NICK SAVES, then turns the game off. It’s late, and he doesn’t want to get started on the next part of the quest right now. And even without his mother telling him, he knows he should sleep. The first day of school is tomorrow.
He’s been living the game for almost a week now. Dad hasn’t bothered him, either. They’ve barely spoken, just eaten together, and then Nick goes back upstairs to play. Dad hasn’t left the house, except once, to go to the grocery. Nick explored some more while Dad was gone—looked in the hall closet, the downstairs cabinets—but he couldn’t find anything about Mom or her dad. Any clue to prove she’s got something that isn’t Alzheimer’s. Maybe he can search her room at the home.
He crawls into bed and sets the alarm. He focuses on the game, instead of Mom. He wonders if that new elf, Reunne, is an NPC or another player—a real person somewhere out there. She looked older, but then, some of his friends (not really friends anymore, he remembers like a punch in the face) like playing as old wizards, so maybe there are people out there who like playing as older women warriors, too. And she’d had a sense of humor—joking about how thin Severkin was. NPCs are never really funny—they don’t get jokes, the way Rel didn’t get Reunne’s jokes. She’s probably a person. He hopes that she’s not mad he turned off the game, though, and that she’ll wait for him to finish the quest. There are probably plenty of other quests for her to do in the meantime.
He turns out the light. He doesn’t want to go to school tomorrow. He wants to keep playing. But he knows that’s not an option. When he visits Mom next week, she’s going to ask how the first day of school was, and he can’t say he didn’t go. So he closes his eyes and tries not to think about how it’s going to be tomorrow. Instead, he thinks about what he’s going to do in the game when he gets home.
Nick has already been inside Reagan a few times, for some sports events and field trips. But he has a locker here now, and has to remember where the classrooms are.
He sees people from Lincoln. Some are even people he used to hang out with, but mostly now they turn away from him and whisper to each other. Some of the girls give him PityFace, but when he smiles at them, they look away. After the thing last spring, he’d lost all his friends, but in a way that had made it clear to him he’d never really been close to any of them.
The first day is mostly orientation, with a big assembly, and then they’re divided into groups and instructed to tell each other their names and favorite subjects and stuff. It’s pretty boring. At lunch, Nick sits with some of the people from his group who hadn’t gone to Lincoln, but they talk among themselves on the other side of the table while Nick stares at his lunch.
After lunch they have twenty minutes in each of their classes, so they know where their classrooms are and so the teachers can introduce themselves. The teachers seem to fit the standard roster of “enthusiastic” and “weird,” none of them too scary or special, except for Ms. Knight, for world history, who is really young for a teacher, or at least looks and acts it.
And dresses it, Nick thinks, looking at her long yellow polka-dot skirt and T-shirt. She has giant eyes and long red hair and talks with her hands a lot. She’s very excited.
“So, what we’re going to do,” she says, “is figure out where each of your families interacted with a famous moment of history! For the first quarter, you’re all going to do a research project based on some historical event that your family, or ancestors, were part of. It could be slavery, or the War of the Roses, or…anything!” she says, making a giant circle with her hands. “So you guys should start talking to your parents, and figure out what bit of history you’d like to do.” Nick sighs, and puts his head down on the desk. Dad is going to love this. “Oh, and don’t forget to put your email on this sheet. I want to be able to contact you about the project.” Nick puts his Severkin email down instead of his student email so he doesn’t have to check more than one.
Luckily, history is the last class of the day on Wednesdays. He shrugs his backpack on and leaves the classroom, headed for the buses.
“Hey!” comes a voice from behind him, but he ignores it, assuming it’s for someone else. “Hey, Severkin!” the voice says again, and Nick turns. There’s a girl he doesn’t know running toward him. When he turns she stops and smiles. She has eyes like huge, soft hills, and lots of freckles on her fawn-colored skin. Her black hair is piled up behind a blue headband, and then falls down her back like a horsetail. It’s streaked with chlorine blue. Her eyeliner flies out from her eyes in wings and she wears a shimmery purple dress. He’s staring, and a girl is talking to him, and he realizes he hasn’t learned that skill yet—talking to girls.
