The Other Normals (3 page)

“You’re still a, um, reserve member.”

“Like an understudy? Since when?”

“Michael Imperio is, um, sick, understand?”

“Michael Imperio is never too sick to do math.”

Behind me, the students have all left and gone home or to a ninth-period class or to a club or to a sports team because it’s 2:55 and they have better places to be than talking to a teacher who says “um” every other word. I think about camp. Will it be like being sent to a 2,048th-period class?

“All right, um, he’s not sick, he has an, um, issue with qualifying for this meet.”

“You mean like not having a green card?”

Michael Imperio comes from a country in South America that doesn’t have good diplomatic relations with the US. Despite his lack of proper American entry protocol, he was
accepted into my school, Simmons Leadership Academy, due to his math skills, which are the sort of skills that might help steer the future of America.

“Um,” Mr. Getter says.

“Yeah, fine, I’ll sub for you. Where’s the meet?”

I WILL PROBABLY NOT DO WELL. I WILL probably be humiliated by a greasy student next to me with a boil; this has happened. One math whiz from Cambodia via Bronx High School of Science has a boil on his forehead, right of center; when I sat next to him at a meet I began wondering about the way a particular drop of sweat was likely to run down the surface of the boil and lost my train of mathematical thought.

I walk into the classroom where we’re having the meet with my face buried in my
Other Normal Edition.
Although it’s at a different school, the room is as familiar as the role-playing-game floor of Phantom Galaxy Comics, as comfortingly sealed from the outside world and climate-controlled, even if it is a tropical sweatbox climate. The boil Cambodian is nowhere in sight. I set my cell phone to “off” and sit. I look up, shocked—I’m right next to the kid I saw in Phantom Galaxy. Sam.

“Hey,” he says. “What’s your name?”

He seems a lot calmer than he was in the store when he threw down his bag of beads. He’s at the back row of desks; he’s an understudy like me. I put my
Other Normal Edition
away.

“You been playing?” he continues. “My name’s Sam.”

“I know, Roland said—”

“Screw Roland. Fat bastard.”

“Why are you here?”

“I got accepted to my school’s math team. You have a problem with that?”

“You’re not following me?”

“Why would I follow you? Why would
anyone
follow you?”

“You could be planning on ridiculing me in some elaborate way.”

“Get over yourself. You been playing the
Other Normal Edition
?”

“Just by myself.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just read the book and make up characters by myself.”

“What, you think you get points for being sad?”

“No, I’m just telling you the truth—”

“Where do you play?”

“Everywhere. Mom’s house, Dad’s house, school …”

“What school?”

“Simmons.” I know his school from the blackboard at the front of the room: Xavier in Brooklyn.

“I hang out near Simmons. You want to play sometime?”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I can’t find that book anywhere.”

“Why?”

“Look it up on the internet. Try A-Plus Comics in Flatbush. Prison Planet. It’s nowhere.”

“Why not? It’s a great expansion.”

“It’s sold out. How spoiled are you? You never heard of something being sold out? Where do you play in Simmons?”

“At the bottom of the fire stairs by the science labs.”

“Perfect.”

“Excuse me? Mr....
Eek-er
?” the proctor says.

“Eckert.”

“Mr. Eckert, can you please come to the front of the room with your answer sheet?”

“I didn’t get an answer sheet yet. We haven’t started.”

“This will serve as your answer sheet,” she says. She’s a prim woman with skin that’s wrinkled and tight at the same time. She writes
Disqualified for speaking
on a piece of paper and passes it to my team captain, the assiduous and silent girl Min, who is so brilliant that she has rendered herself asexual (and whom I always feel guilty about characterizing this way).

“If your group has no other team members to take your place, you’ll have to forfeit the match,” the proctor says.

“I, uh—”

Mr. Getter steps into the room; he was outside pacing by a bench with the other math coaches.

“We have one, we have one!” he says, and produces Michael Imperio, who produces a Police Athletic League card. I’ve been told that these are get-out-of-jail-free cards if you ever get busted for pot or jumping turnstiles in New York. Apparently they work at math meets too. Michael Imperio takes my seat. I wave good-bye to Sam, who’s now sitting with such attentiveness and rectitude that apparently he can’t be disqualified for speaking.

I HAVE A GOOD THING GOING ON THE fire stairs. No one messes with me; I can set up my dice and my
Other Normal Edition
and my graph paper and mechanical pencils and create characters to my heart’s content. A few times since I got the book I had the feeling I was being watched again; once I heard the
skritch-skritch
pencil noise like in Phantom Galaxy … but it was probably just me making the character sheets.

As I’m setting up my area a week after the disastrous meet (Mr. Getter isn’t talking to me at all now, not even a single “um”), Sam opens the gray metal fire door. “What’s up?” he asks.

“What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

“School ended.”

“Five minutes ago! Your school is in Brooklyn, I thought!”

“I cut some classes, calm down. I’ve been looking for you.”

“You must be really obsessed with this book.”

He pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his hoodie. “You want?”

“What? To smoke it?”

He scowls and creaks open the door he just entered. This door has an angry red bar on it that says
EMERGENCY—ALARM WILL SOUND
, but now Sam has opened it twice, from inside and outside. Why did I never try?

Sam blows smoke out the door. I watch it curl away into the spring air. He looks nervous while he smokes, but then he looks very relaxed. He asks, “You chill here, but you don’t smoke? You could sell
drugs
in this piece.”

“People do that. And there’s a couple that comes here to make out some days, and yesterday the girl told the guy she was pregnant.”

“So? Is it your baby?”

“No!”

