Cherninsky always dies this way—we all do, or die of something like it—but he seems pretty desperate this afternoon. Maybe he’s thinking of people who really have died, like his baby sister. She drowned in the ocean. Nobody ever mentions it.
“This situation begs the question,” the Dungeon Master says, sips from a can of strawberry milk. “Is bread the staff of life or the staff of death?”
“What does that mean?” Cherninksy says.
“Read more. Enrich yourself.”
“We all read,” Brendan says.
“I mean books,” says the Dungeon Master. “I can’t believe you’re a wizard.”
“Don’t kill me in a bakery,” Cherninksy says.
“Don’t steal bread.”
“What do you want? I’m a thief.”
“Roll.”
Cherninksy rolls, dies, hops out of his chair.
“So why’d you get detention?” he says.
“When did I get detention?”
“Today,” I say. “You got it today.”
The Dungeon Master peers at me over his screen.
“Today, bold ranger, I watched a sad little pickpocket bleed out on a bakery floor. That’s the only thing that has happened today. Get it?”
“Got it.”
I know that he is strange and not as smart as he pretends, but at least he keeps the borders of his mind realm well patrolled. That must count for something.
“Now,” says the Dungeon Master, “any of you feebs want to take on the twerp with the kitchen utensil? Or would you rather consider a back-alley escape?”
“Back-alley escape,” says Marco.
“Valentine the Twenty-seventh?” the Dungeon Master says.
“Twenty-ninth.”
“Don’t get too attached, brother.”
* * *
There are other kids, other campaigns. They have what teachers call imaginations. Some of them are in gifted. They play in the official after-school club.
“I’ve got a seventeenth-level elf wizard,” Eric tells me in our freshman homeroom. “She flies a dragon named Green Star. We fought an army of frost giants last week. What about you?”
“We never even see a dragon, let alone fly one. You have a girl character?”
“You play with that psycho senior, what’s-his-face.”
“The Dungeon Master,” I say.
“He calls himself that? Like it’s his name?”
“He doesn’t call himself anything.”
“I heard that when he was little, he hit some kid with an aluminum bat. Gave him brain damage.”
“Completely made up,” I say, though I’m pretty sure it’s true. “He’s very smart.”
“He’s not in gifted,” Eric says.
“Neither am I.”
“Good point,” Eric says, turns to talk to Lucy Mantooth.
* * *
Most days we play until we’re due home for dinner. But sometimes, if we call our houses for permission, Doctor Varelli cooks for us—hamburgers, spaghetti—and if it’s not a school night, we sleep over. Breakfast brings waffles, bacon, eggs, toast.
“Eat, eat, my puppies.”
We puppies eat in the study. Since we die so often, we take breaks while one of us rolls a new character.
One day, while Marco makes Valentine the Thirty-second, I wander out to the parlor. Doctor Varelli sits on the divan with a shiny wooden guitar. His fingers flutter over the strings, and he sings something high and weepy. He stops, looks up.
“It’s an Italian ballad.” There is shame in his voice, but it’s not about the song.
I follow his gaze to an old photograph on the wall. A young woman poses beside a fountain. Pigeons swoop off the stone rim. Marco once told me that this woman is his mother.
“So beautiful,” I say.
“Of course,” Doctor Varelli says. “Rome is a beautiful city.”
Later, we gather in the study for a new adventure. Our characters join up at the Pinworm Inn. We’ve all died here before, in brawls and dagger duels, of poisoned ale, or infections borne on unwashed steins. But the Dungeon Master insists the place has the best shepherd’s pie this side of the Flame Lakes.
We befriend a blind man. Cherninsky steals his silver, but the poor sap does not notice, so we befriend him some more. He tells us of a cave near the top of Mount Total Woe, of a dragon in the cave, a hoard beneath the dragon.
“Sounds dangerous,” says Marco.
“That’s the point,” I say.
“It’s a tough decision,” Brendan says. I barely know Brendan. He met Marco at swim club or something. He’s nice, kind of dim. Wherever he goes to school, I doubt the bullies even notice him.
Not true of Cherninsky. He makes a habit of asking for it, though some tormentors hang back. There’s something wrong and a little sickening about him in the schoolyard. You sense he might take a bully’s punches to the death. He’s the kid people whisper has no mother or father at home, but of course he does, they’re just old and stopped raising him years ago, maybe when his sister drowned. He always plays a thief, and even outside of the game, when he’s just Cherninsky, he steals stuff from the stores on Main. He and the Dungeon Master are not so different, or this town hurts them the same, which is probably why they pick on each other.
