33 HEALED!
Kurt Ellers was back the next morning. He wasn’t even limping.
Charlie knew it was wrong, but that filled him with rage. He wouldn’t have chosen to blow up the phone in Ellers’s front pocket, but knowing that Kurt wasn’t maimed, Charlie couldn’t help but regret that it hadn’t done slightly more damage.
Especially when he saw the smug look on Kurt’s face. He didn’t look like a guy who had just been humiliated in front of his peers. He didn’t look like Alex Dinh, eyes heartbroken, snot running down his face. He grinned and shrugged with a “What can you do?” affability. Yep, my phone blew up. Isn’t that crazy? I’m still gonna get laid tonight. Are you?
But then Charlie thought about the strange magic of the internet. Maybe that Confederate flag photo would go viral and turn everyone against Kurt. Or maybe someone would leak the video of him hopping around, pants on fire, some dowdy old teacher spraying him with white foam. No matter how infallible Kurt was with his friends, the wisdom of the crowd could prevail. Isn’t that what happened with dictators these days? They stay propped up for so long, their power intact, rising on a web of fear and belief. But when the truth spreads like wildfire through the crowds, the illusions burn up and old gods fall.
Charlie tried to remember who had filmed the phone episode. Eric Weisman, maybe? Elena Moore? In the excitement it had been a blur. He’d ask around after class. Or maybe the Game had it already? Maybe he could buy it with Goldz?
Once the rage passed, Charlie realized he felt pretty good. He’d slept like a baby after their wild adventure. In the daylight, with some rest, everything felt less terrible. Mary wasn’t wearing his bracelet, but she wasn’t wearing Tim’s either. The Game was crazy, but it was fun, too, and they’d washed away the pentagram; now they could relax. No harm, no foul.
This morning, rightly or wrongly, things seemed possible.
He looked at the posters in his backpack. The five lame, lousy VOTE FOR CHARLIE flyers that Mr. B. had made for him. They were pathetic. He’d be embarrassed to put his name behind them. But he also felt touched. Underneath all the pain and grief, for the first time he felt a small ray of gratitude.
He wasn’t going to run for student body president. But he did want to be able to say, honestly, to Mr. Burklander, that he’d put up one of the posters. Charlie didn’t want to have to lie to him anymore. Charlie tried to think of the most obscure area of the school, where people were least likely to see it (besides the Tech Lab, which was obscure, but not to his friends). Charlie found a bulletin board on the fourth floor, south wing. He wasn’t 100 percent sure, but it might have been near the remedial classes, so maybe the students wouldn’t be able to read it.
He hung the poster, stuck a pin through, and threw the other four in a trash can.
Okay, Mr. B., he thought. Okay. Now you can feel good.
Kenny was feeling better, too.
His DNA, after all, had been in the bloody graffiti.
No one had thought to scrape a little blood off—not Eddie, not Candace—and now the blood was gone. Nothing could link the photos Candace took to the Vindicators; photos were just pixels on a disk. If he played the Game right, those might disappear soon, too.
So why did Eddie look so smug this morning, even as he told them about the strange sprinkler malfunction?
“Walker let me back in,” Eddie told him. “The place was a mess. Water everywhere. The graffiti was gone.”
“Well,” Kenny said, trying to sound nonchalant, “we’ve got the pics. So we’re good.”
“Oh, we’ve got more than that,” Eddie said viciously, without explaining what he meant.
“And now there’s a cover-up!” Candace added. “It’s like Watergate.”
“No pun intended,” Kenny tried lamely, but they ignored him, excited.
“Right!” Eddie nodded to Candace. “If it was a prank, why break in and wash it away? You’d want people to see it.”
“Okay, slow down, everyone,” Kenny said. “I thought it was a sprinkler malfunction.”
“That’s what Walker thought, too, but he’s dense. We know about the pentagram. We’re supposed to think this is all just a coincidence?”
Kenny shook his head, trying to look casual. “If I were a devil-worshipping graffiti artist, I think I’d use a rag, not water an entire room.”
“Are you a devil-worshipping graffiti artist?” Eddie said it like he was joking, but Kenny didn’t like the look in his eyes.
“Yeah, right,” Kenny said, trying to laugh it off.
