The Hideout

The Place Where Promises Aren’t Kept [Chapter 3]

The second day began with me walking to the neighborhood bus stop, the way I would be getting to and from school for pretty much every day after. I was far from the first to show up that morning. My savior from boredom and loneliness had already arrived. Jakey was a kid who was quite tall and quite rounded, probably the biggest kid around my age with such massive proportions. Like me, he wore rounded glasses and sported only the finest graphic t-shirts. That morning, beneath his unzipped sweatshirt, he was sporting one with just the number 7 down the front, something supposed to look like a sports jersey. I don’t think I had ever heard Jakey mention a sport. I had to think that it was one of those back-to-school choices picked out by his mom.

It wasn’t just his body that was massive, but his personality too, that towered over everyone else. He extracted his hands from his sweatshirt pockets when he noticed me on the sidewalk, shaking both pointer fingers at me like he was doing target practice.

“My companion!” He called out, grabbing up my wrists in his hands and grabbing the notice of the other kids waiting for the bus. “I feared that you had become lost in the Mines of Moria, or at least fled the country to avoid the first day of school! And not even a peep last night online, either.”

I finally regained the use of my arms after they left his grasp. “Yeah,” I sighed, “My mom drove me yesterday morning, picked me up too. Then we went out to dinner to celebrate or whatever? I don’t really consider coming back to school really anything to celebrate.”

“The peasants will do as they will,” He replied in one of his cultured patterns of speech.

I had met Jakey four summers previous when my family moved to the neighborhood. Before, we had lived in a big city called Sacramento. The busy, preppy elementary school there really wasn’t my thing, but my opinion meant even less when I was a little kid. It wasn’t until my dad got fed up with having to wear a hot, stuffy suit every day for work that he decided to move us somewhere more relaxed. He also mentioned inflation and some other stuff, but the suit thing made more sense to me at the time. Either way, he had set himself up with a similar job in a new, smaller town, one where he could wear more comfortable clothes.

Well, moving is a big thing. I swear, we had a mountain of boxes and piles of furniture, all stuffed into a rented trailer behind my dad’s truck, plus arranged into every free spot inside his and my mom’s cars. We were just about to our new home when we met the hill. You see, the current house we live in is up on a ridge, just a little bit, at the back of the neighborhood. The hill isn’t actually that bad. If you were walking up it, you wouldn’t even break a sweat, and if you were riding your bike, you would only have to adjust the gears a little bit. But towing a trailer with thousands of pounds from two hours away was just enough to make my dad’s truck stop working.

Thanks to my dad’s driving, nobody got hurt, but we ended up rolling right back down to the bottom of that hill. While my dad was trying to get the truck started back up again, the nice family that lived there in that house poked their heads out to get a look at the strangers moving into the neighborhood. That was Jakey and his family.

Everyone kind of met everyone right there as they helped us figure out the problem and get the truck started back up, and eventually to our destination. I can remember Jakey showing off for my sister, playing at the idea of hefting several boxes himself up the hill and to our place. From that point on, our two families were pretty close.

The bus finally came to a screeching halt there in front of the stop. “Well, right on time,” Jakey said glancing at his wrist. Despite there being no watch there, he was always prepared to say something of that nature.

I didn’t know the exact time, but judging by how packed the bus was, I realized we were one of the last stops. I could only offer up a single look to the bus driver as I climbed the stairs, looking over Jakey’s shoulder at the nearly-full seats.

Most seats were already full with two people. Many were stuffed with three, the most outward person pushed out slightly into the center aisle. Some of the others looked up at us as if they were angry that we had to be there and take up more of their room. I only caught some of their judgmental looks as Jakey pushed his way through, forming a wall between myself and them. Jakey had a presence that I always felt secure with, like he always knew how to handle every situation and not worry about others or their need to exist in the same space as him.

I joined Jakey near the back where there were two aisle seats next to each other where we could meet up in the middle. I only dared making a second of eye contact with the guy beside me as I sat down, firmly planting the heavy backpack on my knees.

“So who did you get?” Jakey asked suddenly.

