“Noooooooooo!” Bryan screamed as the last ball struck, smashing Oz in the nose. A spray of blood splattered his cheek and shirt. Oz spun once, looking at Bryan with wide, sad eyes. Blinked once.
“Ouch,” he said.
Then he collapsed.
Bryan stood up and kicked over the wrestling mat, staring coldly across at Reese and his men, all of them grinning maliciously. The other team was temporarily unarmed—all the balls were on Bryan’s side of the line now—but they didn’t seem to care. Beside him Bryan heard Archie scream, a guttural, primal sound, even through the braces. Bryan saw the Popsicle stick of a boy scoop one ball and throw it two-handed, soccer-goalie style. His aim was terrible, the throw was low, but the kid on the other team made the mistake of trying to catch it and missed, taking it on the shin instead. Juan also managed to score a hit with his first throw, striking Hunter while his back was turned, laughing about something. Mr. Kilton blew his whistle and pointed, sending them both to the sideline.
Some of Reese’s men started to fall back.
Bryan grabbed a ball and flung it as hard as he could. Ricardo Torres leaped to avoid it, but not in time. It just got him on the leg. He was out.
The blue writing appeared above Ricardo’s head momentarily as he slouched to the bleachers.
+10 XP.
Bryan’s first kill. The taste of it, the sound of rubber striking flesh, the stench of everyone’s sweat, the blue words—it ignited something in him. He scrambled for another ball and heaved it, not even aiming, just throwing. It went mostly sideways toward the bleachers, nearly taking Max Trilling’s head off; he had to duck to avoid it. But Bryan didn’t see it. He wasn’t watching where the balls he threw actually went. He was just throwing them. One after another. Load and reload. Fire at will. Blind rage overcame him. He somehow managed to score two more kills, including a head shot of his own as Zachary Owens stooped over to grab a loose ball and took a blow to the ear.
Bryan lost all sense of his surroundings. He didn’t see Archie go down, hit in the leg. Or notice when one of Juan’s balls was caught, sending him to the sideline. Or when the last barricade, the one Charlie had given up and hidden back behind, collapsed, exposing him to a flurry of balls that simply couldn’t miss. Bryan didn’t notice any of this. He just scrambled for one ball after another, until there were no more balls left on his side.
And that’s when he realized he was alone.
The remnants of Reese’s team—there were still five of them—each held a basketball to their chest. They lined up in the middle, Reese at their center.
“A noble effort, Biggins,” Reese said. “But you had to know you were going to lose.”
Bryan glanced over at the sideline, where his warriors leaned against one another in crumpled heaps, heads on shoulders, noses smeared in snot and blood. Someone had thought to drag Oz over and hand him a tissue. They all looked at Bryan, and a few of them nodded gravely.
Do it for us, they seemed to say.
He would. He would do it for them.
Bryan turned back around just in time to see the lone ball—Reese’s ball—hurtling toward him.
He shut his eyes and threw out his hands. Felt something hard and unforgiving burn past them, slamming him in the chest, causing his heart to stop.
Then he heard the whistle blow. Bryan opened his eyes to see Mr. Kilton pointing at Reese Hawthorne and then at the bench. “You’re out!” the substitute gym teacher said.
“What?” Reese cried.
Bryan held the basketball in front of him, stunned. The squad on his side of the bleachers erupted in a cheer as Reese kicked a stray ball, sending it soaring. Another flash of blue appeared above the boy’s head.
+10 XP.
Bryan held the ball up in triumph and turned to his teammates, his brothers. Those he would honor with his victory. Reese was out. Bryan had actually caught the ball for once. “Yeah! Yeah! That’s what I’m talking about!” It was glorious.
Juan Delgado pointed, a look of terror on his face.
Bryan turned.
Four more balls, one after another, headed his way at optimum velocity. The first one somehow hit him in the armpit as he twisted. Then the leg. Then the chest. Bryan’s vision was filled with orange, followed by red.
-2 HP.
-2 HP.
-3 HP.
The last one got him in the head, rebounding hard above his ear, filling his skull with a dull roar.
