Thoughts & Prayers

by Bryan Bliss

  The bell rang, and a familiar muscle memory took hold of Brezzen. He jumped up and joined the line of students leaving the classroom. As soon as they were in the hallway, he saw Bork sprinting toward them. Brezzen froze for a moment, fully expecting to see the hallway explode with movement. To hear gunfire, screaming.

  Instead, it was just Bork—huffing and puffing.

  When he could speak, he said, “Boys. I have a big surprise for TA period. But that’s all I can say. So don’t be late! I’m serious! Okay, now I’ve got to run back to the other side of the school and make it to precalc.”

  And then he was gone again, running down the hallway like a person who’d failed PE in eighth grade. Like a person whose father had looked at him incredulously—who fails PE?

  Bork did.

  “He probably figured out a way to access porn on the school computers,” the Great Mandolini joked.

  Brezzen knew he should have a response—something quick and witty—but his brain couldn’t manage it. He was still frozen by the visual of Bork running toward them. His inability to read the facial expression—was it fear or excitement? How quickly his body accepted the panic back into his body.

  Brezzen took a deep breath and tried to ignore how the Great Mandolini looked at that moment. Deeply embarrassed.

  Brezzen tilted his head at the bathroom across from Mr. Bruns’s classroom. “I need to go,” he said quickly, trying to mask his panic.

  The Great Mandolini checked his phone.

  “We’ll be late,” he said.

  “You go ahead. I remember where the classroom is,” Brezzen said. He almost pulled out the map but once again wasn’t sure how the Great Mandolini might react. “I can catch up with you.”

  The Great Mandolini hesitated and then looked at his phone again.

  “Okay. We have a quiz—well, I do. I’m not sure that Hoffman will make you take it. But I’d like to look at the information one last time. Dickinson poems. You know.”

  Brezzen nodded like he did.

  Once the Great Mandolini was gone, Brezzen stood and stared at the bathroom—thinking. He should roll, of course, but there wasn’t a good place. Two people were standing right behind him, talking intently. And every few seconds, a kid would come running by—late and annoyed that Brezzen was standing in the middle of the hallway.

  He took a deep breath, walked to the door, and opened it.

  Brezzen was greeted by the faint smell of weed, mixed with a rather potent disinfectant, the combination of which made him momentarily woozy. Once he had his bearings, he looked around the bathroom. It was standard. A sink with a cracked mirror hanging above it, the corners tagged with graffiti. Two urinals. Three stalls.

  A couple of older guys came into the bathroom, looking perplexed that Brezzen was standing there and not, presumably, holding a lighter or a cigarette. They stared at him until he walked over to the last stall, opened the door, and then locked it behind him. He barely moved as they chatted about nothing for what seemed like an eternity, well after the bell rang.

  Once they were gone, Brezzen pulled out his d20 and rolled it carefully into his palm.

  Sixteen.

  He sat there, trying to breathe. Trying to find what he needed.

  If he were GM’ing right now, he’d have set this encounter up with a line that sounded prophetic and would lead to loot—you will sit on a throne before the day is out—and make it seem like they were really about to get into some shit, pun most certainly intended.

  Levity was as much a part of Wizards & Warriors as magic and swords. There were always hard chargers, players who couldn’t enjoy the subtle jokes a GM would introduce in situations like this—situations where the player didn’t yet know the stakes. And Brezzen was as guilty of this as anyone. His ax never needed a warm-up to recharge, like the unhelpful spells the wizards and clerics relied on. He was always ready to go.

  But sometimes patience was rewarded. Sometimes the players who didn’t run headlong into a cave that was glowing suspiciously didn’t get turned into a chicken or zapped with damage that put you on the ground for the entire fight, as all your friends laughed their asses off around the table.

  Sometimes it paid to look around, take stock, and find what you needed.

  Brezzen sat there, waiting—maybe for longer than he realized—because he nearly fell off the toilet when he heard the knock on the door—the two voices.

