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by Vivian Vande Velde

  I tried to look disheartened, as though her threat had knocked the last of my hope out of me. With my shoulders slumped and my head hanging, I puffed out my cheeks and raised my hand to my mouth as though I were about to spit out the crystal.

  Dorinda stepped closer, eager to grab it away from me lest I try something else.

  Just close enough.

  I grabbed the end of her staff and slammed it down onto the pavement. It bounced off, unharmed.

  Dorinda gave a cry of rage and used all her strength to pull back.

  Which is one of the major disadvantages of being a kid: the grown-ups, even the tired, hungry, wounded grown-ups, are stronger.

  I heaved at the staff and felt it come free of her little fingers. I turned my back so she'd be less able to grab it away. Then with all my strength I struck it against the ground. Still nothing.

  Dorinda's fingernails raked the back of my neck as she continued to howl in rage.

  Again I raised the staff and this time brought it down against the metal helmet of the dead goblin. There was a sound and a flash of color like being in the middle of a fireworks blast. The crystal knob had cracked. I hit it again and again, until it shattered and the fireworks dissolved and were no more.

  "There," I said, turning to Dorinda, figuring, Now let her do her worst.

  She wasn't there.

  Only another scattering of crystal shards.

  With a sigh I let the staff drop. Now what? We had discovered the secret of the goings-on at Sannatia. The princess, though not exactly rescued, had been taken care of. The quest was over. The game should end. But I was still there. I sighed.

  Marian was breathing shallowly, and I didn't see how shaking her awake—if I even could—would help. The others were two-dimensional wall decorations. Except for Mom, and there was no way for me to tell how she was. With or without Mom, Dorinda's goblin guards would be trooping up any second, and they'd probably toss me off the castle when they saw what I'd done.

  Through the doorway into Dorinda's workroom I could see her pet chipmunk. It'd grabbed hold of the cage bars with its teeth and was shaking the whole cage.

  Well, I thought, maybe it was just naturally ferocious, but maybe being Dorinda's prisoner had done that. The worst it could do was bite off my fingers.

  I opened the cage.

  The chipmunk ran from one side of the table to the other, chattering at me angrily. "Hey," I said, "give me a break." I watched as it teetered on the edge of the table then launched itself at the chair. It landed on the wooden arm, quickly scrambled down to the floor, and headed for the balcony. With its little paws it swept pieces of the broken crystal—both the original knob and what was left of Dorinda—toward the tip of the staff.

  "If you're trying to fix that," I said, "pardon me, but I just finished breaking it."

  There was a sound like a ten-yard-long zipper getting zipped, and a puff of smoke. Coughing and sputtering and waving his arms, a man stepped out of the smoke, holding the staff, in one piece and bigger than ever. "Well, finally," he said. "Good thing you pointed the far end of the staff at her while you broke the crystal. I was watching you, and frankly, I didn't think you were smart enough to figure it out."

  I didn't tell him that the staff was aimed at Dorinda by coincidence because we were playing tug-of-war with it. "Ahm...," I said. "You must be...?"

  "The High Mage, yes. Of course you're right. Who else?" He looked around and shook his head. "What a mess, what a mess. Still, it's to be expected. Or at least I expected it. I don't know if you did, because I don't know you, so I don't know what you expect and what you don't. Still, it is a mess."

  "Look," I said, "I don't know if you're aware of it, but there's a troop of goblins downstairs, some of whom are due up here—"

  "I," said the High Mage, incredulous that he should have to explain, "I am aware of everything. I was turned into a chipmunk, not a half-wit. Goblins are easy to handle. Stand aside, boy. Stand aside." He repositioned me away from the unconscious Marian, then pointed the staff at her.

  Immediately her eyelids flew open. She sat up. She touched her side and her neck, which were still bloody, but the skin underneath was intact.

  "Stand aside, boy," the High Mage told me again, and this time he was looking at Cornelius, plastered to the wall and floor. He pointed the staff at him, and Cornelius slid the rest of the way to the floor, a continuation of the action frozen by Dorinda's spell. He sat there as though stunned, then rubbed his bottom.

  The High Mage sighed loudly, and I realized I was standing between him and the portrait of the others in the group. "Sorry," I muttered, moving.

  One by one, Feordin, Nocona, Robin, and Thea tumbled out of the frame. "Who are all these people you brought with you?" the High Mage asked me.

  Feordin, holding his new mace aloft, said, "I am Feordin Macewielder, son of Feordan Sturdyaxe, grandson of—"

  "Nobody cares," the High Mage interrupted. To me he said, "This is going to take quite a while, restoring people to their original forms, cleaning up after the goblins, twenty years of Guild paperwork to catch up on. Is there anything I can do for you before I get started, or do you just want to wander around the castle, knocking goblin heads together or whatever it is you warrior types do?"

  "I want to go home," I said.

  "Done," he said.

  The castle fell apart with the sound of ripping fabric, and the sky exploded into a color with no name.

  38. FINAL SCORES

  And so the game ended.

  Of course, the Rasmussem program has an automatic system that figures out each player's score, tabulating treasure won, experience points gained, hit points scored against, prestige, etc., etc., to determine an individual's level for the next time he plays. Not a single one of us thought to call the information up onto the computer screen.

