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by John David Anderson

  “It’s all right, Deedee,” Rose said softly. “I can do it because you are the dungeon master, and you can do anything. Which means I can be anything, even a spell-casting ninja gnome named Moose, because that’s what this is all about. We don’t always have to play by the rules.” She let go and Deedee seemed to relax, though he moved his hands to his lap and kept them there.

  “Yeah. All right,” he said, his voice catching. Wolf handed Rose some dice and we created her character, deciding how strong and wise and smart she would be. “Stronger, wiser, and smarter than the rest of you,” she said with a grin. By the time Moose Wrathbringer was born the pizza had arrived and Wolf paid with the money his mother left on the counter. Equipped with a slice of greasy pepperoni and a magic katana, Rose yelled for us to “get our adventure on.”

  Deedee talked us through the scenario, which started, predictably, with the three of us sitting around a table at a tavern. Eventually we ended up in a graveyard and then descended, with typical foolish courage, into a crypt, where we came across a horde of zombies. I tried to sneak around them so that I could find another escape route but I fell into a pit due to a failed perception check. Wolf tried to sing a song that would paralyze them, but it turned out they were immune. Normally this would be about the time that Bench would whip out his double-bladed Battle-Ax of Bleeding and go ballistic, but Garthrox the Barbarian was out to dinner with his parents celebrating “the catch.”

  Which left us with Moose.

  “You guys are in trouble,” Deedee said.

  Rose licked her fingers and pointed to the cardboard chits that represented the undead horde shuffling toward us. “All right. I got this. I cast a spell of absolute zombie annihilation on the whole lot of them, sending them back to the foul abyss or zombie-making factory from whence they came.”

  “You don’t have a spell of absolute zombie annihilation,” Deedee informed her.

  “How do I get one, then?”

  “There is no such thing.”

  “Well there should be,” Rose insisted. “What do I have?”

  “You have a spell of scorching touch and your sword.”

  “Spell of scorching touch. What is that—is that like I light my finger on fire and go around pointing it at people?”

  “Pretty much,” Wolf said.

  “That sounds lame. I’ll just use the sword.”

  “It’s called a katana,” Deedee said.

  “Its name is Charlene.”

  Six eyebrows shot up around the table. “Charlene?” I questioned.

  “Yeah, why? Is that a bad name for a sword?” Rose asked.

  “No. It’s fine,” I said. “I just thought, you know, you’d want it to be, like, something more . . . intense.”

  “Fine. Her full name is Charlene the Freakin’ Crazy Sharp Sword That Will Cut Your Head Off If You Make Fun of Her.” Rose gave me a challenging look.

  “That’s much better,” I said.

  “Okay,” Deedee sighed. “But I’m telling you now, Charlene or no Charlene, you’re all better off trying to run away.”

  Rose took a Funyon out of the bag and crunched it mercilessly. “You don’t know me very well, do you? Just give me the dice.”

  Deedee consulted the tables, compared Moose’s stats to those of the zombies. Turns out she needed a roll of fifteen on a twenty-sided die to be successful. Otherwise we were about to have our brains sucked out of our skulls. Rose blew on the die. Deedee asked her not to do that anymore. She rolled a twenty, scoring a critical hit and decapitating the first zombie in line.

  “That’s how I roll,” she said with a smile, which would have been vomitously cheesy if all of us hadn’t already said it ourselves at one point or another.

  After that Moose Wrathbringer went into a rampage, improbably rolling one high number after another, slicing and dicing through imaginary undead, shouting “Make way for Charlene!” with every toss of the die. She even stuck her flaming finger into the rotting guts of the last zombie, incinerating him from the inside out, just for kicks.

  When it was finished, Moose had a pile of actually-dead-this-time undead at her feet and the stares of three boys who couldn’t believe what they’d just witnessed.

  “Garthrox is a wuss,” Deedee whispered in awe.

  Rose sat back smugly and popped another Funyon. “Never mess with a ninja wizard princess.”

  “Wait. When did you become a princess?” I asked.

  “I just saved your sorry butt. I can be a princess if I want.”

