The Fun Parts

the DUNGEON MASTER

The Dungeon Master has detention. We wait at his house by the county road. The Dungeon Master’s little brother, Marco, puts out corn chips and cola.

Marco is a paladin. He fights for the glory of Christ. Marco has been many paladins since winter break. They are all named Valentine, and the Dungeon Master makes certain they die with the least amount of dignity.

It’s painful enough when he rolls the dice, announces that a drunken orc has unspooled some Valentine’s guts for sport. Worse are the silly accidents. One Valentine tripped on a floor plank and cracked his head on a mead bucket. He died of trauma in the stable.

“Take it!” the Dungeon Master said that time from behind his laminated cardboard screen. Spit sprayed over the top of it. “Eat your fate,” he said. “Your thread just got the snippo!”

The Dungeon Master has a secret language we don’t quite understand. They say he’s been treated for it.

Whenever the Dungeon Master kills a Valentine, Marco runs off and cries to their father. Doctor Varelli nudges his son back into the study, sticks his bushy head in the door, says, “Play nice, my beautiful puppies.”

“Father,” the Dungeon Master will say, “stay the fuck out of my mind realm.”

“I honor your wish, my beauty.”

Doctor Varelli speaks like that. It’s not a secret language, just an embarrassing one. Maybe that’s why his wife left him, left Marco and the Dungeon Master, too. It’s not a decent reason to leave, but as the Dungeon Master hopes to teach us, the world is not a decent place to live.

* * *

Now we sit with our chips.

“If they didn’t say corn, I wouldn’t think of them as corn,” says Brendan.

He’s a third-level wizard.

“Detention?” Cherninsky says. He stands, squats, sits, stands. He’s got black bangs and freckles, suffers from that disease where you can’t stay in your chair.

“He chucked a spaz in Spanish,” I say. “I heard one of the seniors.”

“The teacher rides him,” Marco says. Marco despises the Dungeon Master but loves his brother. I like Marco, but I’m no fan of Valentine. I’m a third-level ranger. I fight for the glory of me.

The door smacks open.

“Ah, the doomed.” The Dungeon Master strides past us, short and pasty, with a fine brown beard.

He sinks down at the desk behind his screen, which on his side has all the lists and tables for playing printed on it, and on our side has a mural full of morning stars and fire. We’ve been ordered never to touch the screen. We never do, not even when he’s at detention. The Dungeon Master shuffles some papers — his maps and grids. Dice click in his stubby hand. Behind him, on the wall, hang Doctor Varelli’s diplomas. The diplomas say he’s a child psychiatrist, but he never brings patients here, and I’m not sure he ever leaves.

“When last we met,” the Dungeon Master begins, “Olaf the thief had been caught stealing a loaf of pumpernickel from the village bakery. A halfling baker’s boy had cornered our friend with a bread knife. Ready to roll?”

“I don’t want to die this way,” Cherninsky says.

Cherninsky always dies this way — we all do, or die of something like it — but he seems pretty desperate this afternoon. Maybe he’s thinking of people who really have died, like his baby sister. She drowned in the ocean. Nobody ever mentions it.

“This situation begs the question,” the Dungeon Master says, sips from a can of strawberry milk. “Is bread the staff of life or the staff of death?”

“What does that mean?” Cherninksy says.

“Read more. Enrich yourself.”

“We all read,” Brendan says.

“I mean books,” says the Dungeon Master. “I can’t believe you’re a wizard.”

“Don’t kill me in a bakery,” Cherninksy says.

“Don’t steal bread.”

“What do you want? I’m a thief.”

“Roll.”

Cherninksy rolls, dies, hops out of his chair.

“So why’d you get detention?” he says.

“When did I get detention?”

“Today,” I say. “You got it today.”

The Dungeon Master peers at me over his screen.

“Today, bold ranger, I watched a sad little pickpocket bleed out on a bakery floor. That’s the only thing that has happened today. Get it?”

“Got it.”

I know that he is strange and not as smart as he pretends, but at least he keeps the borders of his mind realm well patrolled. That must count for something.

