"You could put these cookies in packages and sell them," said Nathaniel. "You'd get more than working here for my stingy old mother." She smiled. She had been random matter rolling about in empty space moments earlier and now she was put safely back to earth snapped into society like an instrumental piece of life's daily puzzle. "Hispanic Betty, do you think school is like that?" "What?." "I mean good for some people and not others." "So-so. Your madre, Gabriela, may probably kill me for saying it but I think you're right. I mean you need kid school and teenager school. Nobody should to be a dummy--but some maybe they find that special thing not in classes. You go to bed soon?" "Pronto." "Pronto. Excelente. Necesitas dormir las horas bastante para tener un dia grande por la manana. I go to bed now. You do it too after to eat your Betty cookies." "Hey, Hispanic Betty, why do you have two names?" She laughed. "Because of Santa Gabriela. Como se dice? Nickname- -it's a nickname. Your mother has told you when she comes back?" "I don't know" the glutton said evasively as he devoured a cookie. "Buenos noches." "Buenos noches, Nathaniel." In the morning Nathaniel took a bus to the facade of the school and then meandered downtown as obscurely as he could. His virtual friend twenty years his senior had told him that summer school wasn't "all that important" and since this reinforced his own ideas about the matter, there was a guilt-ridden conviction in his movements as he splashed through puddles in effusive kicks of vexation. Nathaniel, who was less than a decade from the womb, had his mother as his conscience; and this conscience chastised his every deviation. And yet it was she who had made herself inaccessible. And when she had the chance to make it up to him with a summer trip abroad it was she who had departed alone. For a couple hours in front of a computer he used a joystick as an extension of the arms of virtual boxers, and the flights of airplane bombers. With it he could also maneuver entire armies according to his sense of viable strategies not that his age and turbid thoughts at present could offer much beyond the contribution of his reflexes. When his body felt stiff he paid, left, and then lit a cigarette in the back alley. Stealth in front of the back wall of the internet cafe and computer game arcade and crouched behind a trash barrel, he tried to release clouds of smoke in various shapes the way in earlier years he had blown bubbles of various sizes into the air. He coughed as much as he smoked and the shapes of his smoke were nebulous; but his cigarettes were a self-taught rebellion in back alleys like this one and lacking male influences both good and bad maleness was an awkward stumbling of trial and error. Coughing inordinately, not able to master smoking a cigarette with that insouciant fortitude and confidence seen in movies, he went into a Ben Franklin dime store. There he twirled the plastic sunglass rack.