“Anyway,” Eddie said, “here’s the plan. I want Kenny to research Friends of the Crypt today. There’s just too many similarities not to link the stories. Plus, we know that got national attention, so let’s bring it up. Candace, I want you to research devil stuff in general—what does the pentagram mean? What other bad stuff would these guys be doing?” Eddie smiled. “Whoever these nuts are, they’re going down hard. And we’ll break the story.”
“It’s kind of thin,” Kenny said, throwing a Hail Mary, “without any physical evidence.”
“I agree,” Eddie said. “That’s why it’s so awesome I’ve got their DNA.”
“What?” Kenny felt his fingers begin to throb again.
“Yeah. After you all left, I was like, wait, why didn’t we take a little sample? Well, actually, it wasn’t my idea.”
Kenny was baffled. “Whose idea was it?”
“That same anonymous source. He really wants these sick fuckers to go down!”
Something was wrong with Mr. B. Charlie hadn’t seen him like this since his divorce. He phoned it in through Creative Writing. All the joy was gone. This was the guy who stood on the table like in Dead Poets Society and read to them aloud from Mark Twain and Dostoyevsky. Only then, seeing Burklander so gloomy, did Charlie realize how much Mr. B.’s annoying optimism had been a scaffold for Charlie’s despair, keeping him from dropping all the way down a bottomless shaft.
He felt unmoored.
He wanted to tell Mr. B. about the poster (now he wished he hadn’t thrown out the other four). But when the bell rang, Burklander was out the door faster than the students.
Charlie ran after him. He heard Mary call his name and almost turned around, but something kept him chasing after the teacher.
He found Burklander outside by the Dumpsters, sneaking a cigarette. “I didn’t know you smoked.”
“Damn it,” Burklander snapped, and flicked the cigarette behind the Dumpster. “I don’t.”
“Can I have one?”
“No.”
Burklander sat on the ground, in the gravel, a strangely juvenile gesture. He let his back slide down the wall till he was seated. He popped another cigarette out and pulled it with his lips.
“No, you can’t have one.”
Charlie sat down beside him. “Don’t you have a heart problem?”
“Yes.” Mr. B. looked at the cigarette in his hand. “I just … needed one.”
“Why do adults who smoke always tell kids not to smoke?”
Mr. B. gave him a dry look. “Because we want to believe you guys will be better than we were.”
Charlie didn’t like this new, cynical Mr. B. “I didn’t want a cigarette anyway. I don’t smoke. I just wanted to see if you’d give me one.”
“So did I pass your test?” Burklander said sarcastically.
“Yeah. Sorry.” Changing the subject, Charlie said, “I put up one of your posters.”
Mr. B. didn’t even look at him or respond.
It stung.
“What happened?”
“I might as well tell you. I’m sure it’ll get around soon enough.” Mr. B. shook his head. “I’ve been teaching for thirty years. And the kids just get worse and worse. Meaner and meaner. Nothing matters to them.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“When I was a baby teacher, someone wrote ‘Mr. B is an asshole’ on my chalkboard. And I was like, ‘Wait, I’m the cool teacher.’ Now that seems quaint. I tried to matter. I tried with you.”
“You do! I put up your poster!” Charlie said, but it was so lame he wished he hadn’t.
“Do you know what someone did? I came out of my house last night, my depressing rented house, all this noise outside, and my car was destroyed. Smashed to pieces. Why? Did I give someone a bad grade? Did I say the wrong thing about Huck Finn? The car is totaled. I stopped paying insurance to pay alimony, so I’m screwed. But what kills me is the failure. I’ve failed, again. Someone hated me so much they destroyed my car, smashed it to pieces. Left it there for me to find. What did I do, Charlie? What did I do to deserve that much hate?”
Charlie suddenly wanted to puke.
No one hated Mr. B. What was there to hate?
It was the Game. He knew it instantly. It had to be. And more to the point, it was someone playing the Game, which meant …
He thought of Alex, with his box of fancy Azitek glasses, thousands of dollars’ worth of brand-new gear. What had he done to earn those? Just a little search and destroy!
So was Kenny right all along, then? Should they have cut Alex loose before he went darker, more dangerous? Or did it mean Vanhi was right—they should’ve held him closer, saved him from going deeper? Either way, they had failed.