“Now,” says the Dungeon Master, “any of you feebs want to take on the twerp with the kitchen utensil? Or would you rather consider a back-alley escape?”

“Back-alley escape,” says Marco.

“Valentine the Twenty-seventh?” the Dungeon Master says.

“Twenty-ninth.”

“Don’t get too attached, brother.”

* * *

There are other kids, other campaigns. They have what teachers call imaginations. Some of them are in gifted. They play in the official after-school club.

“I’ve got a seventeenth-level elf wizard,” Eric tells me in our freshman homeroom. “She flies a dragon named Green Star. We fought an army of frost giants last week. What about you?”

“We never even see a dragon, let alone fly one. You have a girl character?”

“You play with that psycho senior, what’s-his-face.”

“The Dungeon Master,” I say.

“He calls himself that? Like it’s his name?”

“He doesn’t call himself anything.”

“I heard that when he was little, he hit some kid with an aluminum bat. Gave him brain damage.”

“Completely made up,” I say, though I’m pretty sure it’s true. “He’s very smart.”

“He’s not in gifted,” Eric says.

“Neither am I.”

“Good point,” Eric says, turns to talk to Lucy Mantooth.

* * *

Most days we play until we’re due home for dinner. But sometimes, if we call our houses for permission, Doctor Varelli cooks for us — hamburgers, spaghetti — and if it’s not a school night, we sleep over. Breakfast brings waffles, bacon, eggs, toast.

“Eat, eat, my puppies.”

We puppies eat in the study. Since we die so often, we take breaks while one of us rolls a new character.

One day, while Marco makes Valentine the Thirty-second, I wander out to the parlor. Doctor Varelli sits on the divan with a shiny wooden guitar. His fingers flutter over the strings, and he sings something high and weepy. He stops, looks up.

“It’s an Italian ballad.” There is shame in his voice, but it’s not about the song.

I follow his gaze to an old photograph on the wall. A young woman poses beside a fountain. Pigeons swoop off the stone rim. Marco once told me that this woman is his mother.

“So beautiful,” I say.

“Of course,” Doctor Varelli says. “Rome is a beautiful city.”

Later, we gather in the study for a new adventure. Our characters join up at the Pinworm Inn. We’ve all died here before, in brawls and dagger duels, of poisoned ale, or infections borne on unwashed steins. But the Dungeon Master insists the place has the best shepherd’s pie this side of the Flame Lakes.

We befriend a blind man. Cherninsky steals his silver, but the poor sap does not notice, so we befriend him some more. He tells us of a cave near the top of Mount Total Woe, of a dragon in the cave, a hoard beneath the dragon.

“Sounds dangerous,” says Marco.

“That’s the point,” I say.

“It’s a tough decision,” Brendan says. I barely know Brendan. He met Marco at swim club or something. He’s nice, kind of dim. Wherever he goes to school, I doubt the bullies even notice him.

Not true of Cherninsky. He makes a habit of asking for it, though some tormentors hang back. There’s something wrong and a little sickening about him in the schoolyard. You sense he might take a bully’s punches to the death. He’s the kid people whisper has no mother or father at home, but of course he does, they’re just old and stopped raising him years ago, maybe when his sister drowned. He always plays a thief, and even outside of the game, when he’s just Cherninsky, he steals stuff from the stores on Main. He and the Dungeon Master are not so different, or this town hurts them the same, which is probably why they pick on each other.

“Damn it, Brendan,” Cherninsky says now. “A tough decision? I say we go to that cave and get the gold. And then we get wenches.”

“Wenches?” Brendan says.

“Tarts,” Cherninsky says. “Elf beaver.”

It’s all a charade because there is no decision. There is no alternative. We shall scale Mount Total Woe or die trying. Most likely the latter.

“We’re going to grease that dragon,” I say.

“Grease?” Brendan says.

“Vietnam,” I say.

“Oh, right.”

But now the Dungeon Master has a mysterious appointment, which Doctor Varelli leans in to remind his beautiful puppy of, and the game adjourns.

