BENCH’S FAVORITE COLOR WAS ORANGE.
This is probably not something I should know. Maybe if we had been friends since kindergarten or were a couple of fourth graders swapping one of those secret-password journals you can find in the bargain section of the bookstore. But it’s not something that just came up naturally in conversation. Until I went into his bedroom for the first time and saw his tangerine walls and his blinding bright orange bedspread, making me wonder how he ever managed to get to sleep at night.
I know other things about Bench. Things that even his parents probably don’t. Like he’s a little ashamed of his dad because Mr. Jones used to be a runner—track and cross-country—and now he carries a serious gut and can barely huff it a mile. I also know Bench is still terrified of letting his dad down, which is one of the reasons he tries so hard to get straight As and make it onto every team. I know that it takes him twice as long to get through a book as me. I know that he has an irrational fear of his teeth falling out due to the fact that when he was little, his grandmother’s dentures accidentally came loose and dropped into her potato soup. I know that he hates it whenever Deedee shouts, “For the Shire!” which is more often than necessary.
And I know now that even though he never came out and said it, even though he always seemed cool about it, he never liked his nickname.
Because let’s face it—nobody wants to spend their life just sitting around, waiting for their chance to get into the game.
We were playing at Wolf’s this time.
His dad was gone all weekend for a conference, which meant the house would be quiet for a change. We usually played at Deedee’s, but Wolf pointed out the injustice of making Deedee’s parents foot the bill for snacks every time. Everything they say about teenage boys and their appetites is true. We once polished off an entire family-sized pack of Oreos in one night. Forty-eight cookies, minus the crumbs on Mrs. Patel’s linoleum. Deedee was the only one who couldn’t keep his dozen down, scrambling for the toilet to make a deposit.
These were the kinds of stories we kept to ourselves.
I showed up to Wolf’s early, eager to get out of my own house and away from Mom, who was on the phone with the lawyer, discussing alimony. She and Dad never talked to each other directly. They would email or text if absolutely necessary. She had no problem yelling at her lawyer though, so I said I’d just bike the three miles to Wolf’s house. When I got there his mom was trying to finish raking the front yard before it got dark. Hardly any leaves had fallen yet, but Mrs. Thompson was finicky about her lawn. Every hedge perfectly trimmed. Every tree pruned. The grass had those diagonal mow lines that you usually only see on golf courses. She asked me how I was doing, how was school, the usual.
She asked about Mom. She didn’t ask about Dad. Nobody ever asked about Dad.
I had hoped that Wolf would be practicing so that I could listen, but I spotted him in the garage instead. He was working on a plastic model of the battleship Arizona—the one that you could still see sunk at Pearl Harbor. I could smell the glue from the doorway.
Piano was Wolf’s passion, but he was almost as obsessed with those plastic kits. When he wasn’t stuck to his bench pounding out Beethoven, he was snapping pieces together, making sports cars and fighter jets that would take up the shelves in his bedroom—the ones that didn’t need to hold piano awards because those were all downstairs. He had Mustangs and F-15s and a German U-boat. He had a model of the Star Trek Enterprise and the Apollo lunar module. I remember the first time he showed me his room. It was like walking into a museum, with fighter planes hanging from the ceiling and an aircraft carrier (also called the Enterprise) extending past both sides of his dresser. I’d never built one of those kits before—I would have glued my fingers together. Besides, I didn’t have Wolf’s patience. The first time I accidentally broke something off I’d probably just toss the whole thing in the trash.
“Deedee texted. He’s on his way,” Wolf said, sensing me standing there.
I nodded and walked around the garage until I spotted Wolf’s brother’s moped, half covered in black tarp. Everybody’s known for something. Wolf’s older brother Simon was known for that bike. A TaoTao 150cc, cherry apple, given to him as a consolation prize the same time Wolf got the shiny black Baldwin sitting in the living room. Simon had just started middle school at the time, and Wolf said that everyone thought the moped was the coolest thing ever. Then Simon went to high school, with juniors and seniors who drove things on four wheels that could actually hit the speed limit, and the moped suddenly wasn’t so cool anymore. Which explained why it sat in the corner of Wolf’s garage.
