The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [54]
When Blue’s mother offered him a ride after the conference, Blue didn’t want to go home. He biked to the arcade to play DrumMania. An hour later, when he arrived home, his mother was in the car, about to pull out of the driveway to look for him. She was furious. As he stored his bike in the garage, she yelled at him. “What the fuck?! You’re really starting to Piss. Me. Off.” She told him to go straight to the kitchen and sit down. He thought he knew what was coming. He was wrong. “How fucked up are you?! What the fuck are you doing?” she shouted.
Blue didn’t know how to respond.
“Answer me, goddammit, before I beat the shit out of you.” Blue paused before answering. He knew her threat was not idle.
At his silence, she cocked her head and asked suddenly, “How would you draw a lion?”
“What?!”
She repeated the question. Blue looked at her quizzically. She ran out of patience, walked to the cutting block, and picked up a knife. “You better start answering me before I hit you with this,” she said. “Don’t be like your father. I hate that about your father.”
Blue had no idea what she meant. As she waved the knife a foot away from his face, he came to the conclusion that his mother was crazy. This was a relief. He couldn’t take her demands seriously anymore.
“Uh, you’d draw . . . a lion?”
“Don’t fucking play with me!” his mother said, still brandishing the knife. “Be more specific!”
“Uhh . . . catlike features? A tail?”
“But how would you draw it so if I looked at it I would know it’s a lion?” she asked.
Baffled, Blue evaded her questions until she left him alone. The issue went against values he strongly believed in. He couldn’t explain art, even if he tried to, because he didn’t think it should be explained. He felt the same way about English class. How could you teach students to write creatively? Art was passion, to Blue. He tried to infuse his activities with feeling, tucking emotion into skating, gaming, drawing, debating. He couldn’t explain to his mother the process of animating art with a little piece of his soul without sounding like he was crazy himself.
Later that night, Blue’s mother told him, “Here’s the deal. If you don’t get full scholarships and straight As, you’re going straight to Air Force. I don’t give a shit. From now on, if you aren’t home thirty minutes after school, I’m taking away everything. Everything.”
When his mother told him that if he failed a class this quarter he wouldn’t have enough credits to graduate, he froze in fear. “I don’t care how late you have to stay up tonight. You’re finishing all of this. You are never going out with your friends or having friends over again! Until you graduate with straight As. Bring your computer here. Right now! You’re not getting it back until you graduate. Actually, you’re selling it. Post it! But not tonight. Do your homework. I’ll compare it to your reports to make sure you did everything. Go!”
Blue went to his room. His mother was still yelling, but her words were just noise to him now. He thought about running away. But I don’t have any friends who care enough. Where would I sleep? What am I going to do? His resentment chilled him. I hate it here. I don’t have my own life anymore.
Blue’s room was lit only by the glow of the twenty-four-inch monitor he had stared at for eighteen months. I have poured so many emotions into that window, Blue thought.
“You have one minute until I unplug you!” his mother shouted.
He closed the browser. That was filled with the tabs of my life, he thought.
Blue reached around the back of the computer case and dejectedly disconnected the wires. This computer had taken him ages to build perfectly. He rested his hands for a moment on the chassis. The steel was cold—there was not a trace of heat from the hum that he had just silenced, precisely the way he had designed it. He put the computer next to his mother’s