“That’s hot,” I admit.
“In Los Angeles you can get your cars washed by girls dressed in that costume,” Sam says, and we branch out from there to the far reaches of nerd culture. Not the things that women like too, but the things that only boys secretly enjoy when we’re boys without shame, like Warhammer and Magic cards. The things that are so uncool they’re uncool.
Back in-game, Ariane tells Pekker/me that if I can get her out of the city she’ll reward me with treasure from her land of P’Sai. We sneak out of the market. Sam keeps offering dishonorable opportunities: swords that are easy to steal, free drinks.... I have to roll dice against my 50 honor; if I make a bad roll and fail to be honorable, Ariane’s slave outfit expands to cover more of her.
We find a magic lamp. It’s lying in the desert under a cactus. When I rub it, a genie comes out. He punches me in the face and ties me up. Ariane attacks him but gets torched by his Breathe Fire ability. He starts gagging my mouth.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“For a thousand years, I lay trapped,” the genie says. Sam does all the voices himself. “And I promised myself, ‘Whosoever frees me, I shall grant three wishes,’ but then this morning I finally got frustrated and decided, ‘A thousand years, fuck it, whosoever frees me is getting robbed.’ And here you go and release me. Who am I to tempt the gods?”
“Please, genie,” I say. “Let me get home so I don’t starve like a common rat.”
“Home to who? Your family?”
“I have no family.”
“Then who but the desert rats will care if you starve?”
And the genie steals everything I have but leaves my canteen filled with fresh water, so I can wander back to the market. End of game.
12
“WHERE DO YOU GET THIS STUFF?” I ASK Sam. (Our first game takes two weeks.) He shows me a book: The Arabian Nights: The Marvels and Wonders of the Thousand and One Nights, from the Brooklyn Public Library. “All the best stuff is from original sources,” he says, and points to the story “The Fisherman and the Jinnee.” Then he shows me the Pyramid Texts of Saqqara, in a book called Ancient Egyptian Literature. The stuff found in Unas’s tomb sounds just like the magic spells that people yell in Lord of the Rings:
If he wishes you to die, you will die,
If he wishes you to live, you will live!
The difference is that Unas did live, 4,400 years ago.
“People used to be more in touch with actual magic,” Sam says.
“You believe in magic?”
“I believe in something. Whatever else I do during the day, I always make sure to remember, ‘Nobody knows how the pyramids were built.’ You know? You go through life worrying about your little assignments from school, trying to be smart, playing the game, and meanwhile nobody can explain how the pyramids exist. Two-point-five to fifteen tons, each block. Five thousand years ago.”
“Who do you think built them? Aliens?”
“It doesn’t matter. Aliens, magic … Until someone explains the pyramids to me, how’m I gonna take life serious? You want to start a new game?”
13
I WANT, MORE THAN ANYTHING, FOR THE world of Enthral Moor to be real. I pray at night that I’ll wake up as Pekker Cland, a full-grown artisan/magic-user ferrule, with red skin, a tail, and a taste for danger, adventuring with Sam. I’ve never prayed for anything before and I feel guilty about it. I’m not even sure how to pray; I say, “God, life is too boring for me to live anymore, so can I please wake up in the morning in a more exciting place? Not that I want to be a whiner.”
I say these prayers at the end of the night, after fighting boredom by reading the Rule Book, which I now read in lieu of homework. Sometimes I say them as Jake sneaks in, drunk, and lies in bed blabbing to me: “You know what’s amazing about girls’ nipples?” “Man, don’t ever do sake bombs after you’ve had Mexican food.” “If you say anything to Mom and Dad or the lawyers, I’m gonna kill you.” Once he passes out and I hear that he’s breathing okay, I turn out my light and fall asleep, but not before checking if there’s been any action in my personal area in terms of hair growth. There hasn’t.
