“He chucked a spaz in Spanish,” I say. “I heard one of the seniors.”
“The teacher rides him,” Marco says. Marco despises the Dungeon Master but loves his brother. I like Marco, but I’m no fan of Valentine. I’m a third-level ranger. I fight for the glory of me.
The door smacks open.
“Ah, the doomed.” The Dungeon Master strides past us, short and pasty, with a fine brown beard.
He sinks down at the desk behind his screen, which on his side has all the lists and tables for playing printed on it, and on our side has a mural full of morning stars and fire. We’ve been ordered never to touch the screen. We never do, not even when he’s at detention. The Dungeon Master shuffles some papers — his maps and grids. Dice click in his stubby hand. Behind him, on the wall, hang Doctor Varelli’s diplomas. The diplomas say he’s a child psychiatrist, but he never brings patients here, and I’m not sure he ever leaves.
“When last we met,” the Dungeon Master begins, “Olaf the thief had been caught stealing a loaf of pumpernickel from the village bakery. A halfling baker’s boy had cornered our friend with a bread knife. Ready to roll?”
“I don’t want to die this way,” Cherninsky says.
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.”