The Double Life of Danny Day

by Mike Thayer

  “You did all right, Tex,” Noah said, walking by me with the brown bag in hand, “but it looks like the competition in Texas isn’t quite what it is up in Poky!”

  “So are you gonna cheat every time you play, or just when I jump out ahead with four quick kills?”

  “Ha, in your dreams, noob.” Noah jostled the brown bag in front of my face. “Get all the quick kills you want to. You do realize the winner is the last person standing, right?”

  I wanted to snatch the bag from him with one hand and punch him square in his rat face with the other. I could do it. He deserved it, and it was a discard day, but I muscled down the growing rage. I had a quiz in fifth period today, and I needed to see what was on it for the sticky day. I couldn’t spend the next hour in the principal’s office.

  I glared at Noah. “I’m gonna beat you.”

  “You couldn’t beat a drum,” Noah said. His comebacks were worse than my dad’s jokes. He turned to Freddie. “Smell ya later, Frede-reek-a.”

  Instead of replying with one of her colorful insults, Freddie wilted like a dying flower.

  My lip curled as I watched Noah stroll out of the lunchroom, a group of four of his cronies in tow. I knew two things in that moment. One, I would make him pay a hundred times over for being such a turd. And two, I would probably never have the guts to do anything on a sticky day. Such was the curse of living the double day.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE ROOST

  (Discard Tuesday—Sept. 7th)

  Freddie’s one-story house was tucked behind a patchy, brown lawn and a row of overgrown shrubs. A rusty Ford sedan was parked under a slanted carport roof, which hung off the side of the rectangular home. I leaned my bike against one of the shrubs and walked up the chipped cement steps. I stood on the porch and gave my legs a little stretch. Freddie’s house was at least five miles out, and most of it was uphill. I tried the doorbell but couldn’t hear anything from inside, so I knocked three times on the screen door. Just when I was ready to get back on my bike and ride home, I heard the sliding of a chain lock, and the main door opened. I stared through the warped screen-door mesh at an old lady in a floral muumuu.

  “Uh, is Freddie home?” I asked.

  “Freddie”—the old lady turned back inside and cawed with the sound of a dying crow—“there’s some kid here.”

  After a few seconds, Freddie came running to the door. “Thanks, Gammie,” she said, standing on her tippy toes and giving the old lady a kiss. “Here, let’s actually go outside.”

  I stepped back as Freddie opened the screen door and led the way around the side of the house but stopped. “Hey, is that your bike?”

  “Yeah, do I need to put it somewhere else?” I asked.

  “Let’s bring it around back,” she said, walking over and wheeling my bike toward the backyard. “If you don’t lock your stuff up around here, it tends to become someone else’s stuff. You get my drift?”

  “All right, then,” I said, eyeing the other houses in her neighborhood. “Thanks for the pro tip.”

  I followed Freddie into her huge backyard. It was a maze of trees, long grass, and untrimmed bushes. Nestled back between two towering trees stood a sprawling oak tree. Half a dozen or so wooden rungs were nailed into the wide trunk, leading up to a hidden tree house some ten feet in the air with an extension cord dangling down and running to the back of the house.

  “Cool,” I said, watching Freddie go up the ladder after she stashed my bike under an overgrown bush. She took out a key and removed a heavy padlock on a small hatch on the tree-house floor and climbed inside.

  “Come on in,” Freddie called out.

  I made my way up the rungs, poked my head into the tree house, and gawked at the surrounding awesomeness. The walls of the small space were lined with posters of Champions Royale, Minecraft, Portal, and other video games. A poster-sized whiteboard hung on one wall and was covered in anime-style drawings of iconic video game heroines like Princess Zelda, Samus, Cortana, Wraith, Tracer, and others. There was a small TV mounted to the wall with no fewer than ten different retro systems set up below it and shelves with neatly organized game cases to the sides. One small beanbag chair was pushed off in the corner. “This place is incredible.”

