by Mike Thayer
Zak waved a dismissive hand. “So are you sure you don’t want to fight crime?”
“Dude.” I held my hands up in disbelief. “I’m not even willing to look Jaxson or Braxlynn in the eye on a sticky day. I think I’m a few steps away from coordinating a drug raid or foiling armed robbery.”
“Okay, okay,” Zak conceded. “Just needed to confirm where we’re starting from here. Let’s start with that, then.”
“Start with what?”
“With Braxlynn.”
“Nope.”
“Then with Jaxson.”
“Uuuuuhhh, nope.”
“C’mon, man.” Zak laughed. “Work with me here.”
“Zak, I may be new in Pocatello, but I’ve had plenty of discard days to push those kids’ buttons and feel their wrath. I ain’t ending up no dud.”
“Well we gotta start somewhere.” Zak paused and rubbed his chin. “If we’re not going to save the victims of crime in our city, then we’ll save the victims of bullies in our school. Gotham has Batman, Metropolis has Superman, and Snake River Middle School has Team Double Day!”
“Team Double Day?”
“Yeah, I know.” Zak pursed his lips. “It doesn’t have the right ring to it. Maybe the Double Day Squad, or the Double Day Defenders. Oh, wait. I got it. The Double Day Duo!”
“So we’re superheroes now? Is that it?”
“I’ll work on the official drawing,” Zak replied, holding up his sketchbook. “For now let’s work on some ground rules, like we can’t hurt the bullies. We can’t become the bullies ourselves. I’ve read enough comics to know that superheroes always have trouble with that. We can’t become villains to take down the villains, you know? We need a code or something.”
I placed my hand over my heart. “I promise to adhere to the Double Day Duo code, where I will not become a bully or kill anyone. I also promise to still spend some of my discard days playing video games, eating candy, and driving my mom’s car very, very poorly.”
“Needs some work.” Zak cocked an eyebrow. “And I’m pretty sure we just agreed to scale back the video games.”
“Oh, does that include you cutting out your nightly Clash of Warbands sessions?”
Zak’s jaw went slack for a moment. “Who told you … Oh, I did, right?”
I nodded.
“This is so weird.” Zak laughed. “So if we’re not ready for Jaxson or Braxlynn, then where do we start?”
I knew the answer to that question just like I knew the answer to who I wanted to tell the double-day secret to. “We take down Noah.”
“Hmmm.” Zak weighed the name. “Noah is a sufficient punk. So what do we need to do first?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I feel like the answer has something to do with me playing a lot of video games.”
Zak brought his palm to his face. “Of course you do.”
CHAPTER 16
TEXCALIBUR
(Discard Tuesday—Sept. 21st)
The school bus doors thudded closed behind me, and I looked to see Zak saving me a spot in the last row, his eyes looking for all the world like it was his birthday and I was walking toward him with his cake, candles blazing. I shimmied down the aisle, dodging crumpled-up balls of paper and avoiding eye contact with Noah, who was busy gaming away on his phone. I might not like the kid, but you couldn’t doubt his dedication to video games.
“Okay,” Zak whispered as I took the seat next to him. “What day is it today?”
“It’s Tuesday, Zak,” I said blandly.
“You know what I mean,” Zak hissed.
“It’s a discard day.”
Zak sucked at his teeth. “Yeah, but how do I actually know for sure that this day I’m having right now is just going to disappear? It just feels like a regular day to me.”
I looked at Zak like he’d just insulted my mother. “What, you don’t trust me?”
“C’mon, man, this is a pretty new concept for me. A little bit of assurance would go a long way.”
I sat and thought a moment. I’d never had to convince anyone that they were actually living a discard day before. After a minute or so I got an idea. I stood up and cleared my throat. “Attention, all fellow bus riders. My name is Danny Day, and I have a very bad case of explosive diarrhea. That is all.”
I sat back down with a smug look not befitting someone who had just announced to fifty kids that he had severe digestive problems. For a moment, Zak looked like he was going to switch seats, but he just shook his head and laughed. “Weeeellll, I will admit that that is slightly out of character for you.”