I begin testing what Sam does every day—cutting class. I start with English, where we’ve been assigned David Copperfield and the first chapter is “I Am Born” and I think it must be a joke. I cut a chemistry class and find that the laws still work; I cut Spanish class and find that I still can’t understand Spanish. During the extra time I play Creatures & Caverns with Sam or read one of the books he brings me from the library. I never smoke any of his cigarettes; I never try to drink with him; he never brings up pot; our transgressions are wholly childish and so we hide them as if they’re sexual.
When I come home, to Mom’s or Dad’s, I’m astounded that my parents and their lawyers have no idea what I’m doing. I start to feel like I can get away with it, like I’ve been a fool to ever attend school, like the real reason the outlaws and movers and shakers of the world didn’t need school was because they had friends: Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates had Paul Allen, and I have Sam.
14
I COME HOME TO DAD’S HOUSE IN Brooklyn and find Kimberley, Dad’s lawyer, waiting at the rounded edge of the kitchen counter. When I stay with my father, we sometimes eat cereal here, both standing as if we’re on a packed subway; I’m always careful not to let any milk drops splash him. Dad oversees computer programmers at an enterprise-solutions provider and travels a lot. When he sees me, he always taps his bald head and says, “Kiddo, I’m jealous.” And I want to hit him because bowl haircuts are stupid.
“Perry, we need to discuss a few issues.” Kimberly says issues; I hear problems.
“Issues with me personally or issues with my father with you acting as legal counsel?”
“Both.”
Kimberley opens a briefcase. I see what Dad sees in her. Jake does too. She’s buttoned-down, but the lines of her skirts and suits suggest a wildness beneath. She has dyed blond hair, streaked with her natural brown, that frames her face in a huntress’s bob.
“Good,” I say. “I want to talk about some issues with my father too. I made a new friend. I’d like to invite him over for dinner. You may have heard from Horace about the incident a few weeks back, where I was alone on Mom’s bathroom floor with no circulation in my legs, clutching a role-playing-game manual. I’ve changed since then.”
“We know,” says a voice behind me. Horace walks into the kitchen. Hawk-nosed and widow’s-peaked, never in anything but black.
“Both lawyers in the same place? What an occasion!”
“Your mother is concerned about you, Pecker,” Horace says.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Isn’t ‘Pecker’ how you identify yourself in your game?” Kimberley asks.
“That’s different—how do you know about that? Have you been spying on me?” They don’t answer. Kimberley hands me a sheet of paper with Simmons Leadership Academy at the top and a signature from Student Affairs at the bottom and a complete list of all the classes I’ve cut in the last month in the middle.
“This, really, I can explain.”
“How?”
“Technical error.”
“A technical error for two dozen classes?”
“Mutant paradigm shift. Error in the system. Happens every year. Massive lawsuits are filed against the College Board for errors in the SATs—”
“It wasn’t a technical error.”
“Personal vendetta.”
“Against you? Why would anyone care?”
“I … because …” But I can’t think up a reason. I’m not important enough to have vendettas against, I admit it. The person who probably has the biggest vendetta against me is me.
My mother and father walk into the kitchen. Crap. My mother is short and feisty. My father is tall and lanky. They used to play Frisbee together—it was the craziest thing, in Central Park, with smiles on their faces, in love in a way that made people s
ick … but I was about five when this was true, and it could have been in a movie or commercial.
“Dad, Mom, I can explain.”
“Explain what? Where have you been going during the day?” Mom asks.
“We can tell from your pale skin that you’ve been indoors,” Dad says.
“I was playing Creatures and Caverns with Sam, okay? By the fire stairs, okay? But look—you know how college works? You only have to go to class once every three days, and then you do the work on your own. I’m, like, doing free college prep.”
I wait for them to accept this brilliant answer.
“Perry, you aren’t progressing socially,” Mom says. She always looks like she could be holding a rolling pin. “You don’t have any friends.”
“I just asked Kimberley to let me invite my friend over!”
“You aren’t maturing,” Dad says. “We feel like you’re in a state of suspended animation—”
“That’s not my fault! That’s biology!”