“Damn it, Brendan,” Cherninsky says now. “A tough decision? I say we go to that cave and get the gold. And then we get wenches.”
“Wenches?” Brendan says.
“Tarts,” Cherninsky says. “Elf beaver.”
It’s all a charade because there is no decision. There is no alternative. We shall scale Mount Total Woe or die trying. Most likely the latter.
“We’re going to grease that dragon,” I say.
“Grease?” Brendan says.
“Vietnam,” I say.
“Oh, right.”
But now the Dungeon Master has a mysterious appointment, which Doctor Varelli leans in to remind his beautiful puppy of, and the game adjourns.
Cherninsky and I head home. Soon we’re near the reservoir. We squish ourselves under the fence. We stumble down a rock embankment and start throwing things into the water, whatever we can find—rocks, bottles, old toys, parts of cars. We’ve all grown up doing this. I guess it’s our child psychiatry.
Cherninsky drags a shredded tire toward the shoreline. He waves off my offer to help.
“So what’s your opinion?” he asks. “Think this Mount Woe thing is going to be any different?”
The tire wobbles in the water, pitches over with a splash. I whip a golf ball at its treads.
“Maybe,” I say. “It could be.”
“Saddest thing is how Marco and Brendan are so scared of dying. It’s just a game, but he’s playing with their minds. He’s been to Bergen Pines. Did you know that? Certified mental. I’m quitting. This is a game for dorks, gaylords, and psychos, no offense.”
“None taken,” I say, though almost all of it is taken.
“Want to smoke weed?” says Cherninsky, claps my neck.
“No thanks.”
“Want to watch my neighbor take a shower? She usually does it around now. She takes care of herself in there.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Oh, forget it. You want to start a band? I have all the equipment.”
“Where’d you get the equipment?”
“Don’t worry about that. We’d need a name.”
“How about Elf Beaver?”
“That’s pretty stupid,” Cherninsky says. “The fact that you thought of that could be a sign you’re a nimrod. Help me with this other tire.”
* * *
We eat leftover London broil from my mother’s last catering job. My father, home from human resources, has his home-from-work work shirt on. He slices cucumbers for the cucumber salad, his specialty, while my mother pulls a tray from the stove. Upstairs, my sister squeals. She’s all phone calls and baggy sweaters.
Today my ranger nearly got the snippo. A giant warthog jumped him in the woods. Is there even a warthog in the game manual? My ranger—his name is Valium, just to tease Marco—cut the beast down but lost a lot of hit points. Even now I picture him bent over a brook, cupping water onto his wounds. Later he rests in the shade of an oak. The warthog crackles on a spit.
“How’s it going over there?” my mother asks.
“Here?” I say. “Great.”
“Awesome,” my sister says, joining us. “Dead cow. Is there anything veggie?”
“Cucumber salad,” my father says.
“Way to experiment with new dishes, Dad.”
“Way to employ sarcasm,” my father says.
“Not here,” my mother says. “There.”
“Where?” I say.
“The Varelli house.”
“It’s going fine,” I say.
“Is it fun?” my mother asks. “I want you to have fun, you know.”
“Yeah, it’s fun, I guess.”
My mother gives my father one of those meaningful looks that mean nothing to me yet.
“What?” I say.
“The Varelli kid,” my sister says. “Isn’t he the one who flashed those girls at the ice rink? And set his turds on fire in the school parking lot?”
“That was a long time ago,” I say.
“It was kind of cool,” my sister says. “In a pervert way.”
“Poor Varelli,” my father says. “His wife.”
“That’s the thing about it,” my mother says.
“The thing about what?” I say.
My father turns to my sister and me as though he had something to say but has forgotten it.
“I put something special in the cucumber salad. Can you taste it?”
“Veal?” my sister asks.
“I’ve got nothing against you having fun and using your imagination,” my mother says. “But it’s just too crucial a time to get sidetracked with games. And this one’s a little scary. They write those articles about it.”
“My grades are good,” I say.
“It’s middle track, honey. Of course your grades are good. But we’re trying not to be middle-track people.”
