Excerpt from Homebound by Portia Elan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

CHAPTER 1

1983, SPRING

CINCINNATI

I love the way a computer program doesn't just describe something: it is the thing.

Words between people—normal language—is like a glaze over the realness of action and being. A bubble, not something you can touch or count on. But code is the doing, is the thing: words and syntax and rules creating their own world, their own existence. Everything the code needs is there, inside the computer.

I tap this semester's passkey into the door on Baldwin Lab. I get access to the lab because I'm taking freshman Computer Syntax 101, although it's a bullshit class; I could do most of the assignments in my sleep. This is where I come, though, when I don't want to go home and face Sheila the Mother, or when Veronica is busy with Jack.

Down the hallway, there's a grody water cooler, and then the lab, with its twenty Apple IIs and ten terminals hooked into the MUD, a broken clock, no windows, and three rules:

1. No food or drink

2. Save it to a floppy because it will get deleted

3. Don't touch anyone else's keyboard

The TA on duty doesn't care if I work on personal projects, or if I listen to my Walkman with Television or the Clash turned up to eighteen. The glow of the monitor screen washes without judgment over my ripped jeans, my band T-shirts, my dyed-black hair. It feels like freedom.

When I told you, on our weekly call sometime near the start of high school, that I was taking Computer Basics, you got so excited, thinking I was learning BASIC. Back then, I didn't even know what a programming language was. I sat there, coiling the phone cord around my fingers in Bubbe's kitchen, which was the only place I called you from, because of Sheila. You described the possibilities of machine learning, and it was like you were speaking to me not from the East Coast, but from somewhere else in time, from some other world.

"You're going to love it," you said. "It's the language of the future."

I never told you this, although I think you would have laughed: the next day, I stopped by the high school library to see if they had any books on BASIC. I wanted to close the gap between what you'd thought I was learning and the rudimentary typing lessons I was getting in class. The librarian gave me some issues of Creative Computing: I tried to memorize the most obvious commands—LET, PRINT, GOTO, IF—even as my mind tumbled through all the ones I didn't understand yet: DIM, CHR$, TIME versus TIME$. That same day after school, on a TRS-80 at the RadioShack downtown, I tried typing Valley Bomber, one of the programs printed on thin newsprint in the magazine's back pages. Command after command after command. It seems so improbable, so strange—that shapes rendered in ink-on-paper could become something else inside the computer, but they can. In the game, the player flew through a valley surrounded by mountains, dropping bombs in the narrow stretch between the heights. I thought, while I was typing it all in, that I wouldn't mind destroying some mountains. Just destroy it all, maybe.

The game didn't work. I arrowed up through the lines of code, searching for what I'd done wrong, but the glowing letters swarmed opaquely, refusing to show me. After a week of typing the same sequence in over and over, I found the problem—I'd messed up something simple in the syntax.

But I'd gotten a taste of something. I went back to RadioShack again and again to the code, tossing my backpack under the counter and avoiding eye contact with the salesmen so they wouldn't bother me. Once the screen booted up, I could be invisible for a while. Not a loner, not a disappointment of a daughter.

Later that year, I would meet Veronica and she would make me less of a loner, even if I stayed a disappointment to Sheila. But when she and I weren't together, all I wanted to do was slip inside the programs like they were castles, made of logic rather than stones. With a Replacements tape blaring in my headphones, I taught myself to code from a copy of 100 BASIC Computer Games. That's the book the librarian found for me after I'd burned through all her issues of Creative Computing.

Excerpted from Homebound by Portia Elan. Copyright © 2026 by Portia Elan. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.