Cherninsky and I head home. Soon we’re near the reservoir. We squish ourselves under the fence. We stumble down a rock embankment and start throwing things into the water, whatever we can find — rocks, bottles, old toys, parts of cars. We’ve all grown up doing this. I guess it’s our child psychiatry.

Cherninsky drags a shredded tire toward the shoreline. He waves off my offer to help.

“So what’s your opinion?” he asks. “Think this Mount Woe thing is going to be any different?”

The tire wobbles in the water, pitches over with a splash. I whip a golf ball at its treads.

“Maybe,” I say. “It could be.”

“Saddest thing is how Marco and Brendan are so scared of dying. It’s just a game, but he’s playing with their minds. He’s been to Bergen Pines. Did you know that? Certified mental. I’m quitting. This is a game for dorks, gaylords, and psychos, no offense.”

“None taken,” I say, though almost all of it is taken.

“Want to smoke weed?” says Cherninsky, claps my neck.

“No thanks.”

“Want to watch my neighbor take a shower? She usually does it around now. She takes care of herself in there.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Oh, forget it. You want to start a band? I have all the equipment.”

“Where’d you get the equipment?”

“Don’t worry about that. We’d need a name.”

“How about Elf Beaver?”

“That’s pretty stupid,” Cherninsky says. “The fact that you thought of that could be a sign you’re a nimrod. Help me with this other tire.”

* * *

We eat leftover London broil from my mother’s last catering job. My father, home from human resources, has his home-from-work work shirt on. He slices cucumbers for the cucumber salad, his specialty, while my mother pulls a tray from the stove. Upstairs, my sister squeals. She’s all phone calls and baggy sweaters.

Today my ranger nearly got the snippo. A giant warthog jumped him in the woods. Is there even a warthog in the game manual? My ranger — his name is Valium, just to tease Marco — cut the beast down but lost a lot of hit points. Even now I picture him bent over a brook, cupping water onto his wounds. Later he rests in the shade of an oak. The warthog crackles on a spit.

“How’s it going over there?” my mother asks.

“Here?” I say. “Great.”

“Awesome,” my sister says, joining us. “Dead cow. Is there anything veggie?”

“Cucumber salad,” my father says.

“Way to experiment with new dishes, Dad.”

“Way to employ sarcasm,” my father says.

“Not here,” my mother says. “There.”

“Where?” I say.

“The Varelli house.”

“It’s going fine,” I say.

“Is it fun?” my mother asks. “I want you to have fun, you know.”

“Yeah, it’s fun, I guess.”

My mother gives my father one of those meaningful looks that mean nothing to me yet.

“What?” I say.

“The Varelli kid,” my sister says. “Isn’t he the one who flashed those girls at the ice rink? And set his turds on fire in the school parking lot?”

“That was a long time ago,” I say.

“It was kind of cool,” my sister says. “In a pervert way.”

“Poor Varelli,” my father says. “His wife.”

“That’s the thing about it,” my mother says.

“The thing about what?” I say.

My father turns to my sister and me as though he had something to say but has forgotten it.

“I put something special in the cucumber salad. Can you taste it?”

“Veal?” my sister asks.

“I’ve got nothing against you having fun and using your imagination,” my mother says. “But it’s just too crucial a time to get sidetracked with games. And this one’s a little scary. They write those articles about it.”

“My grades are good,” I say.

“It’s middle track, honey. Of course your grades are good. But we’re trying not to be middle-track people.”

Later my father and I do the dishes, scour the pans — our pans, the catering pans.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “Everything will be okay.”

Maybe he’s that guy at the office, too — the reassurance dispenser, the diplomat. The middle man with the middle-track son.

“Are you guys getting a divorce?” I ask for no reason.

“Funny you should say that.”

My father inspects the sudsy platter in his gloved hand.

“Yes,” he says finally, “we are getting a divorce.”

I stand there a stunned moment, until his weird, chirpy laugh kicks in.

“Gotcha!”