Later my father and I do the dishes, scour the pans—our pans, the catering pans.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “Everything will be okay.”
Maybe he’s that guy at the office, too—the reassurance dispenser, the diplomat. The middle man with the middle-track son.
“Are you guys getting a divorce?” I ask for no reason.
“Funny you should say that.”
My father inspects the sudsy platter in his gloved hand.
“Yes,” he says finally, “we are getting a divorce.”
I stand there a stunned moment, until his weird, chirpy laugh kicks in.
“Gotcha!”
He must be the human resources jokester, though maybe I had it coming. Now he gets serious. My mother’s catering gigs keep drying up and the raise he was counting on has fallen through.
My sister and I, my father says, will have to find after-school jobs if we mean to keep ourselves in candy and movies and music.
“There’s still some time,” he says. “Enjoy your game. We’re just saying you might want to find some better things to do while you can. You’re going to be plenty busy.”
I don’t really have better things to do. I could do what I did before I started going to the Varellis’. I could come home and eat too much peanut butter and hide in my room. I could lie in bed and think about Lucy Mantooth, toss a batch, nap until dinnertime. I could watch TV and fake doing my homework. But I’m not sure those are better things.
* * *
We tramp past the tree line of Mount Total Woe, reach a stony ridge shrouded in mist. We hear odd bleats on the wind, and our weapons are wet with the blood of minor beasts we’ve slain along the trail. Deathbirds squawk overhead. Valentine the Whatever scans the rock face for possible points of ingress.
It’s hard to see far in the mist.
“I could weave a spell to clear it,” Brendan says.
“What if the goats are shape-shifters?” Cherninsky says.
“What goats?” Brendan says.
“Those are goats. Only goats bleat.”
“Sheep bleat,” Marco says.
“And anyway,” Cherninksy says, “why should we believe that blind guy at the inn?”
“I think he was chaotic good,” I say. “I recognize my own kind.”
“I’m sure you do,” Marco says.
Marco’s character is lawful good. It makes for what you’d call personality clashes. But today’s game is too amazing to waste bickering. We smite the fanged and scaly, stalk the untold riches the blind man did, in fact, tell us about. Meanwhile, no runaway oxcart smears us into the road. We are not nipped by rabid squirrels. We do not succumb slowly, like one early Valentine, to rectal cancer. This must be what the official after-school game is like—gifted children dreaming up splendors, not middle trackers squirming beneath a nutso’s moods.
What has come over the Dungeon Master? He seems almost happy behind his screen.
“Brendan’s spell works,” he says. “The mist is clearing. About a hundred yards further to the top you can see an outcropping and the mouth of a cave. Guarded, yes, by goats.”
“We’re going into that mountain,” I say. “I can’t believe we are going into that mountain. Let’s stove some heads.”
“And get the gold,” Cherninsky says.
“Stove?” Brendan says.
“He reads,” the Dungeon Master says, and shoots me a grin so rare it’s a benediction. I decide not to tell him I stole “stove” from a whaling movie.
Now we’re at the cave mouth. The goats sing their goat songs and part at our approach. Valentine takes a prayerful knee.
“Enough,” Cherninsky says. “You can blow Christ on the way out.”
“Infidel,” Marco says.
“I’m an atheist,” Cherninsky says.
“There are no atheists in foxholes,” says Marco.
“Where are all these foxholes? I live in a house.”
“Hey,” I say. “Can we go into the fucking cave now?”
We go into the fucking cave now. It’s dark, and we light torches, listen to bats flap off. We hunch and shuffle through the tunnel maze. Putrid fiends lurk at every dead end. That’s how you know it’s a dead end: something that smells like rotten sausage pops up and claws at your eyeballs. This is what we’ve always wanted, the classy monsters, hydras and griffins, basilisks, giant worms. The thief and the wizard set traps and decoys, cast spells of misdirection. Valentine and Valium, that suddenly ferocious duo, berserk right in with swords of dwarven steel. We bash and slice. Creatures fall in quivering sushi-like chunks.
The Dungeon Master, he almost roots for us. He refrains from his dire lessons. We’re already steeped in the dire. We want to stab beasts.
We turn a granite corner, and there, lo and behold, we behold him. The dragon lounges, obscenely, atop a great apron of stone, vermilion scales blazing. Rainbow flame flutters from his nostrils with each dozy breath. He regards us through the slits of his amber eyes.