The Fifth Circle (2 page)

When I couldn’t take it any longer, when I couldn’t handle the feeling of being left behind, I decided to
check out. I was still there, but I wasn’t. My body was in school, but my mind was already gone. Since I couldn’t go to Andrometis, I went to Mordios instead. Mordios, the land of OwlBane 2031. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was still new to the game and somewhat clueless about how the whole thing worked, but that was okay. OwlBane wasn’t as sophisticated as Tales of Andrometis and the graphics weren’t as good, but I agreed with my mom and the counselor—I wasn’t ready for TOA. It was too soon after Stryder’s death to even consider jumping back into that game.

After school, Alex hopped into the passenger seat of my truck, chatting continuously about a Choir competition and how she’d been moved from first Alto to second Soprano. I had no idea what she was talking about, but it didn’t matter. I just liked to hear her
voice.

When I finally got a word in edgewise, I asked, “Do you want to
go over to my house? I’ll make you something to eat.”

“Okay,” she agreed
.

An afternoon with Alex was better than sitting alone playing OwlBane. A smile spread across my face, but it faded the moment I pulled onto our street. Alex’s dad was home. I cursed under my breath and glanced at Alex.
She leaned forward slightly, her body rigid.

“Do you want me to keep driving?” I asked.

“No,” she sighed. “He knows what time I’m supposed to be home.”

The afternoon was ruined for both of us. We went our separate ways
. Alex faced an afternoon of tiptoeing around her father’s bad moods. I had a date with OwlBane. The moment I stepped inside my house, I began to shake. It was happening again. It was just like last year. Who would have thought that something as stupid as school would have triggered it? I could feel myself slipping back in time, back to a time before medication and therapy, before hospitalization, before Stryder’s death.

I couldn’t remember walking through the living room and down the hallway, but somehow, I made it to my room.
My whole body trembled as I reached out to press the button on the computer. I was on auto-pilot. Instinct took over and scattered all the new habits I’d carefully constructed over the summer. I blamed school for my relapse.

A rush of excitement washed over me when
the Mordios landscape appeared on the computer screen. It wasn’t as familiar as Andrometis, but Mordios had begun to feel like home. I was becoming part of the game. I sank into it, let it absorb me, and then I was one with Ares—my avatar.

“
Crap!” The security on my fortress had been compromised. My nemesis,
Dragon1971
, seemingly had no life outside of playing OwlBane 2031. He’d taken advantage of my quest for a high school diploma to sack my guard tower. I launched an attack and had just managed to clear his first line of security, when the alarm went off on my cell phone. 

I hesitated for a moment. I really needed to finish what I’d started, but couldn’t afford for my mom to catch me playing the game. She
was due home any moment, and she’d already made it clear she would cut our internet service if she caught me doing anything I shouldn’t be doing online. I logged off, prayed for the best, shut down the computer, and went out to the kitchen to grab a soda. Would it be possible to skip school the next day? My time would be better spent on OwlBane instead of sleeping in class. If I could just get some uninterrupted time in Mordios, I’d be able to get ahead on the game. Once I got to a certain level, I could concentrate on school.

“
How was your first day as a Senior?” Mom asked the moment she came through the front door.

“Fine
.” No need to burden her with the details of how messed up the public school system was and how I hadn’t learned anything since the seventh grade. Why worry her by telling her about my lack of focus, or how the slightest noise distracted me?

“Good. Did you give Alex a ride to school?” she asked
, putting her purse and keys down on the countertop and taking some ground beef out of the refrigerator.

I loved how
she constantly tried to push me toward Alex. She knew I’d had a crush on Alex since middle school. If only she knew how unlikely it was that Alex and I would ever hook up.

“Yeah,” I muttered
.

S
he reached into a cabinet and took out her bottle of headache pills. I felt guilty. My mom always had a headache, and I believed I contributed to it at least a little. She’d been a single mom for twelve years, worked full-time at a job she hated, made my dinner every night, and paid for the cornucopia of drugs prescribed to treat my Bipolar Disorder. She went to work on Saturdays to make up missed time when she had to take me to see the counselor, and I knew she hadn’t been on a date since my father left. I decided to put a smile on her face, if only for a second. 

“Alex and I are going to Homecoming together,” I said
, trying to act casual while waiting for her explosion of joy. She wanted me to do normal high school stuff—going to school dances was about as normal as you can get.

“Really? That’s wonderful!”  

“As friends,” I reminded her.

“Well, it’s a start
.”  

The moment
my mom went to bed that night, I locked my bedroom door and logged on to my game.
Dragon1971
had somehow managed to repair his defenses. I cursed silently and checked my tower. One troll dead, the other injured. I would almost
have
to stay home the next day, otherwise, I’d have nothing to come home to after school. I thought about Alex—her hatred of the bus, the look of compassion on her face when I got out of the hospital, the disappointment she would feel when she realized I’d abandoned her in favor of my newest imaginary friend. If I stayed up all night, I could take care of my online duties and still be able to go to school.

I glanced at the bottle
s of pills on my nightstand. Trazadone. I was supposed to take one every night to help me sleep, but I decided not to take it. Sleep was overrated. I decided to skip the Effexor too. It made me yawn all the time and dulled my reflexes. If I was going to have any shot at being competitive in this game, I needed to be alert.

When my alarm went off at six the next morning,
I could hardly lift my head off the computer desk. My neck ached and needles of pain pricked my left shoulder. I struggled to remember exactly what time I’d fallen asleep. I crawled into bed and reset my alarm.

