“Late again, Mr. Biggins.”
The class let out a collective snort as Bryan tried to slip unnoticed through the door, but Mr. Tennenbaum caught him anyway, sporting a serious scowl. Bryan glanced at Tara Timmons, who gave him a sympathetic shrug. Though they never talked outside of school, he and Tara often copied each other’s homework, at least on the days Bryan managed to show up on time. Neither of them was a big fan of first-period math.
“Sorry, Mr. Tennenbaum,” Bryan said, trying to sound remorseful, though he only sounded out of breath. He had been forced to take a roundabout way to math, having spotted Tank blocking his usual path. Normally, Bryan would have merged with the crowd and tried to slink by, but Wattly had had that look in his eye. Purposeful. Calculating. Or as calculating as someone with six brain cells could be. Given how Bryan’s day was going so far, skirting around Tank seemed prudent, even if it did make him extra late to math for the second day in a row. Mr. Tennenbaum was making Bryan reconsider.
“It would be one thing if it only impacted your learning, Mr. Biggins. But your tardiness and interruptions affect everyone in the class.”
“I understand. I really am sorry,” Bryan murmured.
Mr. Tennenbaum eyed him from behind his gold-rimmed glasses, looking down at him past his graying beard. He was wearing the tweed jacket with the button missing and the coffee stain on the sleeve. The math teacher picked up his grade book and clicked the pen that he kept tucked in his shirt pocket, quickly scrawling something down. Bryan couldn’t see what it was, of course, but he could see the message that appeared from out of nowhere.
Bryan blinked. There it was, hanging right next to Mr. Tennenbaum’s tufted fuzz of hair, almost sitting on his shoulder, except this time instead of iridescent blue, the letters were red, bright as a new stop sign, impossible to miss. They flashed briefly, then vanished.
“What the heck?” Bryan blurted out.
“Excuse me?” Mr. Tennenbaum’s face glowed, matching the color of the letters that had disappeared, his eyes now sharp slits. Someone in the class murmured a wincing “ooh,” and Bryan quickly backtracked, realizing he had said what he did out loud even though he hadn’t meant to. “Sorry. It’s just . . . I thought I saw something.”
The letters were gone. Nobody in the class made any indication that they had seen them. Maybe Bryan had just imagined them again, but he wasn’t imagining the look on Tennenbaum’s face. Strained and purple, like a toddler holding his breath.
“You enjoy disrupting my class, Mr. Biggins?”
“No, sir.”
“You have a free period this morning, don’t you?” Tennenbaum said, biting off each word.
Bryan nodded. “Third period, sir.” That was supposed to be Bryan’s study hall. He knew where this was going.
“Not anymore,” the math teacher said, then proceeded to fill out a detention slip. Someone in the back of the class whispered something about “trouble in the Shire”—the joke that never got old, apparently—and the kids around him laughed. Bryan took his blue slip and found his seat, slumping as far down as he could, still picturing the message that had shone briefly above the math teacher’s shoulder.
“Today we will be continuing with our lesson in geometry,” Tennenbaum said, stifling his irritation and putting on an air of enthusiasm that he would sustain for all of thirty seconds. Bryan looked at the man, but he couldn’t bring himself to listen. He was grappling with those red letters floating in the air.
HP? Horsepower? Harry Potter? A brand of printers?
Hit points?
Hit points like health? Like in Sovereign of Darkness? Had he really lost a hit point for being late to class? If so, how many did he have to start with? And what did that even mean, losing one? Was that, like, a day off of his life or something? For being a few stupid minutes late? What happened if he ran out of all his HP? How many had he started with? Bryan thought about Kerran Nightstalker. The dark elf had well over a hundred hit points, but Bryan had also leveled him up over days. Weeks. At the start of the game the ranger had had only ten.
This was ludicrous, Bryan told himself. That was Sovereign of Darkness, a charred wasteland infested with demons and monsters, all waiting to bite your head off. This was middle school. There had to be some difference.
“Finding the area of three-dimensional spaces, like this room, for example . . . ,” Tennenbaum droned.
Calm down. Relax, Bryan reminded himself. It was just one hit point. And he didn’t feel any different, except maybe his stomach was queasier than before, and his head had started pounding. But he hadn’t gotten a “game over,” and he hadn’t been asked to insert a coin this time, which meant that whatever was happening, it wasn’t all or nothing, win or lose. Different games had different rules. He could figure this out.
There was pause in the background noise. Then Mr. Tennenbaum’s voice came in sharper.
“Mr. Biggins. Since you must know all of this already, perhaps you can come to the board and enlighten us.”
Bryan snapped out of his daze and looked around at the two dozen faces staring at him. Then he looked at the SMART Board at the front of the room. It was full of drawings of three-dimensional objects. Cubes, cones, pyramids, all with arrows and numbers going every which way. Tennenbaum stood next to it, scowling, his stylus in hand.
“Sorry, what?”
“I said, why don’t you come up and show us how it’s done, since you don’t feel like you have to pay attention to what I’m saying.”
Another twitter ran through the class, but a hiss from the math teacher squelched it. Tennenbaum motioned for Bryan to come up front. Reluctantly Bryan pulled himself out of his desk and walked to the board, like a prisoner shuffling to the gallows. He took the stylus and stared blankly at the screen.
“Start at the top,” Tennenbaum commanded.
Bryan faced the board again, keeping his back to the rest of the class, certain they were all laughing silently at his misfortune. The screen looked like a big jumble. Along the top sat a bunch of formulas that he was vaguely familiar with, stuff they’d been working on like: V = 1/3πr2h and SA = Ph + 2B Though now they looked more like hieroglyphs or alien inscriptions.
“Whenever you’re ready,” the math teacher said in a smug voice. Bryan held the stylus in his sweaty hand and pressed the tip up against the screen.