“Maybe it wasn’t a student?” Charlie said, more for himself than Mr. B. “Maybe it was just random crime.”
Mr. B. studied him then, taking a slow drag on his cigarette, then flicking the butt away.
“Maybe.” Mr. B. nodded. “Maybe it’s all just a big misunderstanding.”
He leaned his head back against the bricks and spoke with his eyes shut.
“But if I have faith in anything anymore—and I’m not sure I do—then it’s faith in the power of children to disappoint you.”
Vanhi felt like she wanted to throw up.
The delivery boxes had left her unsettled. Worse still, the way the Game toyed with them with the Hydra last night was disturbing—it had been so fun, it was easy to forget that any of them could’ve been savagely burned. The Game didn’t seem to care one whit.
But now reality had set in. Forget about the Game. In front of her right now was her Harvard essay. What she had written so far was lifeless and not her, but she couldn’t seem to summon any passion for it; the pressure was too much to make it meaningful but also perfect.
Her mom had come to her this morning, looking cheerful. “Today is the day?”
“It’s not due till next week, Mama.”
“Yes, but you don’t want to be the last one to submit, do you? What kind of message would that send? My Vanhi is always early. She doesn’t wait for the deadline. That’s what they will see.”
No, Ma, they’ll see a D in AP US History.
But she had to try. She had to make everything else perfect so that smile on her mother’s face wouldn’t drop, so those rosy cheeks would stay flushed with pride, not shame.
Even if it was hopeless.
Her mom had missed her own mother’s death. When Alzheimer’s hit and Vanhi’s grandmother had sunk into oblivion, Mina Patel wasn’t in Mumbai with her, holding her hand and walking her though pictures of her family so she could recall. Mina was in Texas with her daughter, giving her this amazing life. Vanhi caught her mom crying at night, looking at pictures of her declining mother thousands of miles away.
That’s what her parents had done for Vanhi.
So she ran home at lunch, closed the door to her room, and stared at her essay for the five-hundredth—but maybe last?—time.
Reading it made her ill.
I am deeply passionate about Harvard because I want to be a computer scientist. Harvard’s CS department has launched so many luminaries in the field. While I don’t assume I would become exactly that, the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of giants would give me the chance to move the field forward. For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved programming.…
It was terrible. She knew it. Every note was wrong. The fawning over Harvard. The off-putting mix of modesty and hubris. I. I. I. She was normally a wonderful writer! But she couldn’t see a way forward. She’d written and rewritten it so many times, it was all mush in her head. She changed luminaries to stars, then changed it back. Finally, she put her head in her arms and closed her eyes.
A voice from her computer, cold and thin, said, Put on your glasses.
She looked up. The same words appeared, superimposed over the application on her screen:
Put on your glasses.
She blew a tuft of red-black hair out of her face, her chin still in the crook of her arm, and fumbled in the dark for her Aziteks.
When she put them on, the application system was the same on her screen. But the essay had changed.
She glanced over the top of the glasses, at realspace.
I am deeply passionate about Harvard because I want to be a computer scientist.…
She looked through the glasses, at gamespace.
Vanhi means “fire,” a Hindi word tied to creation and destruction. Standing at the edge of adulthood, I realize what I need to know was always there, encoded in my name. Who we are is not what we are made of. Fire, earth, water, air, space—the five fundamental elements of the Vedas—we all bring different forms of matter to bear. We are all made from different stuff. It is the choices that we make, the ways we use and combine our elements, that define our worth.
Her mouth dropped open.
It went on:
In Hinduism, the story of fire, like all stories, begins with parents. In my faith, it was the cosmic rubbing of sticks—twin mothers—whose friction gave birth to fire. If they tended the fire and nurtured it, it would thrive. But the consequence—the inevitable result—was that the fire would consume the sticks. I think about this, the ways parents sacrifice for children. The gratitude we cannot fully feel or understand until we ourselves become the consumed sticks, years later and sometimes too late. My own parents brought their Vanhi to America, a journey that separated them from everything they knew and everyone they loved. An act of love and faith, done for me, so that my fire might grow and thrive. My dream of Harvard, like so many, is to fan that flame with knowledge, to study virtues old and new. I am a coder. But code, like fire, is just matter, neither good nor bad. It is how we use it that matters. In Sanskrit, the holy trinity of creation, maintenance, and destruction is together
:, or in English, Dattā. But I cannot accept that, ancient or not, holy or not. I cannot put equal worth on creation and destruction. The app that displaces a thousand cabdrivers, the AI that replaces a million workers. Destruction is not coequal to creation. It is not inevitable or desirable, even if you rebrand it as “disruption.” It has human cost. Whether it is Dattā or data, as a coder, as a person, I will be defined by the deeper choices I make. Harvard will teach me to code. But more important, it will teach me to think.
