The Double Life of Danny Day

by Mike Thayer

  I also found out that there were a bunch of other items similar to the wizard’s cloak that Noah removed from the Brown Bag. Every area on the map had some sort of monster to summon: Haunted Pines had werewolves, Lost Labyrinth had Minotaurs, Dryout Dunes had giant scorpions, and so on. The item needed to summon and control those monsters always spawned somewhere away from that region. Since Noah was the reigning Brown Bag champion, he could choose the game, which included tweaking the variant. Limiting it to just the wizard’s cloak and the dragon made things a lot easier to control. For the Shoebox Game, however, that custom variant would be pulled back, and the full chaotic glory of the Champions Royale map would be on display.

  I boarded the bus on a sticky-day Friday morning and walked over to Zak.

  “Discard or sticky?” Zak asked as I sat down.

  “Forty-nine,” I said, repeating the secret number. “Sticky.”

  “Darn it,” Zak said, writing down another number to confirm the next sticky day. “I bet you do some pretty crazy stuff on discard days.”

  I feigned an apologetic expression. “Well, I’m sorry I’m such a boring friend when I know I can’t get away with murder. I’ve tried to get you to do some ‘pretty crazy stuff’ on discard days, by the way. You’re not exactly the rebellious type.”

  “I can be rebellious,” Zak scoffed.

  “Dude, last week you wouldn’t skip violin practice because you said it would be like skipping out on putting on underwear … which can be super liberating, by the way.”

  “Look, discipline equals freed— Wait, what?” Zak’s eyebrows shot to the ceiling. “Are you talking about missing violin or not putting on … you know what? I don’t want to know. So I’m not that rebellious. Fine. What did we figure out yesterday, at least?”

  “I figured out there are three different underground entrances in Greedy Mines that take you straight to Ghastly Gravestones.”

  Zak shook his head. “You just stayed home and played video games?”

  “Yes, Zak,” I said plainly, as if calmly responding to my sisters’ question of whether they had to put on clothes before going to church. “Have you ever gone to school for like ten days in a row? It’s exhausting. We each have our role to play in this war on Noah. If I’m not in tip-top video-gaming shape, how can I help during the Shoebox Game? And don’t worry, you were just as disappointed with my decision yesterday evening. You almost didn’t tell me your daily secret number. You do realize I always have to hear these things from you twice, right?”

  “Huh,” Zak said, considering the comment. “Well, we all have our roles to play, as you said. I’m your annoying conscience. So what’s the plan now? I can try to keep tracking Noah during class breaks and stuff, but I would bet he just sends the money through an app or something. I think this is a dead end.”

  I kicked the problem over in my mind. Whether it was exchanging items in the game or money in person, it didn’t look like we were going to catch any more cheaters out in the open. So how did we rustle them out of hiding?

  “Let me call Freddie for another opinion,” I said, taking out my phone. “She’s good with this kind of stuff.”

  “Call Freddie?” Zak straightened and looked toward the front of the bus. “Hey, where is she?”

  “She’s faking sick today,” I said without looking up from my phone. “We played video games online together almost the entire discard day.”

  I looked over to see Zak giving me a flat stare.

  “Hey, you should try it sometime,” I said, tapping my phone to call Freddie. “Oh, and remember. No talk about the double day.”

  Zak mimed zipping his lips shut.

  Freddie picked up after the second ring, her untamed black curls filling most of the screen, the unmistakable backdrop of the Roost behind her.

  “Danny? Uh, hey … what’s up?” Freddie flitted her eyes between her phone and the TV before giving two unconvincing coughs. “Not feeling well today.”

  “It’s seven thirty a.m., Freddie,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be resting or drinking lots of fluids or something?”

  “I can’t rest until I rank up to platinum tier,” she said, quickly dropping all pretenses of being sick. “And I’ll drink the plentiful blood of my fallen enemies. Now, how can I help you?”

  “Looks like we got the right person,” Zak said with a nod. He and Freddie still didn’t know each other that well, but our joint quest to dethrone Noah would solve that pretty quick.