He must be the human resources jokester, though maybe I had it coming. Now he gets serious. My mother’s catering gigs keep drying up and the raise he was counting on has fallen through.

My sister and I, my father says, will have to find after-school jobs if we mean to keep ourselves in candy and movies and music.

“There’s still some time,” he says. “Enjoy your game. We’re just saying you might want to find some better things to do while you can. You’re going to be plenty busy.”

I don’t really have better things to do. I could do what I did before I started going to the Varellis’. I could come home and eat too much peanut butter and hide in my room. I could lie in bed and think about Lucy Mantooth, toss a batch, nap until dinnertime. I could watch TV and fake doing my homework. But I’m not sure those are better things.

* * *

We tramp past the tree line of Mount Total Woe, reach a stony ridge shrouded in mist. We hear odd bleats on the wind, and our weapons are wet with the blood of minor beasts we’ve slain along the trail. Deathbirds squawk overhead. Valentine the Whatever scans the rock face for possible points of ingress.

It’s hard to see far in the mist.

“I could weave a spell to clear it,” Brendan says.

“What if the goats are shape-shifters?” Cherninsky says.

“What goats?” Brendan says.

“Those are goats. Only goats bleat.”

“Sheep bleat,” Marco says.

“And anyway,” Cherninksy says, “why should we believe that blind guy at the inn?”

“I think he was chaotic good,” I say. “I recognize my own kind.”

“I’m sure you do,” Marco says.

Marco’s character is lawful good. It makes for what you’d call personality clashes. But today’s game is too amazing to waste bickering. We smite the fanged and scaly, stalk the untold riches the blind man did, in fact, tell us about. Meanwhile, no runaway oxcart smears us into the road. We are not nipped by rabid squirrels. We do not succumb slowly, like one early Valentine, to rectal cancer. This must be what the official after-school game is like — gifted children dreaming up splendors, not middle trackers squirming beneath a nutso’s moods.

What has come over the Dungeon Master? He seems almost happy behind his screen.

“Brendan’s spell works,” he says. “The mist is clearing. About a hundred yards further to the top you can see an outcropping and the mouth of a cave. Guarded, yes, by goats.”

“We’re going into that mountain,” I say. “I can’t believe we are going into that mountain. Let’s stove some heads.”

“And get the gold,” Cherninsky says.

“Stove?” Brendan says.

“He reads,” the Dungeon Master says, and shoots me a grin so rare it’s a benediction. I decide not to tell him I stole “stove” from a whaling movie.

Now we’re at the cave mouth. The goats sing their goat songs and part at our approach. Valentine takes a prayerful knee.

“Enough,” Cherninsky says. “You can blow Christ on the way out.”

“Infidel,” Marco says.

“I’m an atheist,” Cherninsky says.

“There are no atheists in foxholes,” says Marco.

“Where are all these foxholes? I live in a house.”

“Hey,” I say. “Can we go into the fucking cave now?”

We go into the fucking cave now. It’s dark, and we light torches, listen to bats flap off. We hunch and shuffle through the tunnel maze. Putrid fiends lurk at every dead end. That’s how you know it’s a dead end: something that smells like rotten sausage pops up and claws at your eyeballs. This is what we’ve always wanted, the classy monsters, hydras and griffins, basilisks, giant worms. The thief and the wizard set traps and decoys, cast spells of misdirection. Valentine and Valium, that suddenly ferocious duo, berserk right in with swords of dwarven steel. We bash and slice. Creatures fall in quivering sushi-like chunks.

The Dungeon Master, he almost roots for us. He refrains from his dire lessons. We’re already steeped in the dire. We want to stab beasts.

We turn a granite corner, and there, lo and behold, we behold him. The dragon lounges, obscenely, atop a great apron of stone, vermilion scales blazing. Rainbow flame flutters from his nostrils with each dozy breath. He regards us through the slits of his amber eyes.

The dragon’s treasure spills out from beneath him on the floor — gold, silver, rubies, jade. Just what’s heaped around our feet at the threshold of the chamber is a princely sum.

