90 Days of Different

by Eric Walters

  In the end my final “kill” tally was eleven. Of course, I’d been killed three times myself, but that was a pretty good kill/death ratio—I didn’t think I’d ever use that term in a sentence describing my activities.

  After that first game, instead of hiding I went looking for targets. The rush of adrenaline seemed to make me think more clearly. I don’t know how the same stuff that gave me sweats and shakes could lead to that, but it did.

  My final kill in the last game was my favorite. We were playing a second game against our “friends.” I was the one who gunned down Mr. Macho Bigmouth. I hit him with seven or eight rapid-fire bursts, including one shot that got him in the goggles, splattering red paint all over his face and hair. I guess that many shots was overkill, but it felt good.

  His reaction was not quite as good. Despite being “dead,” he decided to squeeze off a couple of rounds at me. Luckily, a judge saw it happen and gave him a one-month suspension from the facility. I was so proud that I didn’t shoot him in the back of the head as he walked away. I was really, really tempted, but I didn’t. I was better than that, better than him.

  By the way, I’m not sure if that jerk is reading this, but if you are, you seriously need to get a life. A little less paintball, a trip to the barber and an occasional bath might change your life.

  I stopped writing and thought about deleting the last bit. No, I was going to let it stand. I continued.

  In the end we played five games against three different opponents. Our record was a perfect five for five. Afterward we sat around and talked. The guys gave us a formal invitation to become members of the Paintball Wizards! We were honored and thanked them, but we told them we were going away to college in a few weeks. Still, we talked about how we just might join them when we are home for the Christmas break.

  Who would have thought it? Sophie Evans, Paintball Killer Queen!

  DAY 68

  Today I was a movie star. Okay, maybe that’s pushing it a bit, but I was definitely in a movie. I won’t be getting a credit and I didn’t have a speaking part, but I did have a role. My role as written on the script was “girl in background walking through cafeteria.”

  Ella had arranged for us to be extras in a movie that was filming in town. It certainly wasn’t a big movie—I’d never even heard of the stars, and it was being made for TV—but still, it was a movie, and I was in it. It’s supposed to be airing next spring, and it’s called Horror High School.

  If you want to see us, you’ll have to look carefully. You’ll be able to see me and Ella in the background of the scene when the blood and guts happen in the cafeteria…well, the first time that happens. We’re not in the second blood-and-guts scene in the cafeteria, which comes at the end of the movie. We were told that would be shot next week, but we’ll be busy then—hopefully, doing another different.

  I thought being an extra in a movie would be pretty exciting. It wasn’t. It was boring. It was a whole lot of standing and sitting around and doing nothing except keeping quiet. And it looked like it was even worse for the stars. They did nothing in the scene, but they didn’t get to go away. This one scene, which will probably be no longer than one minute long in the movie, took over six hours to do—and do again and again and again.

  The best thing about being in a movie is the food. There is some sort of union rule about feeding actors, and they served us a big breakfast and a bigger lunch, and there were always snacks. I don’t think it’s going to be a really well-done movie, but nobody could argue about the quality of the food. It is a B movie at best, but A+ food for sure.

  So now I’ve been in as many horror films as I’ve watched. I wish I’d been in this one before I’d seen the other one. Having watched how the whole thing is done made me realize there was nothing to worry about. Still, I’m never going to spend a night in a cabin in the woods. Or a school cafeteria.

  DAY 69

  Ella moved through the crowd, and I trailed behind her, pushing and shoving. She seemed to be able to pick her way through the packed audience better than I could. She didn’t mind the pushing and shoving. It wasn’t just that I was more polite but also that I didn’t really want to make contact with the guys in the audience—and it was almost all guys here to hear this band. The place was packed, especially up by the stage, which Ella was moving toward.

  I called to her to slow down, but there was no way she could hear me. I could hardly hear me. The music was pounding, the bass so overwhelming that I could feel it in my teeth. Could fillings be shaken loose? Suddenly I missed the sight and sound of the woman standing onstage, singing Adele badly to recorded music. Or the country-music crowd, which had seemed less threatening and much friendlier—and at least half of the country audience had been female. There were so few females in this audience, it felt like we were at paintball.

  The song ended and the crowd erupted, jumping up and down, screaming, and waving and pumping their arms in the air. I used the little interlude between the cheering and the next song starting to try to get Ella’s attention.

  “Ella!” I screamed.

  A couple of people right around me turned, but Ella didn’t. She wasn’t that far ahead, just a few rows. The music started again. There was only one way to catch her. I turned to the side, lowered a shoulder and shoved my way through. A couple of people gave me dirty looks, and one guy swore at me and then apologized when he realized I wasn’t some dude. I was almost there…I reached out and grabbed Ella by the arm, spinning her around.

  “Wait!” I screamed.

  She nodded in agreement.

  I yelled into her ear as the music pounded. “The crowd is too thick—we can’t get any closer!” I wanted to ask, Why would we want to get any closer? because this music was a lot louder than it was good.