  “Oh, hey, Zak,” Freddie said, a hint of embarrassment hanging on her words. “Didn’t know you were there.”

  Zak gave a little wave to the camera, but Freddie was too busy looking at the TV. Zak leaned in close to the phone and lowered his voice. “So Danny tells me you and he are going to take down the great SpudMasterFlex.”

  “Did Danny recruit you, too?” Freddie perked up. “Please tell me you’ve agreed to karate chop him in the pus-bubbling skull.”

  “Uh…” Zak hesitated. “Not exactly. More here for ideas and strategies than anything. Plus, I think I’m more the bodyguard type than the hitman or assassin.”

  “Ah,” Freddie said, deflating a bit. “Okay, so what’s up?”

  I ducked below the seatback in front of me and lowered my voice as well. “So, we were just saying that we don’t think we’re finding the cheaters fast enough, and we’re running out of time before the Shoebox Game. We were brainstorming ideas.”

  “Ratbag, cow poop!” Freddie shouted before putting down her controller. She’d apparently lost her game. She grabbed her phone and angled it toward her whiteboard, which now included Ophelia’s name as well as a bunch more info on potential cheaters. “So, I just want to double-check here. You’re saying all threats of physical violence are off the table? ’Cause I bet we could get them to spill the beans on the other cheaters if Zak put one of them in a headlock or something.”

  Zak cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah, that’s off the table.”

  “Monkey dung.” Freddie snapped her fingers and erased a line from her board. “Well, there goes that idea. So what does that leave us with?”

  “We were hoping you would know,” I said.

  “We’ve gotten what we can from spying, threats of pain and death are off the table…” Freddie gave an overexaggerated glance of disappointment. “I suppose asking nicely isn’t an option. Hog bog, this Noah is squirrelly.”

  “Wait, that’s it,” I said, holding up a finger.

  “What’s it? Asking nicely?” Freddie asked. “I highly doubt that is going to work.”

  “Hogs.” I nodded with a self-satisfied smirk.

  “How is hogs the answer to your problems?” Zak asked.

  “Hear me out,” I said, still piecing my thoughts together. “So back in Texas, my dad used to take me hog hunting. There are millions of the things. They tear up farmers’ land, breed like crazy, and stink to high heaven. They’re like a statewide infestation of two-hundred-pound cockroaches. Anyway, with how many of them there are, you’d think they’d be easy to find, but there’s no fooling a hog’s nose. They’ll smell you a mile off if the wind’s in the wrong direction, and you’ll never see a thing.”

  “So how do you hunt them?” Freddie asked.

  “The hard way is to track them. Move slow, read the signs, but it takes forever. The smart way isn’t to avoid their sense of smell. It’s to use it against them.”

  Zak twisted his mouth. “And how do you do that?”

  Zak was a smart kid, but he obviously wasn’t much of a hunter. “By laying bait. You find something that they can smell for miles that they can’t resist. They’ll come in by the herds.”

  “So you’re saying that we try to bait the cheaters?” Zak asked. “But what do we use for bait?”

  “Money,” Freddie said plainly.

  “Bingo,” I said, snapping and pointing to the camera.

  A shrill call of Freddie’s name sounded in the background. “Oh, sorry, guys, I gotta go,” Freddie interjected. “That
’s my gammie. I’ll have to catch ya later.”

  With a quick wave, she hung up.

  “I told you she was good.” I turned to Zak. “If these cheaters like getting money from Noah, we’ll just have to give them a whole lot more to turn on him.”

  “Okay,” Zak said. “But where will we actually get a whole lot more money?”

  “Doesn’t really matter,” I said, pocketing my phone. “I only pay people bribes on discard days.”

  CHAPTER 20

  RIGATORTOISE

  (Discard Monday—October 4th)

  Zak pressed his lips together and looked nervously around the bus. “Are you sure this is a discard day?”

  I glanced sideways at Zak. “Yesterday was Sunday, Zak. That would make today the first Monday of the week. I’m sure.”