When she was done reading, Vanhi had tears in her eyes. She had no idea if they were tears of gratitude or shame or just plain awe. She lifted her glasses and her old essay was there, so mediocre it didn’t even seem like words anymore. Her hand was shaking.
The essay said everything she felt, everything she believed. It was like someone had borrowed her soul, put it into words, then returned the rest. A part of her remained on the screen—or more accurately, on the screen on her eyes. The real computer still had the old essay. The one she would like to light on fire and consume in holy destruction. Data indeed.
Vanhi didn’t know what to do. She’d never plagiarized in her life. She never would. But this wasn’t stealing from another person. This was woven out of thin air. And it was her. Even though it wasn’t. There had never been a deeper expression of Vanhism. It was like finding your own diary and having no memory of writing it.
There was a whole paragraph on her D. It talked about failure and hubris and immaturity. It talked about error and redemption. She had learned more from that one D, the essay assured her, than she had from any A—about how to recover, face your mistakes, and grow. Goddamn if that essay didn’t make her D sound like a positively great idea.
Suddenly, her dream seemed possible again. Maybe, just maybe. But it was a chance, something she didn’t have a minute ago.
The voice came back, oozing from the speakers in her computer. But this time it was louder, also piping through her stereo behind her, out the speakers she’d bolted to the walls near the ceiling, so the voice boomed through the room making her jump, the words thin and caustic like a bitter wind:
Do you want it?
She did. Oh, God, she did. With a queasy feeling in her stomach, she remembered something the essay had conveniently left out. Vanhi—aka Agni, aka the Fire God—was also the god of deception.
Flashing below the new and improved essay was a button with a single word on it:
SUBMIT.
Kenny was reeling. Why would the Game help them wash away the graffiti, only to tip Eddie off to save a piece first?
Was the Game just fucking with them?
He watched Candace following him, across the library. She might be a great writer, but she was a lousy spy.
How could he know that Eddie had pulled her aside last night, after the three of them had parted ways?
“Did you see his Band-Aids?” he’d asked her.
“He plays cello,” Candace had said. “He probably cuts his fingers all the time.”
“Wrong hand.”
“Even still … Kenny? No way.”
“Why not? Someone had to do it. He hangs with that group.…”
“They’re not exactly the devil-worshipper types.”
“Were the Friends of the Crypt?”
“Touché. Well, so what do we do?”
Eddie told Candace to keep an eye on Kenny today, and that’s what she’d done.
For his part, Kenny was supposed to research the Friends of the Crypt. Trying to act normal, that’s what he did. And the more he read about them online, the more he believed they might have been playing an early version of the God Game. The similarities were striking—smart kids, high achievers, crafty and mischievous. It was the 1990s, the era of bulletin boards and dial-up modems, lower-fi, for sure, but uncharted, vulnerable, wide-open to exploitation. Add the overlay of devil worship, D&D run amok, pranks veering into crimes, sinister graffiti … and then … arrests, ruined futures, suicide. Was that the Vindicators’ trajectory, too? He found a few national articles around the indictments and sentencing, mostly recycling the same facts. Quotes from shocked parents. Then nothing, a blip, the disgraced honors students lost in the dustbin of history.
Kenny printed off several articles. He wanted to show Charlie.
Candace kept eyeing him from her table across the library until he couldn’t stand it. She was supposedly researching devil worship on campus (according to the black-nail-polish set she’d interviewed, there was none). Not surprisingly, the school library didn’t have an extensive collection on occult rituals, just a few obligatory books on cults and how not to join them. Kenny grabbed his pages off the printer and marched straight to her table, where she was pretending to be surprised to see him.
