soccer skills could save dear old daddy tuition and room and board for four years, he’d dang sure make her games.
Problem was, these high-testosterone dads brought their football instincts with them to the soccer field, yelling and screaming and getting into fistfights with other dads whose daughters were trying to steal Suzie’s scholarship. The quest for college scholarships had turned youth soccer into a ruthless competition among the parents. So John always stayed to himself down the sideline and never commingled with the other dads, except for the post-game victory arch and the inevitable bemused smile. After next week’s game, John R. Brice would throw his narrow shoulders back, look the dude straight in the eye, and say, Dang right, she’s my daughter! And I’m a freaking billionaire! — a response guaranteed to wipe that bemused smile off his smug face. But this week Little Johnny Brice just shrugged.
“Yeah.”
The dude shook his head as if pondering one of the great mysteries of the universe. “I played college ball at Penn State, but my girl’s not in the same league as Gracie. Guess you never know where it comes from.”
“eBay.”
“What?”
“I bought her on eBay.”
The girls filed past the other team, exchanging low fives like they were afraid of getting cooties, as Gracie would say, then raced through the arch as their parents cheered insanely.
“Great game, girls!”
“Way to go!”
“Yeah, Tornadoes!”
The final girl ran through, the arch broke up, the mothers embraced each other, the dads swapped hard high fives like they had just won the freaking Super Bowl, and John R. Brice stood there in the middle of a dang soccer field holding a camcorder and cell phone and feeling like a lurker in a porn chat room, as he always felt when male bonding broke out. So he said, “I’m outta here,” hit the Esc key, and exited this app.
Gracie got her concession ticket from the team mom then waited for Brenda and Sally. When they arrived, Brenda leaned in close and whispered, “Thanks for giving me the goal.”
Gracie gave her a little hug. “I gotta tell my dad we’re going to the concession stand.”
They walked over to dadrnerd@we_be_geeks. com; he was yelling at the phone and filming his shoes now, God bless him.
“Harvey doesn’t have the brainwidth to understand the value of the technology! Lou, this is the next big thing, dude!”
He ran the phone and his hand through his curly black hair-it was now standing on end-and he stood out like a, well, like a geek among grownups. The other fathers wore suits and ties and starched white shirts and looked like the lawyers and doctors they were. Her dad looked like the college kid who lived next door. The other girls choked back giggles. Dad noticed her and smiled and aimed the camcorder directly at her face. Gracie reached up and switched the camcorder off then pointed to the concession stand and whispered, “Snow cones.”
“Hi, honey,” Dad said. Then, into the phone: “No, not you, Lou, my daughter. Hold on a minute.”
John R. Brice squatted, wrapped his arms around his daughter, and embraced her; he inhaled her sweaty scent. A thin glaze of moisture glistened on her flushed face, her short blonde hair was damp and stuck to the sides of her head, and her blue eyes sparkled like a multimedia LCD monitor. He placed the camcorder on the grass, flicked a drop of sweat from her cheek with his finger, and admired her. She was swell.
Dad was looking at her like she was a brand new eight-hundred-gigabyte hard drive just out of the box.
“Gracie version ten-point-oh,” he said. “Best of breed.”
Gracie said to the other girls, “I’m the applet of his eye.” With her index finger she pushed the glasses up on her father’s face. “And he’s my favorite propellerhead in the whole W-W-W.”
Dad grinned like he was embarrassed. “Your shoe’s untied,” he said. She held her foot out like Cinderella trying on the glass slipper. He reached down for the white laces but grabbed his blue shirtsleeve instead. It was stained. He looked from his sleeve to her arms.
“Hey, you’re bleeding!”
Gracie examined her hands and arms. She was bleeding, from both elbows, where she had hit the ground when the snot tripped her-which reminded her. She looked across the field to the Raiders’ sideline and spotted the snot standing next to her father, the big butthead. Their eyes met; the snot raised her hand. Gracie thought she was going to wave, ready to put their hard-fought athletic competition behind them; instead, the snot stuck her tongue out and gave Gracie the finger. Gracie’s face flashed hot, as if she had just stuck her head in the convection oven-she wanted the snot alone, like way bad. But it wasn’t going to happen here and now. She turned back to her dad.