“Slightly?” I said, knowing that no matter how many discard days I spent with Zak he would only ever have my sticky-day behavior as a reference.
“Okay, fine,” Zak conceded. “I will admit that I did not see that one coming. So if it truly is the discard day, then what do you have planned so far?”
“Zak,” I said blandly. “I don’t know what’s going to happen any more than you do. Most of the time, discard days are for seeing what goes on, taking notes, and lots of knee-jerk reactions. Or I just play video games.”
Zak rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you’ve mentioned that once or twice. So is that it? You take Noah down by just playing a bunch of video games and then coming out of the blue one sticky day and taking it to him?”
I eyed Noah as he pumped his fist in the air, stood up, and yelled something to the kid in front of him. Gloating, raging gamers like Noah annoyed me to no end. “No, it needs to be bigger than that. I’ve played with kids like this before. The moment things don’t go their way, they start making excuses about how they were lagging, or they weren’t used to the controller, or they’re feeling sick, or the game glitched, or the sun was in their eyes, or whatever. If I just eventually beat Noah in a Brown Bag Game, I don’t think it’ll be enough. I’m not looking to dethrone this punk for a day. I’m looking to take him out for good.”
“Geez,” Zak said. “Remember the code, man. You can’t actually strangle the guy with a controller cord.”
“All my controllers are cordless, Zak. What do you take me for, a noob or something?”
Zak pressed his lips together. “Nice to see you taking issue with the controller cord after I accuse you of strangling Noah.”
I shrugged. “Discard Danny is edgy like that. So look, I’ve got … well I had pretty good evidence that Noah is actually cheating during Brown Bag Games. I would have caught him red-handed on a sticky day if not for an unfortunate run-in with Jaxson.”
“Okay, well, just use the double day to catch him again.” Zak spoke as if I hadn’t thought of that idea before.
“It might take a while for the stars to align,” I explained. “I’ll need to keep taking screenshots of the stats at the end of every game in hopes I can get something useful for our resident Champions Royale expert to interpret.”
The bus lumbered past a speed bump as it pulled into the school zone and over the curb to the school parking lot.
“Expert?” Zak said, confused. “You mean there’s someone that knows the game better than you?”
I glanced toward the front of the bus at a mop of black curls poking above the seat. “Way better than me. And if we’re talking about taking down Noah, I don’t think there’s anyone on the planet that’s thought through it more than she has.”
* * *
“So I know I’m still pretty new here,” I said, tilting my head as I read the spines of all the game cases proudly displayed on a small shelf in the Roost, “but what’s the extent of what a shadow team is allowed to do in a Brown Bag Game?”
“Nothing crazy,” Freddie replied, tracing a new chibi-style drawing of Lara Croft on her whiteboard. “They basically just avoid shooting their friends until the end and team up on shooting other people. Nothing that’s like super obvious, I guess.”
“Doing something like giving someone the wizard’s cloak would be off-limits, then?”
“Uh, does Mario like mushrooms?” Fredd
ie turned and folded her arms, suspicion written across her face. “Did someone actually try and give you the wizard’s cloak today?”
“What? No, I don’t even have a shadow team, Freddie.” I looked around the tree house as if checking if the coast was clear. “I have it on good authority, though, that Noah is cheating.”
Freddie’s eyes narrowed. “How good is that authority?”
“Preeeetty darn good.” If she only knew.
Freddie moved her lips around as if she was swishing her mouth with the new information to see how it tasted. She snapped her fingers. “I bog-squashing knew it!” Freddie stomped the wooden floor. “Noah is good, but no one is that good. Oh, I wish I could get him back, just once. Just one time, I’d like to see him get what was coming to him.”
“You wanna?” I asked.
Freddie stopped and stared at me. “What? Get him back? Of course I spud-thumping want to. I want to make a million dollars a year streaming on Twitch. I want to fly to Paris on a private jet. I want to do a lot of things, Danny, but that doesn’t mean I’m able to actually do them.”