He paused. He thought he heard music. Coming from out of nowhere. Voices humming, softly, barely audible, but steadily growing in volume. It sounded exotic, foreign—Russian maybe?—like something men in fur-lined caps might kick-step to. Bryan whirled around to the class, but as soon as he did, the humming stopped. Everyone was just staring at him.
“We’re waiting,” Mr. Tennenbaum said.
Bryan turned back to the shapes drawn on the SMART Board, and the humming started up again, as if on cue. Dum. Da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-dum-da-dum-dum-dum. He was sure he had heard the tune somewhere before. He turned again and it disappeared, but as soon as he faced the board, it began again.
“Any day now, Biggins.”
Then Bryan noticed that the shapes weren’t normal either. They were no longer frozen on the screen. They were moving. They were, in fact, dropping. Inching toward the bottom edge of the board. It was a slow and steady march—cones and cubes and spheres incrementally making their way down to the bottom of the screen to the beat of the folksy Russian humming.
Whatever was happening to him, whatever had started this morning with the alarm clock, this was obviously part of it. He needed to solve this problem or risk losing more hit points or getting another continue. Beside him Tennenbaum was tapping his foot impatiently but not in time to the song, meaning either that the math teacher had no sense of rhythm (likely) or that the music was only in Bryan’s head (equally likely). Bryan licked his lips and zeroed in on one of the falling shapes. He looked up at the formulas at the top of the screen and then at the cone that was about to drop right off of it. He quickly did the math in his head and used the stylus to scrawl in the answer. As soon as he’d found the volume of the cone, it vanished with a satisfying flash.
Bryan smiled and turned to Mr. Tennenbaum, as if to say, Got it.
“Next,” the math teacher said.
“Next?”
Tennenbaum glanced sideways at the screen. The other shapes continued their steady decent.
“All of them?” Bryan asked desperately.
“We don’t have all day,” Tennenbaum said with a shrug, looking up at the clock.
Behind Bryan, the humming grew louder. Da-dum, da-dee-dum, da-dee-dum, da-dum-dum-dum.
Bryan turned back to the screen, beads of sweat prickling his forehead, the stylus slippery in his hand. He picked a sphere and found its surface area, scrawling the answer on the board. It, too, disappeared, but just as soon as it did, a new one took its place at the top, pushing the rest down. A multitude of shapes filing in columns down the screen.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Bryan said under his breath. Then he quickly puzzled through the formula for the volume of a cube, causing it to vanish and another shape—a pyramid—to drop in place above it. The Russian dance music picked up tempo, grew louder, more frenetic. Bryan hunched over, solving one problem after another, the answers coming easier to him now, but the shapes dropping faster and faster. He let one slip by and heard Mr. Tennenbaum click his tongue disapprovingly.
“Missed one.”
Bryan tried to ignore it, worked the problems as fast as he could, trying to clear the board, but he couldn’t keep up. The shapes didn’t change, but the numbers grew more complicated, harder to calculate.
“Time’s almost up.”
Bryan wiped his forehead on his sleeve with his free hand. The objects were growing fuzzy. He couldn’t keep them straight. There was no way he could clear the board of problems. How many hit points would he lose if he couldn’t? Would he have to insert another coin? Was this really what this craziness was all about? Geometry? Really?
He was about to give up when he noticed a flashing cube at the top of the board. It looked different from the rest. Where the other shapes had simply been outlined in black, this one was multicolored and pulsing. Bryan stopped working on the pyramid that was ready to fall off the bottom of the screen and aimed his stylus at the cube. He needed to calculate its volume. Each side was seven centimeters. Bryan struggled to do the math, his brain in overdrive. Seven times seven times seven. Forty-nine. Three, carry the six. He could feel Tennenbaum’s eyes burrowing into him. The humming had reached a fevered, frantic pace.
“Three hundred forty-three cubic centimeters!” he shouted.
Bryan wrote it in and then pushed down on it with the stylus. Suddenly the rainbow cube vanished, taking all the other shapes with it, as if by magic.
The board was clear.
The soundtrack of Russian folk humming suddenly stopped.
Bryan turned around to look at Mr. Tennenbaum. The math teacher didn’t look happy, his whole face pulled downward. But Bryan couldn’t help from smiling.
There, hanging in the air above the math teacher’s head, was another message written in blue. Two messages, in fact. The first said: +100 XP.
And the second said: LEVEL UP.
Bryan stood there, at the front of the room, staring at the blue letters as they faded, his whole body shaking. Level up. One hundred experience points. That had to be good, right? It had to mean something. Did it mean he was done? That whatever was happening to him was over? He looked expectantly at Mr. Tennenbaum, as if the math teacher had the answer.
“That will do, Mr. Biggins.” Tennenbaum coughed. Then he turned to the rest of the class. “Would anyone else like to try?”
Bryan looked around the room. Half of the students were nearly asleep. The other half were only feigning interest. He wondered if they had even been watching. Wondered why they hadn’t cheered him on or at least shown some small sign that they were impressed. Were they really such mindless zombies that they hadn’t detected anything weird going on?
Asia Delaney raised her hand to take a turn, and Bryan took his seat, slumping into it, sweaty, heart thumping, watching the board, waiting for her to start. Let’s see how she does, he thought.
Except Asia Delaney was given only one problem, and it just stayed in the center of the board. It took her almost as long to finish the one as it had taken Bryan to finish all of his. When she sat back down, Bryan leaned over to get her attention.
“You didn’t hear anything strange while you were up there, did you? Like . . . I don’t know . . . humming Russians?”
Asia Delaney rolled her eyes. “You are so weird,” she said.
Bryan nodded and turned back around.
That’s what he’d thought.