Elliot Allagash (19 page)

Ninja Streets Unlimited Health: Up-Down-Back-Right-B-A-Select

Suddenly, anything was possible.

I took out a pencil and did some calculations. Each level had a ten-minute time limit. But it never took more than two and a half minutes to defeat each batch of ninjas. If I played continuously, without pausing for food or drink, I could get to the final ninja street in just under eleven hours.

The next morning, I faked a cold, cracked a fresh box of Oreos, and went to work. It was a grueling day, and I often lost concentration—but it didn’t matter. I was now impervious to my enemies’ blows. At one point, to break the monotony, I decided to take a break from punching. A ninja screamed, then entered. After a brief pause, he tentatively began to punch me in the face. When he realized I wasn’t interested in retaliating, he worked up the
nerve to do his special move: a jump kick to the face. When I didn’t respond to this aggression, either, he began to walk back and forth across the screen, as if in contemplation. I eventually punched him in the face and moved on to the next enemy.

I got to level 256 just before bedtime. It started off completely normal—and for a terrifying moment, I thought I’d been had. But then it happened. About thirty ninjas into the level, the right half of the screen turned black. The left side of the street was still intact, and the music still played aggressively in the background. But there were no more ninjas coming and there was nowhere left to go.

I watched in disbelief as the clock began to wind down. Seven minutes passed, then eight, then nine. I jammed the arrow forward with all my strength, but all I could do was run in place in the center of the screen, my face pressed up against the blackness. At the moment time ran out, Mack turned, as if to face me. His fists were raised to the heavens, and his eyes were wide with horror. He froze in that pose, at the edge of the void, then vanished.

Game over.

• • •

Ashley took a carton of chocolate milk out of her backpack and poured it into a ceramic kettle.

“Hot chocolate?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You can have it.”

“I don’t want any.”

“Really? Well, then, okay. Thanks.”

She reached under the water tower and placed the kettle on an
exposed metal heating pipe. We had been meeting on the roof every day for weeks but had only recently learned how to make hot chocolate. Like all great discoveries, it had been an accident. I had touched the pipe by mistake while reaching for a fallen pencil and singed a couple of my fingers. I probably would have started sobbing if Ashley hadn’t been there to examine the burn and pronounce it “no big deal.” A few seconds later she was crawling under the water tower, her face dangerously close to the pipe. “Hey, buddy!” she said. “We can make hot chocolate!”

We sat for a few minutes in silence, waiting for the milk to heat.

“That song is horrible,” she said. “Someone played it for me in the hallway. Was it really on the radio?”

I nodded.

“How did that happen?”

“Elliot.”

She poured the warm milk into a mug and handed it to me.

“Are you going to have to be a rock star now?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t know.”

I took a long sip. It was an overcast day, and we could see a woman selling umbrellas on the sidewalk. When people walked by her table, she pointed dramatically at the sky and shouted. But everyone ignored her.

“Remember that party at Lance’s?” she said. “When you pretended to talk on your phone?”

Some blood rushed to my cheeks.

“What about it?”

“I didn’t go either,” she said. “I mean, I
went
. To the street. But
I stayed outside the whole time. That’s why I was sure no one saw you. Because I was watching from behind the next tree.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It was so stupid. Like middle school.”

A bolt of lightning zigzagged in the distance, followed by a lazy growl of thunder.

“When I was in the hospital,” she said, “I met someone who thought he controlled the weather.”

I nodded as casually as I could. It was the first time I’d heard Ashley talk about being in a hospital.

“His name was King Elijah,” she said. “I think he was from Scarsdale. He was short and sort of chubby, with acne.”

“Why did he think he controlled the weather?”

“It had to do with visions he was receiving in his dreams. He’d get messages from God, or the Devil, and then he’d have to decode them using algebra. It was really complicated. He was always asking to borrow my calculator. After a few hours, he’d be left with some incantations—which he could use to manipulate the sun.”

“Oh.”

“He always tried to get us good weather, but it rained that whole winter. He was always so guilty about it. I told him I didn’t mind, that I liked the rain. But he could tell I was lying and that I was just trying to make him feel better.”

“What happened?”

“It was wild: Another god moved into the facility. Some kid from Long Island named Cronos.”

“Cronos?”

“Well, his real name was Ben—but he did
not
like it when you
called him that. He also controlled the weather, but he didn’t need to do any calculations like King Elijah. He could just make stuff happen with his mind. Earthquakes, tsunamis, pretty much anything.”

“Were they friends?”

“No,” she said. “They did
not
get along.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“Yeah. It was especially awkward during group. Eventually though, King Elijah stopped working so hard on his calculations. After a few weeks, he became convinced that Cronos was more powerful than he was. And that it was pointless to manipulate the sun, because Cronos could just overrule him. He stopped asking for my calculator and apologizing for all the rain. And a few weeks after that, he was gone.”

She looked up at the clouds and squinted; it had started to drizzle.

“I bet King Elijah’s doing better by now. But Cronos is probably still in there.”

She looked at me.

“No one should have to control the weather.”

She stood there, waiting for me to respond. It was so silent, I could hear both of us breathing.

The bell rang harshly in the distance, and I quickly packed up my books.

“I’m sorry,” I said, handing her my almost-full mug. “I’ve got to go.”

She didn’t respond.

“I’ll see you tomorrow—fifth period.”

I hopped over the heating pipe and started to squeeze into my tunnel.

“You don’t have to,” she said. “It’s not required.”

“What?”

“You don’t have to come at all,” she said. “I’m not keeping attendance.”

