He brought the sweet graham cracker sandwich closer to his lips. “Ten grams of sugar and a tenth of the average person’s daily caloric intake.”
“Don’t ruin my favorite dessert please.” Kat popped the last bite of her s’more into her mouth.
“It tastes as good as the nutritional label implies.” Peter spoke while he chewed. “Yeah, that’s definitely ten grams of heaven.”
“You don’t like s’mores?” Kat asked Jackie.
“Not really.”
Jackie lied.
Kat and Peter sat against the log on the other side of the fire, laughing and stuffing their faces with chocolate as they reminisced on the memories they’d shared today. Not the memories the game had given them, but the ones they’d made. They talked about stealing Owen’s car, shoplifting from Closets & Beyond, and trying to outdrive the police car in the outskirts of Ravensburg. They talked about meeting Isabella in front of Grove Aid and the fact that Whitney had shown up at the Grovestown dance. But all Jackie could think about was the countdown.
“Oh Jackie, you should’ve seen the act Peter and I pulled on that guy at Sunshine Auto.” Kat clapped her hands against each other as the hysteria struck her. “I used that weird memory wipe power-up on him, and then Peter and I pretended like he was the one in the wrong.”
“I will admit that my acting was impeccable.” Peter’s brows furrowed. “Is Jay alright, by the way?”
“Yeah, we kinda ditched him in Grovestown,” Kat said, “didn’t we?”
When Jackie had first woken up at Lothen Heights her phone had rung with a call from Jay, confused on where they were. Supposedly Sunshine Auto was swarming with police officers, so Jackie had advised him to focus on himself and find a way to leave unnoticed.
“He called me when I first woke up.” Jackie’s throat tightened as she spoke, trying to keep the words from leaving her throat. Trying to protect her. “I told him that Capsule took us to Lothen Heights and that he shouldn’t worry. That I was about to end the game.”
Jackie closed her eyes and let the fire’s rage fight off her chills. Discussion about ending the game had somehow become untouched territory.
Even without seeing them she could sense their presence across the fire. Peter Moon and Kathabelle Pike. They had passed each other in the halls of Brookwood High hundreds of times, but they’d been living as though the other didn’t exist. Tonight, sitting by the fire, the two were united through the game. The same game that was about to rip them apart a second time.
Jackie lifted her chin and opened her eyes to the stars. They were brighter in Lothen.
The absurdity of it all was that this morning she’d been planning to play this game alone. But if she’d reached the cliff without knowing them now—if all she had were the memories Capsule had given her at every level—would she have jumped? Would she have taken that leap for them?
“As weird as today’s been, I’m glad I had the chance to meet you guys.” Jackie lowered her head, a sense of ease overtaking her. Time was running out, and she knew what she had to do. She knew she would have to let them choose. The capsule in her pocket had never been hers, and it wouldn’t be right to give it to the person she felt was the best fit. No—she’d tell them the truth and allow them to come to their own conclusion.
“Of course.” Peter ran a hand through his hair. “I mean, if I had the chance to meet myself, I’d be pretty happy too.”
Kat elbowed him, and they both laughed.
“Okay, so this might be a crazy thing to say,” Peter added, the unsteady humor in his voice fading, “but I consider today the best day of my life. And it’s definitely the best birthday.”
“Same, minus the birthday thing.” Kat nodded. “And Jackie, I’m sorry about what happened at the dance. I know for a fact now that if the game had chosen anyone else as the player, Peter and I would’ve never stood a chance.”
“Kat’s right.” Peter’s eyes glimmered. “You’re probably the most determined girl I’ve met.”
“Whoa!” Kat pointed her finger at Jackie with a grin. “A compliment from Moral Moon? Now that really means something.”
As conceited as it felt to admit, Peter and Kat were right. The pair had always clashed, nice to each other in one moment and at each other’s throats with the sharpest knife from their kitchen drawers in the next. Jackie had been the one to focus solely on the game, to keep them on track and moving forward together as a team. Jackie was the one to click the emergency button a second time when they had been too distracted by their merging pasts.