“Just play along for a second,” I said, plopping down on an old camping chair Freddie had hauled up to the Roost as a guest seat. “Let’s just pretend like we managed to get solid evidence that he was cheating, a screen capture or something. How would you use it?”
“Weeeellll,” Freddie mused, pacing the small tree-house floor. “The temptation would be to post it online or send it around on the Spud Gamers group chat, but that wouldn’t be good enough.”
“I don’t know. Sounds pretty good to me,” I replied. “He’d be disgraced at that point, wouldn’t he? His title of Poky’s greatest gamer would be destroyed. He’d lose everything.”
“Sort of.” Freddie’s tone hinted that she’d thought this through before. “It’s not like he’d cough up all the money he’s taken from people over the years. Also, while there would be plenty of upset gamers, I just know he’d have some explanation, some way to spin the evidence so it doesn’t look as bad. It’s like a superpower you get when you’re a salty-headed, arrogant worm like Noah.”
“What do you suggest, then?” I asked, picking up an Xbox controller and turning on the TV.
“Noah likes a spectacle,” Freddie said. “He doesn’t just like getting kills; he likes shouting about it from the top of his lungs. He doesn’t just like winning; he wants everyone watching. You need to catch him at his grandest moment, when he thinks he’s on top of the world, and have it all come crashing down.” The edge in Freddie’s voice could have been forged from rage or revenge, but it wasn’t. It was a plea for justice, to finally be free of a plaguing, oppressive weight.
“So we use that info somehow to take him down during a Brown Bag Game?”
Freddie shook her head, her eyes distant as though she was already seeing the moment play out. “I don’t want to just out Noah and be done with it. I want to tee him up for a downfall that will be talked about by Snake River gamers for the next decade. We take him down at the Shoebox Game.”
“The what, now?”
“It’s like the Brown Bag Game on steroids. It only happens twice a year, though. Once in the spring and once in the fall. All the gamers meet at a park. Twenty-dollar buy-in. Winner take all. It’s in like a month.”
I did the quick mental math. Although you had roughly twenty-five people playing in any given Brown Bag Game, that only represented about half the people who regularly played. If there were fifty people at twenty bucks a pop … “That’s a thousand dollars, Freddie.”
“I am well aware, Danny.” Freddie sighed. “I was dumb enough to save up for it a year back. I’d be happy just to see Noah fall, but I can’t even begin to tell you how much a win would change my life.”
She didn’t openly fawn over the thousand bucks like most kids would do, but I hadn’t forgotten our conversation during my first visit to the Roost. How Freddie needed a new bike, new clothes, even money just to help her grandmother. It was that moment that my whole plan shifted on its axis. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Noah to lose, it was just that I wanted Freddie to win even more. Luckily, if I pulled this off right, I could kill two birds with one stone.
CHAPTER 17
TOILET TALK
(Discard Tuesday—Sept. 21st)
I pulled my bike up to my garage and punched in the four-digit code. The large door opened with the sound of a castle gate rising. How humanity could invent the smartphone but couldn’t figure out how to make a quiet garage door was beyond me. I squeezed through a hoarder’s nest of moving boxes, tools, camping gear, and sports equipment. My mom had gotten the house unpacked and straightened away, but my dad hadn’t had time to so much as take the packing tape off anything in the garage. It was unlike my dad.
I opened the door to the house and almost tripped over Sarah and Alice as I entered.
“Bike ride, Danny?”
“Bike wide?”
They must have heard the garage door. It was like their dinner bell for a bike ride.
“Not today, twinsies.”
I tried to walk past, but they latched on to both my legs, repeating their pleas as I dragged them over the tile floor with heavy steps like I was trudging through waist-deep snow.
“So what did you two stinkers get up to today that I have to undo, huh?”
“We just played, Danny.”
“Yeah, Danny, we just pwayed and wed stowees.”