The bus jerked and coughed as it took off from our stop and began once more toward the school. I forced myself up against the gravitation forces of the massive vehicle moving forward. “Huh? Oh, my teachers?”

The school schedule and map had been folded up and unfolded, yanked from, and shoved back into my pocket more times than I had changed classes the previous day. It was once again pulled from my back pocket, looking like an ancient document from the founding of the country.

Jakey pulled it out of my hand and glanced it over, flipping it about to the correct side and going through the list of names one by one. “Let’s see. Carpenter? I dunno them. She’s good. P.E.? You get pretty much the same P.E. teacher and class every year. Got to love running and playing stupid sports that don’t teach you anything. Science next? Make sure to laugh at Mr. Jones’ jokes, no matter how sucky they are. You get extra points for that. Uh, yeah, Mrs. Tucker isn’t too bad. Don’t know this math teacher. Ugh, math at the end of the day, though. Don’t fall asleep in class.”

I tried to take down the mental notes, but the names of the teachers were already departing my mind the second the paper had left my hands. “How do you remember where anything is?”

Jakey flipped the paper back into my hands and changed the subject. “So, your sister is in High School now?”

“Yeah,” I said. The morning light flashed past the windows as the bus went past a grove of trees. “She even has friends in her new classes. She’s taking Spanish. When we were out at dinner last night, she was saying some of the words she learned in class. She was saying all that stuff right in Italian Garden, too. Everyone else must have thought she was crazy.”

“Spanish…” Jakey huffed, pressing himself harder against the already squished girl beside him. “Why would anyone take that?”

“I think she said a language is required, like, for two years in high school.”

“I speak a language, it’s English,” Jakey grumbled, forcing his hands up into the pits of his arms. “I better not be forced to take anything like that. All I need are the computer classes they teach there. Which reminds me, my companion! I did not see you yesterday, so you missed out on seeing it.”

“Huh?”

“The hideout awaits you!”

I remember my eyes becoming wide, and my grasp on the backpack in my lap tightening. “Hideout?”

“The computer lab, my boy!”

I lowered my voice to a whisper and leaned in closer. “I can’t get in there, I don’t have any computer classes.”

Jakey shrugged. “The need be not, squire. Mr. Tate is cool about that stuff. They get a class in there like once or twice a week. Definitely not during the first week, either. He’s open at lunch.”

“Is that why I didn’t see you yesterday?”

“T’was.” Jakey hummed mysteriously. “I formally invite you to join the haven of HPs. It is located betwixt the Office of the Elders and the home of the school’s Tomes of Knowledge.”

“Tomes… of knowledge?”

“The library, dude. A tome is like a book. A big, old one,” he described, glancing up over the tall bus seats to judge how close we were to school. “Do you remember when Gandalf went to that big, white city on horseback to learn more about the ring Bilbo had? He was all up in the tomes there.”

“Oh yeah! So like… just beside the office, too?”

“That is correct. Do you still consume the meals prepared by your kin? Your lunch, from home?”

“Yeah.”

“So, just like drop in, man. We can eat together and I’ll show you around the place,” he said with a wink of an eye.

“And that’s okay? I can just go there instead of the cafeteria?”

“Sure.” Jakey shrugged then glanced at his watchless wrist once again, just as the bus stopped in its rightful place before the school. “Right on time. I shall await you there, Mike.”

---

It felt as if I were about to pull the worst crime of the century. I diverted from the flow of other kids headed for the cafeteria and instead made my way for the library. Even if I couldn’t tell the blocks of classrooms apart from each other, it was clear that the second biggest building there at school was the library. I definitely saw many books, or rather, the Tomes of Knowledge, through the windows. As I searched for something resembling a computer lab, I conjured up several different excuses that I could use if a teacher or other adult stopped me.

“I need to stop by the office and call my mom.” No, they might lead me to the office themselves. “I needed to go to the bathroom before lunch.” It might work, but I might be pointed off in a way different direction. “I was trying to find the computer lab.” That would have been mostly truthful, but it might just expose whatever activities were going on there. I would have ended up being a huge tattle-tailer for anyone else trying to enjoy the space, Jakey included.