  “You like it?” Freddie said, her face lighting up with an expectant smirk. “Most of the old systems were my dad’s, but I’ve managed to scrounge a few from yard sales and stuff. Sorry, I’ll have to get another chair up here somehow. I don’t get a lot of visitors. My dad built the tree house. He’s in the army, so I don’t get to see him very much, but he’s really awesome at making stuff.”

  “And what’s your mom do?” I said, climbing into the tree house and closing the trapdoor.

  “I’ve never actually seen my mom,” Freddie said casually. “My grandma takes care of me and my three older brothers. They’re pretty big turd brains for the most part, which is why I spend so much time up here.”

  I gave a small laugh. “Yeah, I’ve got two younger sisters who I’m pretty sure are part goblin, but you can get away with a lot when you’re cute. Your brothers don’t come up here?”

  “Nope.” Freddie smiled, jangling her key. “It’s my own private little space.”

  “It’s perfect.” I would definitely have to come back on the sticky day. “A place this cool has to have a name.”

  Freddie nodded. “I call it the Roost.”

  “That’s awesome.” Freddie was a funny girl. She was nice but had a flair for colorful expletives. Her appearance was a bit messy, but her tree house was super clean and organized. She was an interesting person, and I liked interesting people. I also got the impression that she’d been waiting a very long time to share the Roost with someone, and I was totally fine being that someone. “So is this what you’d spend your money on if you won the Brown Bag Game? Some upgrade to the Roost?”

  “A new bike, actually,” Freddie said without hesitation.

  “Why? What’s wrong with your…” I trailed off, putting two and two together. “It got stolen, didn’t it?”

  “Danny the mind reader,” Freddie said, snapping her fingers and pointing to me. “Some pig-blathering snot brain stole it from my front lawn like a week after my birthday. You have any idea how long it takes me to walk to and from the frog-sliming bus stop every day?”

  I tried to remember where the bus dropped Freddie off. It wasn’t close. “Yikes.”

  “Just wait until winter.” Freddie nodded knowingly. “That’s mega yikes. I swear I spend half my day walking. Cuts down on my sleep, my time to do homework, the time I have to help my grandma.”

  “Not to mention your gaming time,” I added.

  Freddie gave me a strange look. “Nothing cuts down on my gaming time, Texcalibur.”

  I laughed. “So a new bike and anything else?”

  “Well, a new phone is too expensive, but maybe I’d get some data for my current hunk of junk. Now I just bum off of hotspots and free Wi-Fi and stuff. Kind of annoying.” Freddie looked at the floor, her next words coming out in a mumble. “Maybe some new clothes as well.”

  “New clothes? There’s nothing wrong with your clothes,” I lied, partly to make her feel better and partly to make me feel better. Here Noah was, using Freddie’s lunch money to buy new skins for his Champions Royale characters, while she needed actual clothes. It made something inside me burn.

  “Are you kidding?” Freddie said, pinching her shirt and pulling it out. “You see a lot of girls in our grade wearing their brothers’ hand-me-downs? And these ain’t exactly fresh hand-me-downs, either. These suckers have seen some action. I look like I’m homeless.”

  “Don’t listen to what tools like Noah say.”

  Freddie gave a short laugh. “Don’t worry about what people say? Yeah, well, just wait until you get shipped or dipped on Dud Spuds with Oscar the Grouch and people comment how Oscar would never go for Freddie because ‘she’s too much of a slob.’”

  I winced. “Geez. That Braxlynn is ru
thless.” As if I needed any more reasons to make staying off Duds one of my top double-day priorities. Was I seriously going to sit here and give Freddie advice about not caring what other people thought? I’d have a nervous breakdown if someone like Braxlynn, Jaxson, or Noah made a fool of me on a sticky day.

  “What makes it even worse is that Braxlynn actually used to be my friend.”

  “Come again?”

  “Yeah, she used to live just a few houses down, believe it or not. We were actually pretty decent friends until about kindergarten, although I’m sure she either doesn’t remember or at least would never admit to it. Her brother had some ATV accident, got messed up pretty good. They just keep him at home now. He like doesn’t even come to school or anything. Her family sued, they got a bunch of money, and they moved.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding.”