  “Well,” Zak said, fiddling with something in his jacket pocket, “yesterday is always the day before for me, and I only ever have one Monday in a week. It’s not like I wake up on a sticky day and remember the crazy stuff that happened on a discard day. I’m flying blind here.”

  “Oh, stop your whining,” I said. “You remember how I told you that you never do anything crazy on a discard day?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, consider this your first big step.”

  Zak took a couple of deep breaths then pulled his hand out of his jacket and handed me a roll of dollar bills. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. You better be right. You are acting way more rash than usual, and I can’t ever really remember seeing you act rash, so that’s probably a good sign.”

  I looked through the bills. Tens, twenties, and even two fifties. There had to be close to three hundred dollars here. “Yeah, well, my parents aren’t big on cash, and this much is well beyond my personal savings. If we’re gonna get these cheaters to come out of hiding, we need strong-smelling bait.”

  “My parents are going to kill me when they find out.”

  “If they kill you, you’ll only be dead for like half a day,” I said, playfully slugging Zak on the shoulder. “You’ve come so far. See, doesn’t it feel good to be a little rebellious on a discard day?”

  “No. It doesn’t,” Zak said, breathing out and putting his head down between his knees. “It feels like I’m going to throw up.”

  “It’ll pass.” I patted Zak on the back. It was weird to see him like this. He could stand up to the town’s most ferocious bully, but borrowing a bit of money from his mom’s purse had him nearly passed out on the floor. The sticky-day part of me understood every bit of his anxiety, however.

  I stashed the cash in my jacket as the bus pulled up to the school. I may not have known who the cheaters were, but I had a pocket full of bait, video evidence, a discard day, and two places to start: Ophelia Higginson and Adam Sipherd.

  Ophelia Higginson, aka RigaTortoise, was short and broad, and had razor-sharp blond bangs that looked like they’d been cut with the help of a straightedge. She was quiet and sat in the back row of my first period next to Elise, the anime girl. Since she typically spent most of her between-class time and lunch hour with Noah and the gamer group, the tricky part was going to be finding a time when I could get her alone to propose the bribe.

  At lunchtime I picked a table apart from the gamers and sat with Zak and Freddie to reevaluate the situation. We watched the brown bag get passed around, the students discreetly slipping in their money before handing it down the line. Knowing what to look for, I was amazed we’d never been caught by a teacher. At one point Ophelia stood, and I got ready to make my move. When she picked a wedgie and sat back down, I knew we needed to work out a different strategy.

  “I’m guessing you haven’t had any luck yet?” Zak asked.

  I dipped a golden, crispy Tater Tot into some fry sauce and popped it in my mouth. How did I ever live without these things? “Nothing. This girl attaches herself to Noah like a phone to Braxlynn’s hand.”

  Freddie put her elbow on the table and rested her chin on her hand. She mumbled when she spoke. “The Shoebox Game is in less than two bum-busting weeks. What do we do if we never get a chance to bribe her?”

  “We’ll get the chance,” I said, eyes fixed on Ophelia.

  “How much you end up getting for the bribe?” Freddie asked.

  I gave Zak a look and pulled out the roll of bribe money.

  Freddie’s eyes went so big I thought they’d overinflate and pop like a balloon. “Is that real?” Freddie hissed, frantically looking over both shoulders.

  “The money is quite real,” I said. “The bribe will not be.”

  “Where did you get it?” Freddie stammered. She was acting like I’d just pulled the Triforce out of my pocket. However strange Discard Danny was to Zak, he was going to be baffling to Freddie.

  “Freddie,” I said, making sure I had her eyes. “I’m gonna need you to trust me today.”

  Meeting Discard Danny was always a shock to the system for those who only remembered Sticky Danny. It was a moment (or series of moments) of such uncharacteristic behavior that people questioned whether they knew me at all. My parents had said almost those exact words dozens of times over the years. Freddie, however, gave a different response. One that stunned me as much as Zak’s explanation of what he would do with the double day. She simply pursed her lips, squared herself, and nodded. “I trust you.”

