The entire school was summoned to a Must Attend assembly.
The auditorium was packed with nervous anticipation. There had been only one other unannounced Must Attend assembly in recent memory, after an unfortunate incident at a pep rally. The teachers milled now around the outer aisles, and the students were chattering away or buried nose down in their phones texting people across the room. The Turner Tiger—the stuffed papier-mâché one for pep rallies, not the bronze one mounted on a pedestal in the atrium—was tipped up against the wall, staring ferociously at the air-conditioning vents along the ceiling.
Charlie came in and saw Kenny across the room with a bunch of kids from his first-period calculus BC class. They met eyes. Vanhi was there, too, near the front, next to Stacy Shearman, whom Charlie thought Vanhi was pining for these days. He tried to will her to look at him, but she didn’t turn around. Peter was in the room, near the middle. Alex dragged himself in, looking whiplashed but curious.
Principal Morrissey took the stage and teachers began shushing fervently, as if their year-end bonuses depended on it. Mr. Sanders, the school safety officer, stood behind her. She cleared her throat into the microphone and waited for the room noise to reach a low simmer. She wore a serious brown suit and looked like she hadn’t slept all weekend.
“I am sure many of you saw the newspaper article portraying our school in a dim light,” she began, her eyes moving over the room but not looking at anyone in particular, “in regards to a certain graffiti that was plastered on our main façade last Friday. Certain claims were made about our school, about you, that are not reflective of the values we hold dear.” She eyed the audience. Half the students were back to their phones; the other half were staring as focusless as the Turner Tiger. Charlie and Kenny met eyes. Peter, too. Even Vanhi stole a glance back. No Vindicator had owned up to it to the rest of them, but they all wondered if the Game had driven one of them to it. Kenny felt a creeping nausea. He tried to look calm.
Morrissey sighed noticeably and seemed to switch gears.
“I know this is a tough time,” she said, sounding more human. “Not just for all of you. For everyone. This election is…” She caught herself, changed tacks. “There is a spirit of divisiveness I haven’t seen before. Not in my lifetime. Anger. There’s a lot of anger. And fear. And the things we hear on TV, what we read online, it’s not helping. But…”
She paused for effect and seemed to be speaking from the heart. A few more ears perked up in the audience. The teachers were studying her carefully.
“But … what was written on the side of our school is disgusting. It’s horrifying. I don’t know if it was serious or some sick joke or maybe even by someone not even from our school trying to put a stain on us. God, I hope that’s the case. I don’t want to believe that one of you, any of you, could write something like that. I am sure you have all heard by now what happened this morning. There was a savage fight because of that graffiti. I’m not going to go into the details, but it was ugly and disgusting and we have a student in the hospital now. This will not go on.”
Kenny felt his whole body tense up. He started looking for the closest exit, in case he really did puke, which was starting to feel entirely possible.
A chatter started arising among the students in the auditorium. Charlie noticed it first in the front corner of the room. He thought it was a response to the news, but that wasn’t it. It was moving sporadically through the audience. And not in any physical way. Excitement would pop up in a cluster here, then in another spot across the room, then in another place entirely. Something was causing a stir, and it didn’t seem tied to Mrs. Morrissey’s impassioned speech.
“… zero tolerance for hate,” she was saying.
The sounds morphed into a tittering, a nasty, cruel noise. Gasping and glee. Charlie locked eyes with Kenny, who seemed puzzled, too. Then they saw Vanhi put on her Aziteks. She looked back at Charlie and tapped the glasses. Charlie dug his out of his backpack—after seeing his mom last night he couldn’t leave them home, Game or no Game—and looked through the magic lenses. Like X-ray vision, he could see through the seats between them then. In the middle of one cluster of laughing students, the kid in the center had his cell phone hidden between his legs, tilted up. It glowed red in his vision. The girls on either side leaned in, peering at it, snickering. Charlie looked across the room and saw other phones glowing red. The lit screens were spreading geometrically, lighting up throughout the auditorium. The teachers were starting to figure out something was going on, although they were plainly steps behind. One teacher shushed a group of students near her.
In a flash Charlie realized what it must be—Peter had released the video of Kurt Ellers after all, exposing his most desperate secret, even though Peter had promised he wouldn’t. Charlie scanned the room for Kurt and found him sitting with Tim in the back row. They looked as smug as usual, but neither had his phone out yet. Didn’t Kurt know his humiliation was spreading virally through the room, coming like a plague, while he sat there looking like a vicious prick?
“I’m now going to turn things over to Mr. Sanders, who as you know is dedicated to the safety and security of every student in this school.”
The murmuring grew louder, and a couple savvier teachers were scanning across the room now, noticing the trend. One of them grabbed a phone from a group of gawkers and looked at it. At first she looked confused. She lifted her glasses and held it closer. Her mouth dropped. She put the phone down quickly.
“I know some of you may not be feeling safe right now,” Mr. Sanders was saying. “But I assure you…”
A red-glowing phone popped up in the corner of Charlie’s vision. It was down the row from him, near the aisle. He heard someone say, “Oh, man, you gotta see this.”