I stopped when I reached the carpet and glared down at my sisters’ chubby innocent faces. “You know, it would make my life a whole lot easier if I could come home and you two would just confess to everything you did while I was gone. I know you did something. There’s always something.”
“Oh hey, Danny. You’re home,” my mom said, walking down the stairs and entering the living room. Fuzzy white specks dotted her hair.
“You get like a really aggressive case of dandruff or something?” I said, pointing.
“Did I what?” My mom looked at her hair and picked out several of the white fuzzies. “Ah, yes. I just finished restuffing the couch cushions.”
“Why’d you have to…” I glanced down at my sisters and knew from the looks on their angelic faces that this was their doing.
“We pwayed in da snow, Danny,” Sarah said, nodding.
I took out my discard-day notebook and made a note. I wasn’t sure how I was going to keep my sisters from unzipping the couch cushions, but I’d think of something. I turned to my mom. “Have you ever thought about keeping them in some kind of a kennel during the day? Uncle Paul used to have those big hog-hunting cages. They would work great. Put a few stuffed animals in there, a mini fridge with Go-Gurts, a bowl of Goldfish, you’d be set for hours.”
My mom picked another fuzzy out of her hair and narrowed her eyes at me. “The girls would find a way out.”
I laughed despite myself. I had been convinced my mom was going to reprimand me for suggesting we lock my sisters in cages. Her joke, plus the fact that no attempt at dinner had been made despite it being past six o’clock, let me know everything I needed to about what kind of day she was having.
“Did you have fun on your playdate?” my mom asked, going to the kitchen and removing several Tupperware containers from the fridge. It wasn’t that I hated leftovers, I just didn’t like having them for both the discard and the sticky day. And if we had two days of leftovers that made four days for me. There was only so much reheated shepherd’s pie one kid could take. I made another note in my discard-day book. I couldn’t always have an effect on whether my mom made a fresh meal, but if there was even a chance, I’d go for it.
“It’s not a playdate. Mom…” I stopped when I saw a smile creep over her lips. She was getting a rise out of me. It was good every once in a while to remember where Discard Danny got his mischievous streak. It might explain the twins as well … maybe. “Is Dad working late again?”
My mom clicked her tongue. “Chiropractor again, actually. His neck is still givin
g him fits from when he fell asleep at the table the other night.”
“Seriously?” I said, a pang of guilt lancing my gut. My dad was going through a rough patch. “He didn’t exactly get hit by a car.”
“Just wait until you’re forty, Danny. Life gets less forgiving. I once knew a guy who was constantly popping his neck. Would torque it super hard. Over and over again. One day, snap, broke his own neck.”
“Really?”
“No, but it could be true, and—”
“That’s all that matters.” I finished my mom’s sentence. My mom had no idea how many times she’d gotten me with that on a discard day. How did I never see it coming? “Gonna chill upstairs for a bit, Mom.”
“Okay, but stay off your phone. There’s plenty of other things to do in life.”
I tickled the twins until they released their holds, and I ran upstairs before they could reattach themselves. When I got to the safety of my room, I pulled out my phone and dialed Zak’s number.
“Yo,” Zak said, picking up yet again on the first ring. I couldn’t tell where he was for a second and then noticed what looked like a shower curtain.
“Are you on the toilet?”
“Uh, yeah.” Zak shifted his eyes side to side. “You called, so I thought it was urgent.”
“Nothing is so urgent that I need to talk about it while you’re on the toilet. Let’s just agree to that.”
“Fair enough, but you’ll have to let me know again tomorrow, right? This whole day apparently disappears in like six hours.”
“It’ll disappear for you,” I said, pointing to Zak through the camera. “I, however, will be forever scarred with the memory of FaceTiming you while you’re taking a poop.”
“Blessing and a curse, man.” Zak shrugged. “I still can’t wrap my mind around it. Today doesn’t seem any different from any other day. I don’t feel like I’m going to forget.”
“Yeah, well, you will,” I said, taking out my notebook and flipping through the day’s entries. “How was violin practice? Lame as always, I assume.”