  Her sincerity was so pure, it halted me for half a breath. I could probably still make the discard day work without Freddie, but knowing that she had my back, whether I was Sticky Danny or Discard Danny, with no explanation of what a double day even was, was a type of trust I didn’t know I’d been desperately missing until I suddenly had it.

  I nodded to Freddie and pulled out my phone. I searched online for RigaTortoise’s profile and began drafting a direct message.

  I know you’ve been helping Noah win during the BBG. I’ve seen you give him two wizard’s cloaks, one giant healing potion, and walk over a bear trap so he could get a magical mace … and that’s just in the last few days.

  “Here we go.” Zak took a deep breath.

  “Wait for it,” I mumbled, and reassuringly patted Zak on the leg. “No one look at her.”

  Our joint attempt to suddenly not look at Ophelia was probably as noticeable as just staring at her. I watched her freeze out of the corner of my eye. She slowly looked up from her phone and scanned the lunchroom. A few seconds later, three jumping dots appeared at the bottom of my screen. She was typing her reply.

  Is this the new kid from Texas? I have no idea what you’re even talking about.

  “Time to play hardball,” I said, teeing up and sending two of the videos I’d recorded of her helping Noah.

  Let me refresh your memory. I mean, this was ALL THE WAY back to last week, so I see how you might forget. Shall I send a few more? Maybe to the whole BBG crew? I’m sure they’d love to know how helpful Noah’s shadow team can be.

  There was a long pause before Ophelia’s reply.

  What do you want?

  Names. I know SpudMasterFlex is paying you to help him. But I guarantee he’s not paying you THIS much. It’s yours if you tell me who else is helping Noah.

  I sent a picture of a fifty and two twenties. Zak wiped at a sheen of sweat forming on his forehead.

  He doesn’t pay me and no one else is helping him. I’m the only one.

  I’ll give you a hundred and fifty bucks if you tell me the others.

  You think I’ll ruin my friendship with Noah for a hundred and fifty bucks?? You AREN’T a mind reader after all. There AREN’T any others. I’m the only one.

  “A bit squirrelly, this one. Looks like it’s time to take it to the next level.”

  I want names or I start posting videos.

  There IS NO ONE ELSE! I’m the only one Noah trusts and the only one good enough to help him.

  “Wow,” Zak said, looking up from my phone. “I’d definitely rat you out for a hundred and fifty bucks.”

  “I would have done it for the original
ninety,” Freddie added.

  “Thanks, guys.” I rolled my eyes.

  “He must be paying her a huge amount of money,” I said. “No way anyone could actually be friends with that turd. Well, Ms. RigaTortoise, if you don’t think anyone else is helping Noah, then the truth shall set you free.” I selected the two videos of FancyPrance helping SpudMasterFlex and sent them to Ophelia.

  I waited for her reply, but she never typed one. I could see her watch the video, her jaw dropping and eyes bulging in surprise. She tapped her phone several times over the next few minutes, most likely replaying the videos to make sure she was seeing things correctly. She stood, tugged on her wedgie, and turned to loom over Noah.

  “Dude, I honestly think she didn’t know,” Zak said, now openly staring at Ophelia.

  “Oh, this should be good,” I said.

  Ophelia thrust her phone in front of Noah’s face, who was busy playing a game.

  “What the crud, Phee?” Noah yelled.

  “You want to explain this to me?” Both Ophelia and Noah were talking plenty loud for us to hear them from a distance, even with the lunchroom chatter.

  “Explain what?” Noah stopped and watched the two videos of FancyPrance, his face flushing a brighter shade of red with each second. “Phee, it’s not what it looks like.”

  Ophelia’s face contorted with rage, and I thought for sure she was about to punch Noah in the mouth. “I’m not stupid, Noah. I know how the game is played. Adam is obviously helping you. You said you trusted me to be the only one.” Ophelia burst into tears as she spun and ran away.