  I didn’t argue. Instead I went to take a drink and found my cup empty. Rose reached under the table for the bottle of soda and poured me what was left. Then she tapped her cup to mine. “To Charlene,” she said.

  “To being whatever you want to be,” I said.

  We all tapped cups. Then we descended farther into the crypt.

  By the time the adventure was finished—the Queen of the Vampires thoroughly staked, all the loot split between us—Wolf and I had both gained a level and Rose had gained two. Moose was almost where we were. It was still only nine o’clock so we eradicated what was left of the pizza, opened a box of fudge brownies, and watched old Dr. Who episodes.

  It was a pretty much perfect night.

  No one said anything about Bench. Maybe I was the only one even thinking about him as we all squeezed in on Wolf’s family room couch, me and Deedee on the ends, Wolf and Rose in the middle, a little tight but workable.

  Or maybe we were all thinking about him. But the game was over.

  And there was no room left on the sofa anyways.

  That night, after Deedee’s mom dropped me off at home, I tried to call Bench, just to see how his dinner went, but his cell went straight to voicemail. I wasn’t sure if I was going to tell him about Rose or not. I couldn’t make up my mind. And I couldn’t quite figure out what it meant that I couldn’t make up my mind. Would Bench even care? And if he didn’t care, what would that mean? I figured if he asked how the game went I’d just say it was all right.

  “Actually, funny thing,” I’d say after a pause. “Rose came over and joined in. She didn’t use your character, though, don’t worry.” And then he’d ask something, maybe who invited her, or was it strange with her there, and I would say that it was fine, but that it would have been nice if he were there. I wouldn’t say instead. I wouldn’t say too. I would just leave it at that.

  I definitely wouldn’t tell him how much we laughed. How Rose gave Deedee such a hard time, saying her grandmother would make a better dungeon master and urging him to just make stuff up rather than taking five-minute time-outs to page through his three-hundred-page manuals. I wouldn’t tell him how she beat all three of us at an arm-wrestling contest afterward, nearly throwing Wolf out of his chair. Or how she told me that her favorite American poet was Emily Dickinson—even though I’ve never heard anyone else our age admit to having a favorite American poet.

  And I wouldn’t tell him how, when we all said good-bye at the end of the night, she gave out more hugs. Not just to Wolf. To all three of us. I wouldn’t tell him that I hugged her back, and not a limp one either. I stretched to reach all the way around.

  I would just say it was all right.

  Because it was.

  I dialed his home phone and his mom picked up. She sounded apologetic.

  “J.J. isn’t home yet, Eric. He went out to dinner with some of his football friends. He should be home real soon. Want me to tell him you called?”

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Jones,” I said, and hung up without saying good-bye.

  THE QUIET

  MOST PEOPLE WILL TELL YOU THAT THE WAR STARTED IN EARNEST that next Monday.

  It was over by the end of the week.

  I call it a war, but it wasn’t really. It was more like a barroom brawl, the kind you see in old Westerns, where the piano player hides under his bench and the chandelier always gets shot down. It wasn’t just one side against another. I’m not even sure there were any objectives, or,
at least, everybody’s objective was different. Some people were probably just trying to be funny. Others had taken Mr. Sword’s lesson to heart and thought they could really change the world one sticky note at a time. Others were out for blood.

  It wasn’t about anything new. The same stuff kids have done since Julius Caesar was thirteen, probably, showing off his designer togas and thumbing his nose at the poorly dressed peasants beneath him. Fights over who was prettier or more popular, who had whose boyfriend first, who had more money, more followers, more favorites. Fights about who said what when and to whom and why and whether that meant they weren’t friends anymore or not because-I-never-liked-you-anyway and so on.

  What made it unique was the battleground. Every skirmish took place on three square inches. Sticky notes were the weapons and words were the ammunition.

  Whatever it was, it became clear by Monday that the tone of Deedee’s revolution had shifted. Some of the messages were still harmless, quotes from philosophers mixed with yo mama jokes. There were earnest entreaties to Hug a Teacher! or Kick a Squirrel Today! There was an abundance of smiley faces and frowny faces and other emoticons to express our feelings, many of which got hurt when the notes got personal.