“Ashley—”

“I tell you about a serious thing, something I’ve never told
anyone
about, and you just get up and go back to your stupid quizzes.”

“Ashley, come on.”

“Why do I even talk to you? I mean, you’d rather go down a
tunnel
than be seen walking around with me!”

“Ashley, it’s not that; there’s a camera behind the door—”

“We never hang out in school.”

“Well what do you want me to do? I’ve got a reputation to maintain! I can’t just walk around constantly with someone like—”

I stopped myself, but it was obviously too late. Ashley tilted her head down and looked away. The rain picked up suddenly, but she didn’t budge. A few wet strands of hair fell over her eyes. Her arms glistened with rain. I stayed there for a moment, with my head poking out of the tunnel.

“Ashley—”

“You better go,” she said. “You don’t want to be late.”

• • •

Elliot sat by the dumbwaiter, a phone in each hand.

“Next month in Paris,” he said into one of them.

“Save a bottle for me!” he said into the other.

He snapped both phones shut simultaneously and sighed wearily.

Usually, when I entered the billiards room, Elliot was in the process of hanging up on someone. Two phones were not unusual—and there were sometimes as many as four laid out by his drink. Standing there that day, some unsettling questions occurred to me for the first time: Who was he always hanging up on? Why did they always seem to bother him the moment before my arrival? Were there really people on the other lines?

“My apologies,” Elliot said. “I’ve been meaning to prune my correspondences.”

I nodded.

“But on to the news of the day!” he said. “You’re going to be on
television
. It’s a live production called
Little Miracles
. Some mindless talk show, to sell garbage to women.”

I had seen
Little Miracles
a couple of times while home sick. They filmed it every afternoon in a studio in Times Square. There was a live studio audience and glass walls, so people on the street could hold up signs and be on television.

“Elliot, that’s insane. I mean, what do they even want me to do?”

“You won’t have to
do
anything, Seymour. Just a couple of scripted banalities and you’ll be on your way. It’s tomorrow during your free period. James will drive.”

“You mean fifth period?”

“Yes.”

I thought about Ashley, sitting alone by the water tower, heating hot chocolate and watching the mouth of the steam tunnel.

“I don’t think I can go,” I said.

Elliot sighed angrily.

“Tell me why.”

“I have to be somewhere,” I said.

“Have
to?”

“Or, you know…I
want
to. I want to be somewhere.”

Elliot clenched his jaw.

“Where?
Where could you possibly have to be?
” His fists were trembling.

He took a deep breath and shook them out.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I forget sometimes how much spelling-out your mind requires. That I need to you address you as I would a small child.”

He poured himself a glass of Scotch from a crystal decanter.

“Women
watch
these shows. Their opinions, or the recycled pap they consider to be their opinions,
originate
on them.”

“So what?”

“So. Every woman from Glendale will tune in to see you.
Including
Jessica. Do you want her or not?”

I hesitated.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

He finished his drink and poured a second, spilling some Scotch over the sides of his glass.

“You know, Seymour, if you wanted that mousy Ashley girl, you could have just said something. I could have had her for you by now, and it would have been a whole lot cheaper.”

I froze. How did he know about Ashley?

“We’re just friends.”

Elliot laughed.

“You’re
what?”

“Friends.”

Elliot clapped his hands.

“A social alliance with a mental patient. That’s your new strategy!”

“It’s not a
strategy
, Elliot. Not everything is a strategy.”

“Oh yeah? Why do you think she’s even talking to you? To hear your brilliant
bons mots?
She’s trying to get her claws into you, so you can drag her up from the ocean floor.”

“Elliot—”

“Falling for a woman is one thing, but Ashley! Christ! That’s like a gold miner happening upon some quartz and—”

“Elliot, just shut up.”

“All right, all right, good Lord! If you’re going to be this
irrational
, I’ll get her for you! We’ll start planning it out right now.”

“No.”

Elliot froze for a moment and then forced a chuckle.

“Of course,” he said. “You don’t need my help for something so trivial. We’ll move on to something else.”

He started in on some new idea—but I interrupted him.

“It’s not that I don’t need you to help,” I said. “It’s that I don’t think you
could.”

Elliot stared at me, nostrils flaring.

“Excuse me?”

“If I wanted to be with Ashley…you wouldn’t know how to help me with that. You would be totally lost.”

Elliot’s eyes narrowed.

“Do me a favor, Seymour: Don’t tell me that I don’t know how a thing works.”

“You don’t know how
this
works, Elliot. You haven’t the slightest idea. I mean, how would you? You’ve never had a friend in your whole life.”

Elliot turned away from me, and I could see his bony shoulders heaving. When he turned back around, his face was flushed and wrinkled. For a moment, it almost looked like he was crying.

“Elliot,” I said. “Listen—”

He picked up his decanter and hurled it against the pool table. It shattered, spilling glass and Scotch across the felt.

“Out!” he screeched. “Out!”

I ran into the hallway, slamming the door just before a billiard ball collided with it.

“I can take it back!” he shouted, hurling another ball against the door. “All of it!”

I sprinted down the staircase, my damp palms slipping on the banister.

“All I have to do is snap! That’s all it takes!”

I could hear Elliot behind me, screaming hysterically at the top of the stairs.

“You’re just a hobby! A mouse I’ve been playing with! And now I’m through playing! I’m finished! I’m
through!”

I ran through the lobby and pushed open the door. The storm had gotten worse. I paused at the threshold for a moment, catching my breath, staring at a wall of rain.

And then I ran home.

• • •