32

  Brad

  This is a difficult point in the story for me, as I’m sure it’s a difficult point in the story for all of us to recount. I hope Cody lets us all have our input in the finished project regarding this. This was the moment things changed. Of course, all of us had joked of going native, becoming obsessed with that fantasy world. They were jokes. We never knew it would actually happen to one of us. We could have never known it would actually happen to one of us. But it happened to Christian, of course, he was the most likely candidate to go native. I still remember what he said before he ended the reign of terror Morgan LeFaye was bringing to that world.

  “I just want to live in it,” Christian said.

  I wouldn’t tell this directly to Cody, but I felt he had made his decision far before we entered Somewhere Else that day. I know he made that decision. He brought the gun. Maybe in some other course of events he would have used it in defense. In the event of Morgan, that poor misguided girl trying to attack us, trying to kill a threat to her power herself. She wasn’t trying to kill us though, she wanted us to join her. She wanted us to join her in her conquest of Somewhere Else. Christian wouldn’t have any of that. I’ve debated this so many times, Morgan was evil, I keep telling myself. I’ve heard word of the people she had killed from every town we had visited.

  Christian took a life, and it weighed on him. Before you go thinking he’s some kind of Psycho, like Susie will probably say that his act was evidence too, he wasn’t glad he did it, he wasn’t happy that he found the worst way to end Morgan Lefaye’s rule. He was changed after that moment. He was even more distant towards us then he had been already. I feel it was this moment when Christian truly abandoned the real world, abandoned its rules, its laws, he didn’t live here anymore. He lived in that world, and for those awful five days that this world’s laws forced him to live through in high school of all things, he cared not for any happiness he could try to obtain in our world. He only cared about his world, and his world was Somewhere Else.

  We didn’t go back after this, by we, I mean the three of us. Your three humble narrators. We were done with Somewhere else, we all agreed that going back after the horribleness we had seen, even if there was more good we could do over there, would be a lie, would be a charade. We cared not for the gold or trappings that Somewhere else offered. We cared not about princesses in danger, lustful serving maidens, friendly townsfolk, or kingdoms under the threat of this or that menace. We just wanted to go home when we jumped in that lake for what we knew would be the last time. We just wanted to go home. I was actually surprised that Christian wasn’t the last of us to jump back through the lake. But it makes sense, Cody took a moment to himself to contemplate what we had all been through, what we were all trying to contemplate.

  It’s not Cody’s fault. I mean, he did instigate all our adventures Somewhere Else. It’s laughable when you think of it, a football player of all people pressuring what insensitive people would call just another random nerd to help him cheat on a test led to this. To all this that changed our lives forever. Me, another guy from the team, and Susie, the innocent cheerleader Cody had a crush on. One act caused everything about our lives to change course forever.

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  Again, this was the last time any of us when Somewhere else, any of us three narrators at least. Christian went back, we let him go back, we shouldn’t have, but we let him. Susie knew that we shouldn’t have let him go back and I’ll let her make her argument for that opinion in her chapters. I hate to say it, but she was right, or rather, she was probably right. The things that happen after this moment were out of any of our control. Christian was a determined man, a man who saw what he wanted and took it. He wanted that fantasy world to be safe, so he did what at least in my opinion was the sensible course of action a man like Christian would take. Does that mean what he did was right? I don’t know, I don’t pretend to know. If Somewhere Else really was a real world like Christian thought it to be, if real people died over there because of Morgan’s actions, one could make the argument that stopping her in the most direct way that Christian did was right. But I don’t know if Somewhere Else was real, everything about that place seemed to be just a fantasy for us, I don’t know if that was a real world or just some fantasy land where all a man like Christian’s dreams could come true. A fantasy land where Morgan’s dreams could come true. Morgan was what the three of us would call real, she was from our world, she was a real person. She was a real person with a family, friends, with dreams and wishes all her own. I don’t know if any of the things we saw were real, but I knew Morgan was real. If what we saw Somewhere Else was real, Morgan threatened it more than any Big Bad Wolf or beast we could slay ever could. Morgan was evil, at least she was eviler then Christian in my opinion. Somewhere Else can change you, it seems. Somewhere Else can warp a weak person’s sensibilities, the fact that we didn’t turn Christian in for murder is enough proof of that. It’s not like we could even bring a case forward. Morgan’s case had been closed. She had already been assumed dead on our side of the lake. Christian killed a girl already dead, already lost. I’m sure that in the other’s recollection of these events, we all see the similarities between Christian and Morgan. Two people who found this world and then found themselves lost in it. I wonder what would have happened if Christian had accepted Morgan’s deal. What would have happened if Christian, the greatest hero Somewhere Else had ever seen, had joined her? Would he have left us all behind and rampaged and conquered that other world with her? Would he fall out of our plane and just be consigned that his only impact on our world was a mere mention in our yearbook’s in memoriam section? So many questions that we wouldn’t have to answer, not ourselves at least. We got our answers eventually, but the yearbooks were already printed. There was no room left for Christian to be remembered in our world, Christian is gone. Now it’s up to the three of us to pick up the pieces and try to make sense of all of this. Christian saved Somewhere Else that day, saved thousands of, perhaps real, people from death. I can understand his motives, I can understand him. Again, I say, I’m not condoning or condemning him, I’m understanding him, he loved that place, he would do anything to keep it safe. He would even kill someone. He would kill someone real. He murdered that girl. The more I think about it, the more I need to cling to my three-year chip as I desperately want a drink when my mind goes back to that dark time. He killed someone to keep that world safe, that was enough to show Susie that he was capable of anything. That’s why Susie had us for a talk, why she demanded we, the three of us, sit down and have a real conversation about Christian, about what he was capable of, and about why we needed to stop him almost as much as we needed to stop Morgan LeFaye, Morgan Lafayette. The fun was over, our fun living out fantasy exploits,our fun flirting with serving girls and maidens, our fun killing monsters and wolves, was over. Susie made that very clear to us when she demanded we give Christian her ultimatum.