  There was the note on Sophia Bauer’s locker that said Just another pretty ugly face, where the “ugly” had been scrawled in after the fact. There was the note I heard four guys arguing about, listing each of them in order of attractiveness. There was the note Maggie Manklin found on the back of her chair with a simple sketch of a pair of puckered lips inching toward a bare buttocks. Maggie was kind of a suck-up, true, but that didn’t make it any less hurtful. It didn’t stop her from raising her hand seven times in science either, though.

  There were a lot of questions. Why do you follow me around everywhere? Why don’t you text me anymore? What’s that smell every time you walk by? Some of them got corresponding sticky-note answers. Some of them were probably responded to in other ways.

  There were the usual slurs, slings, and arrows. A lot of name-calling, though nothing on the level that Ruby Sandels had heaped upon Mr. Jackson. It hadn’t quite gotten to that point yet. Not out in the open, anyways.

  I tried to stay out of it as much as possible. In war, even if you’re not the one firing the shots, you still have to keep your head down. It didn’t make a difference. I’m pretty sure everybody in the entire school took a note at some point. My first was stuck to my locker with nothing but a big L on it, etched in red marker. Deedee was with me.

  “Maybe it stands for ‘locker,’” he suggested.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s not what it stands for.”

  “Could be worse.” Deedee showed me a note that he’d found on his locker that morning. At the top it said One Dweeb to Rule Them All. Underneath was a drawing of what I assumed was Deedee, though his facial features were exaggerated, too-big eyes, too-big ears. They got his hair right, though. And he was holding a lunch box.

  “How do you know I didn’t put it there?” I asked. It was easier if you tried to laugh it off.

  “Because you don’t know how to draw,” Deedee said.

  I took the note from his hand and crumpled it together with mine, tossing them both in the bottom of my locker. Just another nudge. Besides, being Lord of the Geeks could be something to be proud of. Just maybe not in Branton.

  Not everybody was able to brush it off so easily, though. Two boys nearly got in a fistfight outside the gym, one shoving a Post-it in the other’s face. Then there was the note I saw Rebecca Goldsmith holding, handed to her with some emphatic lower-lip biting from her supposed best friend. I didn’t see what the note said, but it sent Rebecca bawling in the direction of the girls’ bathroom. A teacher eventually had to go in after her.

  The bathrooms were the worst.

  There were hundreds of sticky notes being posted all around the school, out in the open for all to see. But the really nasty ones—the ones with fangs—were either tucked into the slats of lockers or left on the bathroom mirrors. Like the graffiti scribbled on the backs of stall doors, the messages you found in the bathroom used a different vocabulary, easily worthy of a parental advisory warning. Some were crude. Others just outright vicious, intended only to hurt.

  Except you didn’t know who was hurting you. Almost all the notes were anonymous. Nobody had the guts to sign their name. You didn’t know unless you saw the person actually stick the note, and even then you couldn’t be sure. Some were passed along from binder to binder, backpack to backpack, until they reached their destination.

  Most of them didn’t stay up for long. The person the note was intended for would laugh, or cry, or groan, or growl, or just stare at it dumbly for a minute before crumpling it and tossing it or stuffing it in a back pocket to be forgotten. There were a few conscientious objectors who saw where it all was headed and tried to put a stop to it, taking down any note they saw regardless of what it said. For the most part, the students got to the worst notes before any of the teachers did.

  But not always.

  Unsurprisingly, Ms. Sheers was the first to pounce, pausing her explanation of differential equations midsentence, her eyes narrowing on the third row.

  “Can I see what you’re writing, please?” she said, circling in typical bird-of-prey fashion around Casey Hillman’s desk. Casey slapped her hand over the sticky note, but it was too late.

  “Just copying down the homework assignment.”

  “I haven’t assigned any homework yet.”

  Checkmate. For a moment I was certain Casey was going to stuff the paper in her mouth and try to choke it down secret agent style before Ms. Sheers could pry her lips apart, but instead she melted in her seat while Ms. Sheers took the note from her. “Did you write this?”