“Are you going to follow me all day?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“I’m not following you,” she said defensively. “I’m researching. Just like you.”
“False. You’ve shadowed me all day. You won’t stop looking at me now. Are we on the same team here or not?”
She searched for a quick excuse, then settled on the truth. “Eddie thinks you’re hiding something.”
“What?” Kenny tried to act shocked.
“Why do you have Band-Aids on your fingers?”
“You don’t seriously think…”
“You’ve been trying to kill this story from the very beginning.”
“No, I’ve been trying to make sure we don’t get hoaxed and embarrass ourselves.”
“You hang out with that group.…” She said it as if the word were cult.
“We play computer games. We don’t hold séances.”
“Lots of people play games. They don’t name themselves.”
“It’s just a joke. You’re grasping.”
“Am I? Someone had to paint that symbol.”
“I’m in National Honor Society.”
She tapped her book. “Smart kids are more likely to get into cults.”
“Give me a break. My friends watch movies and run the Tech Lab for Coach Hapler. I cut my fingers building a remote-controlled GoPro at the robotics station. You want to check? We’re about as satanic as Mickey Mouse. Okay, Sherlock?”
It came out smoother than he’d hoped. She might find him nerdier, but less demonic.
“Fine.”
He tried to tell if she was buying it at all. “Look, Eddie’s going a little nuts here. He wants this story to be big so badly. Personally, I don’t want Columbia to know me as the reporter who got punked into fake news.”
“So what’s our move?”
“So it’s ‘us’ again?”
“I’m not sure.” She eyed him. “But I’m listening. I’m applying to Columbia, too, you know?”
“Great.”
“And Eddie. That makes three.”
“Trust me, it won’t be Eddie if he runs this story before we back it up.”
“Okay. What do you want?”
“Well, stop following me, for starters.”
“Fine.”
“Look, if you’re calm, and I’m calm, let’s see if we can’t pull Eddie back. Or,” Kenny ad-libbed, “if it was just a prank, let’s make sure Eddie kills the story or goes down alone. No reason for us to go down with him.”
Candace slung her bag. “Okay, that seems fair.”
It felt like he had her. It did. Had he managed to talk his way out of this? But then she was staring at his hands with a funny look on her face. He was holding the stack of articles he’d grabbed off the printer.
He looked down and turned the pages over, so he could see what she was looking at.
In his hands was a picture totally unlike anything Kenny had seen online or anywhere else. It was the Turner High crest, modified with an upside-down pentagram in the middle of the shield.
In each of the four quadrants were other esoteric symbols: a scribe’s hand. A skull. An hourglass. A key. Across the bottom, where it should have said A. B. Turner High School in collegiate font, the crest announced instead:
Candace looked at him and blinked.
“I’ve never seen that before in my life,” Kenny said, wishing he could take it back the second the words left his mouth.
Alex sat down for the test, feeling as if he were sitting for his own execution.
He could feel the cool blade on the back of his neck.
His eyes kept closing on him, so right before class he popped another Adderall and threw back a Red Bull.
He had tried. He really had. But formulas made no sense to him. He couldn’t wrap his brain around them. If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, then how do things ever move? He asked Peter that right before class over text. A year or two ago, he would’ve asked Charlie. Peter had written him back right away:
Because the action and reaction are on different objects. You punch my face, my face hits your hand equal and opposite. I might move. You might move. Or not. Doesn’t matter. Different objects.
Alex tried to parse that. It made sense, then two minutes later he was confused again. It didn’t help that he was basically high from sleep deprivation and stimulants.
Now he stared at the test in front of him. In the first problem two billiard balls were hitting each other. Where would they go? Where would it all end?
He had no fucking clue. A big white space was beneath the question. That’s where his work was supposed to go. Jesus Christ, he didn’t know where to start. Write your equations, Peter had told him. Alex wrote F = ma. Fine, now what? Fuck, his heart was beating so fast. He thought about the belt his father used for occasions such as this, for abject failures.
A shiver rippled up his back. Maybe he would just run away.
The white space of the test stared at him, and he knew it then.
He was fucked. It was all over.
Then it occurred to him: Ask the Game! Isn’t that what people did when their lives were in the shitter—ask God for help?