“Mike! Hey Mike!”

I froze in place. All my excuses left my head that very moment. I jerked my head over my shoulder. It was Jakey calling my name. His voice was deep enough that I had thought it was a teacher, and that my journey had ended before it had begun. I relaxed my shoulders and nodded at him.

“Funny meeting you here,” I said, my heart slowed back to its normal speed.

“You’re in luck. I can now give you a proper tour,” my big friend said back, patting me on the back on his way past me.

The door that he brought us to there beside the library didn’t seem like much. The painted letters above it said ‘L4.” Jakey opened it for me, then waved a hand to let me in first. The space I entered at that moment was the place I always wanted and needed, but never knew existed.

The big computer desks lined three of the walls. There were two smaller islands of more desks holding their own computers in the middle. I scanned the endless rows of keyboards, pared with mice that each had found their own place on the corner of the desks. The room didn’t have many windows to start out, and they were covered with blinds that were drawn. Unlike the other classrooms with glaring lights that stayed on all the time and reflected off the shiny floors, only a few of the banks of lights were turned on. All of that missing light was replaced by the glow of rows and rows of computer monitors.

I heard my favorite sounds, too. First, it was the low, repetitive clicking of hard drives reading and writing data. It kind of sounds like little rats or rabbits nibbling on something. My dad said that if they start to get louder, that means the spinning disks inside the hard drives are going bad, and that’s not good. One of my dad’s coworkers lost all their work to that once.

The other unmistakable sound was of the computer screens themselves. Big CRTs (that also meant the TVs we had back then) make a little buzz when they’re in use. With that many computer screens packed in the room, I could feel the sound inside my whole body. There was also the whoosh of the air conditioning, trying its best to keep the room cool, fighting the heat of the computers inside and the remaining summer heat of the outside.

The outside world was gone as soon as Jakey shut the door behind us. He slung his backpack off his shoulder and wandered forward. Besides us, there were a few others inside already. Not far from the door was a black girl watching a cartoon or something on her screen. She stared at me for a little bit as I stepped in, then moved her chair to keep me from looking at what she was doing. Further in the back were a couple of dudes. Their computers were letting out a series of beeps and boops of some flash game, one where you solve one of those simple puzzles, or just hit things really fast.

At the far end of the room, Jakey was talking to the one and only adult the room contained. He probably would have called him ‘the master of the domain’ or something like that. Jakey pointed a finger back at me. I heard my name being used.

“Mike, is it?” The teacher said.

I approached, nodding. “Yeah.”

“This is Mr. Tate, Mike,” Jakey said, holding out his hands like a game show host.

“Well, welcome to the computer lab,” Mr. Tate said with a welcoming tone.

His area of the lab was a battle station of a futuristic design. Instead of a big, thick CRT screen, he had not one, but two flat-panel displays. They were turned facing the corner so nobody could see what was on them, but I imagined them being full of all sorts of computer information and data. On the wall behind him was the usual teacher stuff like his framed college diploma and other degrees, but also a shelf with indescribable computer equipotent, all lit up and wrapped in a tangle of wires.

Mr. Tate himself was a younger guy, with short, dark whiskers all over his face and a straight-edged haircut that wrapped around his head. He wore one of those dark polo shirts like the ones my mom picked out for me. For a moment, I thought they might have looked not that bad. Around his neck was a pair of sunglasses resting on a band, ready for when he stepped out into the glaring light of the outside world.

“You tell him the rules, Jake?” Mr. Tate asked.

“What rules?” Jakey said back.

Mr. Tate rolled his eyes and sat back in his tall-backed desk chair. “Well, first off, welcome to North View. There are a few rules for this place. Yes, you may eat your lunch in here, but clean up after yourself. I don’t want a single ounce of sticky, dirty mess smeared on one of my keyboards or mice. I do have proper classes that come in here and use this place like civilized people.”

“Oh yeah,” Jakey said, laughing and nodding his head. “He’ll make you eat up all the crumbs that end up between the keys if you do leave a mess.”