“No big deal,” she said. She glanced over at the parking lot. “Guess Mom’s trial didn’t end. Oh, well, maybe she’ll make the playoffs. You want to get a snow cone with us?”
Dad held the phone up. “I gotta talk to Lou.”
“Hi, Lou!” Gracie shouted at the phone.
John R. Brice watched the girls skip off and merge into the stream of colorful bodies flowing toward the distant concession stand set back against the thick woods. He filled his shallow chest with the smell of popcorn riding out on the breeze and smiled. Ph. D.’s in the Algorithms Group at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Sciences aren’t given to emotion, as a general rule. Emotion had no place in the virtual world, where logical, ruthless intellect prevailed. In fact, the closest hackers came to emotion was emoticons, using ASCII characters to configure facial expressions in online communications. Virtual emotion. Real emotion belonged in that other world, that nonvirtual arena of pain and shame and smart-ass-ex-college-jocks-upgraded-to-real-estate that John Brice visited (like today) but did not inhabit.
But standing alone on a soccer field in an upscale suburb on a brilliant spring afternoon, he had to admit it: he was feeling pretty dang robust! And why shouldn’t he? For the first time in his life, he was on top of a world that was not accessible via a keyboard. In five days the IPO would hit the street and Little Johnny Brice would have his revenge- he would have it all! — everything he had dreamed of having all those lonely days and nights at Fort Bragg: two cool kids, a Range Rover, a big home, a drop-dead gorgeous wife who consented to sex twice a month (an unheard-of frequency during his premarital existence-computer geeks at MIT don’t get much sex, as another general rule), fame, fortune, respect, manhood, and maybe even love. After all those years, moving from Army base to Army base, never fitting in with the other Army brats, being bullied by brutish boys who dreamed only of following in their daddies’ bootsteps, a nerd in a soldier’s world-now, finally, the world belonged to the nerds.
Little Johnny Brice had found his place in this world.
But he had lost Gracie. Cripes. He pushed his glasses up and squinted. He spotted her golden head bobbing between the other girls when she suddenly stopped and turned back to him. The last rays of the setting sun spotlighted her perfect face, and father and daughter shared one of those rare moments in life you wouldn’t trade for the Windows source code. She smiled and waved to him. He loved her and he envied her. She was everything he had always wanted to be: confident and athletic, blonde and beautiful, social and popular, physically strong and mentally tough. She was entirely unlike him, and she was better. Often, like now, he would behold her and wonder exactly what part of her DNA he had contributed. But no matter: she was his daughter. John felt a catch in his throat and an inexplicable urge to run to her, snatch her up, and hug her again. Instead, he waved back with the phone and the moment evaporated-he had forgotten Lou.
“Shit.” He put the phone to his ear. “Sorry, dude, I had a brain fart. Look, Lou, while other kids were outside playing baseball, I was in my room hiding from bullies, hacking code, and dreaming of being a billionaire like big Bill. Thirty bucks a share makes me a billionaire-and that’s the ticket to happiness! A billion dollars buys me everything I ever wanted!.. Maybe even love… Yeah, Lou, geeks need love, too.”
One hundred yards away, ensconced in a silver Lexus sedan circling the packed parking lot in search of an empty space, Elizabeth Brice was jabbing a finger into the climate-controlled air: “Truth and justice demand you acquit the defendant, a good and decent man who is not guilty of looting his bank or hiding a million dollars in an offshore account but only of falling in love with a cheap tramp-Look at her! Those aren’t even real! She’s nothing but a gold digger willing to destroy his reputation, his family, and his bank-for his money! Blame her!”
She paused and smiled at the memory.
“Guilty as sin, and they bought it-lock, stock, and pantyhose. Twelve good citizens with the mental range of a
