18

  Cody

  The alcohol was flowing as free as it would at a college party, we all had too much to drink, all of us, even Christian. Man, he had come so far from fleeing to the lake at Freeman’s Farm just to get away from any threat he would look like the clueless loser he for some reason believed himself to be in the real world. He was pounding Mead with the best of them, sharing a drink with these big burly warriors as he regaled the tale of slaying the Wolf. He was laughing, he was confident, he was getting pats on the back and free refills from blushing serving girls without even having to ask for them.

  Brad was chatting up some of the maidens, not for nothing but his particular skin tone had the opposite effect on his popularity with the locals that it had in Nebraska. The girls were blushing, sharing dances and drinks with that handsome dark foreigner from the distant land of Nebraska. I think he said they thought he was something called a Moor? Might have to brush up on my European history to get that reference.

  Susie was with the high-born ladies, laughing as they probably compared the various unmarried boys at the party. I watched her fall victim to the simplistic charms of this world that I was sure she was the last holdout in the group from embracing. Damn, she looked so good in that red dress. I know she was self-conscious about the color when we first gave it to her, but it looked so good on her even in spite, no, because it matched her hair. The two tones really blended, she looked like one of the most beautiful maidens a man living Somewhere Else could ever be blessed with.

  I had what had to be my fourth mead of the night, and by the way, four beers don’t sound that bad. But as Brad has probably told you, the mead somewhere else offered had was quite stronger than your everyday twelve ounce bud or miller. I got a few minutes in with a couple maidens, talked, bragged even. I felt more confident in myself then I did after the game with Butler when I actually got off the bench and could put some, very important, minutes in on a game when the team needed me. Not to brag but I threw a fifty-eight-yard Hail Mary to Derrick REDACTED who ran it for a touchdown to clinch the game. Again, I’m not trying to brag but Tom Brady’s record for yards thrown in one play is sixty-three. I bragged of the few hits I got in on the Wolf before Christian, like the mighty hero he was Somewhere Else, impaled its chest and ended the threat once and for all. I always had one eye on Christian. Watching him work the crowd, watching him rub elbows with people, watching him joke and laugh like he was the most popular kid in the room. He was like that little kid who won the Jr. High Whiteboard challenge. He was being congratulated, receiving positive attention that we all knew he was probably so desperate for. All I could do was smile, good for you Christian, I said to myself, good for you.

  Susie sauntered up to me, she was just as drunk as I was. I want to make that clear, she was just as drunk as I was. And we were both pretty hammered that night.

  “Hey, Sir Cody,” she laughed, hands on her skirt tossing around her red dress, god, she looked so good in that dress, a smile on her face, her face beaming with a smile perfected by the pain of a couple awkward junior high years wearing a retainer and stressing at night with worry about how her parents were asking themselves if they could afford putting braces on her.

  “Susie, don’t go native on me,” I laughed, I smiled, I couldn’t help but smile, damn she looked so good right now. She always looked good, but right now, between the mead and the festivities, damn, she looked so good.

  “That’s what they’re calling you,” she laughed, tilting her head to the giggling maidens, she reached out and took my hands in hers, her voice was a bit slurred but so was mine. We just smiled at each other, holding hands, her hands were so soft, I could feel the tips of her perfectly manicured nails on my skin, something about the light scratch a girl’s nails can give you just does something for me, I don’t know how to explain it.

  “How does it feel? Being a hero,” she raised her eyebrows, her cheeks rose with a blush. I thought I saw them blush, I don’t really remember ever detail of that night, me and Susie never really talked about it after it happened. I wonder how much she remembers. I’m sure she’ll make it clear when she gets to this part of the story. I want to stress that this was a very important moment in my life, I was a seventeen-year-old boy, I was a boy. Hopefully, for my sake, Susie is still so pissed at Christian she’ll gloss over this unfortunate incident. This unfortunate, life changing, amazing incident.

  “That dress looks good on you,” I said, grin on my face, thinking I was so smooth. I had been into this girl since we were fifteen, met her after a low-key no booze kid’s party pep rally after I took the JV team to the quarter finals, and she was that cute redhead in the obscure middle of the pyramid.