  The first was the Great Mandolini’s. The second was Principal Townsend.

  “Brendan—you in here, man?”

  “Is everything okay, Brendan?”

  Brezzen stood up too quickly, accidentally knocking his backpack, the map, and the d20 all onto the floor. The die skittered under the stall door. Brezzen reached down and picked up the map, nearly falling over his backpack in the process. By the time he emerged from the stall, Mr. Townsend and the Great Mandolini both looked ready to call his parents, the paramedics—maybe the National Guard.

  “We were worried about you, Brendan.”

  Townsend’s eyes moved around the bathroom as he spoke, like he was taking a mental picture of the space. The broken mirror. The faded paint. The Great Mandolini bending down and picking up the d20. Brezzen, clutching the map of the school to his chest.

  The principal smiled.

  “We just wanted to make sure everything was okay.”

  “I’m fine,” Brezzen answered quickly. “Everything’s fine.”

  A kid Brezzen recognized from middle school walked into the bathroom and—seeing Townsend and two sophomores seemingly just hanging out—promptly turned around and walked back out the door.

  After he’d left, Mr. Townsend turned to face Brezzen once again.

  “Maybe we should call your parents,” he said.

  And for a second, Brezzen thought: yes.

  That’s how you get out of this dungeon, this school, for good. There were rarely escape hatches. And when you found one, they almost always led to a bigger, more complicated fight. Maybe this was different. Maybe he could pull the lever and go back to his life.

  But he shook his head.

  “I’m fine. Better now.”

  Mr. Townsend didn’t seem convinced. He studied Brezzen for a long moment, only breaking his stare when the Great Mandolini started talking.

  “It was probably that school lunch yesterday,” he said with a believable smile. “It’s hard to get your stomach back, uh, in the game, so to speak.”

  “Perhaps, Theo. Perhaps.”

  Mr. Townsend’s expression had changed when he turned back to face Brezzen. He no longer looked angry, or even annoyed that a student had basically skipped an entire class to sit in the bathroom. Instead, he put a hand on top of Brezzen’s shoulder and leaned down to meet his eyes.

  “I promise you’re safe here.”

  He said it low, as if he didn’t want the Great Mandolini to hear. And in the process, his voice had transformed from its usual, booming friendliness to something softer, almost knowing. The voice of someone who knew all too well what Brezzen was going through. A person who had been here a year ago—had lost something, too.

  Brezzen nodded, just as the bell rang. But either Townsend needed him to say the words, or he didn’t care about the bell—if they missed the rest of the school day—because he didn’t break eye contact.

  “I’m going to be okay,” Brezzen finally said. “Thank you.”

  His answer worked. Mr. Townsend stood up straight and cleared his throat once before returning to his regular, painfully official, voice.

  “We’re not going to worry about a pass. I’ll make sure your teachers know. Just get to class, both of you. Please.”

  The hallways were almost empty as they walked to their geometry class. Before the final turn into the math hallway, the Great Mandolini stopped Brezzen and fished something out of his pocket—the d20.

  “Here. You might need this.”

  “Thank you,” Brezzen said, starting to walk again.

  “Hold u
p a second, B.” The Great Mandolini looked like every word that came from his mouth was painful. “So, what were you doing in the bathroom for that long?”

  Brezzen clutched the d20 and tried to think.

  Before, whether they were playing or not, there was an ease to his friendship with the Great Mandolini and Bork. It was safe, organic. Something forged across countless tables playing countless campaigns. And while the world wasn’t full of dancing goblins or tricksy elves intent on getting you into some shit—he never doubted that his friends had his back.

  But that ease was gone now, and Brezzen had no idea what to say to the Great Mandolini or how to explain his confusion. Every person he encountered moved without thinking, without a hint of hesitation. All Brezzen wanted was the right way to ask how. How did they not live in that single moment again and again, every minute of the day?

  “It was my stomach, like you said.”

  Brezzen didn’t need to roll to see the Great Mandolini’s disappointment. He waited one more second, then shrugged his shoulders and started walking down the hallway.

