Game Over, Pete Watson

by Joe Schreiber

  I sat forward, gripping the controller in both hands, sweat popping out along my upper lip. I finished building the grizzly MechReature, but it was too late. The time loop sealed around us. Wesley tried to use the bear’s chainsaw claws to slash the loop open, but it just kept getting tighter.

  “Arrrrggh!” Wesley shouted. “Can’t breathe!”

  “Hold on,” I said. “I want to try something.” And before any of them could stop me, I took hold of the grizzly MechReature I’d just built, and I started tearing it apart.

  “What are you doing?” Wesley shouted.

  “Dude,” Nabeel said, “give it up. You’re doomed.”

  “Not yet.” I started tearing everything else apart too, destroying all the creations that everybody else had built, not just the creatures but the environment itself. And the game was letting me do it.

  “Pete,” Wesley said, “are you nuts?”

  “Time can go backwards, right?”

  “Yeah, but that only happens when the game wants it to.”

  “What if we make it go backwards?”

  “What, like, on purpose?” Squid asked. “That’s crazy! Why—?”

  Then he stopped.

  It was working. Everything onscreen was going backwards. Time itself had reversed its flow. The black circle of the time loop started spinning in the other direction until it tore itself apart completely, clearing the entire screen, and a big word bubble popped up:

  !SNOITALUTARGNOC

  “Huh?” Rashaad said, and the word reversed itself:

  CONGRATULATIONS!

  We all slumped back with a gasp of relief.

  “Whoa, Pete, that was awesome!” Wesley had landed in a bowl of Doritos, and he was picking chips out of his hair. “How did you know it was going to do that?”

  “Just a guess,” I said, except that wasn’t exactly true. The fact was that I’d kind of stolen the idea from Superman: The Movie, which came out way back in the seventies. My dad made me watch it with him one afternoon when there wasn’t anything else to do. It was a pretty corny movie in a lot of ways, but the end, when . . .

  ****SPOILER ALERT!!!!****

  . . . Lois Lane dies and Superman brings her back to life and saves the world by flying around the whole planet backwards, faster and faster, until he reverses the earth’s rotation and makes time go backwards, was pretty cool.

  ****END SPOILER ALERT!!!****

  Wesley was still looking at the video game screen. “That was the coolest,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said, and tossed a handful of Doritos in my mouth. I was feeling pretty good about it myself.

  “What did you have to tell me about again?” Wesley asked.

  “Huh?” I glanced at him. “Oh yeah.” I looked back at Squid, Rashaad, and Nabeel. “Is there someplace private we can talk?”

  I was already starting to walk back toward the corner of the basement, but Wesley hadn’t moved. He had this funny look on his face I’d never seen before.

  “Come on,” I said. “What’s your problem?”

  “Mom said we’re not best friends anymore,” Wesley said.

  I frowned at him. “What?”

  “She said you took advantage of our friendship.”

  “Come on,” I said. “That’s ridiculous. What did I do?”

  “Like when you spread that rumor that I had a contagious skin rash all over my back that was shaped like the state of Texas,” Wesley said.

  “I didn’t spread that rumor,” I said. All I’d told everybody was that I’d heard Wesley had a skin rash, and that it might be contagious, and that it could have been shaped like Texas, which wasn’t even remotely the same thing, and the only reason I’d done it was so that I wouldn’t have to come over to his house and risk making some awkward scene with Callie. “Come on, this is serious.”

  “Anything you can say to Wesley, you can say to us,” Nabeel said.

  “Yeah, we’re his friends now,” Squid said. Without taking his eyes off the screen, he picked up the Doritos bag and shook the last crumbs into his mouth, then crumpled it up and tossed it on the floor. “Yo, Doublewide, you got any more Cool Ranch? This bag’s empty.”

  “Sure, I think,” Wesley said.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” Nabeel asked.

  “Yeah,” Rashaad said. “Hop to it.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right back.” Wesley jumped for the stairs. I followed him.

  “Wesley,” I said, “those guys aren’t your friends.”

  Wesley peered at me suspiciously. “How would you know?”

  “Just trust me, okay?”

  “They treat me better than—”

  “Yo, Mount Flabmore!” Nabeel shouted up from below. “Bring down another two-liter of Mountain Dew while you’re at it!”

  I looked at him. “You were saying?”

  “That’s just how we talk to each other. He calls me Mount Flabmore, and I call him . . . Nabeel.”

  “Because that’s his name.”

  Wesley twanged his rubber bands, and his eyes shifted away uneasily. “Well, yeah, but . . .”

  “Look,” I said, “it’s not up to me, so I don’t care who you hang out with. That’s not why I came here anyway.”

  “It’s not?” Now he looked disappointed. “But I thought—”

  “No,” I said. “Listen. Remember at the garage sale this morning, when you saw that CommandRoid and you said that your dad had one of them too?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I guess.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Up in his study. But I’m not allowed to go up there.” Wesley’s face turned a little pinker, and he lowered his voice. “He only let me in there one time last year, to talk to me about where babies come from.”

