by Mike Thayer
The music nerds sat in the corner with large headphones over their ears or around their necks while they drummed on notebooks, plates, and tables. The role-playing nerds ate with their food on their laps to clear space for an elaborate card game of Magic: The Gathering. Dozens of gamer nerds huddled around a handful of tables, their heads bowed as if in prayer while their fingers blitzed over their phones. Booming laughter shot above the chatter, and I looked to see Jaxson sitting with a group of square-jawed goons over by the door. They’d be eating as quickly as possible to use the rest of lunch for basketball or football or something. Most kids, though, just sat and ate. They would either be floaters, going from group to group depending on the day, or they’d belong to one of a dozen other, less visible subcategories: art nerds, bookworms, and so on.
I wove through the maze of chairs to find Noah at the head of a long table, staring intently at his phone.
“Who’s ready to lose?” Noah asked no one in particular. “SpudMasterFlex is ready to crush dreams and hear screams!”
I raised my eyebrows at the comment. I was hoping he wasn’t serious, but it looked like my dad had some competition for the cringey comment king. All the seats in the area were taken except for one next to a spindly girl with a mop of scraggly black curls and an upturned nose. I vaguely recognized her from one of my classes.
“This seat free?” I asked the girl.
“Only if you’re playing in the stink-squattin’ Brown Bag Game.” The girl scooted her jacket over to make room but didn’t look up from her phone.
I put my tray down and looked at her screen, having no clue what a Brown Bag Game was. She played on an outdated phone with a crack running down the middle of the screen and was logging on to a local game of Champions Royale, probably against the other kids in the lunchroom. It was a pretty new game that I hadn’t played a lot, but I’d spent plenty of time on similar ones. A medieval-style battle royale with knights, wizards, dragons, ogres, and magic, where your player got dropped into a giant map in a mad scramble for resources and weapons. Last player alive won.
The girl slyly passed me a brown paper bag under the table. Confused, I glanced down and saw the bag was full of dollar bills and coins. “What the heck is this for?”
“It’s not yours, Scrooge McDoofus,” the girl said, finally looking up from her phone. “Oh, hey. You’re the new kid, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, laughing at the girl’s choice of insults. “Name’s Danny. What am I supposed to do with this bag of money?”
“Name’s Freddie,” the girl said, extending her wiry hand. She had on a unicorn T-shirt with a stretched-out neck and sweatpants that were wearing through at the knees. “Gamertag is FreddieCougar, kinda like the dude from the scary movies with the melted face and knives on his hands. Freddy Krueger.”
“Yeah, I got it.” My parents would never dream of letting me watch horror movies, but I’d seen more than my fair share on discard days.
“Anyway, the Brown Bag Game is a daily tournament. Two bucks to play. Winner take all.”
“Aren’t we gonna get in trouble for having our phones out?” I asked, glancing around. A teacher stood on the far side of the lunchroom casually glancing down at her own phone.
“You kidding?” Freddie said, waving a dismissive hand. “We’re allowed phones during any break from class. Plus, things are pretty chill here. I’ve been playing in the Brown Bag Game since I was in fourth grade. As long as you’re not causing trouble, no one cares. So you in or out, Texas man?”
“What do I got to lose, right?”
“Uh, two bucks,” Freddie said, looking at me like I was an idiot.
I shrugged and slipped a couple of dollars into the bag before slyly passing it to a boy on my right. I pulled out my phone, clicked on the Champions Royale app, and searched for the local game.
“Password is hotpotato20, no caps,” Freddie said.
I typed in the password and cued up my character, who was a simple peasant. I didn’t have any cool skins or anything since I’d only played the game a few times, but I was relatively confident I could still do some serious damage. Many a discard day had been dedicated to honing my gamer skills. The match started, and I dropped my character onto the north edge of Dryout Dunes, a large desert of sandy hills and stone ruins. Before I could even find a weapon, a kill notification popped up on the bottom corner of my screen.