  Christian, at least the old Christian, the one before his time Somewhere Else probably would have though it so typical, so normal. The football player hooks up with the cheerleader, that’s just what someone like him would think football players and cheerleaders do. But it was more than that. I was just as bashful as he would be the first time I actually got to talk to her. Though unlike Christian, I had a few reasons to feel confident in myself. I thought I was so smooth, thought that all it took was throwing a touchdown to land a girl. Whenever I talked to Susie, purely as a confidence booster, I would tell myself it wasn’t like I was trying to approach Cassie REDACTED, the top of the Varsity pyramid with two percent body fat, a rich dad, and a room full of dancing and gymnastic trophies that could even intimidate a college guy. It was just Susie, and I liked that about her. She was just a normal girl, we were all just normal kids. Kids, that’s what we were, and we got up to the kind of things normal kids got up to.

  “Did you see the hit I got in, hobbled his leg,” I smiled, raised and straightened my shoulders in a prideful brag.

  “I did see that, and I saw you dodge it’s slash, that was like, crazy brave, you’re so brave,” she laughed, ran her perfectly manicured hand up my chest. We were both so drunk. We were drunk on the mead, we were drunk on the praise, and we were drunk on the experience of dodging certain death. But like Christian so often told us, things made sense Somewhere Else. What was supposed to happen, things that made sense happened Somewhere Else. The good guys won Somewhere Else. That’s what made Somewhere Else so enticing to him, to all of us. This place just seemed to work. We forgot all our problems when we were Somewhere Else, we forgot algebra tests and homework and college admissions. Before you judge us for being so enveloped in this world, for falling to the temptations of preferring it to reality, at this point in the story for every week we spent in the real world, we spent a week Somewhere Else. Slowly but surely, this world was becoming a place where we were spending the majority of our oh-so-important and influential youth.

  “You know, I remember your first game, the first game when you played,” Susie smiled.

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  “Come on, I just helped slay the Big Bad Wolf, and you’re going to bring that up?” I asked, laughing at the memories of a time that felt so long ago but in reality, was just a scant three years prior.

  Susie laughed, “You threw four interceptions, we, the JV cheer team, we were beside ourselves, we had no idea what to do. We had no idea how we would be able to cheer you on after the third one,” she laughed, her hands moving back to take mine, “Some of the girls were saying that you were going to be cut for sure, like it was a guarantee,” she smiled.

  “Yeah, but if you’re remembering that game, you should remember that we did win that game,” I said, laughing along with her over a funny, if meaningless, event in our lives.

  “Because you got benched, Joey REDACTED the JV second string, came out and saved us. If his parents hadn’t divorced and he didn’t have to move and end up in Carolina, he would have had your job, no question,” she teased me, “I heard from some girl, his cousin, that he’s being scouted by Tennessee, and he’s probably going to go pro,” she squeezed my hands, not realizing her hands were giving me that light scratch, that signal of a woman digging her claws into a man.

  “Well good for him, now if the two of us go head-to-head with medieval weaponry, I wonder who would come out on top,” I said, trying to defend myself.

  “Oh you know you would,” Susie rolled her eyes, “You’re better then him anyway, you just had a bad game, you could be quarter back you know, like, if you’re lucky enough to have a scout see you actually play for a change, have a scout see what you can do, what I know you can do after the Butler game, you could make a run at it, going pro,” she said.

  I took a deep breath, “No, no that’s not for me,” maybe as much as my confidence had been rubbing off on Christian, some of his shyness was rubbing off on me, “I just want to go to college, and get a job good enough to get me out of debt for said college, or hell, just use the insane amount of gold we’ve earned here and pay in cash, I don’t know how long we’ll be visiting, this place,” I looked around, “But I think we can all have good lives if we use it to our advantage,” I said, raising my eyebrows almost as high as hers were raised.

  “It took a while for me,” Susie said, “To come around, I mean,” she took deep breath, and still holding my hands started to rock them back and forth, “This place really is magical, I’ve loved my time here, I really have,” there was a moment between us. Neither of us said anything, that pause was broken when Susie leaned in, stood on her toes, and kissed my lips. Then there was another moment, we said nothing, and again that pause was broken when I leaned in and kissed her, deeper, longer.

  “I want to show you something,” Susie said, backing away from me but still holding my hand, tugging me along like a puppy on a leash. We left the party behind, we left Brad to keep flirting with service girls and maidens, and we left Christian to keep embracing his new role as the greatest hero of Somewhere Else. We went down a hallway, and Susie had found one of the Castle Maidens's bedrooms, she tugged me inside and all I could do was follow.

  It happened. For the first time in my young life, it happened.

  I won’t bore you with the sordid details. She kissed me, I kissed her, and we progressed from there.

  The next morning was a little awkward, we had fallen asleep holding each other but had woken up on opposite sides of the bed.

