“A game designer.”
“What — like Monopoly?”
“No.” He looked at me solemnly. “You ever play Dungeons and Dragons?”
I grinned. The dragon on the business card made sense, and all of a sudden I liked Officer Tom a whole lot better. “I, ah, have some friends who do.”
In fact, what few friends I had played Dungeons and Dragons and so did I. That year, I had a 10th-level paladin named Honorius Pyurhart who in June had single-handedly mopped the floor with the green dragon guarding the time portal at the bottom of the Labyrinth of Flies. I hadn’t played since my family had headed off to the cottage, and I despaired of ever running old Honorius again: the dungeon master, Neil Hinkley, was going into Grade Seven and so wouldn’t be joining me at high school for another year. “Are you a gamer?”
Officer Tom nodded miserably. “Yeah,” he said. “I was voted best dungeon master two years in a row at GenCon.”
“Cool,” I said. The weekend convention at GenCon was the Las Vegas for Dungeons and Dragons. One day, one day…
“I even got one of the game designers at Wizards of the Coast to look at my dungeon,” he said. “But they said it was too — what was the word? Avant garde. That was it. Avant garde. Can you believe it?”
“Shocking,” I said.
“So I work security. The only magic wand I got—” he slapped his belt “—is this one.”
“That sucks,” I said.
“And how.”
We sat quietly for a moment, him pushing his handkerchief against his cheek, me leaning against the rock.
“What’s going on out there?” I finally asked. “In the Fun-Park?”
“Pandemonium. That’s what. The kids are everywhere. About a dozen of them managed to push over a swing set. They’re shouting and swearing and knocking over garbage cans, and just like always, their parents don’t do a thing. I tried to stop them, and they just formed into a posse.” He lifted one foot and pointed at it. The boot, I saw, was undone, and one side of the lace had a broken bow on it. “Two of them tied my bootlaces together. I fell over and that’s when I hit my head.”
“And their parents didn’t do a thing.” I thought about little Blair, who poured a milkshake on her brother’s fries and her father, who wouldn’t do anything about it. I thought about the photographs that Mr. Natch had on his computer, of kids blowing up garbage cans and knocking over signs and vandalizing cars. There weren’t any parents in those photographs.
“That,” I said, figuring it out, “is the other part of Fezkul’s powers. The kids — what they do — they’re, like, invisible to parents.”
“Maybe to their parents. But not to me,” said Tom, fingering the wound in his head. “That’s one of the reasons Mr. Natch keeps me on — I can sort of see when kids are getting ready to misbehave here. Most people can’t. Even if they’re not parents. Not on Labour Day.”
“What’s so special about Labour Day?”
Tom sighed. “It’s the day that everything goes crazy here,” he said. “For the past five years. Ever since Mr. Natch put up that walkway over the highway. I only came on last year, but I hear it’s been getting worse every year. Last year, some kids blew up the garbage dumpster. And this guy — Fezkul — is behind it all. God knows what he’s got planned this year.”
I thought about my conversation with Fezkul just a few minutes earlier: Burn down the grill, he’d said. Kill Natch.
“Something pretty serious,” I said. “Do you have any idea why he’s doing it?”
“According to Natch,” said Officer Tom, “he just hates people with the gumption to succeed. He just hates America.”
“So, no idea.”
Officer Tom smiled. “No idea.”
“Why doesn’t Natch just shut down? It’s just for one day. He could open up again on Tuesday.”
“You met him,” said Officer Tom. “You think Oliver Natch is the kind of guy to back down? He just hires more security every year. It’s like a holy war for him.”
“That’s just whacked.”
“Tell me about it.”
We sat there quiet again. Officer Tom peeled some lichen off the rock and sniffed it. “So you really don’t have any parents, Stan?”
“Sam — that’s my real name. Not Stan. And I do have parents. I’m just not here with them. I’m here with my sister and—”
I stopped.
I was here with my sister Lenore and her boyfriend Nick. They were waiting at the picnic table for me to come back from the washroom.
And they had been waiting a very long time, and I’d barely spared them a thought since I got hauled into Mr. Natch’s basement office, and with everything that was going on at the Fun-Park, who knew what kind of trouble they were in.
“Crap!” I said. “I completely forgot about them!” I turned to Officer Tom, desperate. “Are they okay?”
He dabbed at his cheek. “Should have told me about them. Should have told me your real name. I could have saved you a whole lot of trouble.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just after I left Mr. Natch’s office, this girl stopped me. She was pretty, yay high, kind of light brown hair down to here, wearing low-slung jeans and an Up With People T-shirt. Sound familiar?”
“Yeah, that’s Lenore. You nailed everything but pretty.”
“Well,” said Officer Tom, “she was looking for a kid called Sam. Not Stan. When I told her I’d picked up a kid called Stan she just threw up her hands and ran off.”
I slumped against the rock, feeling like a first-class jerk. Who knew what kind of trouble she was in?
“We have to find her,” I said. “And Nick. Come on.”
Officer Tom held up his hands. “No way. I got an injury.” He tapped his cheek. “And there’s no way I’m going back there. We should stay here. Wait for things to settle down.”
I looked at him. “You know,” I said, “Sam and Stan sound alike. You could have figured out that a missing kid you thought was Stan could have been called Sam. Then you could have told my sister what happened, and I’d be safe with her.”
He glared at me. “You saying that this is my fault?”
It was some glare Officer Tom could muster. But I wasn’t about to back down.
“It sure is your fault,” I said, “if you just sit here staunching your wound when there’s trouble that you could have prevented.” He didn’t say anything, so I went on: “A real gamer wouldn’t spend the whole adventure hiding behind a rock. That wound’s not more than one hit point’s worth if that—”
Officer Tom held up his hands one more time. “All right,” he said. “Don’t pull that Lawful Good guilt trip on me. I get. I get.” He sighed, and cautiously stuck his head up over the edge of the boulder. “Okay, hero boy. Looks clear. Let’s go.”
It wasn’t much farther to Natch’s. But it seemed like we’d travelled to another country when we got there: the Sovereign Nation of Junior Kindergarten.
The place was a sea of little kids… if that sea were being kicked up by a monster big hurricane — the kind of hurricane that knocked over garbage cans and turned big picnic tables on their sides. The little kids ran this way and that, they screamed in high-pitched voices, and they tore at each other and property like wild beasts.
But inside that country, there was another nation that the hurricane didn’t touch. A proud, oblivious nation: the Country of Parents. They sat around what tables hadn’t been overturned, drinking their lattes and munching on their curly fries, talking to each other about the things that parents talked to each other about: getting back to work on Tuesday and the start of school and do you remember last summer when there was too much rain or it was so hot or as bad as this one, and hopefully winter wouldn’t be too long this year so they could get going on another summer soon…