  Casey nodded meekly. Ms. Sheers pointed to the door and told Casey to wait for her outside. Then she turned to address the rest of us, holding the note up—backward, so we couldn’t see what it said. “I don’t want to see any more of these in my class for any reason, do you understand? If I see them I will confiscate them and you will go straight to the office.”

  We all nodded. I noticed a few people tucking their yellow stacks back into their bags. Ms. Sheers had that enough-is-enough look in her eyes. And something else. Sadness maybe. Disappointment. She followed Casey out of the room, closing the door with a little more emphasis than usual, though even with it shut we could still hear Ms. Sheers’s voice. Disrespectful. Irresponsible. Call your parents. Take this note to Principal Wittingham immediately.

  I didn’t see Casey for the rest of the day. That’s how it is in war. One moment somebody is sitting right there next to you and the next moment they’re gone.

  I decided to keep my own pad of notes in my locker from that point on. I had a few things I wouldn’t mind saying to a few choice people, but it wasn’t worth getting sent to the Big Ham for.

  And besides, I wasn’t sure it would do any good anyway.

  Right after math I looked for Bench on the off chance that he wanted to at least walk to lunch with me. He hadn’t been on the bus that morning. I hadn’t seen him all day, in fact. We didn’t have a class together until the afternoon, but you still ran into people—people whose routes and schedules you’d memorized. Maybe he was at home sick. Maybe his head exploded after reading about himself in the paper. I hadn’t even had the chance to tell him what an awesome catch it was.

  Or to ask him about dinner with his friends.

  He wasn’t waiting at the corner of the hall, so I walked to the cafeteria by myself. Wolf, Deedee, and Rose were already there. I didn’t even bother to get in the lunch line, just went straight to the table.

  “Have any of you guys seen Bench?”

  There was a round of worried glances, Wolf to Rose to Deedee to me, full circle. Then, finally, Deedee looked sideways, almost guiltily.

  I’m not sure how I missed him when I walked in. The table he sat at was easily the loudest in the room, seven kids packed around the circle, all m
embers of the football team, all dressed in blue and white, in uniform even when not in uniform. Number 80 had his back to me, but his jersey made him impossible to miss. Part of me hoped he would turn around at that moment and catch me staring at him, just so I could read the expression on his face, to see if he would smile with embarrassment or offer an apologetic frown—something, anything. But he didn’t look my way.

  “He was there when I came in,” Deedee said. “I figured if I came and sat down he might grab his tray and come sit with us.” Deedee spooned up a glob of tapioca pudding, then plopped it back into the cup. Over in the corner Bench appeared to be telling a story to the other guys, who were all laughing. One of his football buddies slapped the table and the sound startled me. I felt something swell and catch in my throat and I forced it down, deep into a hole that had opened inside me.

  “It’s all right,” Wolf said. “He’s a big boy. He can sit wherever he wants. Besides. His stock has gone up.”

  I turned back to our table, but my eyes kept flitting back to Bench and the people he was with. They were his teammates. Friends by association, I guess. But they weren’t his tribe. For two years he’d never sat with them. Not once. And yet, as much as I wanted to feel surprised, I guess I wasn’t. I knew the difference between surprised and disappointed. As I watched him laughing, I couldn’t help but think about what the bus ride home would be like that afternoon. There were a couple of student athletes on bus 152. They weren’t on the football team, but I wasn’t sure it would matter—there was nothing keeping him from sitting wherever he wanted. I nudged the empty chair next to me with my foot, maybe a little harder than I meant to. Rose’s voice piped in.

  “Did you see all the notes this morning?” she asked, looking at Deedee but mostly just trying to change the subject I think. “They’re everywhere now. It’s insane.”

  “Speaking of insane, you should show Frost your new picture,” Wolf said.

  For the first time since sitting down I noticed he had swollen gray circles under his eyes. I wondered if his parents had been arguing all night again. “What picture?” I asked, tearing my attention away from Bench.