t stopped smiling.
“Is that a good thing?” Eve said. “Do you want to look like Jason Bateman?”
“It isn’t good or bad. It just confirms something.”
“You’re a lot bigger than he is.”
“I’m leaving,” Lincoln said, walking away.
“Thanks for choosing Second National,” she called after him.
IT TOOK FOREVER for the IT office to clear that night. Everyone was getting pretty intense about the millennium bug. Kristi, Lincoln’s desk-mate, wanted to stage a practice New Year’s Eve, to see if their code patch would work. But Greg said that if they were going to shut down the newspaper and maybe cause a six-block blackout, they might as well wait until the real New Year’s Eve when it would be less embarrassing. The members of the International Strike Force stayed out of the argument. They just sat in the corner, coding, or maybe hacking into NORAD.
Lincoln was still trying to monitor their progress and to help, but they avoided him. He was pretty sure they knew he wasn’t one of them, that he’d never actually taken a computer course, and that he’d scored higher on the verbal section of the SAT. The IT kids all wore off-brand Polo shirts and New Balance tennis shoes and the same smug look. Lincoln refused to ask for their help with the digital color printer upstairs, even though he was at his wit’s end with the damn thing. Every few days it would have a crazy spell and start spitting out page after page of bright magenta.
“How can we prepare for the worst-case scenario,” Kristi was saying, “if we don’t understand the worst-case scenario?”
Lincoln was itching to open the WebFence folder. Dying to open it.
Greg said he didn’t have to drive his Nissan into the river to know it would be a fucking disaster.
“That doesn’t even compare,” Kristi said, and then she said she wished Greg wouldn’t curse. Right at the moment, Lincoln was wishing that the system really would fail at 12:01, January 1. That it would fail spectacularly. And that he’d be fired and replaced by one of the Strike Force, probably the Bosnian. But first, he wanted to check the WebFence folder. Now.
Maybe he didn’t have to wait for everyone to leave …It wasn’t a secret that he checked the WebFence folder. It’s nothing, he told himself, checking WebFence is my job. Which was such a lame rationalization that he decided not to let himself check it, even after everybody else went home.
When he finally opened the folder, sometime after midnight, he told himself not to expect a revelation like last night’s. What were the chances that Beth would be talking about him again? What were the chances that she’d seen him again? If she had seen him, would she have noticed that he was wearing a nice shirt and that he’d spent twenty minutes that afternoon combing his hair?