High School is a scary place for a freshman. From the moment you step foot inside on the first day, you’ve jumped into a race to see who becomes friends with who, who gets into the "in" crowd, and who gets left behind. It didn’t take long for me and Paul to strike up a quick friendship. We were in different athletics courses, he in baseball, and I in basketball, but we were big fans of both sports, and just happened to have lockers next to each other. That was fate man, I tell ya.

And not necessarily in a good way. I’ll be the first to admit, I was a bad kid. I came from North Junior High which was notorious for all the gangs and troublemakers. Anyway, just a few weeks into school, all of the major cliques had formed, and those who still had no friends were quite obvious targets to pick on. One of those kids was Bennett.

He was a chubby kid who kept to himself. If people weren’t making fun of him for the way he dressed, they were making fun of him for how he would doodle anime characters in his notebooks or how he’d spend time in the computer lab, just looking at all that whacky Japanese stuff. He was a real easy target.

One time when I walked over to hit him on the head, not real hard or anything, just enough to annoy him, I glanced over at his computer screen and saw what he was looking at. It wasn’t anime or video games or whatever he usually looked at, it was something real strange. Made me sick to the stomach now that I remember.

It was a website that had photos of various kids, I think they might’ve been students, none that I recognized anyway, and it was just their faces. Some of the faces were grayed out. I also looked at the top of the web browser, cause you know, it usually says the name’s site there.

And what do you think it said? It said "A New Game has begun".

And Bennett noticed that I was looking at it. And he asked me, "Are you interested?"

Interested in what? I asked him. And he pointed to the screen. "The Game."

Creeped me the hell out. I just walked out of there and I hadn’t even hit him yet. I didn’t want anything to do with him and every time Paul or Jermaine or Olen wanted me to help pick on him I would decline.

That’s about when Bennett moved from the computer lab to Room 208. The room with no windows and just one computer. I dunno what deal he struck with the teachs’ but apparently he was allowed to use the computer there. He’d be there every day after school. We were sophomores at this point, and quite some time had passed since I had that encounter to him, so I decided to find out what was going on with him. I went in and said straight up, "What are you doing?"

That creepy bastard just smiled back at me. I don’t know if he remembered our encounter the year before or anything, but all he said was, "A new game is going to start soon."

I don’t know what the hell he meant by that, but suddenly I remembered what I had seen on that computer screen back then. I just ran the hell out of there, and next thing I know, I bump into Jermaine. He asked if I had seen a freakin’ ghost. I told him the story, about how Bennett was always in that room after school, looking at something weird. And I was getting angry at that point so I told him that he should go and mess his shit up. Jermaine agreed, and next thing you know, the whole gang was there the next day after school.

And that’s when it happened.

*

Brady finished his story off with a retelling of what had happened in the room which mirrored what Paul had told Storell previously. "So, this whole thing is a game," Storell said. The words left her mouth slowly. Brady could see tears starting to stream from her eyes, but her mouth remained closed. She was a strong girl, Brady thought. She didn’t break down crying this time.

It was getting dark and the others had started to find sleeping spots behind the waterfall in the grassy enclave. "I’ll let you be," Brady said as he stood up.

"Wait," Storell said. Despite tears still flowing, she reached over and grabbed her notepad and pencil. "I want to jot this down before it gets dark. Can you give me the names of the people who were in the room with Bennett?"

"Uh sure," Brady said. And he rattled off the names. Storell wrote them down as quickly as she could. Brady covered the names he had mentioned in his story. Bennett. Jermaine Banks. Mike Wilcox. Olen Detts. He also gave out names of people who were not part of the gang, but had gone missing that day as well.

"They weren’t part of the gang but disappeared that day… Did you see them there, by any chance?" Storell asked.

Brady shook his head. "I can’t remember. Wait, I think I saw August there. Big Hispanic guy. You know what, I think he was Teltenary’s brother."

"Teltenary… She’s one of the people that was in the room, but whose bed was empty."

"Right. Seems there’s quite a bit of people who knew about this game, not just us. Argh, that website! I should have found out what that website was that Bennett was looking at. What was I thinking?"

Storell closed her notebook and placed it in her backpack. She sighed. "You named fifteen people. That matches with what we had. This is some crazy game all right."

Brady thought back to Montgomery’s story, about how Pernwall received a photo of Jermaine and Mike, both seemingly dead. And then it hit him. They were all going to die. All of them, except perhaps the "winner" of the game. Bennett must have been the winner. And that thought made Brady sick to his stomach. "Ugh, I’m going to sleep. Talk to you tomorrow, Sto’," he said as he hurried off to find an empty spot.

"Goodnight, Brady," Storell said without turning her head to face him. She remained sitting on the ground, huddled, and staring blankly forward.