“Do you want to come to Game Night?” I asked Brianna. She scrunched her nose without even looking at me and continued hanging up clothes that seemed way too fancy for school. I got the feeling she was not a scholarship student.
According to the flyer I’d seen in the dorm, Game Night would take place at the Rathskeller. I’d looked up the word online and immediately gotten confused—the word was German and referred to basement bars located in government buildings. Gardner wasn’t German, I was pretty sure there wasn’t going to be a bar at a high school, and the town center was miles away.
As it turned out, the only connection Gardner’s Rathskeller had to any real Rathskeller was its location in a basement. After Brianna turned me down I wandered over on my own to what turned out to be the rec center, heading downstairs with a crowd of other students. Gardner was a three-year institution—we’d all had our chance to either excel at or screw up our first year of high school—so I had to get used to the idea of first-, second-, and third-year students, rather than sophomores, juniors, and seniors. A group of second years had organized the event, but I figured the rest of the students filing into the basement were first years like me.
The room was filled with couches and chairs from eras long past, and ranging in fabric from tattered basket-weave tweed to pleather. It definitely felt like a hangout for scholarship kids. I chose a faded floral-print armchair and sunk in, craning my neck to face a raised platform in the middle of the room. On it stood a pair of second years, one male and one female, both knobby-kneed, the girl nearly a foot taller than the boy, both looking far younger than I’d have expected sixteen-year-olds to look, both staring out at us with bug-eyed intensity.
“Welcome to Gardner!” Both boy and girl clapped their hands together as they shouted their greeting in unison. They’d clearly practiced. The fact they’d needed to practice something so basic made me wonder how smart they could possibly be.
“We know orientation doesn’t officially start until tomorrow, but we thought it would be fun to do some get-to-know-you stuff first and get the party started down here at the Rat!” The girl talked through a toothy smile. “We’re going to split the room in half, and each of us will lead the first game.”
I looked around, trying to figure out if there was a side I wanted to be on, but how could I tell in a basement full of strangers? Any one of them could be my future best friend or someone I would completely despise. Back home I knew who my friends were, or had been; I’d been hanging out with the same group of girls since kindergarten, expanding the group only slightly once middle school started and we met kids from the other public schools. Here I had no one, so I just stayed where I was. Worst-case scenario I could always take a nap.
Maybe forty kids had shown up of the hundred or so in the first-year class, so we ended up in groups of twenty. The first game wasn’t much of a game at all; it was more of an icebreaker. We had to introduce ourselves, say where we were from, and then say something unusual about ourselves. After the first few people spoke I could tell we were all trying to figure out who the scholarship kids were, but it wasn’t as easy to tell as you’d think. The intros went by so fast I couldn’t keep track of anyone’s names, so I was grateful for anything memorable. My group included an extremely good-looking Asian boy wearing glasses and an argyle sweater who claimed the TV show Breaking Bad had inspired a love of chemistry; a girl with upsettingly perfect hair who was some sort of internet fashion influencer; and a too-pale boy who appeared to be twelve years old who was, in fact, twelve years old.
The introductions got everyone talking, so they served their purpose, even if their more lingering lesson was to teach us to be skeptical of one another. (I, for one, had convinced myself the chemist was here for cooking meth.) Our next game was a round of Assassin, in which one person is designated the killer and has to murder the other players by winking at them without getting caught in the act. From this I learned quickly that (a) Gardner students were as aggressivley competitive as one might expect, and (b) a very cute red-haired freckled boy’s gentle smile belied his ability to decimate the population. I took him down, but it was less about my ability to solve mysteries and more about the fact that I was staring at him the whole time. Still, I liked the fact that I’d been the first person to win something here. I could tell people were impressed.
After a few more rounds of Assassin people got bored, and several first years wandered off, presumably to find more interesting things to do. People tossed around ideas for more games, and eventually we settled on a round of Would You Rather. I stuck around, even though I’d always hated that game.
The game started as it usually did, with gross questions (“Would you rather eat worms or maggots?”) quickly devolving into sexual questions (“Would you rather sleep with your best friend’s significant other or your middle school principal?”) I held back and watched as my fellow classmates revealed their preferences for worms and friendship betrayal. This game was the worst.
Once people ran out of questions that were both gross and sexual, the room fell quiet for a moment. “Can I ask one?” a boy asked. His skin, eyes, and hair were all nearly the same shade of light brown, and he had an intense look on his face. I had a feeling his question would be neither gross nor sexual. “If you knew the world was going to end tomorrow, would you rather die along with your friends and family and everyone you’ve ever known, or live among strangers to rebuild civilization?” The boy’s eyes widened as he spoke, flirting with the line between curious and creepy, inching a toe past and then pulling back. He must have been stewing over his phrasing the whole time we’d been playing.
Finally, a question I was interested in hearing the answer to. Given how I was feeling about my parents these days I was pretty sure I knew where I was at, but more information couldn’t hurt. “How’s the world going to end?” I asked.
“She speaks!” the red-haired assassin said, and I hated myself for blushing.
“Will there still be technology?” asked a wiry girl with short, bleached-out hair.
“How can you be sure we wouldn’t know anyone?” asked the terrified twelve-year-old.
“Is it, like, the Rapture or something? Where everything would be exactly the same but the people would be gone?” This from the meth chemist.
“I’m not sure it matters how things end,” the shaggy-haired boy said, “but I can make it interesting, I guess. Let’s say plague. The survivors are immune but there are few enough that the power grid goes down. No power, no internet. Not enough people to keep the world moving as it has been, though we would work together to bring it back.” He flushed red. “Guess I’ve told you where I’m at.”
The twelve-year-old immediately said, “I’d want to die.” He looked like he wanted to die right now.
“I’d live for sure!” shouted the meth chemist. “I’d go steal an Escalade and then raid the grocery store for all the food and water. Then I’d charge people so much money I’d be the richest person alive.”
“Because Walter White over here would definitely be the only one to think of that,” said the wiry girl. “Yeah, you’re a real genius.”