Lost Boys

by Orson Scott Card

  Stevie nodded. Then he got up and left the room. DeAnne wanted to ho ld him, comfort him. But if he had wanted her right then, he could have stayed. He wanted to be alone, and that was his right.

  Step sat back down beside her on the couch and put his arm around her. "It went pretty well, I'd say" he said.

  She said nothing.

  "I know what you're thinking," said Step, "and it isn't true."

  "What am I thinking, smart guy?" she asked.

  "You're thinking that you're the worst wife and mother who ever lived on the face of the earth and I'm telling you, that's just the pregnancy talking."

  "No it's not," she said.

  "I know you hate it when I point out things like this, but you've always spent the last couple of months of every pregnancy in the slough of despond. The worst mother, the baby would be luckier if it was stillborn-"

  "I've never said such an awful thing!"

  "You said it about Stevie and you said it about Betsy."

  "So I'm just a machine that hormones use to accomplish their evil purposes in the world," she said.

  "I'm not saying that the feelings you have aren't real, Fish Lady," said Step. "I'm just saying that you can't believe the things they make you think. You're a wonderful wife, and I wouldn't have any other."

  "Oh yeah? Well what have I done this morning that was so wonderful?" asked DeAnne.

  "For one thing, you've kept my fourth child alive for another day, and that's a fulltime job all by itself. And you didn't tell me to stop when you thought I was letting Stevie decide not to go to the shrink."

  "What, have you suddenly decided that you're a mind reader?"

  "You sat on the edge of that couch like it was all you could do to keep from leaping at me and stapling my mouth shut," said Step. "I don't have to read minds. But you didn't do it. You trusted me, and it worked out. I'd say that gives you the hero-of-the-morning medal."

  "No it doesn't," said DeAnne. "Not after the way I talked to you in the kitchen."

  "Nothing that anybody says on the same day they find five hundred thousand June bugs staring at them through the kitchen windows is allowed to count against them," said Step. "Now give me a kiss before I go to work because my ride is outside."

  She kissed him. Then: "You didn't get any breakfast," she said.

  "Why do I need breakfast," he answered, "in a world with candy machines?"

  Then he got up and left.

  Taking Stevie to Dr. Weeks was almost an anticlimax. She piled the kids into the car. Stevie was silent on the way to the doctor's office, but then he was usually silent, and there was no waiting when they got there, the receptionist just greeted Stevie with a smile and told him that his mother and brother and sister would be waiting for him when he got through and why not come in right now and meet Dr. Weeks? Stevie didn't even give DeAnne a backward glance. He just let the receptionist usher him into the office like a soldier letting the sergeant herd him into battle.

  This has to work, thought DeAnne as she told stories to Robbie and Betsy in the waiting room. Please, Lord, let Dr. Weeks find a way for us to help get Stevie back to his old self.

  Then the hour was up and Stevie came out. DeAnne raised a questioning eyebrow to Dr. Weeks, but the psychiatrist was not going to confide anything in front of Stevie. She just smiled and shook DeAnne's hand and then graciously shook hands with Robbie, who asked if he could come in and talk to her sometime, too, because he was really good at talking to people and he liked to do it a lot more than Stevie did. Dr. Weeks laughed and said, "Maybe someday you will, Robbie, but not for now."

  On the way home, DeAnne wanted to ask Stevie about what happened, but she resisted the impulse. He couldn't be free to speak openly to Dr. Weeks if he knew he would face an inquisition as soon as he got into the car. So she confined her questions to one: "How was it?"

  "Fine," he said.

  The next morning, alone in the kitchen at 8:30, she called Dr. Weeks at home, hoping to catch her before she went to work. A man answered; it must be Lee, DeAnn realized. "May I speak to Dr. Weeks?" she asked.

  "Who may I say is calling?" asked Lee.

  "This is DeAnne Fletcher."

  A pause.

  "What's this about?" asked Lee.

  "Is she not at home?" asked DeAnne.

  She wasn't about to confide in this young man, not after his display at the baptism.

  "I need to tell her what it's about," said Lee.

  "Then I'll call back later."