GrizzlyAdamson was axed by SpudMasterFlex
“Sit down, son!” Noah hollered, blindly grabbing a few Tater Tots and shoving them into his mouth.
Thirty seconds later another kill notification flashed on my screen.
R2DPoo was sniped by SpudMasterFlex
“A hundred and seventy-seven yards, folks!” Noah made a gun with his fingers and pointed it to the ceiling. Even though I didn’t know the game that well, I was itching to get my hands on a long-range weapon. The physics of sniping were a bit different in every game (some had bullet drop, travel time, ricochet, and wind effects, while others were just click and kill), but I could quickly adapt to just about anything. Sniping was what I did best.
I spent the next few minutes cobbling together two kills with a spear and handful of throwing knives before a dragon swooped out of the sky and blasted me with a fireball.
You were scorched by SpudMasterFlex
The words flashed across my screen in bold letters.
“Beware the reign of fire!” Noah shouted.
I put down my phone and looked over Freddie’s shoulder, since the spectating feature was apparently turned off in this custom game variant and I couldn’t watch any more of the game from my phone. After another few minutes, it was down to the final four players, which included Freddie. Her knight character hid in a tree, waiting to get the jump on another player, who crouched along the forest floor. There was a flash of light, and just like that Freddie was dead, her tree burned to a smoldering crisp.
You were scorched by SpudMasterFlex
“You gotta be kiddin’ me,” Freddie said, slapping her leg. “There’s just no pig-flippin’ way he could have known I was there.”
“Nobody hides from SpudMasterFlex!” Noah gobbled down a few more Tater Tots and did a pathetic attempt at evil laughter.
In another thirty seconds, the game was over. Noah yelled again and shook his phone triumphantly in the air, a small crowd now gathered around him. “That’s another brown bag for SpudMasterFlex! Better luck next time, suckers!” He walked over and grabbed the brown paper bag from the middle of the table, stopping when he saw me. “If it isn’t Professor Tex. Wait, is your money in here, too?” Noah made a show of looking into the bag and back at me. “Guess you didn’t see that one coming. You honestly thought you were gonna come up here from your hick town and win at my game on my home turf? Hey, what am I thinking right now?”
I stared at Noah and twisted my face in thought. “You’re thinking about how many skins you’re gonna buy in Tinker Bell’s Magical Wardrobe with that fifty bucks.”
A couple of people around the table snickered. “I was thinking about how much I love it when talentless noobs move into town. Just means there’s more suckers giving me their two bucks.” Noah turned to Freddie. “Pleasure doing business with you, FreddieBooger. What does that make for you, like a billion in a row? I know you haven’t ever won any money, but isn’t it like free to take a shower? I swear, you stink more in person than you do at Champions Royale.”
Noah leaned in close to Freddie and grimaced before plugging his nose and walking away toward the exit with a small group of kids in tow.
Freddie scowled at Noah’s back and stuck her tongue out. I glanced at the final stats. SpudMasterFlex had racked up nine kills. He was single-handedly responsible for a third of the kills in the whole game. Freddie had gotten five.
“Hey, good game,” I told Freddie.
“Thanks,” she sighed, and the anger fell from her face. Her lower lip quivered, and for a second I thought she’d start to cry. “That’s like t
he best I’ve ever done. I hardly ever break the top five.”
“Y’all play every day?”
Freddie wrapped one of her black curls around a finger. “There’s a Brown Bag Game every lunch, but I can only afford to play once a week. A lot of kids play every day, though.”
I dipped a pair of crispy Tater Tots into a cup of ketchup and popped them into my mouth. They were actually really good. “Noah usually wins, I’m guessing?”
Freddie pressed her thin lips together. “Yeah. Winner chooses the game and variant, and Champions Royale is his game, so unless someone dethrones him and picks something else, he’s just going to keep piling on the wins and taking our money. He always plays a custom variant that takes away basically all the monsters except the dragon, which he always seems to get. It’s so rat-scatting annoying.”
