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You had thirty minutes on the Apple IIe. You did not spend them learning multiplication. You spent them running from a purple troggle across a five-by-five grid of numbers, and if you got eaten it was because seven was not a multiple of four, and the whole class saw.

Six minutes past the hour, six minutes past the next hour, forever. A wall of beige text, a tri-city temperature list, and a saxophone that had never been to your area but wanted you to know your dew point anyway.

A clear plastic dome. Two dice inside. You pressed the top and they tumbled and the dome went POP, and you never held a die in your life. Trouble solved a problem nobody had asked to solve.

A plastic bottle shaped like a fruit with a smiling face. A twist-off head. Six ounces of thickened corn syrup. You drank the head, then you crushed the body. Nobody thought this was strange.

A pink plastic hockey puck. A snap-on lid that was already slightly loose. Six feet of gum measured out in inches, and thirty seconds of flavor to spend it in.

The pole was warm. The rope had a knot from where the last kid tried to fix it. The rules were made up by whoever was winning, and if you argued, they made up new ones.