  As she spoke, however, there was a click on the line. "Hello?" It was Dr. Weeks.

  "Dr. Weeks, I'm so sorry to bother you at home, but I wanted to speak to you before you had other patients in the office and while the kids were still asleep."

  "That's fine," said Dr. Weeks. "And who is this?"

  "Oh, I'm sorry, I thought Lee had told you. This is DeAnne Fletcher, Stevie's mother."

  "Lee was on the phone with you?"

  "Yes, he answered the-"

  "Lee, hang up the extension right now."

  A long silence.

  "He must already have hung up," said DeAnne.

  "Lee, hang it up now. This conversation will not continue until you hang up the phone."

  Another silence. And then a click.

  "I'm sorry, Mrs. Fletcher. Sometimes it's like living with an oversized four- year-old."

  "Yes, I understand," said DeAnne. But she did not actually understand.

  "You wanted ...?"

  "I just-I needed to know if you- if there's anything I can help you with. Information or whatever. After your first visit with Stevie yesterday."

  "Not really," said Dr. Weeks. "You already gave me the basic information before. Oh, I would appreciate it if you would make a list of all the names of his imaginary friends and mail it to me at the office."

  "I could tell you all the names right now," said DeAnne.

  "At the office, please," said Dr. Weeks. "That is how I maintain things in the strictest confidence."

  "All right," said DeAnne. "Thanks. And I won't bother you at home again, I promise."

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

  In the moment before DeAnne hung up, she heard a second click.

  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.

  DeAnne sat down at the table at once and wrote down the names she could remember. Jack and Scotty, of course. But yesterday morning while Stevie was playing Lode Runner ... what were the names? Roddy. And David was the one Stevie had mentioned after the baptism. Four now. Jack, Scotty, Roddy, and David.

  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 Johnny Whitaker, and Jack was a freckled round- faced brown-haired boy like Artful Dodger in Oliver!, and David was quiet, shy, holding back, perhaps a medium blond. And Roddy, bold as brass and inclined to get himself in trouble from which others had to rescue him. All hanging around the house here, always coming into the kitchen and she had to keep shooing them away from the fridge or there'd never be anything left for dinner, but then they'd come in and tell her all about the game they were playing in the back yard, and they'd be sweaty from running and have that acrid little-boy smell that DeAnne remembered from her brother, probably the worst smell in the world she had thought then, but now she thought that she would love to smell it on Stevie, on his friends, the stink of sweat from hours of hot play in the afternoon as the summer vacation got under way and the still- lengthening days left them with so much time, so much time in the evening, the
lightning bugs like tiny meteor showers on the lawn as the children ran and ran, and they would never stop until at last she called them in and said, "Time for you boys to go home, don't you think? But first here's some milk and I made these cookies after supper, Stevie remember to let your friends choose first, one to a customer please, and maybe if you washed your hands you wouldn't catch a vile disease. I suppose I'll have to teach you how to work the faucet, from the look of you none of you boys has ever turned on a watertap in your lives. The square thing by the sink is a bar of soap." And they would laugh and protest and Stevie would say, "Mo-om," and then they'd eat the cookies and flecks of chocolate would cling to the corners of their mouths.

  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 DeAnne had written.

  "You forgot Peter," said Robbie.

  "What?" asked DeAnne.

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

  "Do you know what this list is?" asked DeAnne.

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

  "No, I don't guess he would," said DeAnne.

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

  "Don't worry about it," said DeAnne. She put the list up on top of the serving dishes in the top cupboard. "I was just writing names. What do you want for breakfast?"

  "Cream of Wheat!" cried Robbie.

  DeAnne let him help make the mush, and within moments the list was forgotten.

  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 stunned silence as the blood flowed into his face, turning it red. "You sold Hacker Snack to a competitor?"

  "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. DeAnne could hardly blame him for leaving his job if he got fired, could she? So he even found himself enjoying this confrontation. There was nothing Step valued that Dicky could take away from him. "I don't think I'm the one whose job is on the line. I think the person whose job is on the line is the one who suggested developing an adaptation of my game behind my back. The one who didn't even bother to find out that my employment agreement is different before committing Eight Bits Inc.'s resources to a game that you didn't own."

