Lost Boys

"All right," said DeA

"That would be best," said Dr. Weeks. "Good morning." Then she hung up.

In the moment before DeA

Lee had not hung up before. He must have listened to the whole thing.

No wonder Dr. Weeks was having her mail the list to the office. No wonder she said "That would be best."

It wasn't rudeness, it was simple recognition of reality. Lee was spying on his mother every chance he got. Lee was out of control at home.

DeA

Then she set that paper aside and wrote another: Names of Stevie's frie nds in the order we heard them: Scotty Jack David Roddy She sat there for a while, looking at the list. Imagining those imaginary friends herself. Four boys, Stevie's age. Maybe Scotty was a redhead like that child actor Joh

Oh God, why can't Stevie have real friends? Why can't I hear my son's voice crying Ollie ollie oxen free in the front yard as dusk settles over the street?

She folded up the list and put it in an envelope and addressed it to Dr. Weeks's office and then took it out front and put it in the mailbox at the curb.

When she got back into the kitchen, Robbie was kneeling on a chair, sounding out the names on the first list DeA

"You forgot Peter," said Robbie.

"What?" asked DeA

"Peter," said Robbie. "He won't come out and play though. He just watches."

"Do you know what this list is?" asked DeA

"Stevie's friends," said Robbie. "He won't ever let me meet them, though."

"No, I don't guess he would," said DeA

"What you writing them down for, Mommy? Is Stevie having them come over?"

"Don't worry about it," said DeA

"Cream of Wheat!" cried Robbie.

DeA

Dicky came into Step's office on Tuesday afternoon. "Good news," said Dicky.

"Oh, really?" Step immediately felt a thrill of dread: Ray had decided to support the PC after all.

"Ray has decided to publish a Commodore 64 version of Hacker Snack."

How ludicrous! thought Step. No one had ever spoken to him about Hacker Snack, not even after he walked in on the programmers working on it as a secret project just before the San Francisco trip. He had assumed that the programmers told Dicky and Dicky told Ray and they just dropped the whole thing. But no, apparently it was still alive and now Dicky had the gall to walk in here and say that Ray had decided to publish a game that didn't belong to him.

"Oh, that's a shame," said Step.

"What do you mean?" asked Dicky.

"I already sold it to another publisher."

Dicky sat there in stu

"No one here made me an offer for it. It's not as if I was hard to find. So I figured you weren't interested."

"Don't give me that bullshit," said Dicky. "I know perfectly well that you've been aware of our interest in Hacker Snack for months."

"On the contrary," said Step. "I knew that Glass had disassembled my code and that the programmers had been goofing around with it, but since I had not sold the rights to anybody and no one at Eight Bits Inc. had ever so much as whispered the name of Hacker Snack to me, it never occurred to me that there was any official interest in it at all."

"Well, now I'm telling you tha t Ray has decided to publish Hacker Snack."

"And I'm telling you that I've signed a contract selling those rights to someone else."

"You had no right to sign such a contract," said Dicky. "Your employment agreement specifically gives the rights to any and all—"

"My employment agreement specifically excludes all games I published before coming to Eight Bits Inc., Dicky. Before you go quoting people's employment agreements, you ought to read them. They aren't all the same."

Dicky looked as though his face was going to explode. "You ungrateful little shit."

"Grateful for what?" asked Step. "I've worked here for more than four months, and not once did anyone make any kind of offer about Hacker Snack. You even forbade me to do any programming, remember? It has been crystal clear to me all along that Eight Bits Inc. valued me only for my manual writing. Or am I mistaken in that? Should I have thought of myself as a gamewright all along?"

"Do you realize what you've just done?"

"I've done nothing," said Step. "You're the ones who went behind my back and invested time in developing a product for which you hadn't the decency even to ask about the rights. Is that my fault? All I did was sell what was mine to a company that expressed an interest in it."

"Who! Who did you sell it to!"

"There is nothing in my employment agreement that obligates me to tell you what I do with my property, Dicky."

"We're going to sue their asses off!"

"Which is precisely why I have no intention of telling you."

"Ray will fire you for this."

"He'll fire me?" asked Step. Actually, he thought this was quite likely. But to Step being fired wasn't that bad a prospect. DeA

"You fool," said Dicky. "That was Ray himself who did all that."