He closed his eyes and whispered quietly to himself, “Please, please, please, God, help me. I can’t fail this test, you know what he’ll do…,” speaking just loud enough that his Aziteks could pick it up in the little mics. Even then, Jenny Prentiss cast him an annoyed look.
“Mr. Dinh, what are you doing?” Mrs. Kite asked from the front of the room.
“Praying,” he answered honestly, and got a laugh from the class.
Mrs. Kite shook her head and went back to grading papers.
Nothing happened, but Alex was so used to disappointment, it didn’t even hurt now that the Game was ignoring him. He’d failed at the Hydra, so maybe he didn’t deserve help.
Or maybe praying wasn’t how it worked anyway.… Wait, that was it! He knew how the Game worked! Come on, Alex!
He made discrete gestures with his hand on his desk—to anyone else it would look like fidgeting—but he pulled the little icon in the corner of his Aziteks that woke them up, then went into his inventory in the Game.
He felt a shaking pass through him, fear, excitement, hope, desperation. Among the choices, he saw Illuminated Text.
That had to be it. He understood the Game, its riddles and clues. He’d never cheated. Somehow, that was the one lesson his father taught him that had sunk in. He’d always just accepted the inevitability of his failure. There was honor in that. He took his lumps and moved on. But why not cheat, now? If it meant not hurting, an end to the pain? He had Goldz left over—what better to spend them on? Besides, refusing the Game’s help now that he’d asked for it seemed ungrateful. It might make the Game hate him more.
He clicked on the purchase.
Illuminated Text. 10,000+ Goldz.
Worth it.
Then through the lenses a bit of magic happened. In fire-laced gold font, formulas began writing themselves on his exam, in the space where his work was supposed to go, like a book from the Middle Ages. The diagrams and notations burned and sparkled. He looked around him. The other students were heads down, working on their exams. Mrs. Kite looked up and met Alex’s gaze. His eyes shot back down to his test.
Stay calm.
This is amazing.
Someone was watching him (or something, he reminded himself—couldn’t an AI handle intro physics?). Someone was feeding him a way out. He thought about the belt. Not this time.
But then he saw the text disappearing, even as new text appeared at the end of the work.
“No!” he thought—he almost said it out loud.
Jenny Prentiss glared at him.
He had said it aloud. What was wrong with him? Why hadn’t he slept more?
Well, because I didn’t know God would be my silent partner on the exam.
Don’t waste it, he told himself, this time silently.
He started tracing over the fiery equations on the paper, his pencil flying, locking the answers down as the text burned itself out. He started worrying his results would be too good—no one would believe it was his work. Put some mistakes in, he whispered to the God Game, I only have to pass. For all he knew, there were mistakes in there. He imagined the AI could deliver a perfectly calibrated score—good enough to avoid the belt. Bad enough to avoid suspicion.
He was halfway through the exam when the golden handwriting stopped.
He didn’t notice at first. He was too focused on keeping ahead of the lines disappearing above. But then he saw. What the hell? Where’s the rest?
“Come on,” he said, and this time it was out loud again.
Jenny Prentiss was engrossed in her work. No angry look this time.
His hand was shaking, gripping the pencil too hard. Why would the Game toss him a lifeline, then snatch it away? Then he got his answer:
INSUFFICIENT GOLDZ.
What? His cache was empty?
No, no, no.
He couldn’t run out now. Not in the middle of the test. He was doing so well. Sweat ran down his cheeks. How much amphetamine was in his system? His heart sounded like a kettledrum. He simply put his head down on his desk; resigned.
Promise me, a voice said in his ear.
“What?” Alex moaned quietly into the crook of his arms.
Promise me you will always do what I ask.
“I will,” he said, almost crying.
Anything.
“Anything.”
His Goldz began spinning upward on the counter in the corner of his gamespace. The illuminated text returned. Shaking, he grabbed his pencil and began tracing again, as fast as he could, minutes to go.
Time’s up, the voice said in his ear.
The bell rang, and Mrs. Kite said, “Pencils down.”
He’d made it two-thirds of the way through the test. Was it enough? Did he pass?
Mrs. Kite stopped him on the way out. “I like your new glasses.”
He stared at her blankly for a second, dumbfounded.
As he left, the Game whispered in his ear, The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.