Jackie was the one to take a leap of faith when they would’ve accepted defeat.
For a moment Jackie smiled. It was so genuine. So calming. They really do care. But the satisfaction had a time limit.
“Guys, there’s—there’s something you should know.” Jackie reached into her pocket. “I only have—”
“I lied earlier.” Peter picked up his marshmallow-roasting stick and held it over the fire, watching the tip ignite. “I saw.”
“We both saw,” Kat said. “And we decided neither of us should take it.”
Jackie wrapped her fingers around the capsule, her face going stiff. They’d seen her in that strange room? They’d known this entire time?
“I realized that Capsule has been here to mess with us from the start. It wants a violent finale. It wants hate.” Kat pulled out Jackie’s phone and wrapped her tense fingers around the screen. “But we don’t have to let it control us anymore.”
“But then we’ll lose.” Jackie stood from the log, the quilt sliding off her lap and onto the dirt. “You’ll disappear. Both of you.”
“Jackie, you have our memories.” Peter tossed the remainder of the twig into the fire before standing from the log. She could see his face clearly now, not one wrinkle between his brows. He was so calm. Idiotically decisive. “You know us better than anyone else, and as long as you remember us, our friendship will live on through you.”
Kat stood by Peter’s side. “Capsule will never be the winner of this game, even if it claims to be.”
“You guys are crazy.” Jackie shook her head as they spoke. “After all we’ve been through, you wanna give up? We can’t just lose the game after everything we—”
“Jackie. Stop.” Kat walked around the fire and offered the phone to her. “I’m sorry, but we’re not changing our minds.”
“Can we just enjoy the time we have left?” Peter asked.
Jackie pushed Kat’s hands away, refusing to accept the countdown. “There should be two!” She reached into her pocket and pulled the capsule out, pinching it in front of her nose and dreaming about strangling it. Choking it to death. But right now, the object she hated the most was also her only hope.
“Well there’s not!” Peter’s bold voice ripped Jackie’s focus from the capsule as he joined them on their side of the fire.
Jackie lowered her hand, meeting Peter’s quivering eyes. They’d harvested the flames.
“There’s only one,” he said.
Jackie’s fingers loosened around the capsule. Her plan had been to let them choose, and they’d made their choice. If that’s what they wanted, she’d have to respect their decision. Capsule was horrible, cruel, vicious—but their reality had been set, and they couldn’t change that. Her nose fell to the ground, embarrassed that they’d accepted their fate before she had.
“I’m sorry.” Jackie tucked the capsule back into her pocket.
“It’s okay.” Kat held the phone toward Jackie again. This time, Jackie took the device from her with a weak grip and checked the countdown.
00 HOURS : 07 MINUTES : 14 SECONDS
The three sat on Jackie’s log in silence, and soon enough two minutes had flashed by. Time was so precious now. So delicate yet so dangerous at the same time.
Peter cleared his throat. “I told myself that I’d
never be caught dead wearing this outfit, but look at me now.”
Neither Jackie nor Kat could bring themselves to laugh at his failed attempt to lighten the mood. They simply watched him as the grin faded from his face.
“I’ve been thinking,” Peter continued. “Sure, my uncle’s not all that great—maybe he did do some horrible things—but his past didn’t make saving Isabella any less meaningful.” He ran his thumb along the lines in his palm as though he’d accepted the features as a part of him for the first time.
When Jackie turned to Kat, she had silent tears running down her face. Tears at such a random time—so random they had to be unintentional.
“I still don’t know whether I can forgive Nicholas.” Kat reached to wipe away her tears, but stopped herself, allowing them to reach her chin. “But I do think I’m ready to forgive myself.”
Jackie raised the phone screen to her chin, holding her breath as she swiped to unlock the phone. The countdown ticked closer to zero.
