When he got up to the apartment, his mother was out shopping and his father hadn't come home yet. That left him all dressed up with no place to go. Like an atheist at his own funeral, he thought. Even with a good report card, he didn't feel like starting in on his homework right away.

He turned on the TV. He'd always taken it for granted before. Now he saw that the picture wasn't nearly so sharp as the one on the screen of Eduardo's impossible handheld computer. The colors weren't so bright and vivid, either. Gianfranco wanted a machine like that. He wanted a world where everybody used a machine like that.

He had… this. Four channels showed different flavors of propaganda. The news told him how the goals for the twenty-third Five-Year Plan were being exceeded. The goals for the other Five-Year Plans had all been exceeded, too. So why weren't things better?

On another channel, a Russian and an Italian were hunting down an American spy. If a villain wasn't a Nazi, he was bound to be an American. Sometimes he was an American who wanted to bring back the Nazis. These days, the USA was harmless. It did what the USSR told it to do. If it didn't, it suffered. Sometimes it suffered anyway, just because it had been the Soviet Union 's most dangerous rival before the Russians won the Cold War.

Eduardo said the USA was top dog where he came from. Gianfraneo wondered what that was like. Were all the villains on American TV Russians? The ones who weren't Nazis, anyhow? He wouldn't have been surprised.

But Eduardo also said the USA was where the idea for computers came from. He said some of the games The Gladiator sold-had sold-came from there. That made Gianfranco think better of it than he would have otherwise.

The door opened. In came his father, with a heavy briefcase. "Buon giorno, Father," Gianfranco said. "How are you?"

"Tired," his father answered. "Some of the people in the provincial planning administration are donkeys. Real donkeys. They should have reins and harness, so they could haul bread carts around. We'd get some use out of them that way." He sank into a chair with a martyred sigh.

He came home complaining about the people he worked with maybe one day in three. "Guess what?" he said.

"I don't know," his father said. "Will you fetch me a bottle of beer?"

"Sure." Gianfranco brought him one from the refrigerator. Then he said, "Guess what?" again.

His father drank half the bottle at one long, blissful pull. "Ah!" he said. "That's good. Takes the edge off the day-know what I mean?"

"I suppose." Gianfranco liked wine much better than beer. He tried once more: "Guess what?"

His father paused with the beer bottle halfway to his mouth. "What?" he said at last, and the bottle finished the journey.

"I got second honors," Gianfranco said.

"No kidding?" That made his father stop without emptying the beer. "Not bad, kid, not bad." Then he said what Gianfranco knew what he would say: "I bet Annarita made first."

"She did." Gianfranco couldn't very well deny it, not when it was true. "She always does. Some people are like that."

"Greasy grinds." But his father caught himself. "Can't say Annarita's one of those. She's smart, but she's not stuck-up about it." He did kill the beer then, and set the bottle on the little table next to his chair. "But you got second, eh? How about that? Your first time. Way to go."

"Grazie" Gianfranco said.

The way his father looked at the beer bottle, he was thinking about having another one. But he didn't get up, and he didn't send Gianfranco after it, either. "What took you so long?" he asked. "I didn't think you'd ever do it. I didn't think you cared enough."

"Up till this semester, I didn't," Gianfranco said. "Things seemed to get more interesting, though, so I guess I worked harder."

"Well, a little hard work never hurt anybody much," his father said.

Maybe that was a joke. Then again, maybe it wasn't. That joke about pretending to work and pretending to get paid ran through Gianfranco's mind. Workers got money, but a lot of the time money couldn't buy what they wanted. When the wait for things like TVs and cars and apartments was so long, getting excited about money wasn't easy. Getting excited about work wasn't easy, either.

His father proved as much, saying, "Sometimes I don't know why I bother getting upset with those asini. How much will it matter ten years from now? How much will it matter ten days from now?"

Before Gianfranco could answer, his mother walked in. "They had the outfit I wanted in the window at three different shops," she said unhappily. "But when I went in, two were sold out and it was a two months' wait at the third one. Sometimes I think you can only buy things with a prescription."

"If that were so, the Crosettis would have more, and they don't," his father said. "Guess what, though?"

"What?" his mother asked. Only one try-Gianfraneo was jealous.

His father pointed at him. "Second honors."

"Gianfranco?" His mother's eyes went big and round. She couldn't have been more surprised had his father said he'd been kidnapped by green men from outer space. "How about that?"

"Not bad, eh?" his father said. "I don't think he takes after either one of us. Must be the milkman."

"Oh, stop that, you-man, you," his mother said. "Besides, when did this building ever have a milkman? Not since before we lived here, that's for sure."

"All right. The plumber, then," his father said.

His mother made as if to throw her purse at his father. She seemed satisfied when he ducked. Then she turned back to Gianfranco. "So why didn't you do this a long time ago? The Crosetti girl always does, regular as clockwork."

There it was again, thrown in his face in a different way. It would have made him angrier if he hadn't known ahead of time it was coming. He shrugged. "I don't know. Things seem more interesting now."

"Annarita's smart. Maybe he thinks he has to be smart, too, if he wants to keep taking her out." His mother talked about him as if he weren't there. That did make him mad.

"Whatever works," his father said. Then he did the same thing: "That can't be all of it, though. The grades are for more time than when he started going out with her."

"Is there anything else you want to say about me?" Gian-franco asked. "Do you want to talk about my shoes, maybe? Or this cut I got shaving my chin?"

"No, I don't think we need to worry about those." His father didn't even notice the sarcasm, which only ticked him off worse. "And your beard isn't as heavy as mine, I don't think, so you won't cut yourself very often."

"My father and my brother-your Uncle Luigi, Gian-franco-only have to shave maybe once every other day," his mother said, so she didn't get it, either. Gianfranco wondered how he'd ended up stuck with such totally normal parents. It didn't seem fair, not when he prided himself on being strange.

"You'll have to tell that Silvio. He'll be happy for you," his father said. "He looks like the kind who got high marks in school."

"Much good it did him," his mother said. "Here he is, scrounging off of family instead of going out and finding work for himself."

"Si." His father nodded. "He doesn't go anywhere, does he? He couldn't stick any closer to the Crosettis' flat if the Security Police were wailing for him outside."

He was joking. Gianfranco understood that, but only after a split second of something worse than alarm. He felt as if someone dropped a big icicle down the back of his shirt. The laugh he managed sounded hollow in his own ears, and his smile must have looked pasted on. But his parents didn't notice anything wrong. Most of the time, they just saw what they expected to see.

He often got angry at them for not paying more attention to him. Every once in a while, though, that was nothing but good luck.