by Marilyn Kaye
“Hey, maybe we could bring them together!” I exclaimed. “Like in Clueless!”
They both looked at me blankly. Obviously, their parents didn’t have a stash of old teen movies like mine did.
“It’s probably on streaming. And I’ve got the DVD.” I had a wistful memory of sleepovers back in Brookdale with former friends. Pajamas and popcorn in front of the TV. “Hey, maybe you two can come over sometime, stay overnight, and we can watch it.”
I could tell from Rachel’s expression that she’d never been to a sleepover.
“Do you think your parents would let you?” I asked her.
She considered this. “Maybe…and maybe I could beg.”
“Or insist?” Alyssa asked.
Rachel considered that. “Um…maybe.”
I wanted to hug her.
“Good for you,” Alyssa declared. “Do what you want to do. Forget them. Fight for your rights.”
“I’m not sure I’m ready to do that,” Rachel murmured as Alyssa went back to the spyglass.
“Anything interesting?” I asked.
“Paige Nakamura.”
The name was familiar. “Who’s that?”
“Remember the girl in English class who didn’t want to catch my cooties?”
Rachel shook her head sadly. “Why are mean girls like that so popular? I don’t get it.”
“Maybe she’s not so popular,” Alyssa commented. “She’s all alone and she’s crying.”
“For real?” I asked.
“Couldn’t be,” Alyssa replied. “She’s not wearing a coat and it’s freezing outside.”
I took a look. Sure enough, there were leaves on the trees. It wasn’t winter in the spyglass. I let Rachel look.
“I guess even popular girls can have problems,” Rachel commented. “I wonder why she’s crying.”
“I don’t know and it’s not important,” Alyssa stated. “She deserves problems, the way she picks on people, and not just me. She makes really awful cracks. Not that I care,” she added hastily.
I wondered if that was really true. Thinking back, I remembered how hurt I felt when kids started saying mean things to me.
Rachel sighed. “I know, she’s made fun of me too. Sometimes I wonder what’s worse: getting insulted and being called names, or just being ignored.”
I was ignored too, back at Brookdale, when friends stopped speaking to me. Like Rachel, I didn’t know which was worse.
“Let’s look for Kiara,” I suggested.
We surveyed the town, but all we saw this time was the real Lakeside on a Sunday afternoon.
“Why are you so interested in her?” Rachel asked.
“Because I think she might be one of us,” I said. “You know. A loner.” Even as I said this, I was thinking that we’re not really loners anymore. We have each other.
But Alyssa and Rachel seemed to know what I was saying.
“We should find out more about this game she plays,” Alyssa said. “We maybe could understand her better. Can we look it up now?”
I groaned. “We don’t have internet yet. Maybe not till Tuesday.”
Rachel piped up. “Why don’t you two come to my house tomorrow after school and we can try to find her game? Bring your phones or a laptop. Maybe we can join it.”
Alyssa and I agreed to this. And then Rachel suggested practicing our oral reports.
Alyssa frowned. “I thought we weren’t really going to do that.”
“I haven’t even worked on mine,” I confessed.
But Rachel had, and wanted to talk about it. “I’m a little nervous about it,” she told us. “You know how Ms. Gonzalez said we had to make the report personal? I’m worried about talking like that in front of the class.” She turned to Alyssa. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”
“Yeah, kind of. My poem is ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’”
“What’s it about?” I asked.
“There’s this guy, and he wants to go into the beautiful winter woods, to, like, be in that environment and experience it, but in the end he doesn’t because he’s got other stuff to do. Responsibilities.” She hesitated, and then she said, “So I’m going to talk about how one time I thought I’d run away from home, to get away from my family. Who probably wouldn’t even notice that I was gone.” She sighed. “But I didn’t. I mean, who knows? They might have noticed and completely freaked out.”
“Wow.” I was impressed. That was pretty personal. “What’s yours?” I asked Rachel.
Rachel’s poem was “Desert Places.” It was about someone being isolated. In her report, which she delivered to us right then and there, she talked about how she could relate to the poem, because she felt very lonely sometimes.
“That’s brave,” Alyssa commented when she was done.
“I know some kids might laugh,” Rachel said. “They’ll think I’m a real loser.”
I put an arm around her. “Well, you’re not a loser. And who cares what they think? We’ll be there to support you. You’ve got friends.”
Alyssa nodded in agreement. And Rachel looked like she was going to cry.
She didn’t, though. Instead, we went downstairs and dug up some snacks. Rachel’s Mami—who turned out to be called Cecilia Levin-Lopez—was still there, talking to my mother, and fortunately, they were so involved in their conversation that Rachel’s Mami didn’t notice that we were eating nonorganic corn chips.
Once everyone was gone, my mother asked how the practice went.
“Okay,” I said. “But I’ve got a little more work to do.” And I ran up to my room.
I felt ashamed. Alyssa and Rachel had really worked on their poems, and they were both relating the poems to their own lives in especially meaningful ways. I had to come up with something. And not how I thought the world would end.
Reading the poem over a couple more times, I thought about what the poet was really saying. It was something about what was worse, fire or ice. And then I remembered what Rachel had said earlier. Which was worse, getting picked on or being ignored?