Someone else said, “That’s messed up!”
Charlie thought of Kurt’s private pain, his most intimate, hidden moments out there for the world to see, and shuddered.
Charlie pressed his way down the aisle until he got to the guy with the phone, and as soon as Charlie saw the screen, his heart sank. He felt it literally cave and drop in his chest. The kid looked up at Charlie and his smile dropped, as he knew Charlie wouldn’t like the joke.
It was Kurt Ellers all right, but out of sight, and not in the way Charlie had assumed.
Instead, the picture was eerily familiar. The portable buildings out back. The pile of bricks and other construction debris.
There was Alex, standing alone, his pants down around his knees, his dick hanging out for the whole world to see. And now it had.
The asshole thugs who pantsed him were out of the frame. The picture was just of Alex, alone, crying, jeans and underpants around his ankles. It was probably taken the second before Charlie had rushed out and smashed Kurt’s phone, but of course the pic had already gone to the cloud.
Charlie immediately looked back to where Alex had been sitting. He was gone. “Oh, shit.”
Charlie looked at Tim and Kurt, who were slipping out the back.
“Turn that off,” Charlie said pointlessly to the kid next to him.
He had no idea where Alex had gone, but maybe Tim and Kurt were following him to taunt him more, so Charlie went after them out the back doors of the auditorium.
The halls were empty. He passed the Turner Tiger in the main lobby, the real one, bronze and polished, paw raised, on a pedestal. He forgot that his glasses were on and jumped when the tiger flicked its head toward him and gave a low growl.
Tim and Kurt were at the end of the hall, going around the corner.
Charlie went after them, and when he cleared the turn, they heard him coming and faced him.
Then he realized he had no idea if they had spread the pic or the Game. “Did you do it?”
“What did you think was going to happen?” Tim asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You came after my girlfriend? Peter came after his?” Tim nodded over at Kurt.
“It’s their choice,” Charlie said.
“Your friend tried to put those posters up? Mocking me?” For once, Tim didn’t talk like a bully or a monster. He was speaking quietly, reasonably.
“They were just drawings,” Charlie said.
“Of me naked. What did you think we’d do?”
“You destroyed him.”
But still, something was nagging in the back of Charlie’s mind. No one deserved what had happened to Alex. Yet hadn’t they come after Tim, unprovoked? Hadn’t Alex tried to humiliate Tim in his own crazy way? Did Tim have a point? Charlie squelched the thought—it was flat wrong, he knew it.
“We just did what you tried on us. But better. An eye for an eye.” Tim shrugged. “Maybe we took two.”
You destroyed him. What will Alex do now?
The worry started spiraling inside Charlie: What would he do if someone sent his naked pic to the entire school? Add to that Alex’s instability, his depression and darkness and drugs. With a shiver, Charlie recalled how quickly Alex had offered to cut himself with the razors in the boiler room when Kenny balked. Charlie thought of Alex’s words at his house: Nobody likes me. I’d be better off gone.
“Did you see where he went?” Charlie asked desperately.
Tim almost said something snide, but then he saw how worried Charlie was and gave him an honest answer. “He went toward the lot.”
Kurt had been quiet this whole time. The sadist in chief, Tim’s henchman, stood just behind him, strangely muted. He’d finally gotten his way, shown the world his masterpiece of bullying, captured in a single image. Maybe it hadn’t felt as great as he’d hoped.
Charlie wanted to be magnanimous, since they’d told him where Alex had gone, but he couldn’t help the rage inside. He wanted to attack them, but it would be suicide: Tim had batted him away like a fly last time, and now it was two against one. But he had to say something.
“How would you feel? If someone posted something secret about you?”
Tim thought about it. Behind him, did Kurt shudder just a little, or was Charlie reading in?
Tim said, “I would hate it. That’s why I have to stay in control. That’s why I can’t have you guys running around messing with us. You know what my dad taught me? The world is a joke. No one knows what they’re doing. Never blink. If someone hits you, hit back twice as hard. If someone smells blood, it’s over.”
Charlie nodded. Even his sarcastic question had backfired. But the anger was second to his worry for Alex, and he had to pass them to get to the lot. Or he could double back around like a coward, and they’d know it. So he walked slowly and calmly toward them, clenching inside, wondering if they’d take this opportunity to smash him on the back of the head as he passed.
Yet their brutality apparently had a nobility, a barbarian’s code.
He passed between them, and no one laid a finger on him.
Charlie was about to cut his losses and keep going, but a question occurred to him, the one that always seemed to come up since he’d started playing the Game.
Alex was attacked days ago. Charlie turned around. “Why’d you do it today?”
Tim said, “Because you told me not to.”
“What?”
“Your text this morning. Delete the pic or you’ll kick my ass? Now’s your chance, Charlie. Come try it.”
Charlie closed his eyes. The Game could make them or destroy them. Tim and Kurt were just as much pawns as Charlie was. He turned his back and went toward the lot.
Then he got his own text from the Game:
Better hurry