  As soon as we found ourselves in Shelton's basement, everybody started asking Mom, "Are you all right? How do you feel?"

  She seemed a bit groggy, but she said, "I'm fine. What happened? Is the game over?"

  "Your headache," I insisted, "how is it?"

  "Gone." She pressed her fingers lightly to her temple. "Really. I'm fine."

  I knew she was going to refuse to go to the doctor; I knew she was going to say it had all been a computer glitch.

  I knew she was going to wait until it was too late.

  Shelton saved the day. "Modem," he commanded the computer, "dial nine-one-one." Because he has cerebral palsy and on bad days finds it hard to control his movements, his computer's functions are all voice-activated. Before Mom could protest yet again that she was fine, Shelton was announcing, "We have a medical emergency."

  Mom didn't say anything, figuring, I guess, now that the ball had started rolling, she'd let it go.

  Of course, the only way we were able to convince the doctors to even look at her was to explain about how we'd been hooked up to the Rasmussem program. And once the doctors agreed to look at her, it didn't take long for one of them to come hustling out of the examining room all serious and in a hurry, demanding a phone number where he could reach my dad.

  They wouldn't talk to me, they wouldn't let Mom talk to me. It wasn't until Dad arrived, about five hours later, that I learned she was already in surgery. They sat us down—they sat Dad down; they still wouldn't acknowledge me—and explained that Mom had an aneurysm in one of the arteries in her brain. That means a weak spot where the artery kind of balloons out and eventually breaks. If it's an important enough artery, the person can die, and of course an artery leading to the brain is one of the most important. In Mom's case, the "eventually" was more like "any minute." Finally, after treating me like a smudge on the wall all afternoon, the doctor congratulated me on getting Mom to the hospital when I did.

  Dad insisted I was old enough to be allowed to stay, and I wasn't sure which was worse: being forced to wait outside or watching her while she lay unconscious, listening te the awful sounds of the machines that helped her breat
he and monitored her life signs. It seemed like we were there forever before her eyelids finally fluttered open.

  The doctors had warned that she might be disoriented, unable to remember things, might not, in fact, immediately recognize us. I steeled myself not to be frightened or worried, no matter what.

  Dad leaned over and kissed her. She kissed him back, which may or may not have been just an instinctive reaction. But I knew she was going to be all right when I went to kiss her cheek and she whispered, softly but clearly, "Who won?"

  Actually, we never found out.

  We had told the doctors about the Rasmussem program, and apparently one of them told a reporter, and it didn't take any time at all for the Rasmussem people to hear about us.

  At first they threatened to take Shelton's whole computer, but here was this poor kid in a wheelchair—and, boy, did Shelton play that up—who couldn't do his homework or dial a phone or communicate with the outside world without his computer. In the end, possibly afraid of bad publicity, they relented and just confiscated the pirated program.

  I figure the computer would have given me top billing, since I happened into being the sole survivor of the game. Which just goes to show how dumb computers can be.

  The last I heard, Shelton's given up being Cornelius the Magnificent. He's pirated a self-teaching law course, and he's hoping to learn enough to take on the Rasmussem Corporation.

  I say "the last I heard" because—between going back and forth to the hospital with my dad while Mom was there, and helping her get around now that she's home—I haven't seen too much of him lately.

  The old group has pretty much fallen apart.

  Dominic, a.k.a. Nocona, hung around until the ambulance picked my mother up, but he didn't say much. Two days later he came up to me in school and said, "I'm glad your mother's going to be OK."

  "Thank—" I started.

  "But I hope a truck runs over your face," he finished.

  I've seen him in the halls since, but he won't talk to me.

  Cleveland—Feordin—has dropped out of the group, too. His parents heard about what happened, and now he isn't allowed to play with us. They say we're too rough a crowd.

  Noah and Dawn Marie are into bigger and better things than Maid Marian and Robin of Sherwood. They're running for Student Council, and they're running, of course, as a team. Instead of calling themselves candidates for president and vice president, they're running as co-chairpersons one and two. Best of luck.

  Giannine—Thea—I see every day because we're in all the same classes. Today she walked up to me and said, "Boy, you really made me crazy during that game. Always showing me up. Always being in the forefront of the action. Always knowing the right answers, knowing what to say and do."

  Me?

  "I kept trying to compete with you, and I kept falling on my face."

  Her?

  "I was really getting to hate you," she said. "But I've been watching you the last couple weeks, taking care of your mom and all. You're not really a bad guy after all."

  Ah ... thanks. I think.

  I was about to try to put into words how I felt I'd been given a second chance, which is kind of hokey and I probably would have regretted it later, so it was a good thing she interrupted, saying, "I'm impressed to see sensitivity and nurturing from a fourteen-year-old male." She said it the same way you might say "from a green-tentacled creature from outer space."

  My palms were beginning to get sweaty.

  "So," she said, "wanna go to the school dance with me?"

  "Noooo," I said slowly, "I don't think so."

  "Arm wrestle you for it?"

  "I don't think my parents would like me arm wrestling with a girl," I explained.

  She hesitated, as though thinking. "Play you a game of cards. You win and I'll do tonight's math homework for you. I win and you'll take me to the dance."

  What can I say?

  How was I to know she'd been getting lessons from Dawn Marie?