  However unexpected it was to admit, I actually felt a little bad for Braxlynn, or at least for her family. There wasn’t ever a good excuse for being a turd like Braxlynn, but there was always an explanation. She’d have to layer her public image on pretty thick to bury her past deep enough that no one would ever find it. Half of me wondered if the part of her that had been friends with Freddie was completely dead or whether there was anything left to resurrect. The other half of me just wanted to spend the next twenty discard days putting rotten fish guts in her backpack. Life was complicated like that sometimes.

  “So what game do you want to play?” Freddie said, changing the subject back to why she’d invited me over in the first place.

  “You don’t want to practice up on Champions Royale?”

  “I don’t know.” Freddie shrugged her small shoulders. “It’s just so cow-farting frustrating. No matter how much I practice, I just can’t ever get close enough to beating him. I’ve even looked up his online stats. He’s darn good at sniping, but overall he’s not that much better than I am, you know.”

  “If you want to get better at sniping, I can show you some tips and trick shots you can work on in your spare time.”

  “Kind of like video game homework?” Freddie said, perking up.

  I shrugged. “Yeah, like video game homework. Noah’s definitely got a knack for it, but we can close the gap, Freddie. I guarantee it.”

  “That’d be awesome, but I’m not even sure it would matter, honestly. I think I just choke when money’s on the line.”

  “Maybe not,” I mused as Freddie turned on the TV and pulled up a side-by-side view of her online stats and SpudMasterFlex’s. Seeing the numbers reminded me of the screenshots I’d taken of the post-game numbers after today’s Brown Bag. “I agree that something feels off, Freddie. You saw how quickly I got the wizard’s cloak today.”

  I pulled up the screenshots and shared them to Freddie’s TV.

  “These from today’s Brown Bag?” Freddie asked, squinting her eyes and scanning the numbers.

  “Yeah, something just didn’t feel right, so I saved them before they disappeared. Look at the overall kill list. I was totally in the lead. He only had one kill before he scorched me. If I had gotten that dragon instead, I could have wiped out the whole map.”

  “Wait a second,” Freddie said, tilting her head. “That doesn’t make any poop-tooting sense.”

  “What doesn’t make any poop-tooting sense?”

  “Look here.” Freddie pointed to the kill map. It spelled out who killed who, where they were killed, and how. They could be scorched, crushed by a boulder, shot with an arrow, zapped by magic, or any of the hundreds of other ways to die in the game. “You zapped two people right off the bat with the wizard’s-cloak lightning; then SpudMasterFlex killed someone with a holy grenade shortly after that. You got two more zaps at Haunted, a few other people got kills, and then you got scorched.”

  “That’s a pretty good summary, yeah,” I said, not seeing where Freddie was going.

  “Noah couldn’t have rat-sacking done that.” Freddie frowned.

  “Why not?”

  “Because the custom settings for the Brown Bag Game only allow for two wizard’s cloaks on the whole map.” Freddie help up a pair of fingers. “Otherwise it would just be wizard’s-cloak chaos, which can be fun, but it’s not for the Brown Bag. The cloaks always spawn on the opposite ends of the map from one another. Aside from getting your four kills, you basically ran straight to Fangthorn Peak from the start, which means that he would have had to be booking it in order to get to the dragon before you.”

  “And he couldn’t have done that?”

  “Keep up with me here, Texcalibur,” Freddie urged. “If he got a wizard’s cloak at the beginning then he would have put it on right away because it lets you float, which is faster than running. But he didn’t have it on when he got his first kill one minute and eleven seconds into the game. It says right here he got his kill with a holy grenade, not a zap.”

  I rubbed my chin. “Couldn’t he have taken the cloak from the person he killed?”

  Freddie shook her head. “The wizard’s cloak is immune to the holy grenade, you know that.”

  “Right…,” I said. “Couldn’t he have gotten the kill, then found the cloak?”

  “Look at where the kill was.” Freddie pointed to a grenade icon on the map on the west side of Bandit’s Bog. “If you got your cloak in Peasantville, then the other cloak most likely spawned up in Lost Labyrinth. There’s no way he would have had time to go up there, in the wrong direction, find the cloak, and still beat you to the dragon.”

