Bryson chewed his lumpy oatmeal slowly, choked it down, replaying the scene. The moment that landed him there with a body on fire. The punches thrown, the kicks kicked. Everyone’s phones out, recording. He’d seen the clips all over social media the night before. Commentary. Filters. Memes. Hashtags. #BurmanStreetBeatdown. The shaky footage of him throwing haymakers, trying not to fall, because once you fall, it’s over. Everyone knows that. Ain’t no getting up. Ain’t no coming back.
He signed out. Then signed back in. Then deleted all the apps from his phone. At least for a few days. He wouldn’t have—he wouldn’t have been able to—but his mom made him. Made him unplug from the laughs and likes. From the catchy captions and antics from kids who barely spoke in school but had mastered saying the right things online, matched with the perfect light and angle to turn out-of-this-world boredom into an Oscar-worthy blockbuster. And now Bryson was sitting alone on the living room floor, trying to swallow sludgy oats and forget it all.
By going to war.
The television glowed.
Call of Duty.
Xbox, powered on.
Headset on.
Controller gripped,
as Bryson Wills crawled into World War II.
* * *
Ty Carson went to school today. And the whole time he was there he felt like he was being watched, stared at even though the new rumor had taken over yesterday’s old one. Because rumors only last a day. But still, Ty felt like his classmates were following him. Not stalking him, peeping around corners and things like that. No. But more like looking away whenever he’d catch their eyes. Or cutting their conversations whenever he walked by, like he was some kind of human mute button. Made him paranoid. So paranoid he even felt like every clock was actually a giant eye, and every time the bell rang he imagined it was the building laughing at him. He was losing it and wished he could make himself small. Unseeable. Turn himself into a speck. Into a black streak swiped across the floor from a sneaker sole. Turn himself into a penny swept into one of the corners by Mr. Munch’s big broom. But he couldn’t do none of that, so he shrank mentally. Tried to crawl inside himself, another thing he wished he could really do. Be like a turtle. Pull his head into the home of his body. Look around the shell. Try to figure out why he felt how he felt. Why he did what he did, which was nothing but felt like something. Yesterday. Figure out if it was wrong. It wasn’t wrong. But maybe it was. He didn’t know and that was the hard part. Or at least part of the hard part. About yesterday. Not just yesterday, but yesterday… too. Yesterday when everything was fine. Yesterday when he could just be… Ty.
Ty was cool enough to be cool with everybody, because most people looked at him like a human video game. Bright. Full of color and sound. Awkward movements. Dramatic moments. He lived in his own world, but it was a world full of windows that everyone could see into. A world full of bloops and bleeps, vrooms, and the occasional boom. It wasn’t strange to see him pretending to crawl up the lockers, or for him to perform tactical movements like barrel rolls in the middle of the hallway. The type of kid who wore his backpack on the front of his body—a chest pack—just so he could pretend it was some type of armor, and on any given day an umbrella could become either sword or shotgun. And to top it all off, Ty was one of the best gamers around. Nationally ranked. And everyone knew. He’d won tournaments and competitions and had been trying to get Ms. Wockley to convince Mr. Jarrett to start a gaming league at the school.
“We don’t need more distractions, Mr. Carson,” she’d say, biting down hard on her words.
“Bleep, bleep, bleep, bloop, Ms. Wockley,” he’d reply. He’d shake his head and she’d shake hers, and that would be that.
Because everyone knew Ty’s gaming skills, his classmates were always trying to convince him to play on their squads, but Ty only played with the best. Well, he was the best so… the second best. And at their school, the second best was Bryson Wills. A boy whose father made him grow out his hair, and instead of letting him get it braided or cornrowed, convinced him that an Afro was the best way to go. And Bryson owned it. He owned it so much that his screen name was AfroGamer. Ty’s was TYred, which he said was pronounced “tired” because he was so tired of beating everyone. But most gamers thought it was TY Red, which made sense too, because Ty saw red whenever he was playing. All instinct. All thumbs.
Bryson and Ty lived close enough to each other to get together on weekends and play. Sometimes, Bryson would come to Ty’s house, a small house over on Crossman—Bryson liked this because Ms. CeeCee, the world’s best candy lady, lived at the top of Ty’s street—and other times Ty would come over to Bryson’s house, a bigger house over on Burman. Ty preferred to play at Bryson’s. The snacks were better. The TV was bigger. And a tiny dog named Max Payne wasn’t running around barking and clawing at it.
The game of choice: Call of Duty, World War II, which really bothered his parents.
“Pac-Man… now, that’s a game. You just eat and run away from ghosts, which is what I like to call, life,” his father said, joking.
“Or Super Mario Bros,” his mother added. “I mean, other than fighting the big bosses, you’re basically just trying not to be eaten by the environment. Mushrooms and plants and…”
“Turtles!” his father yipped.
“It’s nothing like what you’re playing.”
Ty tried to convince his parents Call of Duty was educational. That it was basically like interactive social studies class. That there was no better way to learn about that particular war than to jump right into it.
“There is no way you can know war, son,” Ty’s mother scolded. “Not unless you’ve fought in one. And you haven’t. You’re talking about Nazis. That’s a lot more than some video game.”
Ty understood that he didn’t know the kind of war he was simulating in the game. That his controller wasn’t a rifle and his raggedy family-reunion T-shirt wasn’t a flak jacket. His headset wasn’t a helmet, and the sounds in his ears were, in fact, just sounds in his ears. But Ty also knew that there was some kind of war he was in. Some kind of battle he did know but couldn’t make sense of. That the other sounds in his head were more than just sounds, that they made his heart do weird things, made his stomach tighten. Ty knew the anxiety of a kind of war. He knew the adrenaline and the confusion of it all.
Because yesterday. Because yesterday. Because yesterday.
Ty had been kissed. By a boy. Slim.
At the water fountain after first period. PE.
On his cheek.
But close enough to his mouth to count.
They were fighting over the water.
We were fighting over the water, right?
It was weird.
He was surprised. But not mad. Which was more surprising.
It was so weird.
It wasn’t that weird.
It was a little weird. But not a whole lot weird.
It was seen. By someone no one saw see it.
And that someone told everyone. Everyone.
And by lunch, Slim—whose real name was Salem—had twisted the story, told everyone Ty kissed him. So when Ty walked into the cafeteria, he walked into a minefield. A war zone. Everyone locked and loaded, firing at him.