“Let’s take that,” Cherninsky says.

“Take what?” Marco asks.

“What’s around our feet. Just scoop it up and run.”

“Not fight the dragon?” the Dungeon Master asks.

“I like it,” Brendan says. “That’s strategy.”

“The dragon could really kill the hell out of us,” Marco, who will never learn, explains.

“No. Let’s fight the dragon,” I say, and the Dungeon Master nods. “It’s part of the game. Maybe we can tame him and ride him.”

“Ride him?” Cherninsky says. “Are you out of your mind?”

“People do it.”

“It would be cool,” Brendan says.

“I got one thing to say,” Cherninsky says, out of his chair now, pacing. “I’m not going to die here.”

“Take a chance,” I say. “Otherwise it’s just boring. You’re the one who said we shouldn’t be afraid to die.”

“When did I say that?”

“Down at the reservoir.”

“The reservoir,” the Dungeon Master says. “You guys talk about the campaign down there? You suck each other’s little bird dicks and talk tactics?”

“Yeah,” Cherninsky says. “We suck them Bergen Pines style.”

“Guys,” I say. “Stop it. Come on. Let’s decide about the dragon. You really want to bail?”

“Better safe than sorry,” Marco says.

“Is that an old paladin saying?”

“You’re outvoted,” Cherninsky says to me.

“Fine.”

“Okay,” Cherninsky says to the Dungeon Master. “We’ll just scoop up what’s near our feet and not rile the dragon. Can you roll for not riling the dragon?”

“Sure you want to do this?” the Dungeon Master asks. “This moment might never come again.”

“We’re sure.”

“Listen,” the Dungeon Master says. “I know I’ve been hard on all of you. I want to be more easygoing from now on. I want you to have fun.”

“This is fun,” Brendan says. “Really. Thank you. This is so exciting. But I think right now we should just grab a little gold and leave the cave.”

“This is pathetic,” I say.

“You don’t know anything about real violence,” Brendan says.

“What?”

“You heard.”

“It’s a dragon, man! It’s not real!”

I notice Cherninsky slide a scrap of paper over to the Dungeon Master. The Dungeon Master drops dice in his leather cup, the one reserved for the most fateful rolls. The dice thump on the desk blotter.

“Consider the dragon officially riled.”

“No,” Brendan says. “No, no.”

“Get the gold!” Cherninsky says.

I brandish my two-handed sword at the dragon while the others shovel treasure and flee.

“Come on!” they call.

“Go,” I say. “I’ll catch up. I’ve got a sudden craving for dragon burgers.”

A smile wavers on the Dungeon Master’s face. Because I am brave, I realize, he will spare me.

I charge the dragon, leap with my sword for his throat. Rainbow flame pours over my magic chain mail.

The Dungeon Master flicks his eyes at my roll.

“You’re dead. Deep-fried.”

“Huh?”

“A craving for dragon burgers? You think you’re in a movie?”

“No,” I say. “I think I’m in a fantasy game. And I have magic chain mail.”

“Bogus magic chain mail,” the Dungeon Master says. “You bought it off that wino monk.”

“It’s held up okay until now.”

“You thought you could kill a dragon? Sorry, my friend. Long may we honor the memory of Valium.”

“This is bullshit.”

“Bullshit?” the Dungeon Master says. He’s wound up. He really isn’t that well. “It’s not bullshit. It’s probability. What, you gonna kwy? You gonna kwy like my little brutha? Life is nasty, brutish, and more to the point, it bites grandpa ass. Get it, bird dick? How’s your two-handed bird dick now?”

“It’s great,” I say.

The remainder of the group makes it out of the mountain maze, but the goats turn out to be shape-shifters, just as Cherninsky warned. They transform into ogres with huge spiked maces. It’s hardly a fight. Before he dies, Cherninsky’s thief does manage to stick an ogre with his dirk. The ogre turns back into a goat, then into Cherninsky’s dead sister, drenched, draped in seaweed.

“Just a little girl,” the Dungeon Master says.

