by Danny Tobey
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” his dad said, sounding weary.
Inside the envelope was a copy of Alex’s last physics test.
The red F sent a shiver through him.
Alex grabbed the test from his dad’s hands. He knew where it was supposed to be. In his locker. How did it get here?
“Who sent this?”
“When is your next test?” his dad asked back, ignoring him.
When was his next test? Thursday? And what was today—Wednesday? Oh, shit, he should have been studying already. But the Game had happened. And that was so infinitely better.
Unlike physics, he was good at the Game. It told him so.
“Not for a couple weeks,” he told his dad, lying.
But then he realized—what if the same person sent his next test home? He’d be busted twice over. The bad grade. Plus the lie. He knew what that would mean. He could feel it in advance. Phantom pain. No, that was the ghost of pain past. This was the ghost of pain future.
“I told you what would happen if you failed another class.”
“I know.”
“I want to see your next grade. It has to be a pass.”
“Okay, sure.”
“I mean it. The next grade is a pass, or there will be consequences.”
“Okay. I will. I’ll do it.”
His dad hesitated. “Please.” He sounded younger and sadder. “Please pass.”
Alex couldn’t answer. He bit his bottom lip and nodded.
His dad left, and once the door was locked again, three times over, he looked at the physics homework on his desk, then back at the Game on his computer, and picked the Game.
The Vindicators had been the only good thing in his life. Freshman year, it was a haven, from the people who still remembered him from middle school as the Boy from Mars. But then Peter had come, and everyone fell in love with him and worshipped him—Alex did, too, because Peter was the charming trickster Alex longed to be. Yet the things Peter did came out warped when Alex copied them, making him seem all the more alone and odd. Alex had always been the tagalong, but when Peter came, Alex fell one notch lower in the Vindicator hierarchy, which made him feel expendable. Again.
And where was Charlie in all this? Freshman year, Charlie had rescued Alex from oblivion, and it was like, sure, yeah, you’re quiet and everyone thinks you’re a freak, but be one of us. He wished that Charlie still existed, but that guy fell into a black hole of pain, and someone else came out. Deep down he hated Charlie—old and new—for how much Alex needed him.
He would do it. He would do what the Game asked. It would be fun. His prize would impress them. But right now he was more interested in impressing the Game.
He locked himself in the bathroom, and his phone buzzed, a text from an anonymous number.
He read it twice and felt a pit in his stomach.
Who would say this?
Why?
It couldn’t be the Game. The Game’s been saying good things.
Could it be the Game?
Had he screwed up somehow?
Lost favor?
He felt panic. If he was losing ground in the Game, all the more reason to do this task, to win it back. He wasn’t scared.
He read the text again and looked up at the mirror.
Deep circles. Lost eyes.
He stared at himself as the message repeated over and over in his head:
Nobody likes you.
28 BLOOD ON THE WALL
Kenny texted the other Vindicators to warn them away from the school.
Eddie & team snooping around basement—stay away until i say clear
Charlie wrote back:
why snooping?
Kenny replied:
Someone told him about graffiti
Vanhi wrote
WHO?
I don’t know.
Charlie wrote back:
Does he know it’s us?
Not yet
Peter said,
I’ll go now. Clean it up
Kenny answered:
I tried. Door won’t open. Breath of God gone.
Vanhi wrote:
Fuuuuuuuck.
Kenny replied:
I’ll handle.
Vanhi asked:
How?
Kenny didn’t answer. He went silent because Eddie walked up, with Candace in tow. She had a nice camera with her, the paper’s high-end Nikon. Huge flash, great for lighting blood markings in dark spaces. Their sudden appearance made him put down his phone abruptly and not answer Vanhi’s question about how he was going to fix this. But he also had no fucking clue.
* * *
Eddie paid off the janitor, a slow man named Mr. Walker, who without hesitation said he’d let them in. The school had cleared out, and the basement was deserted.
“Ready?” Kenny said, trying to sound excited in a positive way.
He noticed the throbbing in his fingers. That afternoon, he’d run home to shower and change clothes, dipping his pierced fingers in rubbing alcohol and nearly bringing his parents in when he yelped. He slipped that hand into his pocket now, without realizing he was doing it.
The boiler room door was closed, the magnetic swipe box next to it at knob level.
Kenny didn’t dare pull out his phone to see if the cryptic firelight writing was still on the door. Or if the magnetic swipe box was still overlaid with glowing spy-fi keypad controls.
Instead, trying to act nonchalant, Kenny said, “So this is the boiler room?”
“Technically, they call it the mechanical room,” Eddie answered. “I pulled the specs. They put the security pads in when they added the panic doors last year.”
“Isn’t it locked?” Kenny asked, again trying to act clueless and calm.
“Not for long,” Eddie said.
Soon enough, they heard footsteps, and the lanky frame of Mr. Walker came ambling down the hall. He was in no particular hurry, which drove Kenny nuts because all he wanted to do was get this over with.