“How much money do you think he’s won over the years?” I asked, tossing up another Tater Tot and catching it my mouth.
“Kendra Burg has a secret online leaderboard that keeps track of the all-time money leaders. Noah’s first place, and no one else is even close. He’s won well over three thousand dollars since the fourth grade.”
I nearly inhaled my Tater Tot and coughed until my eyes watered. “Three thousand dollars? You gotta be kidding me.”
“I wish I was.”
“Why do people even keep playing?” I asked. “You know it’s gotta be rigged somehow.”
“Yeah, well, good luck proving it.” Freddie folded her arms. “I know a lot of gamers that would like to be the one to finally knock Noah off his throne.” Freddie’s eyes drifted to my food. “Hey, you gonna eat those peaches? My, uh … lunch money was in that brown bag.”
“Be my guest,” I said, taking a swig of milk. I took out my little notebook and listed Freddie as a potential friend before turning to my earlier notes on Noah. I crossed out friend, and replaced it with bully. Every group had its bullies. Didn’t matter if it was the drama kids, the sporty jocks, or the chess club. There was always that boy or girl who had a bit of power and liked to use it to make other people’s lives miserable. A bully wasn’t all-powerful, though. They could only pick on kids when they felt they had the upper hand. Noah could push around other gamers, but he’d probably be powerless in front of a guy like Jaxson.
I glanced around the lunchroom. The crowd had thinned out considerably. Noah was more than likely a mid-level bully, dominating the gamer world but nothing else. There did, however, look to be quite a few gamers at this school, so his sphere of influence was still decently big, and it just so happened to be a sphere that I cared very much about.
I pulled out my notebook and wrote three more words:
Goal: Dethrone SpudMasterFlex
CHAPTER 3
FOOLISH
(Discard Monday—Sept. 6th)
I stood outside, my back against the redbrick wall of the school, and studied the scene. A large blacktop area hosted half a dozen intense basketball games while a sprawling field of well-kept grass was home to football games, live action role-playing, and everything in between. Even with all the activity, the back of the school seemed naked and alien without slides, swings, tetherball poles, and monkey bars. Most sixth graders would probably have to go through a bit of an adjustment after having daily recess and playgrounds their whole life. I’d had them for two lifetimes.
In elementary school I was a bit of a floater when it came to any kind of break time. I was coordinated enough to play most games, but I wasn’t the best at anything. If they had a Ping-Pong table, that would be another story. I had spent countless hours on both discard and sticky days playing my dad in Ping-Pong. Right now, however, I wasn’t trying to find a place to play or even hang out. I was here to map out the social scene, and somewhere among the chaos of screaming, laughing, and gossiping students was the most powerful group in the whole sixth grade.
Whether people knew it, admitted it, or realized it, there was a group that had even more power than the sporty kids like Jaxson, because it was this group that actually gave Jaxson his status. You’d think his looks, his money, and his muscles made him popular, but you’d be wrong. Those things just made sure that he’d get selected by the group that gave popularity. This group had the magical power to grant popularity to whomever they deemed worthy. In Texas, they were a benevolent little club and mainly used their powers for good. Summer Swanson was probably both the prettiest and nicest person in all of Conroe. After meeting Braxlynn, however, I wasn’t sure I’d be so lucky here in Pocatello. I was, of course, looking for the popular girls.
I made my way around the blacktop basketball courts and scanned the crowd. Spotting a popular girl in the wild was easy once you knew how to triangulate their position. Popular students were, by definition, the ones that attracted the most attention. I ignored the kids that were playing sports, dealing Magic cards, and reading books. You needed to find the ones that were idle, find them and follow the eyes. Some would stare, a few would gawk, but most just flashed casual glances. It took me all of ten seconds to find the popular girls sitting on a bench under a large oak tree.