“I’m Nat,” she says, extending a hand. Her other hand clutches some books to her chest. Nick shakes her hand, swallowing. “I recognized your handle on Ms. Knight’s email list. I’ve seen you on the message boards. For the game. I always thought it sounded fun to say—‘Severkin.’ ” She says the name like a serpent coiled around a sword. Nick feels his body warm slightly. “I love Wellhall—have you been playing it?”
“Yeah,” Nick says, smiling. “I think I’ve done every side quest in Bridgefall. And my real name is Nick.”
“Nick, right,” she says, shaking her head. “I was totally prepared to just call you Severkin for the rest of your life.”
“So where are you?” Nick asks, pulling his backpack straps higher on his shoulders.
“I’m all over the place. Not too far in the main quest, though. What server do you play on?”
“The Character one,” Nick says.
Nat’s eyes go wide. “Hardcore,” she says. “Wanna play together?”
Nick thinks about it. He’s played with friends before, but that was always just taking turns watching each other play. Same when he plays with Mom. Played with Mom. Will play.
He doesn’t know how it will work with someone else. A girl with freckles and blue streaks in her hair.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ve never…I mean, I don’t usually play MMORPGs, so I might not be good at it.”
“Well, you play on the Character server, so I just won’t tell you who I am,” she says, smiling.
Nick laughs. “That doesn’t seem fair,” he says.
“It isn’t,” she says, still grinning. “But it’ll be fun for me.”
“Okay,” he says. Cold hands tickle his stomach from the inside. He doesn’t know if she’s being sincere or just pretending to like him.
“Oh, I gotta get outside or I’ll miss my bus. I’ll see you in history tomorrow?” She bites her lower lip.
“Yeah,” Nick says, smiling back. She runs off, and Nick stares after her, the phantom of freckles and blue streaks left behind like fireflies.
He takes the bus home and eats potato chips in his room. Dad’s semester has started, too, so Nick has the house to himself. He thinks of searching his parents’ room, again, but knows it’s pointless—he’s given the place a once-over, as Severkin would say. He’s found all the treasure. There are no secret doors or puzzle-locks here. No notes left from Mom.
He looks down at the homework he has for tomorrow. There is way too much of it for the first day of school. He puts it on his desk, then goes to turn on the game, but his finger hovers in front of the power button, and he can hear Mom saying he needs to do his homework first. If she were here, he’d complain and say he’d get to it later, but somehow her absence makes him pull back his hand.
It’s mostly reading. English, math, history, bio, Spanish. It’s slow going, too. He keeps looking up at the power button on his game console and thinking of Nat saying she’d find him. He finally turns it on when he’s halfway through his homework, but before his game can load, he hears Dad pulling into the garage. Nick’s just following Reunne out the door of the guardhouse when Dad knocks and comes in.
“First day of school!” Dad says, smiling. “That means we’re going out to eat. Turn that thing off. Tradition.”
Nick sighs, and turns the game off, not even bothering to save. His parents used to always take him out on the first day of school to this burger place he loved as a kid but since he grew up has found kind of sad. The jukebox and the stuff on the walls just look like junk now. And he feels bad for the waitresses, having to wear those big skirts that don’t really fit between the tables. But he knows he can’t get out of it. Can’t complain, either, without Dad saying, “It’s for you! It’s about you!” So he doesn’t. He just follows Dad downstairs to the car, and they drive to the burger place and get a table for two. Nick orders a burger with curly fries, and Dad orders the same, but with cheese, and they eat, staring at each other and trying not to talk about how Mom should be there.
Nick wonders if Mom was the one who kept the conversation flowing. He doesn’t remember ever being this awkward and silent with Dad before.
“So, how was the first day?” Dad asks. “Classes all look good?”
“Yeah,” Nick says.
“Teachers?”
“Yeah,” Nick says again, and takes a bite of his curly fry. He doesn’t mean to be terse, but he doesn’t know what else to say. It was one day—it all seemed fine.
“What are you reading first in English?”
“Romeo and Juliet,” Nick says. “I have to finish Act One by tomorrow.”
“Junior high. They’re not going to go easy on you anymore,” Dad says, his head bouncing.
“Because it’s been so easy for me before this,” Nick says, half joking, half mean. Dad just looks sad, though, even when Nick smiles.
“I meant teachers,” Dad says.
“I know,” Nick says, and sips his soda.
“How about history?” Dad asks.
