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Chapter 22

Part 2: Next Level / Chapter 22

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I heard the laughter first—at least a dozen kids chuckling and snorting.

Then a whole world faded in around me. I looked up to see a series of hideous fingerpainted portraits lining the picture rail molding above a chalk board. To my left, a hamster habitat sat atop a table beneath a world map pinned to a corkboard. To my right hung a poster of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue, accompanied by his famous quote: “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”

I was in a classroom. No not a classroom, my classroom. My third-grade classroom to be precise. And judging from my point of view, I’d been shrunk to my third-grade height.

Holy Toledo. The game had done some impossible stuff up to this point, but fooling around with the spacetime continuum? We were in uncharted territory to say the least. The questions were coming fast and furious. How was I here? Why was I here? And if the game could punt me through time, couldn’t it at least have the decency to send me back to kill baby Hitler? Hm. Darla was right. I shouldn’t pick on poor Hitler so much.

Speaking of Darla, she was nowhere to be seen. Where was she? Was she okay? And what the hell had she meant by “to have and to hold”? I steeled myself, realizing the answers to all those questions would have to wait until I figured out why I was in this classroom with all these kids cackling like they’d just taken a hit of nitrous oxide.

I looked down for the first time and noticed I was wearing a suit—a green suit. It was my special occasion suit. I’d worn it to funerals and weddings and other stuff I hated. The only time I’d ever worn it to school was—

Oh no.

The suit.

The laughter.

I looked behind me and saw a little brunette girl with pigtails laughing so hard tears were practically squirting out of her eyes. Her name was Becky Borgna. And she was the devil.

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I know it’s hard to believe that an eight-year-old girl could be the actual devil. But Becky’s credentials were impeccable. There was the milk poured over a classmate’s head in the lunch room, the gum stuck in the hair of no less than four girls, and of course the wedgies and flat tires inflicted on innocent passers-by on the regular. But the worst of it? This one time Becky had told me that Katie Gilmore liked me. And not just liked me, but “like-liked” me. In third grade, this was virtually unheard of. But I embraced it. The next day, I put on my special occasion suit and brought Katie a Spring bouquet of wild-flowers. It was a gesture that was both prodigiously romantic and tragically ill-advised. As it turned out, Katie did not like-like me. Katie didn’t even like me. Katie, in fact, disliked me. I’ll never forget the sensation of her slapping the flowers out of my hand, or her look of red-faced humiliation as she fled the classroom, mortified by my invitation to “catch the matinee on Sunday.”

My father had assured me that said invitation would seal the deal. But it hadn’t sealed the deal. It had led to this moment, right here. In some bizarro Dickensian turn, the Ghost of Trauma Past had whisked me away to relive the worst moment of my eighth year.

As I recalled, the teacher had gone downstairs for supplies before class began. So there was no adult to come to my rescue. And per third grade bully dynamics, the rest of the class was overjoyed to see Becky’s cruelty being directed at anyone who wasn’t them.

I realized now that there were tears in my eyes. Alas, unlike everyone else’s tears, they weren’t tears of laughter. They were the regular kind—a reaction to Katie’s brutal rejection and subsequent flight. And I knew what was going to happen next.

As the giggling and guffawing of my entire class crescendoed, Becky stood up and sneered, “Smooth move, Henry Bubble!” And the class headed for a double-crescendo.

Remember, I wasn’t just husky as a little kid. I was full-on chubby—round and soft. So replacing the “H” in my name with a “B” was low-hanging fruit in the name-calling game. And the name-calling game was a game Becky Borgna enjoyed very much. Because Becky Borgna was the devil.

“Henry Bubble!” Warren Plasset chimed in. “Good one, Becky! Good one!” Warren was Becky’s right-hand man. A rat-faced little runt she’d spared from her torments, presumably in exchange for his soul.

Events were unfolding just as they had nearly two decades before. But I thought maybe they didn’t have to. I still had the stats on my arms. And whatever Becky was, it wasn’t a regular NPC that would be immune to my Weaponized Noggin. I could head-butt her right through the window and send her plummeting to the street two stories below where she’d be run over by five or six cars, splattering her guts across the asphalt in a glorious rainbow of viscera. I pictured myself looking down on the grisly scene and shouting, “Who’s laughing now, Becky?”

Under ordinary circumstances, all that might sound pretty extreme. But these weren’t ordinary circumstances. Heck, there was no way I’d actually been sent through time. This whole thing had to be some kind of simulation. So: time for less thinking, more headbutting little girl into traffic.

Lowering my head, I charged across the classroom, bellowing in my prepubescent soprano, “You mess with the bull, you get the horns!” I reached top speed just as I launched myself head-first into Becky’s midsection and . . . bounced off like I’d hit an NFL lineman.

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I stumbled to the left and collided with several nearby desks, before falling to the ground. Then, as a fresh peel of laughter erupted from the class, my stat radar finally kicked in to give me the bad news. My attack hadn’t even made a dent in the Life-O-Meter I was now sensing from Becky, leaving it topped off at an astronomical eighty-five points.

