The Summer to Start it All

The Place Where Promises Aren’t Kept [Chapter 1]

It was the summer of 2002, and eleven-year-old me was spending it the best way I knew possible: playing video games. Well, one specific video game. And it wasn’t just any ordinary video game either; it was one of endless adventures known only as Rune Quest. You see, Rune Quest was a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, an MMORPG for short. Compared to the fancy games you see these days, Rune Quest would look like a pile of garbage and pixels. But through my eyes at the time, there was nothing better. I mean, you could play online with anyone, anywhere, at any time, leveling up your character to be the best they could be.

Well, at the time, my character was hardly more powerful than your average goblin, and the only person I played with was my friend Jakey, but even just those little challenges were enough to keep me going. With every free second I was allowed, I found myself on the game, blissfully making my character better and stronger with each feat accomplished. That is, until my fun was shattered in one single blow. I was spending the afternoon mining iron and chatting with Jakey in-game when the conversation took a sudden turn for the worse.

MakeMeJake88: oh yeah

MakeMeJake88: did u get ur class schedule yet?

MakeMeJake88: like to see who ur teachers r going to b and stuff?

The topic was school, and it was looming so close in the distance. Jakey had betrayed me by bringing that up. That summer had gone by so fast. Most of the time I was completely unaware of what day it was, let alone what month. I knew it had to come sooner or later, but certainly not this soon. The hints of school coming closer had even been there, and yet it had been so easy to miss them.

In the past few weeks, my mom had gone clothes shopping several times with my older sister, Jess. Their shopping trips were always longer than any trips with me involved, and they always ended up with piles of clothes too. Somehow, though, my mom always returned with clothes for me as well. Looking back, hose clothes were definitely for the new school year.

My mom had bought me more polo shirts. They’re the ones with short sleeves, but also a collar and a few buttons. I think they’re supposed to look nice, but they just end up being hotter and more uncomfortable than a regular t-shirt. Plus, t-shirts are better because they’re the only type of clothes that are acceptable to have cool designs on them. Like superheroes or goofy sayings telling other people to leave you alone.

I’m sure there were other signs that the school year was coming up, too. Right, the few times I did end up shopping with my mom, the basket ended up with a stray pack of pencils or a couple of cheap lined notebooks. Do you know who needs exactly those types of supplies? Someone cursed to be heading back to school.

How much time remained of my relaxed summer, I wondered. I had no idea when the first day of school was, and even the calendar built-in to the corner of the computer screen was no help. Since Jakey asked the question, he must have known. He was older, after all, and headed off to the eighth grade. He pretty much knew everything there was to know about middle school. I typed my response to him finally.

IcyMike203: no…

IcyMike203: i should ask my mom 2 see

IcyMike203: uh when is it

IcyMike203: the first day?

MakeMeJake88: uh…

MakeMeJake88: next next tues

Two weeks, I sighed to myself. I had probably just enough time to level up enough to finish mining iron and move on to coal. Would I have enough time to start learning how to take that iron and coal and turn it into steel? The sudden time restraints hit me like a troll with a great hammer. Yes, that’s when it started, or rather, ended. My carefree virtual role-playing was soon to be replaced by a massive dose of the real world.

---

But wait, it still isn’t too late to remember how great that summer had been and how it turned out like that. The story actually starts back near the end of fifth grade, with my parents having one of their talks. Their talks were one of those things that I was supposed to be a part of, but most of the time, it was just them going back and forth between each other, deciding what was best for me regardless of anything I said. Luckily, this was one of the few times where it actually turned out in my favor.

“So Mike,” my dad started up in his fake playful tone after the whole family had sat down at the table to eat. “Your mom and I were talking about you starting up middle school next year.”

At the time, I couldn’t help but wonder if my grades were suddenly failing. Maybe my parents were just about to announce that were going to move just like my friend Sal had done earlier in the year. I tapped at the overcooked broccoli on my plate, something more appetizing than whatever I thought was going to come up at any moment.

My mom butted in before my dad could continue. “It’s been your dad mostly wondering about this.”

“But you agree too, Leah,” my dad said back. “Jr. High is a big step, Mike, as your sister can tell you. There’s a lot more work than elementary. And everything is getting high-tech.”

“Yeah, and they’ll teach him all that tech stuff in class,” my mom added, holding off on her first bite still.

My dad shrugged and started chewing a mouthful of chicken, barely pausing before he continued. “The neighbor’s daughter, two doors down, she applied for college last month. She had to write an application essay on the computer. Typed and printed off and sent to the school all fancy like. That’s how the registration offices want them now. They won’t accept anything written by hand. The girl’s probably sent more emails to various colleges than I have to my coworkers this entire year.”

“That’s college,” my mom said back.

My dad shrugged. “And you think young people just know how to write emails like that? I had to teach one of the older guys at my job how to make that little symbol that looks like the letter ‘a’ with a circle around it so he could send an email to another branch.”