  “If that’s the story, then I guess that’s the story.”

  The Great Mandolini barely spoke to Brezzen until they were sitting in front of the computers and Bork was gleefully punching letters and numbers onto both of their computers.

  “It’s a cheat code,” he said. “Auto shot. We can’t lose!”

  “Yeah, we’ll just get banned,” the Great Mandolini deadpanned.

  Brezzen was staring at his screen, the blinking cursor asking him to type in his screen name once again. He had no desire to get back into that plane, to face the shower of bullets he knew was coming once the screen went black.

  “And besides, why do we need auto shot? Isn’t the fun in trying to win on your own?” the Great Mandolini said, glancing at Brezzen momentarily. Bork dropped his head back and groaned loudly.

  “Are you, like, forty years old? Because that sounds like something a forty-year-old dad would say. ‘The point isn’t winning, son, but having fun doing a good job and all that happy shit!’”

  When the Great Mandolini didn’t answer, Bork took it as assent and finished typing the code into the final computer.

  The monitors flashed and they both typed their screen names. Brezzen didn’t move, and Bork started barking about how Brezzen was going to get put on a different server. Brezzen entered his screen name quickly and within seconds was back on the plane.

  This time he could see with hyper focus. As if every direction he turned, there was a laser pointer tracking each movement, every single speck that crossed his vision. And if he looked in one direction for too long, the laser pointer would begin drawing him closer to the object with that same otherworldly focus.

  He was too distracted to notice the coming jerk, the feeling of having his body pulled through his mouth. In that second or two of disorientation, he landed on the ground—in the desert—and he started running.

  This time the bullets came immediately.

  There was no place to hide. He tried to duck behind a cactus, but it exploded, all the pieces floating around him for a moment, before there were more bullets. More tiny explosions going off all around his feet.

  Bork was running next to him, laughing maniacally as he fired his gun indiscriminately, each shot miraculously taking out a different player. When he got to Brezzen, he started dancing around one of the bodies, smiling like a fool, and then took off running—yelling for Brezzen to follow.

  Brezzen ran out of habit and fear. There weren’t any bullets now. And anytime somebody got close, Bork took them out with that same cheating shot. When they got to the cliff, Bork grabbed a pulley that appeared magically in front of them. In an instant he was gone—flying up into the sky, to the top of the cliff. When the pulley appeared a second time, Brezzen wasn’t sure what to do. Just as he was about to reach out and grab it, a spray of bullets tattooed the ground around him.

  He spun around just in time to see the gun being raised to his head.

  “Shit, Brendan. Grab the pulley! Go!”

  Before Brezzen could move, there was a flash. A sudden explosion. And then his entire body felt like it was being dragged to the ground.

  Brezzen could barely breathe as Bork started yelling.

  “Seriously? You just stood there. What are you doing, man?”

  “Dude, calm down,” the Great Mandolini said without taking his eyes off the screen. “He just started. He doesn’t know how to play yet.”

  They kept arguing and Brezzen, still unable to breathe, stood up. Bork gave him a quick but dirty look. The last thing he heard before he walked out of the room was the Great Mandolini’s voice, telling him to come back.

  Brezzen was blind with panic, nearly running down the hallway without a plan or direction. He just needed to move—to get away from the computer lab. But when Mr. Bruns appeared outside of his classroom and stopped him, Brezzen felt a piano fall on his shoulders. All of his fight was gone.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “I don’t know,” he said quickly, reaching into his pocket and pulling out the d20. He could roll for initiative right now and maybe it would get in front of the panic. The fear. He just needed a good roll, and everything would get back on track.

  “Do you have a pass?” Bruns asked.

  He did not, of course. Brezzen just stood there, unable to move or speak, waiting for some kind of instruction—a clue as to what he should do next.

  “Come into my classroom,” Mr. Bruns said. When Brezzen still didn’t move, he leaned close and said, “Listen, it’s my classroom or the office. If I was you, I’d pick my classroom. Less chance you have to talk to that sycophant Alice.”