-5 HP.
Bryan dropped to his knees, then slumped over to his side. He heard the roar of Reese’s men. Heard someone tell him to “Take that, hobbit.” Heard the double whistle blow, marking the game’s end.
Somewhere amidst all the ringing he heard Jess’s voice asking him if he was busy tonight. Saw an outline of her standing over him, but it wasn’t her now, it was her four years ago, in the third grade, handing him his valentine, the one with the candy heart. He tried to pull himself up, but it was as if his legs refused to move, just like this morning. Everything was blurry. His cheek burned. The floor was slick with sweat. He blinked once, twice, then looked beside him at the inch-long slot that had been carved into the laminate board, about three feet from his nose. The words just hovering there.
INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE.
The timer already counting down. Already at ten. He reached down for his sock, blindly, unthinking, digging for the penny that he had tucked there. The timer was down to five. Bryan pulled the coin free and dragged himself on his elbows to the hole in the floor, inch by painful inch, grunting at the effort.
He dropped it in with two seconds to spare.
He waited for everything to go black. He wanted to pass out. To wake up in the nurse’s office, or better yet in his bed at home. But he didn’t. He had made it in time.
The game was over, but Bryan was still playing.
12:11 p.m.
Angry Chickens
Oz’s nose had stopped bleeding by the time the fourth-period bell rang. Bryan’s bruised and battered team had spent the last ten minutes of gym in a slumping heap, while Reese and his men had shot baskets and called one another names. At one point Mr. Kilton strolled casually over to the bench, asking Oz if he needed to go see the nurse. Oz shook his head.
“That’s the spirit. A little blood loss never hurt anyone,” the substitute gym teacher said.
Bryan was pretty sure that wasn’t true—in his experience blood loss was usually accompanied by pain, sometimes lots of it—but he didn’t say anything. He couldn’t shake the thought that maybe it had all been his fault. That if he hadn’t come to school today, none of this would have happened. They wouldn’t have had a sub, maybe. Or they wouldn’t have played deathball. Raj wouldn’t have one cheek the color of a strawberry. Charlie wouldn’t be whimpering in the corner. Whatever he was going through—whatever this was—he had dragged all of them into it. He wondered if Oz was thinking the same thing. His best friend looked at him from behind his bloody tissue.
“Nice catch, at least,” he said in a nasally voice, fingers clamped tight between his eyes.
“Thanks.”
Bryan looked at the smeared blood on Oz’s cheek. At the floor rash on Juan’s chin. At the bump already bubbling up from Charlie’s head. The one catch hadn’t prevented him from having to drop another coin. He was only halfway through the school day and he’d already had to continue four times. He wondered how many he had left. Maybe as many as he could afford. Maybe he could continue forever. If that was the case, he was going to need more money.
At the sound of the bell, Bryan helped Oz get to his feet and hobble toward the locker room to change into a shirt that was stained with grape jelly instead of blood.
“Good job, everybody,” Mr. Kilton sang to them, clapping his hands. He looked at Bryan specifically. “You can’t win ’em all, kid.”
Bryan frowned. He wondered which of them he could win.
“Come on,” Oz said, pulling him along. “I’m starving.”
Lunch
at Mount Comfort Middle School was the same as at any school: noisy and nauseating, with a 30 percent chance of thrown food. The tang of meat loaf hung in the air whether it was meat loaf day or not, and you had to dodge the ketchup packet land mines that littered the floor. But even for all that, Bryan didn’t mind it. It was one of the few times during the day when you could talk to your friends about stuff that mattered, like what you were going to do over the weekend and who’d gotten kicked off the reality shows you watched and how it would be fun to have a Wookiee as a pet, especially if it really could pull people’s arms out of their sockets.
Or maybe you could talk about how your life had turned into a giant video game.
Bryan hesitated as he turned the corner on their way to the cafeteria. The incident in the teachers’ lounge, followed by crushing defeat in gym, had put him even more on edge, looking for an ambush from every angle. He half expected the cafeteria to be transformed somehow, maybe laid out in a grid with little balls of food set in crisscrossing rows along the floor, and students running around, frantically gobbling them up while the lunch ladies chased them around wearing bedsheets and making ghost sounds. Or maybe there would be a series of platforms he would have to jump across just to get his chocolate milk.