“Then how come it’s your business? I don’t want people to know I play C and C. If you’re the kind of person who spies on people and talks crap about them, I don’t want to even start this.”

“Sorry.”

“All right.” He shakes my hand, still smoking. “Now, what kind of character do you play?”

“Artisan. Named Pekker Cland.”

“
Artisan?
What’s wrong with you?” For a minute I think he’s going to ask, “You gay?”—but he doesn’t and I like him for it. “You got no business playing RPGs unless you’re a magic user.” His glasses slide down his nose. He motions for the
Other Normal Edition.
He turns to the runecraft section.

“You know what the best spell is? There’s one that makes
people fall in love with rocks. You cast it on them, and they’ll fixate on the next big rock they see, and they’ll think that rock is a beautiful man or woman, and they’ll marry it and give up everything that they have going in life, and they’ll stop fighting if they’re in the middle of a battle, just to be with the rock. It’s an eleventh-level runecraft. Rock Spouse.”

“Do you play a certain character?”

“I got a bunch. One of them’s a mystagogue. She’s like a fortune-teller with the skills of a highly trained assassin.”

“What level?”

“Thirteenth.”

“Wow!”

“I got another who’s a seventh-level thief. But the best is a fifteenth-level barbarian I got. Peter Powers.”

Sam reaches into his hoodie and takes out a black velvet drawstring bag. He opens it to reveal a perfect pewter miniature: a bald giant with a huge beard standing in a pile of snow, snorting in the cold air, holding a mace high, about to bring it down on an enemy.

“How’d they sculpt his
breath
?” I peer in fascination.

“I don’t know.” Sam puts him back. “Maybe if you look at it too hard, it’ll go away.”

“Sorry. Where do you get the money to buy figures like that?”

“What’d I tell you about being nosy?”

“Sorry.”

“You just told me sorry three times, and we haven’t even
talked for two minutes. What, you think if you say it enough, the Candyman is gonna come?”

“Candyman?”

He tosses his cigarette out the door. “Let’s start playing an Enthral Moor campaign. I’ll run the games.” Sam sits down—and it turns out he can stop time just as well as the book.

SAM MAKES UP A LOT OF RULES AS WE go along. Role-playing games are meant to be played with more than two people, so to help me out, he invents a character to accompany Pekker Cland on his adventures: a beautiful woman named Ariane who’s escaped from prison.

In our first game, Ariane accosts Pekker while he kneels at his forge trying to make a scarab-shaped cigarette holder in the market in town. (Sam tells me that ornate cigarette holders are big sellers and if I don’t want my character to be poor, I’d better make them.) Ariane has long dark hair and a robe that reveals more of her to those with more honor. Innocent men see her naked; hardened criminals see her in a full dress and veil. Since Pekker has a 50 honor, he sees her in Leia’s slave outfit from
Return of the Jedi.

“That’s hot,” I admit.

“In Los Angeles you can get your cars washed by girls dressed in that costume,” Sam says, and we branch out from there to the far reaches of nerd culture. Not the things that women like too, but the things that only boys secretly enjoy when we’re boys without shame, like Warhammer and Magic
cards. The things that are so uncool they’re uncool.

Back in-game, Ariane tells Pekker/me that if I can get her out of the city she’ll reward me with treasure from her land of P’Sai. We sneak out of the market. Sam keeps offering dishonorable opportunities: swords that are easy to steal, free drinks.... I have to roll dice against my 50 honor; if I make a bad roll and fail to be honorable, Ariane’s slave outfit expands to cover more of her.

We find a magic lamp. It’s lying in the desert under a cactus. When I rub it, a genie comes out. He punches me in the face and ties me up. Ariane attacks him but gets torched by his Breathe Fire ability. He starts gagging my mouth.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“For a thousand years, I lay trapped,” the genie says. Sam does all the voices himself. “And I promised myself, ‘Whosoever frees me, I shall grant three wishes,’ but then this morning I finally got frustrated and decided, ‘A thousand years, fuck it, whosoever frees me is getting robbed.’ And here you go and release me. Who am I to tempt the gods?”

“Please, genie,” I say. “Let me get home so I don’t starve like a common rat.”

“Home to who? Your family?”

“I have no family.”

“Then who but the desert rats will care if you starve?”

And the genie steals everything I have but leaves my canteen filled with fresh water, so I can wander back to the market. End of game.

“WHERE DO YOU GET THIS STUFF?” I ASK Sam. (Our first game takes two weeks.) He shows me a book:
The Arabian Nights: The Marvels and Wonders of the Thousand and One Nights,
from the Brooklyn Public Library. “All the best stuff is from original sources,” he says, and points to the story “The Fisherman and the Jinnee.” Then he shows me the Pyramid Texts of Saqqara, in a book called
Ancient Egyptian Literature.
The stuff found in Unas’s tomb sounds just like the magic spells that people yell in
Lord of the Rings
:

If he wishes you to die, you will die,

If he wishes you to live, you will live!

The difference is that Unas
did
live, 4,400 years ago.

“People used to be more in touch with actual magic,” Sam says.

“You believe in magic?”

“I believe in
something.
Whatever else I do during the day, I always make sure to remember, ‘Nobody knows how the pyramids were built.’ You know? You go through life worrying
about your little assignments from school, trying to be smart, playing the game, and meanwhile nobody can explain how the pyramids exist. Two-point-five to fifteen tons, each block. Five thousand years ago.”

“Who do you think built them? Aliens?”

“It doesn’t matter. Aliens, magic … Until someone explains the pyramids to me, how’m I gonna take life serious? You want to start a new game?”