  I shuddered. I remembered Wesley coming to school the next day and telling everybody what his father had said about where babies come from. I’m not sure what his dad said originally, but if you broke it all down into a pie chart, Wesley’s version of it would look something like this:

  Anyway, one thing was for sure: Wesley’s dad hadn’t done him any favors in the popularity department. There were kids who still weren’t talking to him because of that.

  “Yo, Chunk Muffin!” Rashaad yelled up the stairs. “We got any kind of ETA on those Doritos?”

  “Coming right up!” Wesley yelped, and I saw him getting nervous. “I can’t go in there right now, Pete,” he said. “I’ve got guests.”

  “Wesley,” I said, “this is important.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  I took a deep breath, knowing what I was going to have to say. “It’s time for the Super Mario Brothers to get back together.”

  Wesley looked at me for a long time. “You seriously mean it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay,” he said, and nodded. “Let’s do this thing.”

  [CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE]

  We Do This Thing

  The first thing we had to do was get the key to Wesley’s dad’s study. That wasn’t too hard, because he kept a spare hanging in the laundry room, on a key chain that said DAD’S STUDY. It was a big brass key that looked old and heavy, like if you hit somebody with it, you could put them in the hospital.

  “Whoa,” I said. “That’s some key.”

  “We have to be quiet,” Wesley said. “Mom’s polishing the silver in the dining room and—”

  “Wesley? Where are you going with that key to your father’s study?”

  His mom’s head popped around the corner. I considered running for it, but that wouldn’t have done much good. Fortunately, at that moment Nabeel came bursting up from the basement with the empty chip bowl in both hands.

  “Yo, Blubber Nuggets! We got a serious chip shortage down here, and—” He stopped when he saw Mrs. Midwood looking at him. “Oh, hey, Wesley’s mom.”

  Mrs. Midwood’s eyes got huge. “Blubber Nuggets?”

  I glanced at Wesley, and I could tell we were both thinking the same thing. Mrs. Midwood hat
ed it when anybody made fun of Wesley’s weight. It had been a sore spot since kindergarten, and I’m pretty sure that it bothered her even more than it bothered him. She’d been to the principal’s office four times, and on the fourth time she’d brought a lawyer with her.

  She was still inhaling a breath to unload on Nabeel when Wesley and I spun around the corner and started upstairs with the key. His dad’s study was at the end of the hallway, and when we got there, I stepped back while Wesley put the key in the lock.

  “This place makes me think of storks and seeds,” he said.

  The lock went click and we stepped inside.

  His dad’s study was this big dark room with bookshelves on the walls and a giant wooden desk in front of the window. It smelled like old paper and leather furniture. Wesley turned on the light, and I saw it sitting there on the desk.

  The CommandRoid in all its glory.

  Just like Dad’s.

  It was hooked up to a TV set with the joysticks sitting out on either side.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” I said. “Switch it on.”

  Wesley hit the power button and turned on the TV. The screen lit up with chunky pixelated letters:

  “What am I supposed to say?” Wesley asked.

  “Click YES.” I already had a joystick in my hand. Wesley picked up the other one. This controller felt like it was carved out of wood. It was so unresponsive that I wondered if it was hooked up at all. Now I knew how the pioneers had felt when they’d played video games while crossing the prairie back in the eighteen hundreds or whatever.

  “Ugh,” Wesley said. “I can barely budge it.”

  “Push harder,” I told him. “You can do it.”

  “I’m trying!” Wesley said. “Oh, man. This is really hard!” He released the joystick and shook his hand out. “My fingers are going numb!” He glanced at me. “What about yours?”

  “Mine doesn’t work at all. Here, trade me.” I reached over and took Wesley’s joystick, grabbed the top part, and shoved it forward. The cursor moved a little. I pushed harder.

  CRACK!

  I guess maybe I shouldn’t have done that.

  The top of the controller had snapped off in my hand. Now there were a bunch of old wires that were never meant to see the light of day dangling out of the bottom. The sight of the inside of broken video games makes me feel a little sick, like I’ve accidentally stumbled on one of those medical shows where they show surgical procedures.

  Wesley’s face went totally white. His mouth became a perfect O of sheer terror.

  “You broke Dad’s game,” he said. “I’m so dead!”

  “Okay, just calm down; it’s going to be okay. We can fix it.” I tried to push the top part of the controller back into place, but it wouldn’t fit.

  “Wesley?” his mom’s voice cried from downstairs, getting louder, and I heard the thump-thump-THUMP of her feet up the steps. “What are you doing?”

  “Dude,” Wesley said, “whatever you’re going to do, hurry up!”

  What was I supposed to do? I mean, if this were a choose-your-own-adventure story, this would be one of those moments when . . .

  A) If you want Pete to shove the two parts of the joystick together and try to convince Mrs. Midwood it still works, turn to page 79.

  B) If you want Pete to jump out the window and try not to break his leg when he hits the ground, turn to page 193.

  Except I hate those kind of stories, because I always end up dead, eaten by a shark or lost at sea or something, and anyway I haven’t even written page 193 yet. How am I supposed to know what happens? How am I supposed to know if there’s even going to be a page 193? I could be dead in five seconds.

