First... Second... Third... He felt the familiar clunk as the chain locked into place, and the resistance of the pedals as his feet pushed against them. Now that he was out on the road, he could pick up speed.

For the first time he was scoping out his new neighborhood. Although Charlie's family had just moved a couple of miles and he could still attend the same school, this neighborhood was very different from the one that they used to live in. It had large houses with basketball hoops and expensive cars in the driveways with their names in gold letters upon the back of them. These houses had immaculately trimmed lawns with water sprinklers and brightly colored flags outside their doors—flags that changed with the seasons. It was the Pleasant Valley Estates—one of the wealthier parts of the city of Pleasant Valley. "A neighborhood for middle to upper income professionals," his father had said. "Not just anyone can live here, you know. You have to be in a certain income bracket."

Charlie wasn't sure what income bracket meant, but he thought that it had something to do with how much money you earned. These houses looked expensive. They were on streets with names like Charming Lane, Pleasant Drive, or Wisteria Way. Charlie thought that they just sounded like fancy names made up by advertising people, for folks who wanted to say things like, "Oh yes, you can visit us anytime...The address? Charming Lane..."

It made Charlie want to puke his guts up.

He wheelied off the curb and onto the street. He loved being on his bike. It was a bit like flying. You could go where you wanted and get away from everyone else. If people asked you where you were going, you just told them that you were going for a ride—you didn't have to tell them where you were going.

Charlie glided down the street. If he remembered correctly, his mom had said that there was some kind of high class senior housing estate nearby—somewhere that rich old folks bought houses close together so that they could rely on one another and have someone to talk to. His dad had said that it gave stability to a neighborhood to have seniors nearby, and anyway, there was a cemetery next door, so the old folks didn't have far to go when they popped off.

Popped off, thought Charlie. His dad was always using funny expressions like popped off. Computer geeks had loads of funny words like gigabyte, terabyte, and hard disk drive. It was like they had their own language sometimes. Every month, his dad would host a group at their house, for people who liked to disassemble computers and put them back together again.

Freaks and Geeks, his mother called it.

His father described it differently, "It is intelligent discussion and practical advice," he had said, "on the inner workings of the personal computer, with a particular emphasis on CPUs and memory."

"Freaks and Geeks!" his mom would say again, and then they'd get into an argument about how the long-haired, leather-jacketed one always parked his motorbike too close to her flower beds, or how the anxious, spectacled one would nervously pull out his hair, leaving strands of it on the couch—which inevitably the cat would eat and later throw up in a hairball.

"Fifi doesn't like it!" his mother would say.

His dad was alright, thought Charlie, except that he was a bit obsessed with status, computers, and safety. Other than that there was no problem. Charlie panted as he cycled up a hill between fallow fields and partially constructed timber-framed houses. Over the crest of the hill, he was freewheeling down a narrow road. Upon either side lay overgrown verges, a ramshackle stone wall, and deep dark woods—well tended yet gloomy and desolate somehow, as if no one were allowed to go there. Charlie flew along with the wind in his hair.