“Your brother ever planning to sell this thing?” I asked.
Wolf shook his head, fidgeted with a rudder. “Are you kidding? He still loves that bike. He says I can have it when I turn fourteen. Provided I give him a hundred bucks. He still lets me ride it sometimes, though. If I clean his room and put away his laundry.”
I lifted the tarp a little. The bike looked like it was still in good shape. I’d probably clean Simon’s room for a chance to take it around the block. “Does he ever let you take it out on the highway? You know, open her up? Full throttle?” I didn’t even know if you could “open up” a moped.
Wolf laughed. “Dude, full throttle on that thing is about fifty—and that’s if you’re going downhill. Uphill you still have to hop off and walk it.” He carefully put a radar dish in place, stepped back to admire his work. “Did you hear anything from Bench?”
He said it casual, like he didn’t care about the answer either way. Maybe he didn’t, but I doubted it. It had been my job to call Bench and make sure he knew about tonight. It was three hours before he called me back. “He said he couldn’t make it. He’s going out to dinner with his family to celebrate last night’s game.”
“The catch,” Wolf said.
“The catch,” I repeated.
The catch had actually made the paper. Local sports page, local paper, and only a two-paragraph article, but Bench’s name was mentioned. A miraculous forty-yard catch and run by Jeremiah Jones, coming off the bench to seal the victory for the Falcons. I was sure his parents had already clipped it and framed it. I kept our copy of the sports section just in case.
I sensed there was something else Wolf wanted to say about “the catch,” but instead he just screwed the cap back on the glue and began putting the rest of the unused pieces back in the box. The battleship was still only half finished. It was in need of more guns and a whole lot of paint, but it looked pretty good. Wolf’s work always did. “His loss,” Wolf said. “I’m sure we can tackle anything that pathetic excuse of a dungeon master throws at us.”
“Just for that I’m adding more zombies.”
We both turned. Deedee stood in the driveway, an overstuffed Avengers backpack threatening to topple him backward. “Your mom says that if we bag those leaves we get pizza.”
I smiled and nodded. I’m not sure what Mr. Thompson’s problem was. Seemed to me like Mrs. Thompson knew the way straight to a man’s heart. We went out to bag leaves.
Afterward Wolf’s mom ordered an extra-large pepperoni and promised to leave us alone for the rest of the evening, retreating to her bedroom to enjoy some “quiet time,” which Wolf translated for us as reading mystery novels and stalking people on Facebook. We thanked her for the pizza and promised not to break anything.
“How’s it going?” I whispered to Wolf as his mother padded upstairs.
“She’s been happy today,” Wolf said with a shrug. “I like it when they’re happy, even if it’s only one at a time.”
I didn’t bother to say that with me it was always one at a time. He was right, though. A happy one was better than a miserable two. Most days.
While we waited for the pizza, Deedee unzipped his pack and pulled out the library of manuals he’d brought, complete with maps and traps and cardboard tokens representing everything from zombie rats to vampire lords. He unloaded a small hoard of dice that skittered across the table. Wolf and I picked up a handful and challenged each other for the highest number. Deedee yelled at us to leave the dice alone. This wasn’t rock-paper-scissors, he told us. Dungeons & Dragons was serious business. I told him he should be extra thankful to have us as friends. Especially since he’d forgotten the Pringles.
The doorbell rang. Deedee and I both looked at the clock. We had called for pizza only ten minutes ago.
“Maybe Bench managed to weasel out of dinner,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe,” Deedee said.
Wolf smiled as he stood up. From his seat, Deedee had the best angle on the front hall, and I watched his expression shift from curiosity to confusion. I spun around to see who was standing there, though I really should have guessed.
