a short story
by
Nancy Werlin
War Game
What I did to Lije. It might have seemed . . . okay, in some ways it was cruel; I’ll give you that. But I had to do it. It was important. Okay?
You don’t see? Fine. I’ll explain.
Lije—Elijah Schooler—and I were friends, though nobody knew it except him and me. It had just kind of worked out that way over the years, with Lije being a boy and two years younger and going to the private school his father paid for. His bedroom window faced mine over three feet of alley, and he used to sleep with the light on. Sometimes at night we’d talk for hours—or rather I would—when Lije was worried and had trouble sleeping. For years we did that. And he lent me books. His school had an incredible library, and he could get me anything I wanted.
It wasn’t a big secret, our friendship. It was a little secret, something pleasant, but not really important. Until last August when I was fourteen.
It’d been an almost unbearably hot summer. At first it was just the little kids who had the guns—you know, the big plastic machine guns with huge tanks for water. Super-Soakers. Water Uzis. Ricky Leone and Curt Quillian and even Curt’s little sister, Janey, were jumping out from alleys and from around corners and behind cars, screaming like police sirens and soaking everybody in sight. The rest of us had to defend ourselves. Before you knew it, nearly every kid in the neighborhood between six and fourteen had a water gun. They were under fifteen dollars at the supermarket.
They were just plain fun, the guns. I’d had no idea. Though I’d seen real guns before, around the neighborhood and at school and on TV and stuff, I’d never actually had a toy gun before, even when I was little. I wasn’t the kind of girl who was interested in toy guns. But I felt so powerful, cradling the gun under my arm and pumping away. Every time you hit someone, they’d jowl. Run. Unless they were armed too; then they’d whip around and shoot back. It was incredible. I’m not a violent person—none of us were, really (except maybe Lina at times). We weren’t gang kids; in fact, we did our best to keep away from the gangs. It was the city. It was summer. It was hot. That’s all.
At first, we big kids did just like the little kids and ambushed each other. But then I said something, and we got more ambitious. Kevin DiFranco and Lina Oswego organized two teams—armies—and we were all assigned ranks. The little kids were privates and scouts, and the older kids were lieutenants or spies. I was a lieutenant colonel and the head of the war council. “You’re smart, Jo,” Kevin said. “You do the strategy.” Of course Kevin and Lina made themselves generals. Within a week, there were nearly thirty of us involved.
At first I just did it for something to do. And maybe also because it felt good to get the attention from Kevin. He’d never had much to do with me before. I wasn’t interested in him, you understand; I wasn’t interested in any real boys right then. That was the summer I had the tremendous crush on Talleyrand, and in all my fantasies I (or rather, my alter ego, Anne Fourier) was deeply involved in the politics of the French Revolution. Anne generally disguised herself as Pierre-Ange Gaultier, a boy journalist and the best of Talleyrand’s spies. I had worked out nine separate and extremely elaborate scenarios, all of them leading to the danger- and passion-filled moment in which Talleyrand would realize he was in love with Anne. But where were Anne’s loyalties? With him or with the Revolution or only with herself? It depended on how I was feeling that day. Usually in the end I was on my own side, though, because in a war that’s how you survive. That’s how Talleyrand did it.
Kevin DiFranco was both popular and cute, but he couldn’t have competed with my fantasy world if he’d tried.
But my imaginary life was private—I wouldn’t even have told Lije the details, and he borrowed most of my books for me. A massive crush on a centuries-dead Machiavellian priest-politician in a powdered wig wasn’t the kind of thing you shared. And if I’d gone on to tell people about my mental war games, my elaborately researched historical alter ego, well, my façade of social respectability would have cracked right there, and I’d have been the butt of a million idiotic jokes. If you want to survive, you have to blend in.
