The Blue Nowhere

series of tutors after school—in effect, buying themselves a couple of extra hours at their respective jobs. They took to bribing Phate’s brother, Richard, two years older, into keeping him occupied—which usually amounted to dropping the boy off at the AtlanticCity boardwalk video arcades or at nearby shopping malls with a hundred dollars in quarters at 10:00 A.M. and picking him up twelve hours later.
    As for his fellow students . . . they, of course, disliked him on first meeting. He was the “Brain,” he was “Jon the Head,” he was “Mr. Wizard.” They avoided him during the early days of class and, as the semester wore on, teased and insulted him unmercifully. (At least no one bothered to beat him up because, as one football player said, “A fucking girl could pound the crap out of him. I’m not gonna bother.”)
    And so to keep the pressure inside his whirling brain from blowing him to pieces he spent more and more time in the one place that challenged him: the Machine World. Since Mom and Dad were happy to spend money to keep him out of their hair he had the best personal computers that were available.
    A typical high school day would find him tolerating classes then racing home at three P.M. and disappearing into his room, where he would launch himself into bulletin boards or crack the phone company’s switches or slip into the computers of the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control, the Pentagon, Los Alamos, Harvard and CERT. His parents weighed the $800 monthly phone bills against the alternative—missed work and an endless series of meetings with teachers and counselors—and happily opted to write a check to New Jersey Bell.
    Still, though, it was obvious that the boy was on a downward spiral—his increasing reclusiveness, viciousness, and bad temper whenever he wasn’t online.
    But before he bottomed out and, as he’d thought back then, “did a Socrates” with some clever poison whose recipe he’d downloaded from the Net, something happened.
    The sixteen-year-old stumbled onto a bulletin board where people were playing a MUD game. This particular one was a medieval game—knights on a quest for a magic sword or ring, that sort of thing. He watched for a while and then shyly keyed, “Can I play?”
    One of the seasoned players welcomed him warmly and then asked, “Who do you want to be?”
    Young Jon decided to be a knight and went off happily with his band of brothers, killing orcs and dragons and enemy troops for the next eight hours. That night, as he lay in bed after signing off, he couldn’t stop thinking about that remarkable day. It occurred to him that he didn’t have to be Jon the Head, he didn’t have to be the scorned Mr. Wizard. All day long he’d been a knight in the mythical land of Cyrania and he’d been happy. Maybe in the Real World he could be someone else too.
    Who do you want to be?
    The next day he signed up for an extracurricular activity at school, something he’d never done before: drama club. He soon learned that he had a natural ability to act. The rest of his time at that particular school didn’t improve—there was too much bad blood between Jon and his teachers and fellow students—but he didn’t care; he had a plan. At the end of the semester he asked his parents if he could transfer to yet a different school for the next, his junior, year. Since he said he’d take care of all the paperwork himself and the transfer wouldn’t disrupt their lives, they agreed.
    The next fall, among the eager students registering for classes at Thomas Jefferson High School for the Gifted was a particularly eager youngster named Jon Patrick Holloway.
    The teachers and counselors reviewed the documentation e-mailed to them from his prior schools—the transcripts, which showed his consistent B+ performance in all grades since kindergarten, counselors’ glowing reports describing a well-adjusted and -socialized child, his outstanding placement test scores and a number of recommendation letters from his former teachers. The in-person interview with the polite young man—cutting quite a figure in tan slacks, powder blue shirt and navy blazer—went very well and he was heartily welcomed into the school.
    The boy always did his assignments and rarely missed a class. He was consistently in the upper-B and lower-A range—pretty much likethe other students at Tom Jefferson. He worked out diligently and took up several sports. He’d sit on