  Without waiting for Mr. Bruns, Brezzen rushed into his room and rolled once—a fifteen, thank God.

  When he turned around, Mr. Bruns was giving him a strange look.

  “You just rolled that d20 on my desk. Why?”

  Brezzen looked at Mr. Bruns and then down to the d20 in his hand. “Initiative.”

  To his surprise, Mr. Bruns laughed. Brezzen wasn’t sure how to react, so when Mr. Bruns motioned to the chair next to his desk, he sat down and watched as the teacher unwrapped a sandwich.

  “So you’re rolling for initiative on my desk,” he said, looking up to the ceiling as he ate his sandwich. “Weirdly, that makes sense to me. I can’t tell you why.”

  He took another bite of his sandwich and said, “My friends and I used to play Wizards and Warriors underneath the bleachers at our high school. We were supposed to be in gym class. Playing basketball. Or something? Like gym has ever been the linchpin of any academic institution.”

  He laughed at his own joke and, in a single bite, finished his sandwich. He leaned forward and looked Brezzen in the eye.

  “So what are you fighting?”

  “I’m not fighting anything,” Brezzen said.

  “So it wasn’t initiative—it was a saving throw.”

  Brezzen hesitated, because Bruns was right.

  He’d spent the first year of playing trying never to be in a position to need a saving throw, which of course made the GM try all the harder to put him in a corner. It was a stupid goal, honestly, because everybody gets knocked down at some point. And the saving throw was a chance to get back up. To start fighting again.

  “Once my friends and I were in this really nasty dungeon—a level fifty campaign—and my friend Tommy started yelling, ‘Saving throw! Saving throw!’ And none of us had any idea what he was talking about, because nothing had happened. We were in a hallway! Turns out, a spider had crawled up his leg in real life and he was, shall we say, using his words.”

  Mr. Bruns laughed.

  “Did he make the roll?” Brezzen asked.

  Mr. Bruns gave Brezzen a look that very clearly asked, What in the hell is your problem?

  “Well, no. Because he pulled his pants off in the middle of the comic book shop to try to kill the spider. It was . . . well, let’s just stay h
e still hears that story whenever we get together.”

  Mr. Bruns wiped the crumbs off his desk and shoved the sandwich bag into a drawer. He stood up and gave Brezzen another long look.

  “The bell’s about to ring, so time to roll,” he said.

  “For what?” Brezzen asked.

  Bruns motioned toward the hallway, which was calm at the moment. But soon enough, it would be clogged with students and teachers, all of them trying to push in a different direction.

  “You’re safe now. So you need to do an ability check.” Bruns put his hands behind his head and leaned back. “I mean, it’s up to you—but I like to know what I’m up against.”

  Brezzen rolled. An eighteen. Bruns grunted his approval.

  “Looks like you’re going to make it.”

  The bell rang. Brezzen grabbed his d20 and, before he walked out into the hallway, which was quickly filling with students, Mr. Bruns stopped him.

  “I prefer to spend my planning periods alone,” he said. “But you know where to find me if you need me.”

  Chapter Five

  BREZZEN WASN’T TWO STEPS OUT OF MR. BRUNS’S ROOM when he realized he had no idea where his next class was or where he was going. Rationally, he knew he should just go to the office, but the idea of having to actually talk to another person right now, polite or not, was too much.

  So he started walking toward the gym, away from Mr. Bruns’s class, hoping that the simple act of movement would kick something loose in his memory.

  The hallways were unusually busy, to the point that Brezzen wondered if he’d somehow missed the last couple of periods and everyone else was leaving for the day. But the more he walked, the more he couldn’t focus on his anxiety. He needed every spark of brain power to avoid the clumps of students that formed next to lockers, in front of vending machines. Seeing a break in the bodies, he moved too quickly and ran straight into a group of seniors. Before he could stop it from happening, one of them had his map.