“I moved here from Chicago last summer,” Jimmy said. “I had this friend who was going through some stuff, and he offed himself. In my house, with my dad’s gun. I’m the one who found him.”
For a second I found myself thankful that Hayden had chosen the method he did. I couldn’t imagine my last memory of him involving blood. It made me nauseous just thinking about it. I looked over at Rachel again; now she looked a little shocked. I figured she’d known the basics but not the details.
“It’s why we left,” he continued. “None of us could stand to be in that house, and my mom kept saying how terrible it was to live in cities, all the awful things that happened there.”
“Kind of ironic, that you’d move here, and then . . .” My voice trailed off. I wasn’t quite ready to say it out loud.
“Yeah, that’s one word for it. It would have been a lot harder if I hadn’t already met your sister.” He smiled at Rachel, and she smiled back. I could see how into him she really was. Even Mom was starting to warm to him. “I loved Chicago—I just wanted to leave the house, not the city. It was my dad’s idea to take off for cow country.”
“Corn, not cows,” Rachel said, and squeezed his hand. I’d been tempted to say the same thing, but let’s face it, there were some cows.
“Anyway, I couldn’t talk to anyone about it back home, and I didn’t really want to talk about it here, but now that it’s been a little while I can think about it more clearly. So if you ever need to talk, you can talk to me. Maybe not now, but someday.” I wondered if my sister had put him up to it, but that would be so not like her. And he looked like he really meant it.
“That’s a very nice offer, Jimmy,” Mom said.
I could see Rachel trying not to smirk. This couldn’t have gone better if she’d scripted it herself. She looked over at me, willing me to say something.
“Okay, thanks,” I said. I was starting to like him, despite myself. Too bad he hadn’t showed up before Mr. Beaumont. Then I could have at least said I had someone else to talk to.
The doorbell rang before we could say anything else. Finally, food. It seemed like everyone was grateful to have the pizza to focus on for a while.
“Tell me about your first day back,” Mom asked, after we’d all started eating.
“No big deal,” I said. I really did not want to talk about Mr. Beaumont.
“You missed the first few days when everyone was talking about Hayden,” Rachel said. “Now they’re all talking about what happened to Jason Yoder.”
I turned to her so fast I almost hurt my neck. “What happened to Jason?”
“You didn’t hear? This rumor started going around that he’s gay, I guess. And then, no one knows exactly what happened, but the police found him tied to a telephone pole outside the Blue Star bar. Buck naked. He didn’t press charges or anything—I guess he hoped no one would find out. But people always do. Everyone’s talking about it.”
Libertyville was a pretty conservative town. Even though Iowa was progressive in being one of the first states to legalize gay marriage, it hadn’t trickled down to us quite yet. I hadn’t heard the rumor about Jason, but that wasn’t surprising—I wasn’t exactly clued in enough to be part of the rumor mill. But I’d heard about the Blue Star bar. It wasn’t officially a gay bar, but in the scheme of our small town, it basically was.
The idea of Jason Yoder—one macho third of the bully trifecta—being tied naked to a telephone pole was a weird image. It was probably his worst nightmare.
“Rachel, there’s no need for that kind of gossip,” Mom said. “That poor boy.”
“Poor boy?” I said, feeling myself getting angry yet again. “He was a total bully who treated Hayden like crap. I’m not sorry.”
“Sam!” Mom snapped. “You don’t have to like him, but you shouldn’t say something like that.”
“What’s to be sorry about, anyway?” Rachel said. “You didn’t do it.”
“Of course not. I just meant I’m not sorry it happened to him. That guy was an asshole.”
“Language, Sam!” Mom said. “And besides, we’re not the kind of family who wishes bad things on other people.”
Maybe you’re not, I wanted to say, and I could see Rachel was thinking the same thing.
AFTER DINNER I WENT BACK UP to my room. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep right away, so I decided to play Mage Warfare, Archmage or no Archmage. I remembered when Hayden and I had first started playing. We’d talked a lot about the kinds of characters we wanted to create. I’d just read this crazy book about a video game that was supposed to be like reality, where the author had all these theories about why people created characters and acted the way they did in the game world. In the book some of them replicated their lives online—they had the same jobs, drove the same cars, hung out with the same kinds of people. It was like they were living their lives twice. And then there were the others, who went as far in the opposite direction as they could: accountants became movie stars, schoolteachers became rapists, that sort of thing. It was fascinating to me.
Hayden found it disturbing, though. “Both of those options seem off,” he’d said. “It’s hard to imagine that people who were so content with their lives would want to be the same way online—they could just be happy in the real world and not bother with the game at all. And does it really make sense that people’s fantasies would have no resemblance to their real lives? I mean, if the schoolteachers were killing bratty kids that would be one thing, right?” He thought it made more sense if people were who they were but better. People who had boring jobs but loved karaoke would be the rock stars; beat cops would save the world. He would be tall and handsome and magical, and he’d fight for good. Like the Archmage.
I was more intrigued by the darker aspects of gaming. I kind of liked being a bad guy in a world where no one knew who I was and where there were no consequences. And the whole idea of good and evil—there were so many people everyone thought were good who were clearly awful, so why was it a given that being on the good side was any better than being on the bad one?
“If everyone thought like you did, there would be anarchy,” Hayden said.
“I’m not sure that would be the worst thing in the world,” I said. “How can you say you believe in good and evil as absolutes and then look at politics? Both sides think they’re the good guys, and both seem like idiots to me. And they’re totally inconsistent—one side says government is bad but wants to control everything you do, and the other says government is good and then can’t get anything done, which makes government look bad. If there were anarchy, people would have to find ways to work together to make anything happen.”
“It’s crazy to think people would manage without anyone in charge,” he said. “Look how desperate most people are for someone to tell them what to do.”
“Some people,” I said. “But look at us—we both learn way more on our own than we do at school, and we’re more interested in things we find for ourselves.”
“That’s what makes us weird,” he said, but he laughed as he said it.