But the cafeteria looked normal. People sat at tables and played with their food and talked way too loudly, just like always. The same clusters and cliques. The same satellite kids wandering around looking for an empty seat. Maybe lunch would just be lunch. He got in line behind Oz.
“Chicken nuggets or lasagna with crumbled pork topping?” The lunch lady’s apron was smeared with some sickly-looking brown stain.
“Nuggets?” Bryan ventured.
“Peas or creamed spinach?” School policy required students to pull items from every food group whether they ate them or not. Every day Mount Comfort Middle School wasted enough food to feed half of Uganda.
“I’ll just take a banana,” Bryan said, playing his “Substitute a fruit for one thoroughly unappetizing vegetable” card.
“Potato chips or corn chips.”
“Corn chips.”
“You don’t want the corn chips,” the lunch lady said, waving him off. “They’ve been sitting under the heat lamp too long. They’re like rubber.”
Bryan had chewed enough rubber last period when he took a basketball to the face. He switched to potato.
Tray in hand, Bryan found the table where Oz was waiting for him. He had made the critical error of getting the corn chips and was already starting to stack them into a little tower on his tray. He wasn’t alone. Myra was sitting at the table too, fiddling with a chicken nugget and watching Oz build with a devious smile on her face. She looked up at Bryan and her smile faded to a pout, a sympathetic one. Her hair was purple today, Bryan noticed. It changed every three days or so, depending on her mood. Purple. Dandelion yellow. Fluorescent green. Never anything that didn’t glow in the dark. On magenta days you didn’t want to mess with her, but purple was safe.
Myra was pretty much the only girl that he and Oz hung out with—mostly, Bryan knew, because she humored them, but also because there was no one else she could stand to sit with at lunch. Plus there was the little crush she had on Oz, for reasons Bryan couldn’t immediately grasp. Minus the chameleon hairdo and the triple-pierced ears and her inexplicable love for bands with names like Deathgasp, Zombie Fetus, and Napalm Bloodbath, Myra was fairly relatable for a girl. She had read every graphic novel ever written and was an absolute beast at Call of Duty. Not to mention she had striking green eyes that glimmered beneath the layers of black mascara. Bryan sat down and Myra stared at him as if she were waiting for something.
“She knows,” Oz explained. “I got her up to speed.”
Bryan looked back and forth from Oz to Myra, wondering if he should bother being mad. But the truth was he trusted Myra. They would have had to tell her anyway or kick her out of their lunch table. Besides, Myra was smart. Smarter than either Oz or Bryan. Maybe smarter than them combined. He could use her help. He pushed his plate aside and spoke in a whisper. “He told you everything?”
“He told me enough. He told me about the Twinkie.”
Of course he did. “Forget about the Twinkie,” Bryan told her. “The Twinkie is the least of my worries. He told you about the flashing words? And the game? Sovereign of Darkness? And the coins?”
Myra nodded.
“She agrees with my diagnosis,” Oz added.
“Your diagnosis?”
“Yes. We’ve concluded that you are a paranoid schizophrenic suffering from delusions of reference precipitated by an acute persecution complex,” Myra said.
Bryan shook his head. “Cute Percy what now?”
“She means it’s all in your head,” Oz summarized, pointing helpfully at his skull, just in case Bryan didn’t know where his head was located.
“Except it’s not all in my head,” Bryan complained. “You were there at gym. You saw what happened. And the crazy bikers. And Shakespeare’s zombies. Mr. Tennenbaum—”
“Mr. Tennenbaum’s always been weird,” Myra said dismissively. Oz nodded in agreement. He took a chunk of pork topping and set it on top of his corn chip tower. Bryan looked at his tray. He had zero appetite. He offered his bag of potato chips to the first taker. Oz snatched them eagerly. Myra shook her head and continued, “So nobody else has said anything to you, noticed anything strange?”
Bryan shook his head. It was like they were all a part of it somehow. Or they were just that out of it.
“C’mon, man. It’s middle school. What do you expect? Half the kids around here aren’t even awake.” It was true. At the next table over, a kid named Terrance Whitley had fallen asleep with his head on his tray and had a corn chip stuck to his cheek.
“Still, we can’t ignore the possibility that you are having hallucinations brought on by some kind of psychotic episode,” Myra speculated. “Maybe beating that stupid video game and then having your computer fritz out on you created a breakdown in your mental processes, prompting a kind of dissociative fugue.”
“Do you think maybe you could use words with fewer syllables?” Bryan asked. “My head already hurts.”
“Sorry. I like to read about mental disorders online. It makes me feel normal, relatively speaking. Basically what I’m saying is you’ve gone bonkers,” Myra concluded.
Bryan shook his head. “I’m not crazy. And I’m not imagining things.” At least, he didn’t think he was. He couldn’t be imagining everything. Yes, maybe he was making it out to be worse than it was, but there was no question that he had woken up this morning and the rules had changed. Whatever was happening to him, it was really happening.
At least, he thought it was.
Wasn’t it?
Myra reached over and patted his hand. “We believe you,” she said. Then she elbowed Oz in the side.
“Of course we do,” he said, half choking on a potato chip.
They could just be humoring him. In fact, Bryan was pretty sure of it. But at this point he would take whatever support he could get. “So what’s the alternative? To my being nuts?”
Oz and Myra looked at each other, then back at Bryan. “Well,” Myra began, making her nugget do little cartwheels across her tray, “the alternative is that you really are somehow stuck in a video game version of your own life, I guess.” She didn’t sound at all convinced.
“Which is pretty cool, if you think about it,” Oz added with a greasy smile.
“You said earlier it was pathetic,” Bryan reminded him.
“That’s when I thought you were just making it up. But if you aren’t making it up, I think it’s cool.”
“Either way, crazy or not, I think the solution is the same,” Myra said. Bryan looked at the two of them expectantly.
“Beat the game,” she said.
“Beat the game,” Oz echoed.
“Beat the game,” Bryan whispered to himself.
“Break the illusion, the hallucination—whate
ver it is. Pull yourself out of it by getting to the end and accomplishing your goal. Like Sybil reuniting her split personalities.”
“Or Darth Vader turning against the emperor and saving his son.”
Myra snorted and turned to Oz, still wielding her chunk of chicken. “It’s nothing like that,” she said.
“It’s kind of like that,” Oz countered.
“Really, it’s not. You can’t bring everything back to Star Wars.”
“I disagree, Your Worshipfulness,” Oz said.
“Who’s Sybil?” Bryan asked, interrupting them.
“She was the famously crazy wom—never mind,” Myra said. “The point is you’re having some difficulty dealing with reality, which is completely understandable.”
“Yeah. Reality bites,” Oz concluded, trying to actually bite into one of his corn chips. His teeth couldn’t break through. Myra ignored him.
“So you have to overcome whatever it is in your head or your life or whatever that’s causing all these problems. Confront whatever little demon is inside to get everything back to normal.”
“Confront the demon. Beat the game,” Bryan repeated.
“And bring balance to the Force,” Oz added.
Bryan looked over at Myra, who just shook her head. “Okay. Assuming I’m not just making this all up, how do I do it?”
“Well. Think about every video game you’ve ever played. What has the goal always been?” Myra asked.
“To get the high score?” Bryan said.
Oz snarfed some of his milk. It dribbled down his chin. Myra laughed. Any other girl would have made a disgusted face. “Seriously?” Oz said. “This isn’t Space Invaders. Besides, you haven’t said anything about a score yet.”
It was true. If there was a score of some kind being kept, Bryan didn’t know what his was. He had no idea how he was doing, except he was gaining experience points and losing hit points. And he felt perpetually sick to his stomach. And he had only a dime left to his name. “I leveled up once,” he offered.
Myra nodded thoughtfully. “Good. That’s progress,” she said. “So it’s a role-playing game, then.”
Insert Coin to Continue Page 9