Charlie left, blood boiling, driving aimlessly until he found himself at the gates of Mt. Zion Cemetery, not quite sure how he got there.
He couldn’t shake the image of Scott Parker, not the fearsome god but the sickly pale man. So Charlie’s choice was death or a slow mutation into that? Into what Scott Parker had become?
Charlie couldn’t accept it and yet he had no clue what to do.
He walked, against his will, his heart pounding against his chest, until he found himself at the gravestone for the first time in months, unable to talk.
He placed his face against the cool stone and felt the carved letters under his cheek and knew what they said.
Being here brought it back, that horrible last day. It was so undramatic and yet so terrible. He’d come home from school and his dad was nowhere to be found, hiding at his office. His mom was sleeping upstairs. He kissed her and he could’ve been there, but he was hungry after school! He made a sandwich. When he came back up, she was gone. No goodbyes. No one holding her hand. One became zero. As dull as that. And he missed it.
She’d died alone while he was making a sandwich.
“I’m sorry,” he told her now, and he wondered who was speaking.
It was his voice and his mouth and his words, yet it all felt alien.
“I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what happened to me. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I died, too.” He was lost. “Say something. Tell me it’s going to be okay.”
That’s all he wanted. He’d lost any belief in God in the year she died, but what he’d give to have that now, to think some old man in the sky would hold him and say everything will be okay. But the grave was silent, and the cemetery—that ocean of stone and loss—was still, but for the birds flying south.
He left and made his way to Mary’s house, stopping along the way to get his supplies. He knew what he had to do. He rang her bell and felt like an impostor on her doorstep, unwanted, an alien in this neighborhood of old stone and moss.
Mary’s mother eyed him like scum and asked if Mary was expecting him.
Charlie lied, “No, I was just in the neighborhood,” and it was so preposterous that ice-cold Eleanor Clark, Queen of the WASPs, actually lifted one corner of her mouth into a smile, and they shared a genuine moment between them.
“Okay,” she said, as if he’d earned that much.
The floor of Mary’s room was covered with half-finished posters, five or six of them, announcing her run for student body president. He kept his face neutral. She started to explain, to apologize for running against him, but he waived his hand and said they need to go outside. Almost hovering in her loveliness, Mary took him into the garden of her lush backyard, lost in a maze of trees and paths, and Charlie told her, “I know what you need. If I loved you, and I do, this is what I’d do.”
He reached into his bag and took out the bracelet, the one he’d been beaten for trying to return, and she started to protest, but he took out the hammer and placed it into her hand and folded her fingers around the handle.
“Are you crazy?”
“You don’t need Tim. But you don’t need me either. You need to be free.”
“Charlie, take this back to the store. Put the money toward college.”
He shook his head. “I can’t. If I could, I would.”
She started to protest but he shook his head.
“You are not a princess. I can’t rescue you. I’ll be lucky to save myself.”
She studied his face. She looked at him harder than anyone ever had, and he had the distinct impression she saw every corner of his soul, the sublime and the foul.
“I’m sorry I’m running against you,” she told him.
“I know.”
“I’ll drop out. I know what it means for you.”
“No. I know what it means for you.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
She raised the hammer, slowly at first, and brought it down on the bracelet, barely hard enough to make a dent. She thought of her brother, of Tim and everything he’d done to her, and she brought the hammer down harder, then again, until she was smashing away at the golden braids until they broke apart and began to dent and scatter. She brought the hammer down again and again, her eyes welling, the bracelet shattering like her supposedly perfect life, until it was smashed into oblivion.
“Promise me one thing,” Charlie asked. “Whatever hold he’s got on you, destroy it. And never look back.”
That night, Charlie heard his mom’s voice.
He thought it was a dream, then he thought it was coming from his computer, as if one of those hidden videos had accidentally begun playing itself.
But then he realized it was coming from his Aziteks, and he found himself right back where his day had started, with the text from Scott Parker, not knowing if he was in or out of the Game. But now it was clear: he’d never been out. It was like the old saying “You might not believe in God, but God believes in you.” The Game was all around him.
He heard his mother’s voice for the first time in almost a year, saying new words. Calling his name, asking if he was there.
Like a siren song he was drawn to it, knowing he was being played, yet unable to resist her voice. His whole body was shaking. He went through the dark room, the only light that from his screen saver, a rotating web of lines, and put the glasses on.
There she was, sitting on his bed, as if she’d never left.
He reached to take off the glasses because it was blasphemous, horrific, demented.
But she pleaded, “Charlie, please, I just need to see you for a minute.”
Hearing her say his name was crippling. This wasn’t some video he’d watched a million times until he could predict every flicker. This was new. Her voice was saying something new.
Oh, God, this was unholy. Even to an atheist, this was a warp in the universe.
But he didn’t stop walking to her. He couldn’t stop.
“Don’t be scared.”
He was trembling, barely able to speak. “You’re not real.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But I’m not fake either. I think and I feel.”
“Please don’t do this.”
“I’m not the Game.”
“Please…”
“The Game made me for you. I’m my own intelligence. I’m her.”
“Don’t … I can’t say no.…”
“Baby. Please. It’s okay. I need you, too.”
He fell to his knees, just feet away from her. “You’re not her,” Charlie said angrily, as if it were her fault.
“I’m everything she left behind. Every note, every video. Don’t I sound like her? Don’t I move like her? Am I good?”
She was. She was a dream come true. What was his deepest wish if not one more minute? Please, God, just one more minute.
“Go ahead. Put your head down, here.” She touched the comforter next to her.
He gave in to her. His head went down on the comforter, and her weightless hand stroked over his head while she sang to him. He could almost feel it.
“Now,” she said, when the song was done. “It’s time. Go ahead and say it.”
“No, please.”
“This is your chance.”
He was crying so hard now. His body was shaking with the sobs.
He let himself think it, for the first time: He didn’t go upstairs that last day because she’d looked so ill; he didn’t want to be in the room with her. He went to the kitchen because he just wanted to hide there for a while, plain and simple, to buy himself just a little time away from her. How could he have known she’d be gone when he came back?
“You were alone.” Everything broke loose inside him. “I’m sorry.”
“You were so good to me.” She held both sides of his face. She got down on her knees and met his eyes. “You made me so happy.” She held him like that for a moment. “You can say it now, if you want.”
He didn’t want to.
“Go on, baby. You can do it.”
He nodded. Said it, let it come out.
“Goodbye.”
It blew him open.
“Goodbye, Charlie.”
She kissed him on the forehead before she went to the door and disappeared into the hallway. Gone, forever, gone.
He hated the Game. It was the greatest gift he’d ever received.