00 HOURS : 03 MINUTES : 44 SECONDS
Peter and Kat leaned against her shoulders, watching the numbers drain away.
Jackie gripped her phone tighter. “I’m gonna miss you guys.”
“Hang in there, Jackie.” The warmth in Peter’s voice left her eyes tearing up.
She purposefully lost her gaze inside the flames, unable to watch the countdown fade away. She wished they could’ve had a chance to spend time together outside of the game. That they could’ve had a chance to spend time together without the noise of the past and the future. If only they could’ve shared more moments together like this one.
She had so much to thank Peter and Kat for. If it weren’t for them she never would have fixed her broken relationship with Jay. She never would have proved to herself that she didn’t have to be like the boy who had sat with hollow eyes at the back of the Grovestown gym. With their help Jackie had proved to herself that she could gain the trust of two strangers. That she could befriend both the most hated boy and the most popular girl from Brookwood High all in the course of one day.
Jackie’s shoulder’s lightened. She raised the screen in her hands.
00 HOURS : 00 MINUTES : 00 SECONDS
The shift wasn’t as dramatic as Jackie had expected it to be. The countdown simply faded away to make room for a new line of text to appear.
GAME OVER.
When Jackie turned to her sides, no one was there.
Peter and Kat had vanished into the midnight air as though they’d never been there in the first place. They had truly disappeared. This time, permanently.
And now Jackie was alone. She was just as alone as she’d been before starting the countdown, but now she was no longer blind to what she’d been missing.
Jackie couldn’t stare at the GAME OVER screen for too long.
The words mocked her.
The capsule sitting in her pocket mocked her.
She tapped the screen, desperate for a solution. She swiped, but even the second page of power-ups had vanished. There was no way to fix this. Her battery percentage dropped to two percent.
The phone vibrated. Jackie stood from the log, breathing heavily as her thumb paused over the green answer button. Eugenie. She tapped and brought the phone to her ear.
“Hey, if it isn’t JackieLantern. Finally picking up my call.”
Eugene’s smile could be heard through his voice alone, and Jackie couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down her face.
“Sorry, I know you’ve probably had a crazy day.” Eugene’s voice stiffened as Jackie brought the phone closer to her ear. “I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been doing some thinking lately, and I realized it’s probably best if we stop this gaming thing. You know, our lives are only gonna get busier, and—”
“My phone’s about to die.” Jackie wiped the tears away from her face with her free hand.
“Uh—okay.” Eugene spoke faster. “I just—I think we should take a rest from Mystery Bullets and meet some new people. Or at least try to.”
Jackie took a deep breath. “I have to go.”
“Jackie, wait. Don’t—”
Without even ending the call, Jackie chucked her phone into the woods. The device crushed itself against a tree, but she didn’t bother to survey the damage. Her hand fell to the capsule in her pocket, plucking it from its safe cavern. If only Capsule had never shown up in the first place. If only she’d known that she’d lose everyone in the end anyway. If she’d known, she never would’ve started that pointless countdown.
Jackie raised her fist over the fire, threatening to drop the capsule, but she couldn’t bring herself to let go.
12:58 PM
MR. BERKSHIRE ANNOUNCED Peter Moon and Kat Pike missing on Monday, April 5th of 2021.
Their phones had been found by a search team off the side of Quasso Drive, and none of their experiences on the night of April 2nd had ever been associated with Jackie. She was absent in Closets & Beyond’s security footage, and the owner of Sunshine Auto claimed he’d only seen two teenagers that night—never three. Perhaps Capsule had worked its magic one final time.
Jay had driven to Lothen Heights late that night to find Jackie after calling her ten times with no success. He’d been crushed to hear the news about Peter and Kat’s disappearance, but after a few days he focused on the positives—that Jackie hadn’t been caught for the crimes she’d committed, that she had enough money saved to buy herself a new phone, and that their parents had believed their silly excuse for coming home at nearly four in the morning. But no matter how many great points Jay brought up, Jackie only felt lucky to have known Peter and Kat in the first place.