Braxlynn and her squad fit the stereotype almost too well as they exhibited an advanced case of “selfie syndrome.” Symptoms included constant outstretched arm, permanent duck-face, chronic tilting of head with occasional hand in hair, and repetitive posing. Full makeup and designer clothes at the age of eleven were also common.
Of all the characters in play on the social scene, this group would be the most important. Who were they? How easily were they provoked? What set them off? What level of nastiness were they capable of? All crucial bits of information so Sticky Danny could stay out of trouble. But there was only one really good way of finding out where a line was: You had to cross it. Luckily that was kind of my motto for discard days.
I strolled straight up to the six most popular girls in my grade and cleared my throat. “Howdy, ladies.”
I waited while they finished their current round of pictures and posts. They all wore the latest Ziptalk low-profile earbuds and spoke their commands to their phones to post the pictures and send messages through Snapchat, TikTok, and a few apps I’d never even heard of.
I cleared my throat louder and spoke again. “I’m new here and was going around getting to know people.”
Braxlynn fluttered her dark eyelashes and looked up at me, contorting her face like she had just smelled me pass gas after eating three spicy burritos. “Oh my gosh, you can’t be serious,” she muttered under her breath, and returned to her phone. Even braced against all of Braxlynn’s little tricks, even with the knowledge that this day would disappear from all memory, I couldn’t help but flush with embarrassment. The ability of someone like Braxlynn to make me feel about two feet tall with one dismissive glance was astounding. Behold the mighty power of the popular girls when wielded for ill purposes.
“Braxlynn, be nice,” the girl next to her said. She was probably Polynesian of some sort and had wavy black hair and full red lips. “The way he talks is so Gucci. Hashtag adorbie Texas talk, right? He’s definitely going up on Stud Spuds.”
“Whatever, Sefina.” Braxlynn shrugged and returned to her screen.
The popular girls cooed and looked at me like I was some kind of lost puppy, all except for Braxlynn, who couldn’t be bothered to look away from her phone again.
“I reckon you don’t get many folk from Texas up here in these parts, do ya?” I said, pouring on my accent.
“Oh my gosh, he’s like a little cowboy or something. This is so amaze,” Sefina said, coming over to my side and holding out her phone at arm’s length. “Here, say something in your adorbie accent so I can share it on Studs.”
I had no idea what she meant by “studs” and made a mental note to check it out later. She squeezed next to me to get us both in the shot, and my stomach did a somersault. Her perfume was an intoxicating mix of passion fruit and coconut. I saw her press the record button on her phone and knew she wanted me to perform like some kind of c
ircus monkey. Who was I to disappoint a popular girl?
“Hey, everybody,” I said, waving. “Just chillin’ with my new girlfriend Sefina, lighting up her Insta!”
Sefina let out a scream and flinched backward, dropping her phone as if it had just bitten her. “I was streaming that,” Sefina said in horror as she scrambled to retrieve her phone from the grass. “What is wrong with you?”
“Me? Oh geez, a whole bunch of stuff, but it really kinda depends on the day.” I shrugged. “I get crazy-bad cases of déjà vu, so that’s annoying. It can be super confusing sometimes, so I always make sure to keep really good notes of what goes on. Take this for example.” I held up a finger to the confused group of girls while I pulled out my notebook and pretended to scan through the pages. “Something here about my dad, there’s this kid Noah who’s annoying, and … ah. Here. And I quote: ‘I saw Braxlynn take a picture of a heavyset girl today and photoshop on pig ears and a snout. Despite that, she actually seems really cool … the pig girl, I mean. It’s obvious that Braxlynn’s about as pleasant as a case of explosive diarrhea on a road trip.’ Close quote.”
I calmly pocketed my notebook as if I’d just recited the Gettysburg Address and panned around to see the entire group level glares at me that could strip paint from a car.
“Excuse me?” Braxlynn’s two words oozed with indignation.