  I studied the map, trying to take in everything that Freddie was explaining. She obviously had a level of understanding and familiarity with the game well beyond my own. “So what are you saying?”

  Freddie clapped her hands together. “I’m saying I finally have proof. Someone else found that cloak.”

  “But how did he get it, then?” I asked.

  “Someone must have given it to him.” Freddie gritted her teeth. “He poop-tooting cheated. What I would have given to have been there to catch him in the act.”

  “Well, Freddie, it’s your lucky day.” I pulled out my discard-day notebook and smiled. “I know someone who just might be able to help with that.”

  CHAPTER 9

  MIDNIGHT SNACK

  (Discard Tuesday—Sept. 7th)

  The twins took turns using their spoons to catapult broccoli across the dinner table. I had no idea why my parents even bothered giving them vegetables. They might as well have just dumped the plate on the floor at the start of dinner to save themselves the time. Better yet, they could just dump it in the garbage. That’s where it went anyway.

  The front door opened, and my dad burst into the house. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, hanging up his jacket and quickly making his way to the table. He gave each of the girls a kiss and sat down.

  “Hands,” my mom said.

  “Sorry.” My dad rushed over to the sink to wash up. “It just smelled so good.” If I had to guess, I would say my dad spent half of his life apologizing for something, which I guess was better than never apologizing for anything.

  “How was work?” my mom asked.

  “Busy.” My dad chewed on the word and didn’t seem to like the taste of it. It was strange, having him come home so late, but everything seemed strange since moving to Idaho. My dad returned to sit at the table. “They do things a bit differently around here, so I’m scrambling to keep up at times, but I’ve got a good team. Mawuli Ansah is the new department head. I think his son Zak is in your grade, Danny. I see the last of the moving boxes are gone. That’s good.”

  “Yes,” my mom sighed, “while the twins applied your shoe polish to an entire basket of laundry.”

  My dad’s eyebrows shot up, wrinkling his forehead. “Ah. That’s bad. I may have forgotten to put that away.” My dad spent the other half of his life forgetting things … which was probably where all the apologizing came from.

  I waggled my finger at the twins, and they responded by pelting me with broccoli. I pulle
d out my discard-day notebook and added a comment about shoe polish.

  “So, how was school today, buddy?” my dad said, trying to change the subject.

  “Pretty good. I went to Freddie’s after school and played video games, so that was cool.”

  “Video games, huh?” my dad said, dumping two spoonfuls of lasagna on his plate. “You hardly touch those things. Oh, before I forget again, I got something that I forgot to show you yesterday.” My dad fished around his pockets until he removed a pair of tickets.

  I leaned forward. “Idaho State University football tickets. Sweet.”

  “Sweet is right, buddy. It’s not exactly the Houston Texans, but it’s on the fifty-yard line, third row. Zak will be there, too, but he’ll be up in the corporate box with his dad. From where we’re at you’ll be able to smell the blood and sweat. Work’s going to be busy for a while, unfortunately, so this will be a good way to lock in a solid bros day.”

  “Cool beans,” I said. “When is it?”

  “Not until the middle of next month. The twentieth, I think it is,” my dad said, inspecting the tickets. “The … sixteenth. Geez, I wasn’t even close. Shows where my brain’s at.”

  After dinner I helped with the dishes and then went to my room to pore over my discard-day notes. There wasn’t too much in the way of embarrassing moments to avoid or things I wished I would have said, but there was a good deal of studying. Three blasted quizzes tomorrow. I didn’t have to study for them, but the Sticky Danny in me couldn’t not look over the material when it was sitting right there in my backpack. What I really wanted to be doing was practicing Champions Royale. With a bit of luck, I would get to the bottom of this “Noah and the wizard’s cloak” business tomorrow and be one step closer to taking him down.

  Going to bed on time really wasn’t an issue on a discard day, since how I felt in the morning only ever depended on when I went to sleep on the previous sticky day. As long as I got my discard-day business done by the stroke of midnight, I was all good.