Kenny wasn’t sure who limped more, Mr. Walker or Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths.
When Mr. Walker finally made it down the hallway, he and Eddie had a spirited, quiet exchange. Eddie finally slipped another $20 bill into Mr. Walker’s hand.
He ambled to the door and said, “Well, good evening to you,” to Candace and Kenny, as if he were just passing by. He put his badge on the reader, then let the elastic cord suck it back to his belt.
He kept on walking in the other direction, mumbling something to himself inaudibly and scratching the back of his head as he shuffled away.
Kenny hesitated when Eddie pulled the door open.
“What are you waiting for?”
“We’re not supposed to be in here,” Kenny said.
“You don’t have to stay.”
“Don’t be a pussy,” Candace added. She was half-Scottish, half-Jamaican, with reddish-blond braids and brown skin.
Kenny nearly blurted, I’m not a pussy, which he realized was exactly what a pussy would say. So instead he scowled at her as if the idea were preposterous, then walked into the boiler room. Like the door and the keypad, the room itself was stripped of its enhancements from last night—no glowing open-mouthed furnace, no diminutive animated god.
Everything was much more boring in realspace.
But it was still dark and hard to navigate, with steam valves, large boilers and control panels, and color-coded piping wrapping the walls and ceilings.
“How does anybody work in here?” Candace asked.
“They don’t, really,” Eddie told her. “It’s almost all Wi-Fi now. They only come down here if there’s an actual mechanical issue. A stuck valve or something.”
It felt warm and damp, but Kenny realized he was starting to sweat. He thought about his Columbia application. Eddie’s excitement: This is our Friends of the Crypt!
“Where is it?” Candace asked.
“Keep looking,” Eddie said.
Kenn
y realized the best thing he could do—the least guilty-looking thing he could do—was to be the one to find it. They were going to find it anyway. He needed to stay in the loop. Keep their trust. Then, when the moment was right, kill the story. Somehow.
“Look!” Kenny said. The moment he did, he thought, Is my premise flawed? Maybe the guilty person would find it first, because he knew just where to look!
“Oh, wow,” Candace said.
Eddie just exhaled. A slow breath.
Splashed across the surface of the boiler was a bloody pentagram, upside down and menacing. In the context of the Game, it had seemed perfectly in place, among the belching smoke and glowing glyphs and little Hephaestus. But now, in the real world, boring as all get-out, the bloody diagram stood alone, startling and grotesque. The heat from the boiler had cooked the blood (it was obviously blood) to a gooey dried paste. It looked hideous.
And huge. How much blood had Kenny given? At the time, it was incremental. Now all at once it slapped him in the face: What have I done?
“This was no prank,” Eddie said.
Suddenly, there was a burst of light. Insanely, Kenny thought for a half second that it was the God Game, coming to the rescue somehow.
But it was Candace, snapping her first picture, the flash sizzling.
“Did your parents ever tell you about the Friends of the Crypt?” Eddie asked them softly, almost piously.
“I heard about it,” Candace said. “When I went to the Grove one time.”
“They met there, out in the woods.”
“They blew up a car,” Kenny added.
“Yeah, after putting a live cat inside,” Candace said.
“That was twenty years ago. And still, my mom would never let me play in those woods,” Eddie said.
Another flash went off, lighting the bloody pentagram, drawn in stark lines that dripped downward, startling Kenny all over again.
29 BLACK BOX
Vanhi stared at the package on her bed. Her hands were shaking.
She’d taken it outside and done everything she could think of to tell if it was safe.
She’d thrown rocks at it from a distance. Nothing. No explosion. No screeching. Not even a shattering noise. Just a dull thud.
She’d found a long stick and prodded the package back and forth. Nothing.
She’d shaken it, sniffed it, everything but opened it.
She looked back at the anonymous texts.
Knock on the door
Go around back.
Pick it up
And then the new one. The kicker:
Deliver It.
Vanhi looked up the address it gave on her phone. It was forty minutes away. The name meant nothing to her. Mitchell P. She googled it but the results were junk.
She was just delivering a package! Why was she so freaked out?
She realized she wanted to call Charlie.
She picked up her phone, held the voice-activation button, and said, “Call Charlie.”
The phone echoed back, “Calling Charlie.”
But it didn’t do it.
She tried again. “Call Charlie.”
Again, no call.
She went to her contacts and clicked his name.
And nothing happened.
Was the Game messing with her? If it could blow up a phone, it could do this. But why? Why couldn’t she call Charlie? They were playing together, weren’t they?
She wished she had never heard of the Game, but it was obviously a little late for that.
She was about to try texting him when a new message arrived. It wasn’t from Charlie, but rather the anonymous game thread.
If you tell, I tell.
Okay, fine. She got it. This was on her. No phone-a-friend. But still, there were limits. She wasn’t going to deliver an IED to someone’s doorstep.
She texted back:
Is it a bomb?
