The ghost was wrong, and Max knew it was wrong, and he couldn’t see why.
He’d drawn it on the squared paper at the back of the schrift (exercise book) in maths, during exercise nineteen, which he’d finished.
Sixteen squares by sixteen.
Each square was one dot on the screen, filled in or not.
A dome on top, two eyes, a wavy bottom edge for the little legs.
He’d seen the ghost from Pac-Man ten thousand times in his old life.
On YouTube, on shirts, on mugs, on the side of a bus once in Rotterdam.
On paper, in pencil, his version looked like a jellyfish someone had sat on.
“It’s the eyes,” Otto said.
“I think.
Or the shape of the dome.
Or everything.”
Thanks.
“I can’t draw.
I’m a spreadsheet with opinions.”
He rubbed out the eyes and tried again.
They came out cross-eyed.
He rubbed them out again, and the paper went grey and furry where the rubber had been.
The folded square landed on his desk.
What is THAT.
He looked up.
Femke de Wit had turned halfway round in her chair, her arm hooked over the back of it, looking at the schrift upside down.
He wrote: A ghost.
The paper went back, and came back.
A ghost of WHAT.
He didn’t answer.
After about ten seconds Femke reached back, took the schrift off his desk without asking, and turned to face the front with it.
The maths teacher was writing on the board with his back to them.
Max watched her shoulders.
She had a pencil in her hand.
It moved for about four minutes, quick, and then stopped, and then moved again, slower.
When the schrift came back over her shoulder, there was a new ghost next to his.
It was on the same sixteen squares.
It used exactly the same number of dots.
It looked alive.
The dome was round, not pointed.
The eyes were two big white ovals with the pupils looking sideways, as if the ghost had just heard something behind it.
The legs at the bottom weren’t a wave.
They were four little ragged points, uneven, like the bottom of a sheet blowing on a washing line.
Underneath it, small, she’d drawn a second version of the same ghost, with the legs in a different position.
Two frames.
If you flicked between them, it would walk.
How did you know about the two frames?
he wrote.
Because it’s a drawing of something that moves, dummy.
You always do two.
* * *
At the second break she found him by the bike shed, where he was sitting on the wall eating an apple and not eating the krentenbol Jeroen was holding out to him.
“Can I have it?” said Femke, and took the krentenbol out of the bag before Jeroen could say no, and broke it in half, and gave the other half back to him.
Jeroen stared at it, and at her, and decided to go and see if Vitesse had been in the paper.
Femke sat down on the wall next to Max with her judo bag at her feet.
She had a pencil behind her ear.
“Why sixteen squares?”
“Because that’s how much the chip can draw at once.
For one moving thing.
Sixteen by sixteen.”
“And it’s always just on or off?
No grey?”
“Not on this one.
On or off.
Later, maybe colour.”
She chewed, and thought about it.
“That’s like cross-stitch,” she said.
“My oma does cross-stitch.
You can only use whole squares.
It’s all about choosing which ones.” She took the pencil from behind her ear and turned it over in her fingers.
“You chose the wrong ones.”
“I know.”
“You chose them like a boy who thinks about where things are,” Femke said.
“You have to choose them like someone who thinks about what things look like.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Obviously,” Femke said.
“My dad’s been in a mood all week,” she said, a bit later.
“Why?”
“Because of your dad.”
Max turned to look at her.
“Your dad came into our shop,” Femke said.
“End of August.
Ages ago.
My dad was behind the counter doing a Grundig with the back off.
Your dad stood there in that orange jacket and asked if a boy could make a TV draw a box without a transmitter.
My dad laughed and said no, you need a broadcast signal.
Your dad didn’t laugh.
He just said, ‘Mine can.’ Then he bought a soldering tip and went.” She looked at Max sideways.
“My dad’s been trying to work out how ever since.
He’s got three books out of the library.
He hasn’t got anywhere.”
“Your dad thinks I’m lying.”
“My dad thinks your dad’s mad.” She shrugged.
“I think you’re lying a bit.
But I don’t think the drawings are lying.”
Mine can, Max thought.
“I want to see it,” said Femke.
“It’s in a shed.”
“So?”
So you’re fourteen and you’re a girl and I’m a boy with a shed, Max thought, and I know what that sounds like.
“I’d also note,” Otto said, “that you are twenty-eight in every way that counts, and she’s a classmate.
Friend.
Collaborator, at most.”
Obviously.
Don’t even.
“I’m not even.
I’m writing it down so it’s said.”
“Bring someone,” Max said.
“Bring Jeroen.
Or my sister’ll be there.”
Femke looked at him oddly.
“I wasn’t going to marry it,” she said.
“I just want to see it.”
* * *
When the bell went, they stood up off the wall together.
Max picked up his bag.
Femke picked up hers, and then she stopped, and looked at him.
