To keep Alf and Clark from coming around my house, I said I was grounded for bad grades. They came around anyway, tapping on my screen door as soon as my mother left for work, suggesting we watch MacGyver or play Trivial Pursuit or crank-call the girls in our homeroom. I explained that Mom had the neighbors keeping an eye on me, that Mrs. Digby across the street was watching through her lace curtains, so I had to close the door.
I worked on the code all night, and spent my days editing printouts during class. None of my changes made a difference. The Impossible Fortress was still maddeningly slow. I tried everything. I crunched the code as tight as possible, rearranging my subroutines and deleting REMarks and eliminating spaces between commands. In a moment of desperation, I even vacuumed the crevices of my keyboard, on the off chance that dust was slowing the circuitry.
And I thought many times about going back to Zelinsky’s and asking the girl for help. I knew anyone capable of programming Phil Collins on a SID chip would probably have great ideas for speeding up animation. She seemed funny and smart and cool, and I really needed some good advice. But I knew the flak from Alf and Clark would be ridiculous. All the little piggy baby jokes. All the she’s-so-fat put-downs. They would never let me hear the end of it.
So I worked alone, staying up late every night, getting more and more frustrated. By Friday evening, I was ready to quit—and then I heard a familiar squeak of bike brakes outside my window. I peered out through the blinds and saw Alf and Clark riding into my driveway. They were dressed all in black, like girls in a Robert Palmer video, minus the bright red lipstick.
“What’s with the costumes?” I asked.
“Operation Vanna,” Alf said.
“Take three,” Clark said. “We’ve got a new plan.”
I realized they were still talking about the Playboy magazine, about the Vanna White photos. I’d been so wrapped up in my game, I’d forgotten about them.
“You guys are obsessed,” I said.
Clark looked like I’d hurt his feelings. “You said you wanted to see them, too. You said she was the most beautiful woman in America.”
“I know.”
“You said she was a perfect ten!”
“I know.”
“So why aren’t you interested?”
I thought of Fletcher Mulligan, of the $4,000 IBM PS/2, of my hopelessly inept game that still needed hours of work. “Because I’m grounded, remember? My mom has Mrs. Digby watching me.”
Clark peered across the street to Mrs. Digby’s tiny two-bedroom bungalow. Her porch was empty; her windows, dark. “That old lady went to bed three hours ago. She’ll never know you sneaked out.”
“And you don’t want to miss this,” Alf promised me. “The sooner we get there, the sooner we start getting rich.”
This set off plenty of warning bells. Over the years, I’d learned to be skeptical of Alf’s get-rich-quick schemes. Like the time we spent a week pulling a wagon all over Wetbridge, collecting aluminum cans for resale, because Alf read that the scrap metal yard paid ten cents a can. We collected more than eight hundred cans before discovering that Alf didn’t know how to read digits after a decimal point, that the actual rate was just .01, a penny a can.
“What’s the idea?” I asked.
“It’s simple,” Alf said. “Do you know the story of Jesus and the fishes?”
I stared at him, thoroughly confused, trying to understand how a Bible story could relate to photos of Vanna White.
“It’s like this,” Alf continued. “Jesus goes to this party at Galilee, or wherever, and five thousand guys show up. And everyone’s starving, it’s the middle of a desert, but all they have is one fish. One scrawny little perch on a plate. But Jesus is like, ‘Don’t worry, guys, just pass it around, there’s plenty for everyone.’ And he’s right, it’s a miracle, they keep passing the plate and somehow there’s enough for everyone. He feeds all five thousand people with one fish. That’s the story. But now ask yourself something: What if Jesus charged money for the fish? What if he had a magic machine that turned one fish into five thousand fishes, and he charged two bucks a fish? That’s what I’m talking about, Billy. The magic machine exists! It’s real!”
I turned to Clark. “Translate to English?”
Clark gave me a sheet of paper, and I held it under the dim glow of the porch lamp. It was a photograph of Alf’s face, smooshed behind a pane of glass. His eyes were closed, and a blinding white light illuminated the zits on his forehead. It looked like he’d copied his face on a Xerox machine—except the image was rich with color, like a picture in a glossy magazine. I’d never seen anything like it.
“How did you make this?” I asked.
“Color Xerox machine. My mother’s office just got one. Copies anything you want in full color.”
Suddenly I put it all together.
“You’re going to copy the Vanna White pictures?”
“Bingo,” Alf said.
He handed me an index card listing the prices:
UNCENSORED! VANNA WHITE! UNCENSORED!
1 photo - $2
3 photos - $5
All 10 photos - $10
Its America’s Sweatheart
Like You’ve Never Before Seen Her
“ORDER TODAY”
“I hate to admit this,” I told Alf, “but you’re a genius.”
Alf took a little bow. “Thank you.”
The tabloids and television shows had been talking about the Vanna White photos all month. Every boy in the eighth and ninth grade would be lining up to give Alf their lunch money. He would take a simple four-dollar magazine and Xerox it into a fortune. There was just one problem.
“Where’s the magazine?”
“We’re getting it tonight. Tyler Bell wants to help.”
I was certain I’d misheard him. Tyler was three years older than us, a senior. He was the only kid in town with a motorcycle—a beat-up 1968 Harley with a shovelhead engine. He wore leather in the winter and denim in the summer and he rotated a wardrobe of heavy metal T-shirts all year round: Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer. His pants were fringed with safety pins, and his boots were always scuffed because he didn’t give a shit.
“Since when are we friends with Tyler Bell?” I asked.
“He’s actually really cool,” Alf said. “Most of the stories about him aren’t true.”
“Except he did have sex with a teacher,” Clark pointed out. “Se?ora Fernandez. That story’s totally true.”
Sex-with-a-teacher was minor-league compared to the other rumors I’d heard. It was said that Tyler rode into New York City on weekends, that he got into fistfights with metalheads and had sex with hookers in Times Square. Surprisingly, none of this prevented the girls in my class from going berserk over him. When Tyler came swaggering past their lockers, they’d fall all over themselves, like he’d just stepped off the cover of a Harlequin romance novel. In another life, he was probably a pirate or a Viking.
“Why is Tyler helping you?” I asked. “How does he even know your names?”
“Me and Alf were getting dressed after gym,” Clark explained. “We were talking about Zelinsky in the locker room, and Tyler overheard us. He said for twenty bucks he would get us the magazine.”
“And you paid him?”