“You freak,” I say.

Cherninsky’s got his pen out, and I think he’s about to go for the Dungeon Master’s neck, but then he starts to bawl.

“Cry it out, sweetheart,” the Dungeon Master says.

“Leave him alone,” I say.

“This doesn’t concern you,” says the Dungeon Master. “Just back off. You have no clue.”

“Okay,” Marco says. “It’ll be okay.”

He sounds like my father.

“The hell it will,” the Dungeon Master says.

The Dungeon Master holds up the note Cherninsky passed him.

“Wait till you hear this,” he says. “Your pal was planning to steal everybody’s gold. He wanted me to roll for it.”

“He’s a thief,” I say.

“Go ahead, defend him.”

“I am.”

Brendan freezes in his chair. Cherninsky keeps weeping. Marco bobs in some ruined communion with the spirits of okay.

I stand, whack the screen off the Dungeon Master’s desk, see the dice, the sheets of graph paper, the manuals and numerical tables. There are doodles on the blotter. Crosshatched vaginas with angel wings. They soar through ballpoint clouds.

“I said never touch the screen,” the Dungeon Master says.

“And I say don’t flash girls you will never have at the ice rink. Don’t set fire to your shits in the parking lot. You’re a mental case. They should have kept you locked up.”

The Dungeon Master comes around the desk, and I think he’s about to make a speech. He lowers his head and spears me in the gut. We crash together to the floor. He squeezes my throat. I palm his chin, push. Marco screams, and I’m almost out of air when Brendan climbs the Dungeon Master’s back, bites his head. They both tumble away. The door bangs open and Doctor Varelli leans in.

“Play nice, you goddamn puppies!” he howls, shuts the door.

We lie there, heaving. My wrist throbs. I smell raspberry soda in the carpet.

The Dungeon Master paws at the blood on his head. Brendan rubs his tooth.

“You children,” the Dungeon Master says, rises, lumbers off. We hear him yell at his father in the kitchen. A loser, he calls Doctor Varelli, a lesbian.

“It’s been a little difficult around here,” says Marco.

I crawl over to the window. In the next yard, some kids kick a ball. It looks wonderful.

* * *

My broken wrist takes a long time to heal. I stay clear of the Varelli house, and at school only Eric signs my cast. He initials it, as though his full name might incriminate him. My dad says I don’t have to get a job until the cast comes off.

I join the after-school club, roll a ranger called Valium the Second, but nobody thinks it’s funny. Why would they? Lucy Mantooth plays a wizard-thief. It’s clear she doesn’t want me in the club.

Eric lives near me, and sometimes we walk home together. He likes to cut through some trees near the Varellis’ house, but I never speak of them. One day we see the Dungeon Master’s Corvette in the driveway. His father bought it for him last year, but the Dungeon Master has never driven it. He doesn’t even have a license.

“You like our game so far?” Eric asks.

“It’s cool.”

It is cool, despite the death stares from Lucy Mantooth. We fly dragons, battle giants, build castles, raise armies, families, crops. But it’s all too majestic, really. No goblin child will shank you for your coin pouch. You’ll never die from a bad potato. I miss the indignities.

“I think Lucy likes you,” Eric says.

“What’s the giveaway? The fact that she never talks to me or that she rolls her eyes whenever I say anything?”

“Both.”

“I guess I don’t know much about girls.”

“You’ll learn,” Eric says. “You’ve been out with those weirdos.”

“Everything’s weird if you look long enough,” I say.

“I don’t know about that,” Eric says. “We’re sponsored by the school, just like the chess team.”

* * *

I get bored with Eric’s game. Lucy Mantooth never warms up. Her wizard-thief leaves me for dead in a collapsing wormhole. Was there something I was supposed to say? I resume my old routine: peanut butter, batch, nap.

One day I’m headed home to do just that. A sports car pulls up to the sidewalk, a midnight-blue Corvette.

“Need a ride?” the Dungeon Master says.

I don’t, but slide in anyway. I’ve never been in a Corvette.

