“Joe! Hey, there. How the heck are you?” Karen wrapped her arms around my neck and hugged me, like friends do. Her perfume, Giorgio, mixed with the stale smell of a fresh cigarette embedded in her oversized sweatshirt, probably one of her boyfriend’s. I hadn’t seen Karen in a few months, not since she and her boyfriend, Don, moved. It was the end of June, and school was out. I didn’t know if she dropped out or what. I did know there was some incident that everyone else at Valleyview was aware of, but I wasn’t.

There wasn’t any reason for me to be at the mall. I was just there. No. That’s not entirely true. I was looking at music. And posters. Even though I’d never buy either.

“What are you doing now?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“Come with me. I want to show you where I live now.” She was grinning, excited to be living outside her parents’ house. Why not? It sounded like something more fun than what I was doing, namely wandering aimlessly around Stoneridge Mall.

We walked to her blue Volkswagen bug and jumped in. The drive to Livermore and her apartment was about 10 minutes east on I-580. On the ride, she told me how the principal, Mr. Freeman, told her she couldn’t date Don and still go to school here. “He said it was ‘inappropriate’ for a girl ‘my age’ to be dating Don.” Honestly, I didn’t care. And didn’t know any better. Don was, I think, 20, and she was barely 18. “So I quit. I’m not going back.” I wondered if she was going to finish school. “I’m not going back to school. I’m going to get my G.E.D. and call it over.”

We got to the apartment, and we both could hear the Nintendo NES playing from her second-floor apartment. She rolled her eyes and huffed. “That thing is driving me crazy.” The music was original, organic, like nothing I’d ever heard before. It was a composition like no other video game, not even the coin-operated quarter-eating ones, like Galaga or Donkey Kong. The television, a massive CRT, was on, and the musical tones were playing in an endless loop. I so wanted to play.

Don bought it a few days ago from the electronics retail store where he was working. “He’s playing that dang thing until 2 in the morning, Joe.” I couldn’t figure out why it was on. I thought I heard someone say they could save the game and come back to it later. All your progress was saved? How did that work? It was way different, more advanced than playing a platform game on a computer, like Montezuma’s Revenge on the Apple IIe. Don wouldn’t turn it off. “He won’t even let me turn the volume down.”

She opened the door and showed me the apartment. We came in, and Don was buttoning up a polo shirt for the electronics retail store where he worked. Maybe Circuit City? Probably some now out-of-business consumer electronics shop, records being trumped by cassette tapes. Karen kissed him, said their I love yous, and he nodded as he walked by me. He gave me a funny look on his way out. He was shorter than me, and tried to make himself look bigger as he pushed by me. Karen shrugged. “He gets kinda jealous of other guys,” she said.

“Yeah, whatever, Karen. Jealous of me? Why? Seriously?”

She didn’t laugh. Just smiled and cocked her head slightly.

The apartment had a faint smell of smoke. Nicotine and tar, scarring the pale yellow paint on the walls. A massive yellowish-brown glass ashtray filled to the edge with cigarette butts. The sink was full of dirty dishes. Beer cans were scattered across both the kitchen counter and the coffee table in front of the TV. She lit a Marlboro Light and pointed to an overflowing garbage can. “I keep telling him to take out the trash. Maybe tonight he’ll do it.”

The sounds coming from the game filled the room. Link the adventurer, wandering through Hyrule while Karen smoked, and we stood in the apartment, just two people being present with each other.

I didn’t have many friends back then. Karen was one of them. That was enough of a reason to be there.

“You can’t stay long,” she said. “I gotta get ready for work, and I guess you need to get home. Or back to Stoneridge?”

“If you could drop me at my house? That’d be cool.”

She smiled, nodding.

We got back in the Volkswagen bug. My afternoon was officially over.

And somewhere behind their second-floor apartment’s locked door, Zelda kept running in the background. I’m still wondering if she ever got her G.E.D.