“Holy crap!” I mumbled, finally clued in to what I should have known from the jump: Becky Borgna was the level 2 boss.

As I ambled to my feet and faced her, she took a step toward me and tilted her head left, then right, popping her neck audibly.

“You wanna go, Bubble?” she said. “Let’s go.”

She raised her right hand and balled it into a fist, one finger at a time. A gasp went up from the class as we all waited for her to raise her other fist to complete the “put up your dukes” gesture. But there was no other fist. Just an open palm that slid over to hover beneath the right fist.

“Rock! Paper! Scissors!” she chanted as she pounded her fist against her palm in time with each word.

I didn’t have time to comprehend what was happening, much less react, before she cried “Shoot!”

Her fist descended, and froze in place—a cruel and unyielding ball of thumb and fingers.

I frowned, still not understanding. And then . . . a small rock sailed through the air from somewhere behind Becky and smashed into my temple.

“Erahhhhh!” I wailed in shocked agony as I staggered to the left, raising a hand to my temple to nurse the throbbing ache. The hand came away bloody and I sensed my Life-O-Meter dipping by six points.

“Good one, Becky! Good one!” Warren cried as the rest of the class gave a barbaric cheer, like a coliseum crowd witnessing first blood in a gladiatorial arena. From their rigid poses and looped behaviors, I noticed that these kids seemed like NPCs in the traditional sense—just ambient background sprites. But I regretted taking the moment to size them up, as Becky shouted, “Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!” again. Looking back at her, I saw her fist descend and open wide, palm down.

A sheet of binder paper materialized beside her and whooshed by me. I didn’t even feel the contact until I looked over and saw blood gushing from my right shoulder. The papercut had sliced clean through my suit sleeve, opening a gash in my pudgy, eight-year-old arm.

I pressed my left hand to the wound, which felt less like a paper cut and more like a katana slash. I registered another four points had gone missing from my Life-O-Meter, as I tried to keep my footing.

Bracing myself against the wall, I was vaguely aware of Warren shouting “Good one, Becky! Good one!” again and the other kids cheering again. Then I thought I heard a ringing in my ears. But no. No, the ringing wasn’t just in my ears. I’d actually heard a bell.

Two bony hands grabbed me by the shoulders and yanked me backward into the corner of the classroom. I fell into a sitting position on a stool that had magically appeared there.

“What are you doing in there, ya bum?” Nancy’s mom shrieked at me in a gravelly, put-on voice.

She was dressed in black sweatpants, a grey wool knit cardigan, and a black beanie. The outfit and the impersonation evoked a visceral memory of sitting on the couch with my dad watching Burgess Meredith’s Mickey Goldmill tell Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa that he was going to “eat lightning and crap thunder.”

“What’s going on here?” I blurted.

“She’s murderizing ya!” Nancy’s mom went on, still channeling Rocky’s trainer and father figure. “And you’re just standing there takin’ it!”

It was hard to get my head around what was happening but it was finally sinking in. I was playing the most deadly game of Rochambeau in human history.

It was win or die.

I’d thought I’d have more time before another boss came around. God knows I would have, if the game made any damn sense. But nope. While, my GetGet grinding strategy had offset the janky dynamics in some small way, considering Becky’s stats, it wasn’t going to be enough. It wasn’t going to be anywhere near enough.

I felt light-headed from the blood I’d lost, the concussion I’d sustained, or both. While I’d suffered worse injuries recently, they’d all happened near the end of my various conflicts. So I hadn’t had to operate for long before they’d been hyper-healed. This was going to be different.

I looked over at Becky, who was seated on another stool that had magically materialized in the opposite corner of the class room. Warren was standing behind her, rubbing her shoulders like the freaky little sycophant he was. She glared at me for a moment, and then spat viciously into a water bucket Warren rushed to offer her. Seeing an eight-year-old girl channeling Rocky 3’s Clubber Lang would have been comical under less “I’m definitely going to die” circumstances. But right here, right now, it was spine-chilling.

I’d found a way to squirm out of plenty of scrapes in the last forty-eight hours, but I didn’t think there was a way through this. While I didn’t know exactly how much harder Becky’s attacks would hit than mine, if her other stats were comparable to her Life-O-Meter, it would be a lot harder. That meant my life depended on me winning far more than I lost in a game of chance. And that’s not usually how games of chance work.

I thought, This is really it. I’m not coming out of this alive. But in that moment, I suddenly felt a bizarre sense of acceptance. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t wild about the idea of dying. I just thought maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world. After all, how important was I, really, in the grand scheme of things? Not very. I mean for crying out loud, my biggest brag was a brand new TV.

But then I thought of Robbie and snapped out of it. This idiotic game wasn’t just about me. It wasn’t about me at all. It was about my nephew getting a real shot at life—a shot at achieving more than the purchase of a new TV. So I’d be damned if I was going to quit without a fight.

The bell rang again, and I stood up as Nancy’s mom yelled “Knock her block off!”

Becky rose and strode toward me, the class cheering with demented delight.

I raised my right fist and slid my left palm over to hover beneath it. And then . . . it was on.