8-Bit Christmas by Jakubowski Kevin

Author:Jakubowski, Kevin [Jakubowski, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2013-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N

T immy Kleen may have been a spaz and an asshole, but he was no dummy. He was the only Cub Scout in the cafeteria who smiled when Halberg pulled the sheet back on those encyclopedias. Because that meant his Nintendo had become twice as valuable. This deep into December, there was no way any of us could get our own Nintendos before Christmas now. It was an impossibility, a pipe dream, one that Kleen knew he could capitalize on big time.

The following Saturday morning, the line to get into Kleen’s house was no longer a line. It was a mob. Half the school had descended onto his front yard like a swarm of locusts, pushing and shoving and generally trading unpleasantries. Not only did Kleen still have the only Nintendo in town, but word was that he had just gotten the Power Glove as an early Christmas present. This was very big news.

We’d been reading about the Power Glove in Nintendo Power magazine for months, staring at pictures, drooling over the technology. Its engineering was revolutionary. It was as though the future had decided to grace the Nintendo Corporation with a gift: a glove that you wore on your hand that allowed you to control the game with a flick of your wrist. The thing made Luke Skywalker’s metal hand-replacement look like a Tinkertoy. As far as we were concerned, it was the missing link to humans finally becoming man-robots. And there wasn’t a boy among us who wouldn’t run over his own family to become a man-robot. That went without saying.

Farmer tapped me on the shoulder. “I heard the Power Glove has a suction cup thing that sticks right into your brain.”

“Does not.”

“Does too. It makes moves for you before you even think of them. My uncle works for Nintendo.”

Of course Josh Farmer’s uncle worked for Nintendo. Of course he did.

“Stop talking, Farmer, would ya?”

I was pinned up against the bottom of the porch steps, between a few second graders, trying to figure out what I would offer Kleen as payment to get inside. With the addition of the Power Glove, free admission into his Nintendo lair had gone out the window. You had to pay to play from now on. “One Micro Machine or higher,” as he put it. That meant that unless you had at least one Micro Machine to pony up you weren’t getting in. I was not a Micro Machine guy myself, so I could only guess at its toy equivalent. I came armed with a couple of M.U.S.C.L.E. Men (small plastic figures of bizarre character) and a shitty paddleball thing I got from my aunt after she went to Mexico. It said something in Spanish on it, I think.

“Hey kid!”

I looked up to see Kurt Marshall skidding up on his bike. His sack of Kane County Chronicle newspapers was slung across his shoulders. Kurt was thirteen, with a real job—practically an adult.

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