We drive around town for a while, past my school, the hobby shop.

“Thought you didn’t have a license,” I say.

“Who said I do?” The Dungeon Master smiles. “There are rumors and there is the truth, and there are true rumors. You want the rundown? Here’s the rundown. Hit a kid with a bat and gave him brain damage, yes. Flashing, yes. Burning my bowel movements, no. Have I been to the bughouse? I’ve been to the bughouse. Am I insane? Does my opinion even count? Remember all the newspaper stories about how the game makes kids crazy? Makes them do horrible things?”

“My mom clips them for me.”

“Love those. Take, for example, suicides. The game doesn’t create suicides. If anything, it postpones them. I mean, the world gives you many reasons to snuff it, got to admit.”

“I’m fourteen,” I say. “I don’t know what I admit.”

“In another age you could be a father already. In another neighborhood.”

We drive for a while. We’re a few towns east.

“Nobody’s seen you lately,” the Dungeon Master says. “Marco says you play with some snotty faggots at school.”

“I stopped.”

“You hear about Cherninsky? He got caught with all this stolen musical gear in his garage. Amps and guitars and drums, the whole deal. Tried to dump it in the reservoir, but the cops got most of it. Now his dad might go to jail.”

“His dad?” I say.

“Harsh, right? Anyway, we’re into war-gaming now. Real technical shit. It’s not the same. Brendan can barely handle it. We’re doing Tobruk. I’m Rommel.”

“The Desert Fox.”

“You read,” the Dungeon Master says, though I picked up the name from an old tank movie. “That’s what I like about you. That’s why I thought I could teach you.”

“Teach me what?”

We pull into a scenic lookout, the Palisades. Past the bushes in front of us the cliff drops sheer to some rocks in the Hudson. The Corvette idles, and I wonder if I made a mistake when I accepted this ride. The Dungeon Master looks off across the river, as though ready to jump it.

“Teach me what?” I say.

The Dungeon Master guns the engine. I turn to him, that pale skin, the fine-spun beard, the bitter, glittering eyes.

“Teach me what?”

His answer is another rev. His fingers drum on the gear knob. We’re going to fly a dragon after all. Part of me is ready. Maybe it’s the part that kept me in Doctor Varelli’s study so long. I grip my seat and await ignition, fire, scorched ascent.

“Damn.” The Dungeon Master laughs. “You’re shaking.”

He shifts into reverse and swings the car around. Soon we’re back on town streets.

“Had you shitting,” he says.

“You did.”

“I’m doing that for real at some point.”

“Oh,” I say.

“But not for a while.”

“That’s good.”

“My dad’s kicking me out after graduation. I think it’ll be better for Marco. Kid needs to bloom.”

“Where will you go? Your mom’s house?”

“My mom doesn’t have a house. She died when Marco was born.”

“Really? I’m sorry. I figured she just left.”

“Well, guess it’s true in a way. No, I’ve got a cousin in Canada. We might room together.”

“That’ll be fun.”

“Probably not. Here we are.”

“Thanks for the lift,” I say.

“You were almost home when I picked you up.”

“Still, thanks.”

I’m cutting across the yard when the Dungeon Master calls my name.

“No hard feelings, okay?”

I stop, picture him there behind me with his ridiculous head sticking out of the passenger-side window, but I cannot turn around. I’m still trembling from the drive. Do I have an almost uncanny sense in this instant of what’s to come, some cold, swirling vision whose provenance I do not comprehend but in which I see the Dungeon Master, blue cheeked, hanging by his communion tie in Doctor Varelli’s study, and Cherninsky, his dad in prison, panhandling with the scrawny punks, the pin-stuck runaways in Alphabet City, or me, Burger Castle employee of the month for the month of October, degunking the fry-o-lator in the late-autumn light?

Of course I don’t.

“Really,” the Dungeon Master calls again. “No hard feelings.”

It must be the dumbest thing he’s ever said. No hard feelings? What could ever be harder than feelings?

I want to tell him this, but even as I turn back, the Corvette peels away.