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

  "Oh?" asked Step. "And is that the way Ray will remember it? Will he remember all the times you advised him against such a dangerous course of action?"

  Dicky looked at him in livid silence.

  "Dicky, now's a good time for you to lift your fat cheeks out of that chair and carry them through that door.

  If Ray's going to fire me, then have him send me a memo to that effect and I'll be out of here collecting unemployment in a hot second. And if he's not going to fire me, then I've got work to do and you are in my way."

  Step turned back to the page proofs he was checking.

  After a while he heard Dicky get up out of his chair and leave the room. Softly, softly, on little cat feet.

  When Dicky was gone, Step got up on shaking legs and gently closed the door. Then he leaned against the wall, breathing heavily. He felt so light- headed. Is this how a soldier feels when he has leapt from the trench and run toward the enemy lines and reached them and discovered that not one bullet touched him? Step had missed Vietnam with a draft lottery number of 225-a number that sounded as magical to him now as 7 or 3 or

  12 or 40 sounded to other people. He had no experience of war, of real courage, of struggle between man and man. But this might just have been a taste, he thought. Dicky came in here prepared to bestow some pittance on me as if it were a great gift from Eight Bits Inc., and I laughed in his face and dared him to do his worst. I don't know how I did it without wetting my pants.

  He went about his business as best he could, considering that he expected at any moment to have Dicky come in with his pink slip. At the end of the day he hadn't seen Dicky again at all, and he hadn't been fired. It was almost a disappointment.

  The Cowpers moved on the tenth of June. "I wish you could have waited till Saturday," DeAnne told Jenny.

  "Step wanted to help load up the truck. You've been so good to us, and we've never been able to give anything back."

  "Nonsense," said Jenny. "I've had a wonderful time since you got here. In fact, if you had been living here when Spike accepted the transfer, I don't know if we would have taken it. But that's the way it goes, don't you know? We were each other's best friends--except for our husbands-I had to say that real quick to get it in before you said it, I know-anyway we were best friends, as long as it lasted
, and I'll never forget you. But don't bother promising to write, you know we won't. Except Christmas cards every year., I'll never be bored reading your year-end family newsletter, you hear?"

  "Can't I write if I want to?"

  "Phone me. I'm not a writer. If you're broke, phone me collect."

  "And vice versa," said DeAnne. "You're the one who knows my phone number, so you have to call first."

  "Of course," said Jenny. "How else will you know where to send the five hundred dollars for the Datsun?"

  "Eight hundred dollars," said DeAnne.

  "Make it ten thousand if you want," said Jenny. "But we think the price was five hundred dollars and we don't really care if you never pay that. Think of it as a law-of-consecration car, a churchservice car. Take it out visiting teaching and take teenagers to youth activities in it. And whenever you do, think of us."

  "I'll think of you more than you know," said DeAnne. "And I'll miss you more than you know."

  "You'll make a new best friend within a month," said Jenny.

  "Someone else can be my best friend," said DeAnne, "without ever being half as good a friend as you."

  "Are you just trying to make me cry so I can't drive straight and I run us into a bridge abutment or something?" asked Jenny. "Now make sure none of your kids is standing behind the U-Haul or the car when we drive out." Jenny looked at the U-Haul in disgust. "They're a big enough company to transfer our family across the country and buy our stupid house, but they're not big enough that they can afford to pay for a real moving company. Tell Step to quit his lousy job, they're all thieves." Then Jenny kissed DeAnne on the cheek and they hugged each other and then Spike finally locked the house and got into the cab of the U-Haul with two of the kids as Jenny go t into their nice car with the rest of the kids. DeAnne made sure that Stevie and Robbie and Elizabeth were in plain sight and nowhere near the cars, and then she waved and the Cowpers pulled out into the road.

  She watched them out of sight and then felt the baby inside her do his stretching thing, pushing against her ribs until it hurt, until she thought she couldn't stand it anymore. She wanted to swat the baby, to yell at it, to demand that it stop hurting her, that it just leave her alone for a minute.