“Greetings, oh dungeony ones,” Rose Holland called from the front door. “I come bearing gifts.”
She held up a bag of Funyons and a two-liter of bargain-brand red cream soda and smiled. Deedee’s mouth hung open. I kept mine shut. Wolf took the snacks and gave Rose a hug, the second in two days that I’d seen. “I wasn’t sure you were going to make it,” he said, escorting her into the kitchen.
“You kidding? Hang out with three world-class geekazoids like you on a Saturday night? How could a girl say no?”
I could think of approximately three hundred girls at Branton Middle School who would have. They actually wouldn’t have said no. They would have said, Are you kidding, or, Um, or Seriously? In fact I couldn’t think of a single other kid in the entire school who would have given the offer to sit around with the three of us and roll for saving throws a second’s thought. But Rose was obviously an exception.
“Is that the pizza guy?” Wolf’s mom called down the stairs.
There was a pause. Wolf looked at the two of us, as if he expected us to answer, but we were speechless.
“No, Mom,” he called up. “It’s just a friend.”
It’s important to keep some things to yourself. If Jamie Juarez could have kept his superfluous nipple a secret, I’m sure he would have. It would have saved him a lot of grief. Same goes for Katherine McKinney’s habit of chewing on her toenails or Daniel P.’s unfortunate long-standing history of bed-wetting that earned him the name P-Diddly. That’s what happens when people find out.
Dungeons & Dragons was like that. Forget that half the kids in school probably went around slaying dragons and stashing loot on their PlayStations or iPads. It’s different when you actually have to roll the dice. It’s all about degrees. Mention you like to play board games and you’re probably okay. Break out the Monster Manual and start talking about the difference between fifth-edition and fourth-edition rule sets, you might as well give up on ever getting a date to the eighth-grade dance.
That’s why I was a little surprised to see Rose at the door.
Deedee pulled Wolf aside and the three of us had a quick huddle by the table.
“This isn’t going to work,” Deedee explained. “You’re all at level seven. If she comes in now she’ll throw everything off balance. She’ll muck it all up.”
It was a good excuse. Much better than saying that Wolf had crossed the line, inviting someone else into our game without permission, someone who probably knew nothing about constitution checks and critical hits. Someone we’d have to teach everything to. Lunch was one thing. This was different.
“I don’t want to ruin your game,” Rose said, eavesdropping. “If it’s a problem, I can just sit and watch.”
Sit and watch? Who in their right mind wants to sit and watch three guys play Dungeons & Dragons?
“It’s not a problem,” Wolf said, breaking the huddle prematurely. “We’ll just bump up your stats a little. You’ll be fine. Right, Deedee?”
Wolf and Deedee stared at each other. It was up to the dungeon master. It was Wolf’s house, but it was Deedee’s game. Wolf got to decide if she stayed. Deedee decided if she played. I was just glad neither of them was looking at me.
“She’ll need to make a character,” Deedee sighed.
Meaning that there were four of us playing, just like always. But not exactly.
We took our seats around Wolf’s scarred kitchen table, Rose between Wolf and me but closer to him, and Deedee patiently explained the absolute least she had to know to get started while I poured myself a cup of the soda. “You’ll need to choose an avatar,” Deedee told her. He had a whole trove of little plastic figures. He picked out the tallest—an orc war chief, hulking and muscular, holding a giant ax. “Maybe this one?” he said.
Rose rifled through the box. “Who is this little guy?” she asked, holding up a short, pudgy-looking figure about half the size of the one Deedee held.
“That’s a gnome,” Deedee said. “They are good at making things.”
“Like origami,” Wolf added.
“I’ll be him, then,” Rose said. “What’s his name?”
“You get to decide,” I told her. “You get to make up everything. Name. Profession. Backstory. All of it. It’s the best part about it, really.” At least I thought so. Of course, maybe that was just the poet talking.
“So you’re saying I can pretty much be anything I want?”