“Sean, are you up?”
Mom pounded on my bedroom door, jolting me from a sound sleep.

“
Um, yeah,” I mumbled, rolling over and glancing at the time on my cell phone. It was seven. I had to leave in five minutes.

“Did you take your medicine?” she asked.

“Yeah.” I sat up, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I grabbed the bottle of Lamictal and tried to open the lid. My hands shook uncontrollably—a side effect of the medication. Pissed off, I threw the bottle across the room. I’d skipped my meds the night before, so why bother with my morning pill?

There wasn’t enough time
to take a shower, so I checked on OwlBane instead. Despite my attempt to stay up all night and fortify my tower, I’d made far less progress than expected. Apparently
dragon1971
didn’t sleep much either. Every game was the same. There was always some opponent who spent more time playing than I did and was nearly impossible to beat.

“Sean?” Mom’s thundering fists pummeled my door again. “It’s seven after. Shouldn’t you be leaving?”

Rumpled, dirty, and sullen, I staggered out to my driveway to meet Alex. She looked upon my disheveled appearance with dismay.

“Sean, don’t tell me…”

I cut her off. “Fine. I won’t. Just get in the truck. I’m in no mood.” I turned on the radio so she wouldn’t be tempted to speak to me.

With OwlBane still on my mind,
I spent most of first period thinking about strategy. In second period I caught up on sleep. Third period brought detention, but I knew I would never serve it. Eventually, my un-served detentions would accumulate until the assistant principal rolled them into in-school suspension. I’d been down this road before, and preferred to pay my debt to high school society in one fell swoop rather than one afternoon at a time.

After lunch,
I decided to skip the rest of the day. I went out to the parking lot and slept in my truck until Alex woke me up to drive her home. She oozed disapproval, but I was too worried about the game to pay her much mind. She rambled on about Choir and some other stuff that didn’t make sense, but it was hard to focus on what she said because my mind was already in Mordios.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You seem quiet.”

“I’m fine. Just tired.”

When
I pulled into the driveway, she said, “Oh, good. My dad’s at work.”

Sure enough, his van was gone. Silence filled the cab of my truck. I could tell she was giving me time to invite her in, to extend the same invitation I’d given her the day before. But, I didn’t say anything. Inviting
her inside would just take me away from Mordios and renew my longing for her. Why torture myself?

At last, she opened the door and said goodbye. I almost called her back, but I thought about my extended absence from Mordios and OwlBane.
By the time I logged on to my game, it was too late. Everything I’d fought for had been lost. I tried to beat back flashbacks of Stryder. Dwelling on his death made my heart ache. I couldn’t think about him.

I
turned back to Mordios and pushed my growing depression aside. When Alex called me an hour later, I promised to call her back. At four o’clock in the morning, I looked up from the computer, shocked to discover how much time I’d spent in Mordios. Had I even eaten dinner? I realized I’d never called Alex back. For the first time since I’d been released from the hospital, I let her down. I turned the computer off and promised myself I’d never put a game ahead of our friendship. She was too important and I wouldn’t risk losing her.

Chapter 3- Alex

All hope abandon, ye who enter here!

(Canto III, line 9)

My mother took me out to buy a dress for the dance. I heard my parents arguing about it later.
Not about the cost—about my date.

“You really think it’s a good idea for her to go with that boy?” my father asked.

“He’s a nice boy, Dan. It’ll be fine,” Mom said.

“Nice? He’s a god-damned lunatic. I know why he went to that hospital. In my opinion, he’s dangerous
.”

“Of course he’s not,” she replied. “He’s a little confused, maybe, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly.
I think it’s nice of her to agree to go to the dance with him. I don’t think the poor guy has many friends. ”

“He’s out of touch with r
eality. He tried to kill himself over a video game, Ellen. Is that normal?” he bellowed. “Someone who doesn’t know the difference between a game and real life is a danger.” 

Well then, my father was very dangerous indeed, I thought. The hypocrisy of his statement was completely lost on him. This was a man who retreated to the comfort of a six pack of beer and ESPN every night when he got home from work. His weekends
revolved around a case of Bud and a marathon of sporting events. He read the sports section of the newspaper before he could venture from the house each morning, listened to sports talk radio, yelled at the players as he watched them on TV, and belonged to a fantasy football league. Clearly, he’d blurred the lines between reality and entertainment just a bit. 

“Honey, she’ll be fine. It’s just a dance,”
Mom said. There was no response. His game had started and she was dead to him. 

I wiped tears from my eyes
. Had my father forbidden me to go to the dance with Sean, I would have shrugged and stayed home that night. I didn’t really want to go anyway. But, the venom in his voice when he spoke of my friend disturbed me. The inaccuracy of his statement upset me as well. Sean didn’t try to kill himself—he just threatened to, but that was only because his mom was bugging him about skipping school. Sean had been depressed, but that didn’t make him a bad person. He wasn’t dangerous and he wasn’t a lunatic. He was just a little damaged. 

***

“I’m really glad we’re going together.” Sean’s eyes traveled the length of my body when I met him outside.

“Me too
,” I lied. Lacquered-up and made-up, I felt like a clown, or a mannequin. It was difficult to breathe in the tight dress and my high heels were already uncomfortable. I was afraid to touch my face or hair.

“You look beautiful,” he said, helping me into the truck. “Really beautiful.”

“Thanks. You look nice too.” It was true. Sean was very handsome. He’d always been cute, and back in the days before I realized some guys were acceptable boyfriends and others were not, I had a crush on him in a juvenile sort of way. Any fantasies involving Sean never evolved past hand-holding and chaste kisses.