My sister, Jess, was already ready with a remark. “That sounds like an old person’s problem. Mikey’s been on your laptop so many times, he could figure out how to write twice as many emails to twice as many colleges as the neighbor. And get into at least half of them.”

My sister was older and pretty nice. I guess she was kind of popular too, but I didn’t pay much attention to her friends and stuff. It was nice that she had my back.

“Well, yeah,” my dad sighed. “Which is all the more reason to get him a computer of his own, and get him off of mine. And it isn’t just emails, either, yeah? Jess, how many essays have you had to type up?”

Jess tilted her head back and forth. “I dunno, like one or two. But the teacher brought us to the computer lab to do them.”

My dad groaned and tapped away at his plate with a fork waiting to impale more food. “Well, work like that is going to end up coming home with you next year, high school is a whole different animal.”

My mom sighed and lazily stirred up her plate of food. “I guess we have to be like every other family in America and get our own big computer to take up half the room.”

“If Mikey gets a whole big computer, I should at least get a phone,” Jess begged.

My mom rolled her eyes. “We’ve already talked about this. You’ll get a phone when you start driving, and you won’t start driving until you turn eighteen; the school bus will be good enough for you until then. That’s how me and your dad did it when we were your age. And if we do get a computer, it will be a family computer, not just Mike’s.”

If you want a spoiler to a completely different story than this one, my sister did end up getting a phone before she started driving. If I recall correctly, her friends got their own licenses. Then Jess started getting driven everywhere, and my parents wanted to keep in touch. But we need to get back to my story about the computer here.

Even if it wasn’t decided by the end of dinner that night, sometime in that next month my parents finally reached a middle ground. About buying that brand new computer that would lead me to the next chapter in my life. I still remember the trip to the big box store. The excited salesperson told us about all the details of the best computers there, trying to get us to spend the most amount of money. Not an hour later, we were loading up our cart with the heavy collection of devices that would become the center of my attention for the next few months.

I remember checking out and seeing the register showing off a dollar amount in the four-digit range, a total I would have never imagined seeing. My heart sank for a moment there, but my dad offered his credit card with hardly a second look. Looking back, he might have been as excited about the new toys as I was.

Computers back then were a lot different than the ones you see today. The word I might use is… bulky. There was the screen, not anything flat and slim like a monitor today. Instead, it was a big cube called a CRT, which was even heavier than it looked. Certainly more than my skinny arms could manage to lift. The main, equally heavy, part was the tower, also referred to as the CPU by some, to which everything connected. Included in the whole deal was a mouse and keyboard like you’re probably used to, but also a printer for getting out those school essays that my dad was so focused on.

I would have loved to have the computer set up in my room for all my uses. Alas, I was forced to settle with it living down on the ground floor of our house in the den, at the back of the house where the second TV also lived. Now, if you’re following along with the story thus far, the computer itself was only one half of the equation that led to the most excellent summer. The final thing required to lead me to the virtual world of Rune Quest was, of course, the internet.

---

Even more different than computers back then, the internet itself was both more basic and somehow also more complicated. For the average person living in an average home on an average street, the internet came through the phone line. You may have heard this called ‘dial-up.’ In fact, dialing up is exactly what happened, except that it was your computer taking over the phone lines to dial some sort of number or code that would bring the World Wide Web to your computer screen.

Getting on the internet like this took forever, it was slow, and on top of it all, the process involved your computer making a series of sounds like a dying robot screaming its last digital words. It wasn’t even possible to mute these sounds as they came directly from some deep depths of your computer. To this day, I don’t know why these sounds were necessary for the process, but at least it was something to listen to while you waited for your homepage to load up for you.

Another unfortunate part of this whole internet business? Well, it wasn’t unfortunate for me, but my mom and sister both had their issues with it— dialing up the internet on your computer made the phone line busy. This meant no calls in and no calls out. And no, cell phones hadn’t quite reached enough people to fix that problem either. I can promise you, though, that my desire to explore the web wasn’t stopped by this little holdup.

Looking back, it was the perfect storm of things going my way. You see, up until that point, my mom had worked from home. While also being a stay-at-home mom, she had run a business of sorts over the phone, calling up people and selling sets of encyclopedias. I hate to think it was the internet itself that made selling heavy, inconvenient sets of books pointless, but it absolutely was the fault of the internet. Well, to run that business, a second phone line had been installed in our home. Instead of ditching that when my mom started up a normal job, well, it stuck around, eventually becoming the line allowing our new computer a pathway to the internet.

The story of getting into Rune Quest is much more simple. Jakey, my older friend from a few blocks over, had shown it to me several months before getting the new computer at my house. He already had his own computer and internet situation figured out and was happy to show me the wonders of the virtual world. Unfortunately, you can only spend so long at a friend’s house before their parents beg you to return from whence you came. Well, you can easily guess the first thing I did when I had my own PC and internet connection all to myself.

Next Chapter –>