  She nodded. Thank goodness. We were at a heavy metal concert. I’d have done my different whether we were in the third row or the thirtieth. We’d just stand here, bounce up and down and pretend to like the music until the concert was over and we could go home. Then I could see if I’d suffered any permanent hearing loss.

  “There’s only one way to get closer!” she yelled.

  She tapped the shoulder of a gigantic guy standing directly in front of us. He leaned down and she said something to him. He broke into a laugh and nodded his head enthusiastically as she pointed at me. Why was she pointing at me, and why was he laughing? He turned and said something to his buddy—who was equally big. Then they picked up Ella, lifted her over their heads and passed her forward. She was body surfing over the crowd!

  How would I ever catch her now that she was—the two guys grabbed me and lifted me off my feet. I screamed, but they couldn’t hear me or didn’t care. They spun me around, and now I was looking at the roof of the arena, lying on my back on top of the crowd with dozens of hands holding me aloft and passing me forward. I felt myself being jerked, flung forward, not so much surfing as breaking through the surf. I was helpless, out of control, unable to do anything. I stopped screaming and just bounced along, thinking that if going to a heavy metal concert was one different, crowd surfing should definitely count as a second.

  DAY 70

  I closed the door to my bedroom and joined Ella in front of my computer. In the quiet of the room the buzzing in my ears became louder. Remnants of the previous night’s concert. My father had told me it would go away. Apparently, “back in the day” he’d gone to a few heavy metal concerts himself. He’d even taken my mother to a couple before she “tamed” him.

  I was a little concerned that Ella had shooed me out of my room to begin with—she’d said something about loading a program onto my computer. That made me a little nervous, but then again, what didn’t?

  At Ella’s feet was a large suitcase that she’d brought and forbidden me to look in. Now, dramatically, she undid the zipper.

  I tried to reassure myself by thinking, How bad could this different be if it’s in my room? Still, Ella s
eemed to have a way of making everything we’d done an adventure or an embarrassment or an embarrassing adventure.

  “Your web camera does work, right?” Ella asked.

  “Of course it works.” An element of danger had been inserted into the equation.

  “We can’t follow our plan without a camera.”

  “So what exactly is the plan?” I asked. “And what does it have to do with that suitcase?”

  “It has many things to do with it.” She flipped open the top to reveal a bizarre combination of things.

  “Is that a horse mask?” I asked.

  “There are two horse masks.” She reached down and grabbed them. “Here this one’s for you.” She handed it to me.

  “Why would I want to wear a horse mask?”

  “All I know is I’m going to wear mine. It’s best that they don’t just see two girls sitting in front of a computer.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I have no idea whatsoever, which, of course, makes it so interesting.”

  Ella clicked a button, and the computer screen came to life.

  “What is Chatroulette?” I asked.

  “It’s basically a way for us to have a conversation with people around the world.”

  “What people?”

  “That’s the roulette part of the equation. They could be any people, from anywhere,” Ella said. “So here we—”

  “Wait,” I said, grabbing her hand as she was about to log in. “It says right there under the rules that we have to be eighteen to participate.”

  “You are eighteen, and I’m only two months away. It’s not like they’re going to check our birth certificates before we go online,” Ella said. “Besides, that isn’t the rule you should be worried about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Read rule number three.”

  I scanned down and read Broadcasting or offering nudity isn’t allowed.

  “I don’t think either of us is going to go breaking that rule,” I said. Then I had a terrible thought. “Are we?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “The Internet is forever. Only an idiot does things like that.”

  I let out a sigh of relief.

  “It isn’t you or me that I’m worried about. Let’s go.”

  “Wait, shouldn’t we put on the horse—?”

  Ella pushed the button, and the little screen in the corner of the computer went blank, then fuzzy and then came into focus. There were three guys not much older than us staring at the screen in what appeared to be a bedroom. It looked like they saw our image at the same time as we saw them, and they jumped up into the air yelling. They started talking, but it wasn’t in English.

  “What language are they speaking?” Ella asked.

  “Spanish, Portuguese…I don’t know.”

  They kept talking, louder, and waving their arms in the air.

  “Stop!” Ella yelled. “Stop, right now!”

  They muttered a little bit more but then shushed each other.

  “Do any of you speak English?” she asked.

  “Little, a little,” one of them said.

  “Good. What language do you speak?”

  “Albanian.”

  “We are Albanian,” a second added. “You?”

  “American. We’re American,” I said.

  They started hooting again and yelling out, “American! American!” until Ella shushed them again.

  “You is very so beautiful!” one of them exclaimed.

  “Mrs. America!” another yelled out.

  “Yes,” Ella said. “She is Miss America, and I am the first runner-up.”

  He yelled, “Beauty queens!” and then some words in his language, and they started cheering and talking among themselves.

  “Actually,” I said, “she’s Miss America and I’m the first runner-up.”

  “It was a tie,” Ella added.

  “Do you…wish to be my betrothed?” he said.

  “You want me to be your wife?” Ella asked.