Getting picked on, that’s fire. It’s a real attack, it’s hot, and it burns. Ice…that’s freezing. And when people stop speaking to you, when they stop being your friends, it’s like they freeze you out. I’d been through both back at Brookdale. So had my parents.
I started making notes for my talk.
IT WASN’T TOO AWFUL IN ENGLISH THE NEXT day. While I gave my report, most of the kids looked bored, but that was okay because that was how they looked during all the reports. A couple of kids actually looked sort of interested, but I was glad they didn’t make any comments or ask any questions after I finished. I didn’t really want to go into any more detail about what happened in Brookdale.
Poor Rachel was so nervous, we could barely hear her. Ms. Gonzalez nicely asked her to try to speak a little louder, but when she did, her voice shook. And she wouldn’t even look at the class. I was very relieved when she didn’t get any attitude from our classmates.
Alyssa was not as fortunate. When she got to the point where she said she’d decided not to run away from home, some boy muttered loudly, “I’ll bet your parents wish you had.” And got giggles. Also a very stern look from Ms. Gonzalez, but that was no comfort to Alyssa.
Only, Alyssa, being Alyssa, didn’t need any comfort. She glared at the boy, fiercely, and he shrank back in his seat. Maybe he thought she was putting a curse on him.
After school, I waited outside for Alyssa and Rachel. Beyond the crowd of students pouring out of the building, lingering to talk or waiting for rides, I spotted Rachel’s mom. Since Alyssa and I were going to Rachel’s, I was about to head over in her direction when I heard my name.
I turned to find Mike Twersky standing there.
“Hey, Ellie.”
My heartbeat went into overtime.
“Hi?” he said, and the question in his voice made me realize I hadn’t said anything yet.
I came up with a snappy response. “Hi.�
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“You know Jim Berger?” he asked.
We’d never spoken, but I knew who he was—a short, skinny kid in my English class. I’d heard other boys tease him about this, but he ignored them.
I nodded.
“He’s a friend of mine,” Mike Twersky said.
Well, that was interesting. Cool guys weren’t usually friends with people like Jim Berger. And I didn’t know why he was telling me this.
He went on. “Jim told me about your report in class.”
“Okay,” I said, and even though I didn’t think it was possible, my heartbeat quickened.
“About how your dad tried to start a homeless shelter in Brookdale and the whole town turned against him.”
I nodded.
Then Mike nodded. “That’s cool.”
What, that the town practically threw us out? No, it couldn’t be that. So I just said, “Really?”
“Yeah. My dad’s on the town council. He volunteers at the Lakeside homeless shelter and my whole family volunteers at the soup kitchen on Sundays.”
“Really?” I closed my eyes in despair. What was wrong with me? Had I completely lost my entire vocabulary?
He nodded.
And I repeated exactly what he’d said about my father. “That’s—that’s cool!”
“People shouldn’t have to sleep on the streets,” he said.
And all I could do was nod fervently and say again, “Really!”
Then we just stood there for a second in silence. But it was okay. We’d made a real connection.
“Well, see ya.”
“See ya,” I echoed.
I watched as he made his way through the crowd. An older girl glanced at me oddly as she walked by, and I realized I had a big stupid grin on my face.
Rachel emerged from the building, followed by Alyssa, and we joined Rachel’s mom.
“I brought the car today,” she told us. “I have to drop you all off and go on to a dentist’s appointment. But it’s okay,” she assured us. “Cecilia’s home grading papers this afternoon.”
Like it would be so terrible if three girls our age stayed in a house alone in the middle of the afternoon. I wondered if Rachel still had to have a babysitter. Or maybe her parents never went out without her.
Rachel lived in a small, pretty house that looked like a beach cottage. It was all white on the outside, but the inside was full of color—sky-blue walls, colorful wall hangings, framed art posters, and lots of plants. Rachel’s Mami greeted us warmly.
“Something to eat?” she asked us. I wasn’t looking forward to that, since I envisioned a big bowl of celery sticks.
“Maybe later, Mami,” Rachel said. “We’ve got work to do. I don’t think Mom would mind if we use her computer.”
“Is it for school?”
I mentally groaned as Rachel began to go pink in the face. The poor girl couldn’t even bring herself to fib a little. And it wasn’t even a fib—we were researching Kiara, and Kiara went to our school. So I jumped in and said a firm “Yes.”
Rachel’s mom had her graphic design office in a small study off the living room. Her computer had an enormous screen.
“Let me just adjust something,” Rachel’s Mami murmured, and she hit a few keys on her wife’s computer. I had a feeling it was child protection software, so little Rachel wouldn’t accidentally see something naughty. Fortunately, our kind of search didn’t require the use of any words that would challenge the restrictions set up by the program.
She left us. Alyssa pulled out her laptop and I pulled out mine, a hand-me-down from Charlotte. We got a couple of additional chairs from the dining room, connected to Rachel’s Wi-Fi, and settled down in front of the big computer.
“I don’t even know where we should start,” Rachel said. “There have to be millions of games, right?”
“Hers is an RPG,” I reported. “That narrows it.”