“It’s not all biology,” Mom insists. “You’re using this ‘Caves and Critters’ game to shut out the real world and avoid the tough choices that face you as a young man.”
“So we’ve decided to send you to summer camp,” Dad says.
“Toldja!” Jake bursts in, grinning sloppily.
“No! This is outrageous! I’m not the one with the problems! Look at him! He’s—”
Jake narrows his face into a sledgehammer of doom.
“It’s not about Jake, it’s about you,” Mom says. “We feel you’d grow more as a person—as a man—by going to summer camp this year.”
“Eight weeks,” Dad says. “We’ve spoken to our counsel.”
The lawyers nod. Mom hands me a brochure:
CAMP
WASHISKA
LAKE
15
SIX WEEKS LATER I’M STILL LOOKING AT the thing. The brochure is crinkled and rumpled from my obsessive analysis of it. I’m in Mom’s SUV with my mother, father, brother, and the lawyers, driving through the surprisingly secluded woods of northwestern New Jersey.
“‘Camp Washiska Lake and Conference Center: a nonreligious, activity-centered recreational community for boys and girls ages ten to fifteen.’ It doesn’t sound so bad, right?” I ask the car.
“Shut up,” Jake groans. “You keep reading that. Like we care.” He’s got a headache and he’s wearing sunglasses and drinking actual water for once. The Just Because played last night, and he sneaked into our bedroom at five a.m. I look at the SUV’s hybrid energy gauge, which says we’re getting 99 mpg and then flips to 0.01 mpg.
“Look, we’re here!” Mom says.
I snap my head back and forth from the brochure to real life. The cover of the brochure shows a happy bunch of racially mixed kids waving under an ornate carved wooden sign: CAMP WASHISKA LAKE. In real life, the sign is chipped white paint on nailed-together two-by-fours hanging from a wizened tree.
“Stop the car! What is this?”
Mom ignores me and keeps driving. Horace explains, “That entire brochure is clip art. If it were for legal services, they would have to say ‘paid spokespeople.’ But to advertise a summer camp, you can use whatever clip art you want.”
I put the brochure away and pull out my Pekker Cland character sheet. That usually calms me down. Jake snatches it.
“Hey!”
“Shut up a minute, I want to see this. What’s this say? ‘Honor fifty?’ Is that out of a hundred?”
“Gimme that!”
“I thought you were good at this game. Didn’t you read the Odyssey? The people with honor die quickest.”
“Perry, I don’t know if you’re going to be able to bring your gaming materials to camp,” Dad says.
“We’ll just deal with that when we have to, okay?”
“What would you do if I ripped this up?” Jake asks. He tugs at the corners of the sheet.
“No!” I grab it from him, moving a lot faster than I thought I could with Speed 7. I put the character sheet in my backpack. Jake, for a moment, looks impressed. I know someone else who would be impressed. I pull out my phone and send Sam a message: wish you were here.
16
“I ADVISE YOU TO PULL OVER,” KIMBERLEY tells my mother. She pulls over. A sign is posted at a crossroads in the woods:
NO LAWYERS BEYOND THIS POINT
The sign is terra-cotta with white lettering; it looks more official than the camp sign. “I advise you to let us out,” Horace says. Mom nods; Kimberley and Horace exit.
“What are they doing?” I ask. The lawyers dust themselves off. Jake is as astonished as I am. I don’t want them to go. They’re annoying, but they serve as a nice buffer between me and the nuclear Eckert family unit. I don’t like that unit. There’s something wrong with it. We could never even be happy at McDonald’s.
“They’re obeying posted notices,” Mom says.
“We’ll wait here until you pick us up,” Horace says. He sits on a log with Kimberley.
As we drive away, I ask, “What is this evil place you’re bringing me to?”
“Moments like this, without the lawyers, make you think about the importance of real conversation,” Dad says.
“Do you have any questions you want to ask us before we drop you off at camp?” Mom asks.
“Questions about women, specifically, Perry. You know this is a coed camp.”