Plus, even I couldn’t live in the eighteenth century all the time. And our real-life war game fascinated me. I had a lot of say in it, a lot of control. I was the one who said we were the opposing guerilla factions of a country in the throes of civil war, a country located right on the equator, full of steaming jungles (the playground and the abandoned factory lot around the corner on Eastern Avenue). The jungles, I said, entirely surrounded the bombed-out capital city (our street and its alleys). I was the one who set up the POW camp behind the brick wall in the truck yard, and I wrote up the rules surrounding capture, punishment, and death. Kevin and Lina were the generals, okay, and they planned the raids and battles and took care of the daily details. But I was the one who designed the game. You could even say it was my game.
It was amazing, when you thought about it, when you saw how well it worked. I mean, it had never happened before—all the kids in the neighborhood hanging out and doing something together. We were all different ages, of course, and on top of that there were cliques. But it worked. For a few weeks, it worked. And we had such fun.
Only Lije wasn’t playing. He didn’t have the summer off from school; he was in some special enrichment program and came trotting home every afternoon at around three o’clock and let himself into his apartment with his key. He’d be there alone until after eight o’clock, because his mother worked as a secretary for some big downtown law firm, and she didn’t home until late. And of course his father was, as the social workers say, not in the picture. Actually, Lije had never met him. But he did pay the tuition for Lije’s private school, and hey, I’ve heard of worse absentee-father deals. Mine, for instance. Lije hated it, though. Hated him. It was a funny thing. Lije was a fat, scared mess with a runny nose, and he couldn’t sleep without the lights on. But underneath that he was okay. Because he could hate.
We were on the second day of a two-day truce (really an excuse to concentrate on covert ops and training) on the afternoon we all noticed Lije. He had just come out of the convenience store on the corner of Eastern Avenue and Tenth Street. He looked dorky, especially considering the heat, in his long pants and cheap dress shirt and school tie and with his backpack dragging his shoulders down. He was holding a wrapped ice-cream sandwich that he’d obviously just bought, and he was completely absorbed in trying to pick open the wrapping.
He was a perfect target, and Lina pounced. “Ambush!” she yelled, and in seconds her SWAT team had him surrounded. Lije looked up, blinking, at the four Super-Soakers leveled at his head.
“Hand over the ice cream,” Lina said, “or you’re dead.”
Lije shot a glance at me, where I was lounging on a stoop with Kevin and a couple of the little kids. But then his eyes skimmed on past. Right then it hit me that we had never talked to each other in public, only from our windows across the alley. Out here on the street, that relationship was nonexistent. It didn’t even need saying. So I grinned at Lije but didn’t move or speak.
Silently, he handed over the ice cream to Lina. She laughed, made a gesture, and the SWAT team opened fire. Lije didn’t move. He stood there and took it, until the tanks were empty and he was completely soaked.
We all laughed. “Feels good, huh?” Lina said. If you knew her, you’d know she was actually being friendly. For Lina.
And that was the moment I understood that Lije wasn’t okay after all; that he would need help to be okay. Because he wouldn’t just laugh too. Couldn’t even force himself to do it; couldn’t even pretend. Instead, he acted like a jerk; minded; showed he minded. Why didn’t he know better than to show it? Why did he have to let his
lip tremble and his face get red? Why did he run like that? Why did he let them—let us—let me—see he was scared?
It’s dangerous to show your fear. It marks you as a victim. And watching Lije run away like a little kid, I was afraid for him. And right then I knew I had to do something to help him. I just didn’t know what, or when.
That night, though, was completely ordinary. Lije’s light came on well before the sun set, and I leaned out of my window and called his name.
“You all right?” I said.
“Yeah.” His hair was wet; he’d obviously just taken a shower. Another shower.
“Sorry about today,” I said casually. “You just have to laugh, you know. You can’t let it get to you.” I watched him carefully to see if he understood what I was saying.
Lije shrugged. “Jerks,” he said. He said it like he meant it, but I saw his chin tremble and his eyes brim. So he didn’t get it. I decided to leave it for now.
“Did that book I wanted come in from interlibrary loan?”
He nodded and handed over hardback copy of J. F. Bernard’s biography of Talleyrand. Inches thick, crammed full of detail, and with plates not only of the man himself, but also of his wife and some of his more famous mistresses. I