Nick pauses. He doesn’t want to tell Dad about the assignment and get another lecture on his black roots and where he comes from. He doesn’t want Dad to be excited about a project Nick isn’t even excited about. He doesn’t want to do this project on Dad, for Dad—but the only alternative is doing the project on Mom. Which, the moment Nick thinks of it, makes perfect sense. It’s a brilliant plan.
“World history, teacher seems young,” Nick says, then quickly, before Dad can ask more: “What part of Germany is Mom from?”
Dad leans back, looks a little surprised. Nick can use the project to question Dad, and hopefully Mom, too, about Mom’s past. Figure out what happened that makes her think she has to get locked up. It’s an excuse to go digging, and maybe get them to tell him the whole story. And from that, figure out how to rescue her.
“You doing recent history?” Dad asks. “Germany?”
“I think we’re doing all of it,” Nick says drily. “That’s why it’s called ‘world.’ ” He doesn’t want to seem too eager.
“Yeah.” Dad smiles. “Yeah, of course. Your mom is from Berlin.” He pauses, bites into his burger while Nick eats another fry. “East Berlin,” Dad says, when he’s swallowed.
Nick furrows his brow. That means something, he knows. The eighties, and the big wall that was covered with graffiti and then came down, and the fall of communism, or the cold war, or something. He doesn’t remember, exactly. He’s not sure if it could have anything to do with Mom’s being locked up, either. He’ll have to google it tonight.
“Oh,” he says.
“She doesn’t like talking about it much. She came to America the first opportunity she could. Came to study anthropology. Met me.” He grins. “I told her I was another culture she could study.”
“Ew.” Nick rolls his eyes.
Dad laughs. “Everything was new for her here, back then,” Dad says, more solemnly. “She saw everything as wonderful, even the bad stuff, because she could learn from it. It’s why I fell in love with her.”
Nick looks down at his plate. “Then why did she want to go to the home?” he asks. Damn. He didn’t mean to say that. The words were just bubbling in his mind and overflowed for a moment. His body goes numb, and he feels like he’s about to get pushed over a cliff edge and is just waiting for the fall. He hopes this won’t ruin his plans, won’t make his dad tighten up and lock the truth further away.
Dad sighs, and looks at the empty chair where Nick’s mom should be sitting. “It’s complicated, Nick. But your mom wanted it, in her lucid moments. I…didn’t want her to go, but I know she had to.”
“Lucid moments”—Nick doesn’t know what that means. All Mom’s moments are lucid, by checklist standards. He’s been keeping track. Still, Dad doesn’t seem mad. He’s even opening up a little. Maybe he feels guilty. Nick peels away some of the moisture on his soda cup with his finger, trying to look bored.
“Had to?” he asks as casually as he can.
“Your mom wanted to protect you. And…I do, too.”
Nick scowls at the table—light blue, flecked with mica—and the silver napkin holder. It’s cheap, everything here is cheap. And he knows he’s not getting anything else out of Dad. Once they say “protect” it all goes to nonsense and “You’ll know when you’re older.” Why not just chant Your fault, Your fault over and over?
“Protect me from what?” Nick says loudly enough that the people at the next table look over for a moment. He doesn’t care. “And why didn’t you ever ask what I wanted?”
“Because you don’t get to decide,” Dad said softly. “None of us do, really.”
Nick looks up, ready to yell some more, but he sees Dad’s eyes are wet, like he’s about to cry, and Nick feels himself blushing, and he quickly takes a drink of his soda. The bubbles beat against his throat like an onslaught of arrows. He keeps sucking through the straw, inhaling the soda because he’s not sure if he can breathe otherwise, and his chest feels squeezed empty. The straw makes dry sucking sounds at the bottom of the empty cup, and Dad doesn’t tell him to stop, like he normally would. He shakes the cup so that the ice clatters against itself, like plastic jewelry falling on the floor and breaking.
“Next year, let’s go somewhere else,” Nick says.
“Okay,” Dad says.
At home, Nick looks at the game again but then turns on his computer and googles Berlin. A city divided down the middle by a wall. It reminds him of Wellhall.
When he’s read all the Wikipedia articles and some others on the Berlin Wall and East and West Berlin, he realizes it’s late, and he finishes his homework and goes to bed without turning on the game. He lies in the dark, facing the game and feeling bad that he didn’t meet up with Nat. But how would they do that, anyway? He wouldn’t even know it was her.