  Meanwhile Wesley pointed at the screen, where two columns of digitized code words had scrolled up again like the walls of a prison.

  In between the walls, a tiny eight-bit figure was running back and forth, frantically carrying words from one column to the other and back again. But every time he moved a word, another one just slid up to take its place.

  Wesley grunted. He was still trying to control the action with his own joystick.

  “What is that thing?” he shouted.

  “That’s my dad,” I mumbled.

  The footsteps on the stairs got louder.

  “My mom’s coming!” Wesley said. “We have to hide this! We’re so dead! If she tells my dad about what happened—”

  It was too late. A figure stepped into the doorway.

  “What are you two doing?” a voice asked.

  I turned around.

  It wasn’t Mrs. Midwood.

  It was Callie.

  [CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX]

  Knock-Knock. Who’s There? Interrupting End of the World. Interrupting End of the World Wh—? BOOM!

  I know: dumb name for a chapter. But it felt like the end of the world, me standing there with a broken joystick in my hand while Callie Midwood stared at both of us with her green eyes, holding a bag of frozen peas against her swollen lip.

  She had never looked more beautiful.

  “We’re just trying to . . .” I said, and the words just kind of floated away. It seemed like a good start, but unfortunately I didn’t know where to go from there. It felt like there was an invisible elephant standing on my chest, squashing all the air out of my lungs.

  Callie’s eyes danced from the broken joystick to the CommandRoid, the text and numbers scrolling over the screen, and back to us. She slowly lowered the bag of peas from her lip.

  “Dad is going to kill you,” she said.

  “I know!” Wesley said. His sister had just said the words that he feared the most, and he suddenly seemed to have to go to the bathroom very badly. He was shifting from one foot to the other, his face white with panic. “I know! I know!”

  “Ugh.” Callie sighed. “Follow me.”

  Before either of us could ask questions, she grabbed us and pulled us out of Mr. Midwood’s study, swinging us around the corner to safety just as Wesley’s mom came down the hall. I heard Mrs. Midwood say Wesley’s name again as Callie whisked us through another doorway, shut the door, turned, and looked at us.

  “We were just—” Wesley started.

  “Shut up,” she whispered. “Don’t even breathe.”

  There was a knock. “Callie?” Mrs. Midwood asked from the hallway.

  “What?” Callie shouted.

  “Have you seen Wesley and Pete?”

  Callie glared at us. “No,” she said. “Aren’t they in Jerk Face’s room?”

  “They most certainly are not,” Mrs. Midwood said. “They were in your father’s study, but they aren’t there now.”

  “How should I know where they are?”

  “I’m simply asking for a little help, Callie,” Mrs. Midwood said. “Are you sure you didn’t—”

  “Maybe they climbed out onto the roof and fell off,” Callie said. “If we’re lucky.”

  Mrs. Midwood was silent for a minute. I imagined her standing out there in the hallway with one of those cartoon storm clouds over her head while she tried to decide what to do. Then finally, after what felt like forever, I heard her footsteps go thumping away.

  I let out a sigh of relief and looked up at Callie. “Thank y—”

  “Shut up,” she said. “My mouth still hurts where you head-butted me.”

  “And I’m really sorry about th—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Okay.”

  “And stop staring at me.”

  I nodded and stared at my shoes. Wesley stood next to me. He didn’t seem to have to go to the bathroom anymore, but he didn’t look too happy about things either. In the awkward silence I looked around the bedroom. Callie’s walls were pale pink like the inside of a seashell, and it smelled like perfume and hair product, and there were piles of clothing on the floor. The little TV on her dresser was turned to CNN. Posters hung on the wall, pictures of musicians I’d never heard of with names like Beth Orton and the Mountain Goats and the Killers and Ta
ken by Trees. I tried to memorize as many of the names as I could in case Callie and I ever went out on a date.

  I forgot that we weren’t supposed to talk.

  “You know,” I said, “it was really cool of you to—”

  “What part of ‘shut up’ do you not understand?” Callie asked, but she must have thought we didn’t understand what it meant at all, because then she asked: “What were you two doing in Dad’s study with that stupid video game anyway?”

  But then she wasn’t even looking at us anymore. She was staring at the TV, where the words I’d come to fear the most were popping up onscreen: SPECIAL BULLETIN. The anchorwoman was saying that in a few minutes the president was going to address the nation again.

  “This should be good,” she said.

  “I know,” I said, and this time she didn’t bother telling me to shut up.

  Then the president came on.

  As I stared at the president on TV, I felt something happening inside my brain. I don’t know how to describe it. I knew what he was going to say.

  I started talking just before he did.

  When the president finished, Callie and Wesley were both staring at me.

  “How did you know what he was going to say?” Callie asked.

  “I know a lot more than that,” I said.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s in my head,” I said.

  “What?” Wesley twanged his rubber bands. “The bird poop?”

  “The code,” I said. “That’s why my dad told me not to read the words off the CommandRoid’s display. That’s why the Bug Man wanted it. Now all the codes are in my brain. I can’t get them out.”