Not at his face.
At his feet.
Then his hips.
“You do something,” she said.
“A sport.”
“Kickboxing.
Tempel.”
“In Geitenkamp?” She looked impressed for about half a second, then critical.
“You stand like a kickboxer.”
“I am a kickboxer.”
“You stand like one all the time.
Square on.
Weight on your heels when you’re just waiting.” She put down her judo bag.
“Can I?”
Before he could ask what, she’d stepped in, grabbed his sleeve and the front of his jacket and turned her hip in.
It was quick and small and very practised.
Her foot went past his.
For a fraction of a second he felt the ground start to disappear from under him, eighty-odd kilos tipping over her hip like a wardrobe going over.
His body caught it.
He dropped his weight, bent his knees, and sprawled his hips back.
The hold broke.
He was still standing, a bit crooked, and a bit surprised.
Femke let go and stepped back.
She looked at him with her head on one side, the eyebrow with the scar up high.
“Huh,” she said.
“Huh what?”
“Your stance would get you thrown in two seconds,” she said.
“But you didn’t go over.
Why didn’t you go over?”
Because I’ve spent a thousand hours on a mat with men who wanted to throw me.
“Luck.”
“That wasn’t luck.” She picked up her bag.
The sports hall behind the shopping centre.
Wednesday and Friday, half seven.
The first lesson’s free.
My dad’s the treasurer, so I’d know.”
“I’ve got no money for another sport.”
“That’s why the first one’s free,” said Femke, and went in to German.
* * *
He went to Radio Ruiter on Wednesday after school with four guilders and the dead 6116 in his pocket.
Ruiter turned the chip over under the magnifier on his counter and made a sad clicking sound with his tongue.
“Backwards,” he said.
“How can you tell?”
“Because that’s how everyone kills their first one.” He opened a drawer behind him, a deep one with SLOOP on the label, scrap, and rummaged in it.
He came out with a strip of green circuit board with a row of chips on it, off a cash register or a fax machine or something.
One of them was a 6116, socketed.
He pulled it out with a small tool and put it on the counter.
“Tested,” he said.
“Two fifty.”
Max paid.
Otto said “One guilder fifty,” in the tone of a man reading a weather report in a hurricane.
“What’s it all for, in the end?” Ruiter said, as he dropped the coins in the till.
“All these bits.
You never said.”
“A game.
For a café.
You put two kwartjes (quarter-guilder coins) in.”
“Like a pinball.”
“Like a pinball, but on a TV.
It’s called Pac-Man.”
“Pac-what?”
“Pac-Man.
You’re a yellow circle with a mouth.
You eat dots in a maze, and four ghosts chase you.”
Ruiter looked at him for a long time over the magnifier.
“That,” he said, “is the strangest thing anybody’s said to me in this shop.
And I’ve had a man in here who wanted to wire his budgie cage to the doorbell.”
Nobody here’s ever heard of it, Max thought, walking back to his bike.
Nobody in the whole world.
“Which is either a very big problem,” said Otto, “or the whole point.”
* * *
When he got home Sanne was at the kitchen table, doing her reading homework, and the household envelope was open next to her.
She’d counted the money in it.
Max could tell, because she’d put the coins in piles.
“Is there enough for the Efteling?” she said.
Otto had already done it.
There was enough.
Just.
If they didn’t have meat on two days, and if Max didn’t buy any more krentenbollen at school, which he wasn’t anyway.
“There’s enough,” Max said.
Sanne didn’t say anything.
But she got down off her chair and hugged him round the middle so hard he made an oof noise, and then she climbed back up and went on reading as if nothing had happened.
On Thursday night he put the thirty-two fifty in an envelope with Sanne Brouwer, groep 6 (Sanne Brouwer, year 6) written on it in his best handwriting, which was the same handwriting as H.
Brouwer’s, and on Friday Sanne took it to school in her lunchbox, under the triangle sandwiches.
* * *
On Friday morning, when he opened his schrift in maths, there was a sheet of squared paper folded inside it that hadn’t been there the night before.
He hadn’t seen anybody touch his bag.
He unfolded it.
It was a full A4 sheet of ruitjespapier, and on it, in very sharp pencil, were four ghosts.
Sixteen squares by sixteen.
Two frames each.
They were all the same shape, but each one had different eyes.
One looked straight ahead, flat and steady.
One looked sideways and slightly up, sly.
One had its eyes tilted, as if it was trying to work something out.
One looked worried, the pupils small, glancing back over its shoulder.
Four ghosts, four personalities, drawn by someone who’d never seen the game they came from.
At the bottom of the page, in the same pencil, was a single letter, F.
And under that, smaller, and underlined twice:
je staat verkeerd.
(you’re standing wrong.)
* * *
Thanks for reading.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk