“Thank you,” I said.
He squeezed my hand and nodded.
“Mommy!” I was six years old again, at the playground. I stood on the edge of a wooden platform, waiting to launch myself onto the monkey bars. I had a new trick that I wanted to try. I was waiting for my mom to turn around so I could show her my big girl moves.
“Mommy, Mommy look at me!” I shouted again. But my mom was too drawn into a conversation with our neighbor Doreen, the one with the flamingos in her yard. They were looking at something on her phone. I shrugged and leaped onto the first bar. I dangled from the tips of my fingers, feeling the weight of my body pull me down.
A boy eight years old watched me as I swung back and forth, trying to build up momentum.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, his gray eyes looking warily at my efforts to kick my legs and pick up speed.
“I’m going to flip and land on my feet,” I grunted. “Just like they do in gym-matchsticks.”
“You mean gymnastics,” the boy corrected me.
My fingers started to go numb. I loosened my grip and dropped down to the ground in a squat. All my plastic barrettes clattered near my ears, and I brushed my braids out of my eyes.
“Stop distracting me!” I said. I rubbed my palms together and climbed back up to the platform to try again. “Stranger!” I narrowed my eyes at him.
“My name is Lonnie, and I can already tell you’re going to fall big-time.”
“Shut up, meany-pants,” I responded with my hands on my hips. “You don’t know anything!”
“If you want to do a flip, that’s not how you do it.”
“How then?”
“First you should dangle upside down with your knees hooked onto the bars,” he said. “And then you swing forward and grab the bars and let your feet loose.”
“That doesn’t sound as exciting as my way,” I said, scrunching up my nose. “Why should I believe you?”
“Because I know about physics,” Lonnie said matter-of-factly. “I learned about it in school.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re not old enough for that class.”
He hesitated, then said, “Whatever.” He turned away, pulling a tablet from his back pocket and turning on the screen.
“What’re you playing?”
He glanced over his shoulder at me, still a little stung that I called his bluff. “Minecraft. Do you know what that is?”
“Yes,” I said, sticking out my bottom lip, as if that somehow made the lie more believable.
He spun back toward me. The bright green pixels and gray lettering of Minecraft booted up on the tablet. “You sure?” he asked. He let me have a look at the screen.
“Maybe I know a different one,” I said softly.
Lonnie smiled. “It’s like a building game, but you can also do lots of cool things like fight monsters and set traps.” Lonnie pulled up his house and showed me around what he’d already built in his realm. I was easily impressed at that age, since what Lonnie had built was nothing more than a one-room shack with some redstone-powered carts that could take him from one end of the house to another.
“Let me see that,” I said, reaching for the tablet. “You should build some decorations for your house, it looks really ugly.”
I tapped around the world, surprised at how easily I could manipulate the ground with a shovel. I started digging straight down.
“Not bad, newbie,” Lonnie said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Somebody new to the game.”
I nodded. “You won’t be able to call me that tomorrow,” I said. “I won’t be new then.”
“You’re right,” Lonnie said. “So what should I call you tomorrow?”
“Bianca,” I said. “That’s my name.”
“Well, Bianca, maybe we can play together sometime.”
“I’ll have to ask my mom first, but I guess that’s okay,” I responded. “Does that make us friends now?”
Lonnie shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so.”
I beamed brightly at him, displaying all three gaps in my teeth. “Then you should watch me do my epic flip!”
“Wait, Bianca!” Lonnie began, but I was no longer listening. This time, I took a running leap off the platform. I extended my arms to catch the first bar, but my hands missed the moment to grasp. Suddenly I was hurtling through the air with no way to catch myself.
I opened my mouth to scream, and closed my eyes, which was a very dumb thing to do. The next thing I knew, my body collided with something soft and warm and I heard someone yelp in pain.
Even when he didn’t know me, Lonnie was there to catch my falls.
* * *
—
“Can you talk now?” I asked, looking at Lonnie’s avatar, and thinking we were a long way from that playground.
Lonnie shook his head.
“But it’s you,” I said.
He came over and rubbed me on the head like he did when he was in a good mood.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
Lonnie arched one eyebrow up and looked at me.
“Right, I guess it doesn’t matter,” I said. “What matters now is that you’re finally getting better.”
He gave one definitive nod, then picked up the shulker box and started for the door.
“We still need to find obsidian,” I said.
Lonnie pointed out the door to a boat that hovered just offshore.
“Right,” I said. “We could use that to get back to the mainland.”
Lonnie’s head tilted as he looked at me.
I looked out the window, wondering where Anton and Esme had gotten to. “Well, I could make a quick mission. It would save a lot of time,” I said. “And since you’re better, there’s no reason to leave you here.”
There was a part of me that felt good about leaving Anton and Esme behind. I was tired of them doubting every move I made, and yelling at me every time I messed up. I thought it would be good to be on our own again, Lonnie and Bianca alone, where I could mess up and at least the person reading me the riot act would be someone I knew, someone I could trust.
We climbed aboard the boat. He looked knowingly back at me, looking more Lonnie-like, and giving me the same steady stare that he did out in the real world when he disapproved of something I was doing.
He knew. He knew exactly why I didn’t want to leave. He had probably known all along.
“Once we get to the End, I’ll log off,” I said. I didn’t know if I’d be ready to face the real world by then, but his unblinking gaze got me thinking that I’d at least have to try.
I started to navigate us to the next strip of land, and tried to convince myself that I meant what I’d said, but deep down I knew I would do everything I could to hold off going back to the real world. But there was time, wasn’t there? How much time, I didn’t know.
I shook that thought off and concentrated on steering. Once we were on the other side, I took out the diamond axe and started bashing through things, hoping to hit obsidian or even lava that I could divert water to. Lonnie tagged along but didn’t help with any of the mining. I talked to him the entire time, but my one-sided conversation quickly went from enthusiastic and encouraging to doom and despair the longer we went without finding what we needed.
Lonnie pointed to a crusty-looking gray stone hill ahead, and I headed there, hoping I’d find lava beneath it. Lonnie stood aside as I dug down and hit lava with just a few short strokes.
“Jackpot!” I declared. I poured water over the lava. It sizzled and turned immediately into obsidian, which I dug into with the pickaxe with the enthusiasm of an enderman with a grudge. I kept going until I’d made fifteen obsidian blocks, which were ready to be assembled into a portal right at the side of the rocky hill.
&nbs
p; “This is it, Lonnie,” I said.
But Lonnie wasn’t standing near me anymore. I ran back down to the water, near where the boat was, then back to the first set of rocky hills we had come to, and climbed to the top to look out over the landscape. Nothing. Lonnie had been there, and then he was gone. In an instant. Like he’d been snuffed out of existence.
I turned again and followed the river farther down than where we’d come in, with panic rising in my chest. I found him past a curve in the path, and ran to catch up.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “I got all the obsidian we need. It’s time to go.”
But Lonnie didn’t budge. He stood looking out over the water, peacefully, then turned to me and seemed surprised to see me there, and then confused about why I was out of breath.
“I got it all ready,” I told him as I held my hand out. “We have to go. Are you ready?”
Lonnie looked back over the water as if he wasn’t ready to move just yet, so I went next to him and looked out too. I listened for the sound of the waves. It was there, but so was the tinkly Minecraft music that I’d tuned out since I’d landed inside the game.
He squeezed my hand and looked past me, toward where Anton and Esme were still waiting in our old base. I sighed and said, “You’re right. We won’t leave without them. I wanted some time with just us, but we’ll go back for them before we leave for the Nether. They’re our friends, and we don’t leave our friends behind.”
Lonnie smiled before moving over the sand on the shore of the river and then up onto the grassy plain toward the hills. Watching him walking, for a moment it seemed like the vibrant blue of his shirt flickered, and momentarily he was a shadow of himself. There, but not there. More like the memory of a person than the real thing. Like a ghost.
I shook my head. It was just a trick of the light. I went back to the plain, and while I put the portal together, Lonnie stayed close, but his attention was elsewhere. He looked all around, but never in my direction, not even when I talked to him directly about getting out and eating ice cream at that place we liked on West Elm Road. I even tried teasing him about starting to borrow his car once I was old enough to drive and getting control of the satellite radio station. For a moment it was almost like he’d been at the beginning of the game, when I wasn’t really sure if he was there or not. My frustration bubbled up; it was like every time we took a step closer to the End, he took two steps back.
Is what Esme said before true? Is Lonnie really—
I shivered and shut that thought down. Besides, there was another possibility…I could be creating all the diversions myself. I’d been tracking how things seemed to happen in reaction to me, and what Esme and Anton had said about the mods they created to protect the game from noobs. The game could be reacting to what I feared. Either way, there was nothing I could do but play through. Shaking my head, I focused on building the nether portal instead. I only needed some flint to light it. I opened up my inventory to check, but there was no flint inside it.
“You’re kidding,” I said. I checked and rechecked the contents of the box. Still no flint. Esme and Anton must have taken it, or it got left behind at A.J.’s house, although I could’ve sworn it was in the box before. I took a deep breath and considered my options.
“What would you do?” I asked Lonnie. “Should we go back to get Anton and Esme now, or find some flint ourselves?”
He glanced at the ground, just as I’d hoped.
“Mining it is,” I said.
I left the obsidian portal frame where it was as the two of us went a little farther inland. I dug everywhere I could, looking for some gravel, and turning up nothing. Most everything here was sand and dirt. We kept moving farther in until the water disappeared behind us.
“I’m sorry,” I said out loud, though really I was just saying it to myself, as in I’m a sorry excuse for a human being, or maybe I’m sorry for being a complete idiot that day in the car and getting us all hurt. But it could have been both. Actually, it was both. Definitely.
I smashed everything I saw with the diamond pickaxe, leaving literally no stone unturned as I ran through the digital countryside in search of some gravel.
Lonnie tugged me in another direction when we hit a patch of trees.
“Do you want to go this way?” I asked. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
He led me down a couple of levels of dirt and rock and into a shallow plain, at the base of which was gravel.
“Genius. You are a genius, and you have always been a genius,” I said.
I mined as fast and as furiously as I could. I dug so far down, the valley was no longer shallow. Lonnie stuck close to me as I worked, and it was only when I got about half of the way through that I realized he had been steering me in a methodical path all along. We had mined in one square grid, then moved to another, and then another.
“I see what you did there,” I said.
Lonnie didn’t respond, he just gently moved me to the next section. I kept going.
The thing about mining gravel for flint, of course, is that you’re not very likely to find flint. And it seemed even more unlikely now. Nothing we really needed was going to come easy. I could either deal with it, or get mad and walk away.
Lonnie paused and looked right at me, as if he wanted to say something, or he was trying to bore a thought straight into my brain. I stepped back, out of his line of sight, and his gaze didn’t move. He was looking at a rock behind me. I moved to it and mined down, almost expecting there to be flint. There wasn’t. Once again, I was reading something into Lonnie that wasn’t there. I turned and threw the axe, hitting another bit of gravel. When I went to pull it out, there was something behind it. Black. For a second I got super excited, thinking I’d accidentally hit some flint. But it was coal.
“I give up,” I called up to Lonnie. “There’s nothing here. We’re going to have to look someplace else.”
Lonnie stamped the ground where he was standing.
“No,” I said. “There’s nothing here. We really have to go.”
Lonnie looked back over the plain. I still had a long way to go to go through all of it with Lonnie’s method. But all I wanted to do was hack it up to bits, hoping that by sheer force of luck, I’d hit what we needed.
He stamped again.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “No problem.” I started to dig in the spot where he had been standing. I went down two levels, and there it was, black flint.
I couldn’t help but grin and hold up my hand for a high five, which Lonnie happily slapped.
We rushed back to the spot where I’d made the frame, and I ignited the portal immediately. It glowed purple with swirling patterns splashing out of the border and all around us. It looked so much deeper in person than it did in the game, like we would be diving into an ocean, and we would need to hold our breath to be able to get through.
Lonnie put his hand up, trying to touch one of the purple swirls that came out at us.
“Lonnie, not yet! We have to go back for Es—” I called out. I tried to catch his hand, but lost my balance, and pushed him closer to the portal, which was the exact opposite of what I’d intended to do. He turned and grabbed me, maybe to help me, or to help himself, but before I knew it we had both fallen through the portal, disappearing in a moment.
The shulker box with a good chunk of our supplies was left behind in the Overworld, along with our friends.
I wasn’t expecting the heat to feel like a blast to my face. I raised my arm to shield myself, and hit Lonnie in the process, pushing him forward down a slope of deep brown soil and toward a lake of bubbling lava. I reached out and grabbed him back as I calculated the risk of leaving him there for the length of time it would take me to return to the Overworld, grab the shulker box, and get back to the Nether. Anything could happen in a few seconds. But without the flint, there was no way to
relight the portal if it went out. I’d have to risk it.
I let go of Lonnie and turned back to the portal. Above us, a ghast came screaming down, tentacles waving, cutting off my path. I pulled out my bow and took a few shots, missing terribly, but at least the ghast flew away for the moment. But a stray shot from the mob blew out the portal fire in the process.
It took me a couple of seconds of staring at the empty portal for the following to sink in: we were stuck in the Nether.
The ghast came around again, flying upward in an arc and then diving down toward us. I could see it huffing, getting ready to blow. I knocked down Lonnie and held him there as the ghast sent a fireball straight at us. I wondered if this could ignite the portal, but realized it could also fry us in the process. I pressed us both flat against the ground. It whizzed over our bodies, and I felt the singe of it whisk past my skin. I got up, pulled Lonnie along with me, and ran down the slope toward the lava.
“Where’s that potion of Fire Protection when you need it?” I asked aloud. “Oh right, it’s back in the shulker box that I didn’t bring with us.”
The ghast dipped and turned and came around again, faster this time, its gray face like the cold, hard mask of death.
“When I tell you to jump, you’re going to have to jump, Lonnie.” My heart beat hard in my chest and my legs trembled as I pulled out my sword. “Ready?” I asked as the ghast bore down on us. I waited until it was within striking distance, then shouted, “Now!” I jumped backward over the rivulet of lava while wildly swinging my sword, landing a few good blows while pulling Lonnie backward with me, hoping I wasn’t dragging him, because if he didn’t jump on his own I would be pulling him to his death by liquid fire. But he landed just a microsecond after me on the other side, as the ghast died, plowing face first into the lava and becoming nothing more than motes of smoke. I yanked Lonnie out of the way as its crash landing sent some lava our way, but not quite fast enough to save myself. My leg burned as if someone had slashed it with hot iron. There was no time to worry about it. It would heal. Everything in the game healed eventually. And we had to move on.
The Crash: An Official Minecraft Novel Page 14