“Dad!” I want to tell him, Yes. I want to tell him, A woman appears late at night before my dreams begin behind three sets of horizontally bisected saloon doors. In the first set, the bottom door is open, showing her naked hips and legs; in the second, the top is open, showing her breasts and head and neck; in the third, both doors are open, showing her in full bloom, but try as I might, I can never make the same staccato shuffling noises as Jake does in his bunk. Instead of saying that, I pull out Pekker Cland’s character sheet. Dad grabs it this time.
“We’re concerned about you, kiddo. This game. Can you make a career out of it? Play it for money?”
“No—give that back!”
“Listen. When you were growing up, we always told you that you could do whatever you wanted with your life. It’s time to drop that lie. As you get to be an adult, you have to dial down your dreams into practicalities. If you were very into the stock market, say, or being a doctor, it would be one thing. But you’re doing badly at school and spending all your time on something that never had any social value when I was young”—Mom nods—“and I’m sure still doesn’t.” Jake nods.
“Dad, if you don’t give me back my character sheet—”
“I’ll put it in your bag. I don’t want you looking at it until you meet your fellow campers.”
“Deal.”
We crest a hill and see the lake. Although the camp is called Camp Washiska Lake, the lake is called Lake Henderson, in one of those weird Americanisms that doesn’t make sense. It’s six miles long and a half mile across. I check it against the brochure. In the brochure, the lake is filled with diverse teens in polo shirts sailing over a logo for “Hideaway Village,” the name for my age group—the fifteen-year-olds, who are old enough to be treated like men. We’re paired with “Oasis Villa,” the girls’ section that corresponds in age.
Sure enough, Oasis Villa is on the other side of the lake—I see a glint of white cabins in the woods, like a magical commune for virgins—but the lake itself is drained. There’s a puddle’s worth of black water in it.
“What happened?” I ask.
We descend back into the woods. No one answers. Sam would answer—he’d help me look the lake up on our phones; maybe it’s controlled by a hydroelectric dam—but he hasn’t responded to my text. I can’t count on Sam up here.
17
MOM PULLS INTO A DUSTY PARKING LOT IN front of a big building that looks like an airplane hangar. A sign says DINING HALL, but I don’t believe it. This is in the brochure too. The picture shows a group of kids in a crystalline cafeteria like something out of a Frank Lloyd Wrigh
t catalog. This is a huge slab of concrete with occasional streaked windows.
“Looks great!” Dad says.
Next to the dining hall, in the parking lot, stand dozens of boys. They lounge on trunks, shoulder duffel bags and backpacks, and hug their parents and legal guardians embarrassedly while establishing social status with the boys around them. I can’t hear them, but from their body language I know what they’re talking about: comedy bits they’ve seen, rap lyrics they’ve memorized, and women they’ve allegedly been with. I will probably have to make up a woman I’ve been with.
“They look friendly,” Mom says.
No they don’t. They look like a skyline: there are kids who’ve had the Growth Spurt and kids who haven’t; jutting Adam’s apples and child-sized clothes … but no potential friends. No one with my bowl haircut. Two of the bigger boys drum up dust with a basketball, spinning, showing off their long limbs, and I track from them to two boys unloading a trunk, to two boys comparing logo-ed caps, and I realize: I’m the only white kid. I see Hispanic, black, and Asian in equal amounts. I’m the asterisk.
I power down my window. The group’s buzz of gruff speech hits me. I recognize that I’ve never been in the racial minority before. It feels different. It feels scary.
18
JAKE, DAD, AND I HAUL MY TRUNK OUT of the SUV and carry it to the center of the gathered campers. A counselor—a big, good-looking guy named Travis—checks me off a list.
“Eckert? Can I see your backpack?”
“Why?”
“It has to be inspected.”
I hand it to him. Inside, besides my character sheet, are my Rule Book, my dice, and my mechanical pencils. Travis tosses the bag into a bin on wheels, like something used to haul trash away from a demolition site. “We have to check for drugs, alcohol, and candy.”