  “Yes, wife.”

  “Which one of us to which one of you?” Ella asked.

  “Both of you to any,” he said, and his friends nodded enthusiastically.

  “That is certainly a wonderful offer,” Ella said. “Don’t you agree, Soph?”

  “Yes, we’re very, very honored.”

  “We’re just going to have to think it over,” Ella said. “We’ll get back to you.”

  Ella hit the button, and they vanished.

  “That was my first marriage proposal,” I said.

  “My third,” Ella said. “Of course, the first was in kindergarten, and the second was from my crazy cousin Jimmy, but it’s still nice to have options.”

  The screen came to life again. It was a girl, again about our age, and she was wearing a cat suit and had whiskers on her face. She looked Japanese.

  “Hello, kitty,” Ella said.

  “Meow,” she replied.

  “Yes, and meow to you too,” I offered.

  She meowed again. And again and again.

  “Yeah, we get it—you’re a cat,” Ella said.

  She started hissing.

  “An angry cat, apparently,” I added.

  “I got it covered.” Ella bent down and rummaged in her suitcase. She pulled something out and slipped it over her head. It was a dog mask.

  Ella started barking. The cat on the other end hissed even louder and started swatting at the screen. In response Ella growled, and the two of them went at it, fighting like cats and dogs—or, at least, a cat and a dog. I didn’t want to be left out.

  I pulled the horse mask on and started whinnying. Both the cat on the screen and the dog at my side stopped barking and growling and hissing and stared at me. Then at the same instant they both broke into laughter, and I started laughing as well.

  “Goodbye, kitty,” Ella said. Again she hit the Reset button, and the screen went blank.

  “You have a dog mask and horse masks in your suitcase?”

  “I try to never leave home without them. Those and lip gloss.” Ella pulled off the dog mask and put on the second horse mask.

  The screen came to life again. We saw a middle-aged man with a beard, holding a pad of paper.

  “Hello, would you mind if I ask you two a few questions for a research paper I’m working on?” he asked.

  Ella and I turned to each other. It was pretty hard to read her expression through the eyeholes of the mask, but I knew what I wanted to do. I turned back to the screen.

  “Nay, nay,” I said. This time I hit the button to change to another chat location.

  “Well done,” Ella said. “That horse mask suits you well.”

  Ella pulled off her mask, and I did the same.

  The image on the screen started to materialize, but before we could see what was there some music came over the speakers. I recognized it instantly, even though I hated the song—“Wrecking Ball,” by Miley Cyrus. Then there before our eyes was a guy swinging on what looked like a big blue exercise ball hanging by a big yellow rope from the ceiling of the room, and he was wearing only a diaper. Legs wrapped around the ball, he swung back and forth, singing along with the song. It was, well, mesmerizing, because it was so incredibly bizarre. There was only one thing to do. Ella and I starting singing along too.

  That got the guy even more excited, and he started singing louder and swinging faster, and then the rope snapped and he plunged down and out of sight of the web camera! He bounced back to his feet almost instantly, still singing and, thank goodness, still wearing his diaper.

  “Time to go,” Ella said and exited us.

  “I don’t think I can ever hear that song again without thinking about that scene.”

  “That’s better than having the regular video in your head,” Ella said. She went back into the suitcase and pulled out a pair of ti
aras. We slipped them on.

  “Let’s speak with English accents,” I suggested.

  “Certainly, duckie, we’re members of the British royal family!”

  “I guess we’re both princesses this time.”

  She laughed, and I laughed with her.

  A new screen emerged. Three girls wearing purple wigs and little bikinis were dancing and—wait. Those weren’t girls. They were guys! They were bad dancers but incredibly enthusiastic. The only thing that would have made it better—or worse—was if they were riding on three swinging exercise balls.

  Ella and I had spent almost four hours traveling around the world. We’d gone from the bizarre to the ridiculous to the boring. We’d seen lots of different dances, music videos being reenacted, cardboard cut-outs of superheroes, and real cats sitting there staring at us. We’d had conversations with people in seven different countries. The final chat hadn’t been much of a chat. It was simply some old creepy guy standing there naked. It had made me miss the diaper and wrecking ball.

  It was late, and I was tired of being on the computer, but I had to post something. I felt like I owed it to the people who were following me. I logged onto Facebook as I started to hum “Wrecking Ball.”

  DAY 71

  It had started with a conversation I had with an older woman the second time I worked at the food kitchen. It turned out she’d been volunteering there for almost fifteen years. Her name was Christena—she said to call her Chris. She was a retired teacher who was almost eighty-five years old. I couldn’t believe she was that old. She moved quickly, told jokes, didn’t need glasses to read things and seemed to have better hearing than I did. She treated everybody with such kindness and dignity—staff and volunteers and the people being served.

  She’d talked to me about something she did once a month, and she’d invited me to go with her and the rest of the team. That’s where I’d been tonight—and into the early, early morning. Part of me wanted to just go to sleep now, but I needed to put it up on my blog while it was still fresh.