“Not by much,” Alyssa commented.
“You know about them?” I asked.
“Sure. Last year, I was really into a couple of them.”
“What were they like?” I asked.
She smiled. “Oh, just your average dark, creepy, bloody games. With vampires.” Then she looked serious. “But I got sick of them. The communities weren’t fun. And some of them said really awful stuff to each other.”
“Well, Kiara’s game isn’t one of those,” I told them. “It’s all cutesy animals.”
I described what I’d seen in the media center, and Rachel went to work on the keyboard. She typed in search words: role-play, animals…
“What else?” she asked me.
“Labyrinth. Maze.”
Titles flew up on the screen. Also pictures. Looking over Rachel’s shoulder, I spotted one that resembled Kiara’s game.
“Click on that.”
Rachel did. “The Amazing Maze,” she read aloud.
Lucky for us, it was a freebie.
“Okay, let’s download it,” Rachel said.
We did, and then each of us began reading the directions on our screens.
“Do you think we can just observe the game?” Rachel wondered aloud.
“It doesn’t work like that, you can’t just watch,” Alyssa told us. “We have to join. So first we need to create our avatars.”
This part was fun. We each had to choose an animal, name it, and customize its appearance. I picked a rabbit, made it blue with yellow stripes and red ears, and called myself FunnyBunny. Alyssa became a green-and-purple pig and named it PigglyWiggly. It took Rachel a while to choose, but she finally settled on a bear and colored it red.
“BigBadBear,” she announced, but that was rejected since apparently another player was using that name. She had to add a number and became BigBadBear13.
“Now we’re supposed to join a team,” Alyssa said.
“We want to be on Kiara’s team,” I pointed out. “How do we do that?”
“The directions said you could join a friend’s team if you know their screen name,” said Rachel.
I closed my eyes, thinking back to when I’d watched Kiara playing in the media center. “SwanK,” I told them. “With a capital letter K.”
“Nice recall, FunnyBunny,” Alyssa said.
We found SwanK, and we were in luck—she was online at that very moment! We added our screen names, and our avatars appeared at the entrance to the maze.
“I’m still not completely understanding how this works,” Rachel murmured. Neither was I, and even Alyssa, the only one among us who’d ever played this sort of thing, was frowning at her screen.
“It says you should turn on the microphone,” Rachel said.
“Don’t do it!” Alyssa ordered.
“Why not?”
“I told you about the trash talking. It can get seriously nasty. And I’ll bet these guys will be even worse than the vampires.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They’ll probably trash-talk with animal voices,” Alyssa said darkly. “Do you really want to hear that?”
So none of us turned on our microphones.
We all entered the maze, but then things got really confusing. It seemed you could only move through the maze in certain directions and from particular spots, but we saw creatures from both teams whizzing from one spot to another without being able to figure out why or how.
Up in one corner of the screen was a scoreboard, where avatars in the maze were listed with points next to their names. Points rapidly increased and decreased, but none of us could understand the reasons points were added or subtracted.
“I still don’t get it,” Alyssa complained. “In the games I played, you just killed each other. Then, in one of them, the dead avatars turned into ghosts and you had to destroy them with special weapons.”
“I don’t see any weapons here,” Rachel said. “The animals just seem to be shoving each other around.”
I studied the action on my screen. “Okay, I think the points give an animal the right to shove another ani
mal farther from the exit of the maze.”
“No, I think they get the points when they shove,” Alyssa said.
“Whatever,” I said. “Either way, I think Kiara should just stay away from the animals with lots of points if she wants to get through this thing.”
Alyssa pointed to the screen. “But that strategy’s kind of impossible. The points change so fast that she’d have to be looking back and forth from the maze to the scoreboard really quickly. Like, a high-scoring animal probably could shove her away before she even knows he has the points to do it.”
I was so confused. I hate games—or tests, or anything—with timers. I like to consider what I want to do, which is why I only play games where you aren’t playing against anyone else and you can take as much time as you need to decide on your next move.
In the end we just watched SwanK. And after a while, it seemed like every time the swan was near an opening to pass through, another animal blocked her. FunkyMonkey and the others on her team never seemed to be anywhere near her. Then, as I watched the screen, SwanK was very close to advancing a good distance when she was suddenly swept back.
Alyssa was looking at the scoreboard. “Whoa—I think that was Ponygirl who sent her off! Her points just dropped.”
“No way,” I said. “Ponygirl is on her team. Why would she do that?”
“It must have been an accident,” Rachel decided. “Or maybe they don’t really play as a team and each player is on their own.”
Alyssa must have read the directions more closely than we did, because she was shaking her head vigorously. “No. If a team wins, with everyone through the maze before the other team, each member on the winning team gets the same number of points. But the highest-ranking person on the team gets three times as many points as everyone else, and gets to go into a final with the highest-ranking player on other teams.”
We kept watching. SwanK got close to a gate that would let her move deeper inside the maze. But when she was only steps away, a crocodile blocked her.
“So…what should we do?” I asked.
“We’re going to help her get out of the maze,” Alyssa said with determination. “And destroy everyone who’s in her way.”
“That sounds violent,” Rachel murmured.