This time, as cruel notes accumulated on Peter’s locker and students commented on Kat’s Instagram photos begging her to come home safely, Jackie finally understood how wrong people were about Peter and Kat. Rumors spread throughout Brookwood in the exact same way Jackie remembered them spreading. The theories were crazy, but none rivaled the crazy truth—that a vicious game called Capsule had vanished Peter and Kat into the night air, and that Jackie had been there when it happened.
On the last day of April, exactly four weeks after Peter and Kat’s disappearance, Jackie had been standing at Peter’s locker when a shadow loomed over her. She turned to face the short-haired girl. The book club member had given up on scrubbing the messages away, but she’d occasionally stop by.
I didn’t write anything, Jackie thought. That’s what she’d said to her last time, but now it was merely a thought. What left her mouth was something new, something she’d been wondering for the past few weeks.
“Do you really care about him?” Jackie asked.
The girl nodded and rested her hand on Peter’s locker. “I really hope he comes back.”
Jackie frowned at the messages. “But when did you ever talk to him?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, I know you went to book club together, but did you ever try to—like—be his friend?”
“Be his friend, huh?” The short-haired girl’s hand fell from the locker with a chuckle. “No, that’s impossible. I’ve seen people try to get close to him before, but it never works out. It would take someone really special to reach him.”
As Jay drove Jackie home that afternoon, she scrolled through Instagram posts about Kat on her new phone. The first photo of Whitney’s friendship carousel featured her and Kat smiling together, the red hue in the background hinting that they’d taken the selfie at Cherry Ice. In the caption Whitney spoke about how her best friend of two years had now been missing for four weeks straight. She explained how hurt Kat had been as a result of her sister’s death. How someone who’d been through such a heavy hardship couldn’t possibly deserve to go missing.
Whitney Navarro. Kat’s best friend of two years, and she didn’t understand that Emmeline’s death didn’t hurt Kat in the way she
thought it had. Kat’s best friend of two years, and on the night of Kat’s disappearance she had shown up to the Grovestown dance with nothing but gossip and the urge to spread Kat’s family drama.
“Isn’t it weird?” Jackie said.
Jay looked over at Jackie as he pulled into the driveway. “Isn’t what weird?” He stopped the car, and they remained seated to chat for a bit, something the siblings had been doing far more often lately.
Jackie thought about the short-haired girl scrubbing notes from Peter’s locker and Whitney’s social media posts about Kat. “Isn’t it weird how the people who look like they care and act like they care never actually tried to get to know them?”
“Yeah.” Jay nodded slowly, eyes on the steering wheel. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
Jackie remembered how Jay had tried to connect with Kat after Emmeline’s death but failed. All of the times Jay had tried to connect with her but failed. It wasn’t until now that Jackie truly admired the amount of effort Jay put into making and maintaining his connections with people. Peter truly was wrong in his Moral Moon entry about Jay. People liked Jay for a reason, and it had nothing to do with calling people nicknames and dressing pretty.
Jackie headed straight to her room that afternoon. On her desk were two textbooks and a glass of water—no PC greeted her anymore. She’d sold it on Craigslist and had replaced it with a cheap Chromebook. She only needed a computer for school anyway.
Eugene had messaged her several times on Discord apologizing for what he’d said that night. He offered to play Mystery Bullets again, but Jackie had already moved on. She was done with the internet. Done with technology. All it did was damage.
The Moon Monkeys YouTube channel and Peter’s Moral Moon blog had corrupted him.
Kat’s Instagram had become a hub of a life she pretended to live that wasn’t reality.
And Jackie—she had used her video games as an escape from what really mattered. They had kept her from becoming closer to Jay. They had kept her from finally having an open-hearted discussion with her parents, which she had done last week, and in the process of doing so had lifted a giant weight from her shoulders. Eugene had been right. The world didn’t revolve around the internet.
Capsule Page 27