Lost Boys by Orson Scott Card Read Free Book Online

walked out.
    It was nearly noon, and even though he was probably supposed to go find Dicky and ask where his office was, Step needed to stand outside this building for a minute and decide whether to scream or cry or laugh.
    On the way to the staff meeting he had seen a back corridor that led to a door on the north side of the building—Dicky had told him in passing that everybody in the staff used that door, since that’s where the parking lot was. That’s where Step headed now.
    The scenery wasn’t all that pretty outside—just a narrow parking lot, a high chainlink fence with barbed wire on the top, and then an overgrown pasture where the only things still grazing were old tires and a rusting refrigerator with the door off. Ray’s Mercedes was in the only assigned parking place in the lot, directly across from the north door. Step felt a sudden urge to go pee on the tires like a dog, but he was satisfied just to imagine doing it.
    I’ve been a free man for the past five years, he said to himself, not working for anybody. Living on student loans, I taught myself programming on the Atari just to get history out of my mind, and I ended up creating a program that gave some pleasure to a lot of people and it made me about a hundred thousand dollars in a year and a half. All that money is gone, I owe taxes on it that I can’t pay, and I’ve just signed a contract to work for a company with byzantine internal politics, an owner on a power trip, a vice-president of finance who thinks that being in business means screwing anybody who’ll let you screw him, and a supervisor who’s so incompetent that they want me to clean up after him without letting him know I’m doing it. All for thirty thousand dollars a year. Twenty-five hundred a month. That’s the price of my soul.
    But it was no worse than what his dad had gone through, over the years. A sign company that went belly-up when Dad broke his back, and yet Dad refused to declare bankruptcy and paid it all off, slowly, over the space of ten years, during which time he went back to school, got his B.A., taught at San Jose State for a while, and ended up working at Lockheed designing training programs for missile operators. If Dad had ever had half as much money as I made last year, he would have made sure he was set up as a free man forever. He would have had money in the bank against a rainy day. I spent it like it was going to last forever, and now I’m right where my dad was, all those years at Lockheed, saying yessir to assholes and moonlighting weekends at a camera store in the Hillsdale Mall. Never heard him complain, except that he apologized to Mom when she had to go back to work as a secretary in the public schools.
    That’s why I signed that paper, Step realized. So I don’t have to make that same apology to DeAnne.
    And if I don’t find a way to make some extra money in the next year or so, the IRS is going to put us in that situation anyhow.
    The anxiety, the desperation, the memory of his father’s defeats—it all surged through him and burned in his throat and he thought, If I let myself get emotional about all this, it’ll show on my face when I go back inside. He swallowed hard and breathed deeply, slowly, forcing himself to calm down.
    Somebody opened the door behind him and came outside. Step didn’t turn around at first, half afraid and half hoping that it was Cowboy Bob or even Ray Keene himself, worried about him, wanting to smooth things over with him.
    It was just a kid, looked to be still in high school, who wandered a few yards away from him and lit up a cigarette. He took a deep drag, let the smoke out slow, and puffed it into rings.
    â€œHow long did it take you to learn how to do that? ” asked Step.
    The kid turned to face him. He had black-frame coke-bottle glasses so his eyes looked like they were swimming around in a specimen jar. “I been blowing rings since