Clark’s plan was to fill our baskets with many large but inexpensive items. I grabbed a three-ring binder, a pack of A13 batteries, and a massive tub of Elmer’s Glue. If it cost less than a buck or two, I put it in the basket. There were no other customers. The store was silent except for the radio; Phil Collins was repeating the fade-out chorus of “Invisible Touch.” But as soon as the song ended, it inexplicably started from the beginning all over again.
At the back of the store was a large showroom designed to look like a working office, complete with desks and swivel chairs, typewriters and wall clocks and file cabinets. Everything had a price tag; the whole showroom was available for purchase.
A fat girl sat at one of the desks, typing on a Commodore 64 computer.
The monitor was full of code and I was too far away to read it, but I could hear the results streaming from the speakers: a tinny, synthesized version of “Invisible Touch,” the same song playing on the radio. The melody wasn’t quite right—there were a few wrong notes—but as a copy, it was pretty damn close.
The girl looked up. “Can I help you?”
I grabbed the closest item on a shelf—it looked like a white paper hockey puck—and dropped it in my basket.
“No, thanks.”
I turned down the next aisle but felt her eyes tailing me; none of the shelves were taller than my shoulders, and her desk in the showroom allowed her to observe the entire store. I grabbed some #2 pencils and then topped off my basket with old, bulky typewriter ribbons that were marked down to fifty cents apiece. Alf was in the next aisle over, scooping Styrofoam peanuts into a plastic bag. Clark walked past him with a dozen mailers wedged beneath his arms. They’d already gathered more stuff than we could carry.
I knelt down to grab a handful of erasers, and suddenly the fat girl was right beside me, straightening a display of Post-it Notes. She spoke in a low whisper: “My dad will call the cops.”
“What?”
“He has zero tolerance for shoplifting.”
She pointed to a sign on the wall:
We have ZERO TOLERANCE for SHOPLIFTING!
We WILL call the COPS!
“Thieves will not enter the kingdom of God.” —First Corinthians, 6:9,10
“I’m not stealing anything,” I said, but I started blushing anyway, because we were clearly guilty of something.
She reached into my basket for the batteries. “These are for hearing aids. And this”—she grabbed the paper hockey puck—“this is receipt tape for an adding machine. Nothing you’re buying goes together.”
She was leaning over to whisper, and I could smell her perfume, fresh and clean, like soap in the shower. Long black hair fell past her shoulders. She wore an oversize Genesis concert T-shirt, and her wrists were covered with purple jelly bracelets. A small gold cross hung from the chain around her neck.
“Is that your 64?” I asked.
“It’s the store’s. Technically it’s for sale, but my dad lets me use it.”
“I’ve got one at home.”
She seemed skeptical. “Disk drive or tape storage?”
“Disk,” I said, allowing a touch of superiority to creep into my voice. Programmers on a budget could store their data on cassette tapes, but the process was slow and unreliable. I gestured to the stereo speakers in the ceiling—She seems to have an invisible touch, yeah—and asked, “Was this song playing on your computer?”
“Yeah, I’m messing with the waveform generator. The SID chip has three sound channels, but to do the song properly, you need four. That’s why you didn’t hear any drums.”
I would have been less astonished if she’d answered me in Japanese. “You programmed your 64 to play ‘Invisible Touch’?”
“My ‘Sussudio’ is way better. I’m coding all of his greatest hits on the 64, one track at a time. So I can listen to them on my computer.”
“Are you a musician?”
“Nah, I just really like Phil Collins. British bands are the best, you know?”
I did not know. Most people in our neighborhood viewed the words Made in America like a badge of honor. “What about Van Halen?” I asked. “Could you do Van Halen?”
She shrugged. “Maybe? Guitars are tough.”
It was my first time meeting another programmer, and I had a lot more questions: Was she working in BASIC or Pascal or something else? Was each song its own standalone program? How long did it take to load a song into memory? But across the store, Alf was already glaring at me. This wasn’t part of the plan. We were supposed to move swiftly and purposefully. Operation Vanna was going off the rails.
“Do you go to Wetbridge High?” I asked.
“St. Agatha’s,” she said. “My father’s raising me to be a nun.”
“Do they teach you how to use waveforms?”
She laughed. “If you want to see something hilarious, you should come to my school and watch nuns teaching computer science. We spent all winter learning how to draw a cross. No functions, no calculations, no animation. Just graphics inspired by the holy gospels.”
“At least you’re programming,” I told her. “My school put a typing teacher in charge of the computer lab. I’ve seen her use a floppy disk sideways.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Not if you push hard enough.”
She laughed. “Are you kidding?”
“Swear to God,” I insisted. “She broke the disk and the drive.”
Alf and Clark moved behind the girl, invading my sight line. They were pantomiming furiously, waving their shopping baskets and pointing toward the cash register.
“What about you?” she asked. “Do you program?”
I thought of Strip Poker with Christie Brinkley. “I made a poker game last month. Five-card stud. Human versus computer.”
“You taught your 64 to play cards?”
“It’s not very good. It only wins maybe half the time. But I did teach it how to bluff.”
Now she looked impressed. “That must have taken forever!”
And it felt so good, hearing somebody say that. Because it had taken forever! I’d spent all winter on the game, painstakingly teaching the 64 to recognize the difference between a straight, a flush, and a straight flush—only to have Alf mock the game because digital Christie Brinkley didn’t have enough pubic hair.
“You’re the first person I’ve met with a 64,” I told her. “And you’re a girl.”
“Is that strange?”
“I didn’t think girls liked to program.”
“Girls practically invented programming,” she said. “Jean Bartik, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas—they all programmed ENIAC.”
I had no idea what she was talking about.
“And don’t forget Margaret Hamilton. She wrote the software that let Apollo 11 land on the moon.”
“I meant programming video games,” I said.
“Dona Bailey, Centipede. Brenda Romero, Wizardry. Roberta Williams, King’s Quest. She designed her first computer game at the kitchen table. I interviewed her for school last year.”
“For real? You talked to Roberta Williams?”
“Yeah, I called her long-distance in California. She talked to me for twenty minutes.”