She knew it was insane to put that in writing, but she didn’t care. That was the question haunting her. She didn’t expect an answer, but dammit she had to ask.
The screen showed typing, then:
No.
She wrote back:
Is it something bad?
Not even a pause before:
No.
How could she trust it? What if it was lying?
She went to her desk and grabbed the scissors.
She was about to plunge them through the packing tape wrapping the box when her phone suddenly rang. She jumped, and the scissors skittered out of her hand.
“Shit!”
Her hand shook as she grabbed the phone.
“Hey.” It was Charlie.
“Hey.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” Vanhi said, eyeing the box warily.
“Do you think we’re screwed?”
“What, Eddie? The paper? Kenny will fix it.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“No,” Vanhi said.
“If this blows your Harvard app, I’ll never forgive myself.”
Vanhi closed her eyes. Every time he said that, her lie weighed heavier on her. She wanted to say, No, Charlie. I’m already fucked.
Instead, she said, “Are you okay, Charlie?”
“I think I really hurt someone tonight.”
“What? Who?”
“I don’t know. He attacked me in the garage. At the mall.”
“Oh my God, are you okay?”
“Yeah. But I broke his wrist.”
“It sounds like you didn’t have a choice.”
“Maybe. Maybe I shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
“Why shouldn’t you be at the mall?”
“Never mind.”
“Charlie, you’re not making sense.”
“Forget it. It’s fine.”
Vanhi looked at the package on her bed. “Was it the Game?” Careful, she warned herself. If you tell, it tells.
Charlie hesitated. “I want you to stop playing.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t care about me.”
She looked at the box. I know your secret. “What if I can’t stop?” she said, hearing her voice strain.
“Why not?”
If you tell, I tell. “Just what if?”
“You have a choice.”
Earlier, Vanhi had run into her mom, who looked tired after a long day at the bank where she worked. “What’s in the box?” she asked. “Just school stuff,” Vanhi had answered, and her mom had accepted that without a moment’s pause. Vanhi had spent years building that trust, and the truth would blow it up in one horrible instant, if it ever came out.
The Game could tell her parents that she hacked her grade before they saw it, then hacked it back. It could tell the school. There would be traces if people looked. To hell with Harvard, she could be expelled.
“Right, a choice,” she said, feeling deflated. “I have to go.”
“Hey, easy. You called me.”
“No, I didn’t. You called me.”
“My phone rang.”
Vanhi closed her eyes. “Mine, too. It’s testing us. There’s things we’re not supposed to say.”
“Yeah. I guess we passed.”
She put her hand on the box. “I have to go.”
She buried her face in her hands. It was clear to her now. She asked the Game one last question:
Do I have a choice?
Again, no pause:
Yessssssssssssssssss
That was true.
And she’d already made it.
* * *
Alex biked through the darkness, with the bat tucked under his arm. He knew the back roads and the shadowy ways that would keep him out of sight.
He’d found the bat buried deep in his small garage, under stacks and piles of old crap. An old basketball, deflated years ago. That’s me! A soccer ball, untouched, still in the box from circa 2010. Untouched—that’s me! Unless you counted punishments, and there was
truth to that. Because at least when you were bent over the bedpost, taking your licks, you felt, deep down, It’s about me, they’re paying attention right now, only to me. That was buried beneath the pain and humiliation, but it was real, a tang of sour-sweet juice on the blade of the hurt.
He pedaled furiously to the address the Game had given him. The bat felt strange in his arms. He remembered the night his dad had made him stay outside for hours, until he’d hit the ball off the tee one hundred times. Why? Because he refused to play catch. Didn’t his dad realize, I want to fit the mold. I want to be this thing you imagine I could be. All the threats, all the punishments. Pointless. If I could, I would. I wish, wish, wish I could.
Nobody likes you.
That was true. He’d always known that. Still, just seeing it in writing was like a sucker punch, every time he looked back at the text. Everybody hated him, and now maybe the Game had turned on him, too. He had to do this right.
He pedaled harder, his plaid shirttails flapping in the wind.
When he got there, he held the bat steady, remembering the grip his dad had taught him a decade ago. Just like the US GIs had taught him. His dad could learn it a zillion miles away, but Alex was raised here, and he couldn’t hit a ball to save his life. His dad the hero. Dragging US soldiers out of the fire. Going back in to save more.
Bam.
Alex brought the bat down on the windshield of the car.
The noise echoed through the quiet neighborhood.
Bam.
His dad the war hero.
Bam.
Charlie the saint.
Bam.
Peter the unobtainable.
Bam.
Vanhi the skeptic.
Bam.
Kurt the sadist.
Bam.
Tim the puppet master.
Bam.
The school.
Bam.
The people.
Bam.
Everyone.
Bam.
All must …
Bam.
His mom …
But wait. The bat hesitated. She was kind. She would come in after a particularly bad punishment, whisper soft kindnesses in his ear, stroke his hair, and press her forehead against his.