“Within reason,” Wolf said.
“And within the roll of the dice,” Deedee added.
“In that case,” she said, setting the tiny plastic gnome in front of her, “my name is Moose.”
We all looked at each other. You could hear the carbonation popping in our cups. I was no stranger to tense silences. I’d once witnessed my mother yelling at my father in the middle of a Walgreens loud enough for everyone waiting at the pharmacy to hear, including the guy waiting in the drive-thru. The quiet that followed that incident wasn’t quite this awkward.
Rose shrugged off our stares. “What? You think I’m going to let some stupid little nickname get to me? Screw that. My name is Moose Wrathbringer and I’m a spell-casting ninja with a history of carrying out covert assassinations for top-secret guilds. Or something.”
“You can’t do that,” Deedee said. “You can’t be a spell-casting ninja. For starters you’re a gnome, and the stat requirements, plus the rules for multiclassing, prohibit you to—”
He suddenly stopped talking, his mouth cinched tight, eyes bulging. Rose had reached out and taken his hand, just grabbed it from across the table. By the look on his face you’d know that no girl had ever held Deedee’s hand before. I watched his Adam’s apple jump like he’d swallowed a grasshopper.
“It’s all right, Deedee,” Rose said softly. “I can do it because you are the dungeon master, and you can do anything. Which means I can be anything, even a spell-casting ninja gnome named Moose, because that’s what this is all about. We don’t always have to play by the rules.” She let go and Deedee seemed to relax, though he moved his hands to his lap and kept them there.
“Yeah. All right,” he said, his voice catching. Wolf handed Rose some dice and we created her character, deciding how strong and wise and smart she would be. “Stronger, wiser, and smarter than the rest of you,” she said with a grin. By the time Moose Wrathbringer was born the pizza had arrived and Wolf paid with the money his mother left on the counter. Equipped with a slice of greasy pepperoni and a magic katana, Rose yelled for us to “get our adventure on.”
Deedee talked us through the scenario, which started, predictably, with the three of us sitting around a table at a tavern. Eventually we ended up in a graveyard and then descended, with typical foolish courage, into a crypt, where we came across a horde of zombies. I tried to sneak around them so that I could find another escape route but I fell into a pit due to a failed perception check. Wolf tried to sing a song that would paralyze them, but it turned out they were immune. Normally this would be about the time that Bench would whip out his double-bladed Battle-Ax of Bleeding and go ballistic, but Garthrox the Barbarian was out to dinner with his parents celebrating “the catch.”
Which left us with Moose.
“You guys are in trouble,” Deedee said.
Rose licked her fingers and pointed to the cardboard chits that represented the undead horde shuffling toward us. “All right. I got this. I cast a spell of absolute zombie annihilation on the whole lot of them, sending them back to the foul abyss or zombie-making factory from whence they came.”
“You don’t have a spell of absolute zombie annihilation,” Deedee informed her.
“How do I get one, then?”
“There is no such thing.”
“Well there should be,” Rose insisted. “What do I have?”
“You have a spell of scorching touch and your sword.”
“Spell of scorching touch. What is that—is that like I light my finger on fire and go around pointing it at people?”
“Pretty much,” Wolf said.
“That sounds lame. I’ll just use the sword.”
“It’s called a katana,” Deedee said.
“Its name is Charlene.”
Six eyebrows shot up around the table. “Charlene?” I questioned.
“Yeah, why? Is that a bad name for a sword?” Rose asked.
“No. It’s fine,” I said. “I just thought, you know, you’d want it to be, like, something more . . . intense.”
“Fine. Her full name is Charlene the Freakin’ Crazy Sharp Sword That Will Cut Your Head Off If You Make Fun of Her.” Rose gave me a challenging look.
“That’s much better,” I said.
“Okay,” Deedee sighed. “But I’m telling you now, Charlene or no Charlene, you’re all better off trying to run away.”