  “Hey,” Susie said, trying to sound casual, trying to sound like she hadn’t just made the biggest decision a young girl can make with her body.

  “Hey,” I said back, we quickly got changed.

  “It’s Somewhere Else,” she said, “It doesn’t matter what happens here, this is just somewhere else,” I would imagine that each of us had a bit of a headache after the night of celebration in our honor.

  “Yeah, this is just Somewhere Else,” I said, trying to reassure her as much I was myself. We had grown accustomed to thinking that this world didn’t matter. As much as we were falling to its temptations, our attitudes were moving in the opposite direction as Christian’s were. Somewhere Else wasn’t a world to build your life in. Somewhere Else was an escape from the real world, not a substitution for it. It didn’t matter what happened that night, this was Somewhere Else.

  We met up with Brad and Christian, they had both passed out in the servant’s quarters, they were so groggy and hung over they didn’t peace together that Susie and I had come down to find them together. It was the end of our precious two weeks Somewhere Else and Sunday evening was fast approaching in the real world. We still had school. We still had our responsibilities. It was kind of surreal, your first time has this way of putting things into perspective. What did school matter, what did practice matter, what mattered? All of it was this charade that just revolved you and kept you away from what happened to me last night.

  I shook Brad awake, he still seemed a bit drunk from the previous night’s festivities, “Hey Cody,” he said, his voice still slurring, “I’m thinking we call-in Monday, I’m thinking we just take a day,” he smiled.

  Susie, Brad and I were nowhere near the number of absences that Christian had racked up in his time Somewhere else. I found myself agreeing, “Yeah, let’s a take a day, but let’s take that day back home,” I said, helping him up. Susie was gently tapping Christian’s cheek, trying to rouse him awake to join us in our, what felt like, long trip back to the lake, back home.

  Christian yawned and took a big stretch, “Oh man, that was a party,” Christian said, “The other world’s parties can’t hold a candle to that,” he said, yawning awake.

  “You mean the real one?” Susie asked.

  “Yeah, the…real world,” he said, “I talked to Cinderella last night,” he smiled, “I mean, I don’t know why I thought I had a chance, she was taken, fucking Prince Charming,” he said.

  “Wait, Prince Charming was here?” I asked, ignorant at his jab of a romantic rival.

  “No, he’s not THE Prince Charming,” Christian said as he tried to find his footing, “That’s just some Mouse fabrication, but the Princess had her man, this one already had her hero,” he said, I saw this forlorn look in his eyes. He probably could have gotten lucky with any Maiden at the party. But Christian being Christian, thought that in a world as completely opposite for him as the real world was, he thought that here he could actually get a princess. How that desire would come to haunt all of us. We were all quite hungover, we each had our shares of tumbles as we made our way back to the lake.

  “See you guys Tuesday, I guess,” Brad said as he jumped in to return to the real world.

  “Yeah, Tuesday, I need a day,” Susie looked at me, then looked away. She jumped in and I was left standing alone next to Christian.

  “You got to keep an eye on your absences, you’re way ahead of us,” I said, “You have to be careful,” I rested a hand on his shoulder, “This place is amazing, but you can’t let it consume you. We’re all in this together, remember that, but we can’t lose touch with reality, this is fun, this is really fun,” I looked away for a moment and remembered what I could about my night with Susie, “It’s magical,” I said before collecting myself, “But this place isn’t real, it’s not the real world, so I’ll see you Tuesday, and we’ll slog through another week, and then we can come back,” I smiled.

  “Yeah, we’ll come back, we can always come back,” Christian said, “I’m sure we can find something even better than the Big Bad Wolf, we all have about sixty thousand dollars’ worth of coins over here, so why not keep coming back,” his grin grew wider.

  “Yeah, money, that’s why we’re here,” I forced a smile, all the gold in this world or the other one was nothing compared to what this world gave me last night. In weak moments like this, I become the kind of man who truly understands why Christian did what he did. Love is so much more complicated than gold and money, and infinitely more rewarding in the grand scheme of things. I could tell that for all the money we made Somewhere Else, none of that meant anything to Christian. A man in love is prone to making mistakes, that’s probably my ultimate defense of Christian. He was a man in love, and he made his mistakes, and he was punished for those mistakes. Just because he got a kind of sick justice in the end, that doesn’t prove he was a bad person. I had just had the greatest night of my life Somewhere Else, I can’t fault Christian for trying to obtain the same happiness, the same completeness that I was lucky enough to receive there.