“Okay,” Mr. Tate said with a click of his tongue. “First off, that’s disgusting. Second, keyboards also get filled up with endless strands of hair and flakes of skin when they get used by a lot of people. So eating anything from between the keys is a punishment reserved for only spilling water or juice on anything in this room. But yeah, no spills either. I shouldn’t have to tell you two knuckleheads what water does to a computer, right? Overall, just treat this place and the other people here with respect, yeah?”

“Understood,” I said, nodding, thinking about how many crumbs were in my own keyboard at home.

Jakey shrugged and urged me to follow him to a free pair of computers. “Well, time to dig in, Mike,” he said impatiently.

I nearly had forgotten it was actually lunchtime until Jakey brought out the crumpled brown paper bag from his backpack. His lunch had a sloppily made sandwich on white bread, with a bag of chips and one of those plastic barrel-shaped containers of juice. I had always wanted to just try a lunch like that, something simple and also somehow daring. My own lunch had an egg sandwich on wheat, the filling decorated with those little green herb flakes that come out of a plastic container.

With one hand, Jakey deftly tapped away at the keyboard while shoving the sandwich into his mouth with the other. I kept watching him, nibbling my own food, while the computer accepted his username and password.

He swallowed hard and finally looked at me. “You aren’t going to jump on?”

I blinked and finally made eye contact with the glowing screen. Screen savers were a big thing back at this time. They were fun, random animations that began to play when a computer stopped being used for a while. The default one that was running on my screen had the logo for the operating system bounce around endlessly from corner to corner, side to side. When I moved the mouse, the login screen revealed itself to me.

“I don’t know how,” I admitted. “Is it the same one I use at home? My dad set it up for our computer.”

“Ugh,” Jakey grunted and leaned in closer to me. “No, stupid. The school gave you one. Where’s that paper with your classes?”

The paper had gotten more crumpled over the course of that day. The words with the names of my teachers and their rooms were still readable, luckily. There was also my name and several other bits of information I hadn’t looked at.

“Okay, here,” Jakey said, pointing at one of the corners of the paper. “It’s your initials and ID number— that’s the one right here— for the username. The password is your birthday, backward. Like year, then the month, then the day. All numbers. Don’t tell your parents any of that information, or then they can log in to the school’s website at home and check your grades. It’s a pain in the butt.”

I nodded. I looked at the number that was supposedly my ID number. I had never had one before. At least, if I had had one, I didn’t know it. I typed in the numbers one by one, making sure they were right more than a couple of times.

The computer liked what I typed in. It wasn’t too different from the computer I had at home. If anything, it was kind of a little bit older than my home computer. Maybe it was just more boring. As soon as I was on the desktop looking at all the icons, I had a revelation.

“Jakey!” I shouted out loud. My voice echoed about the room more than I had expected. I glanced over to the teacher’s desk. Mr. Tate had poked his head up from behind his screens for a split second. I quieted myself and continued. “Can we… can we get on Rune Quest here?”

Jakey sat back and rolled his whole head. “No. Blocked. It’s a joke.”

“Oh. Why not?” I said, looking for any icons that looked like they could be used to get on the internet.

He shrugged. “Mr. Tate says its because this is school, and you have to be bored at school and not play any games, at least not the good, fun ones.”

I glanced around the room. I was trying to see if the two other guys who were in there before us were still playing their own games. “So… Mr. Tate blocked it, then?”

“Nah, not Mr. Tate himself. I guess he and the school have to follow what all the other schools do.”

I sighed and looked down at the keyboard. “I guess it would take too long to dial up to the internet here at school, anyways.”

“Dial-up?” Jakey said, interrupting my sulking. “Oh no, my companion. This here is high-speed internet.”

Jakey was pointing at his screen. I saw him on one of the sites he had shared with me in the past. It was one where you could play one of those old arcade games, like where you bounce a ball and break the tiles. For my internet at home, I could go to that website, go make myself a snack, use the bathroom, and come back to it still loading. There on the school computers, on the school internet, the loading bar moved like a kid on a water slide in the middle of summer. Before I knew it, it was up and ready to play.

At that moment, I knew that this place was not just going to be my hideout, but my haven.

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