Rose took a Funyon out of the bag and crunched it mercilessly. “You don’t know me very well, do you? Just give me the dice.”
Deedee consulted the tables, compared Moose’s stats to those of the zombies. Turns out she needed a roll of fifteen on a twenty-sided die to be successful. Otherwise we were about to have our brains sucked out of our skulls. Rose blew on the die. Deedee asked her not to do that anymore. She rolled a twenty, scoring a critical hit and decapitating the first zombie in line.
“That’s how I roll,” she said with a smile, which would have been vomitously cheesy if all of us hadn’t already said it ourselves at one point or another.
After that Moose Wrathbringer went into a rampage, improbably rolling one high number after another, slicing and dicing through imaginary undead, shouting “Make way for Charlene!” with every toss of the die. She even stuck her flaming finger into the rotting guts of the last zombie, incinerating him from the inside out, just for kicks.
When it was finished, Moose had a pile of actually-dead-this-time undead at her feet and the stares of three boys who couldn’t believe what they’d just witnessed.
“Garthrox is a wuss,” Deedee whispered in awe.
Rose sat back smugly and popped another Funyon. “Never mess with a ninja wizard princess.”
“Wait. When did you become a princess?” I asked.
“I just saved your sorry butt. I can be a princess if I want.”
I didn’t argue. Instead I went to take a drink and found my cup empty. Rose reached under the table for the bottle of soda and poured me what was left. Then she tapped her cup to mine. “To Charlene,” she said.
“To being whatever you want to be,” I said.
We all tapped cups. Then we descended farther into the crypt.
By the time the adventure was finished—the Queen of the Vampires thoroughly staked, all the loot split between us—Wolf and I had both gained a level and Rose had gained two. Moose was almost where we were. It was still only nine o’clock so we eradicated what was left of the pizza, opened a box of fudge brownies, and watched old Dr. Who episodes.
It was a pretty much perfect night.
No one said anything about Bench. Maybe I was the only one even thinking about him as we all squeezed in on Wolf’s family room couch, me and Deedee on the ends, Wolf and Rose in the middle, a little tight but workable.
Or maybe we were all thinking about him. But the game was over.
And there was no room left on the sofa anyways.
That night, after Deedee’s mom dropped me off at home, I tried to call Bench, just to see how his dinner went, but his cell went straight to voicemail. I wasn’t sure if I was going to tell him about Rose or not. I couldn’t make up my mind. And I couldn’t quite figure out what it meant that I couldn’t make up my mind. Would Bench even care? And if he didn’t care, what would that mean? I figured if he asked how the game went I’d just say it was all right.
“Actually, funny thing,” I’d say after a pause. “Rose came over and joined in. She didn’t use your character, though, don’t worry.” And then he’d ask something, maybe who invited her, or was it strange with her there, and I would say that it was fine, but that it would have been nice if he were there. I wouldn’t say instead. I wouldn’t say too. I would just leave it at that.
I definitely wouldn’t tell him how much we laughed. How Rose gave Deedee such a hard time, saying her grandmother would make a better dungeon master and urging him to just make stuff up rather than taking five-minute time-outs to page through his three-hundred-page manuals. I wouldn’t tell him how she beat all three of us at an arm-wrestling contest afterward, nearly throwing Wolf out of his chair. Or how she told me that her favorite American poet was Emily Dickinson—even though I’ve never heard anyone else our age admit to having a favorite American poet.
And I wouldn’t tell him how, when we all said good-bye at the end of the night, she gave out more hugs. Not just to Wolf. To all three of us. I wouldn’t tell him that I hugged her back, and not a limp one either. I stretched to reach all the way around.
I would just say it was all right.
Because it was.
I dialed his home phone and his mom picked up. She sounded apologetic.
“J.J. isn’t home yet, Eric. He went out to dinner with some of his football friends. He should be home real soon. Want me to tell him you called?”
“That’s all right, Mrs. Jones,” I said, and hung up without saying good-bye.