The Boy in the Tunnel

by Gardner Linn

2a.

Just inside the false wall panel on the Inner Arm of Tier 2 of the third floor that led to the tunnels, Tim found the Cloak of Great Reward. Chet had warned Tim before his first game that the Cloak wasn’t necessarily something you wanted to find—“doesn’t help you at all in the game, might fuck you over later”—but Tim still had enough of the Batman-obsessed adolescent in him to get a thrill out of tying the Cloak around his neck. He took a few long strides down the hall, and the pleasantly heavy purple fabric swept dramatically behind him. So cool.

The Cloak was gravy, as far as Tim was concerned. He was just happy to be really playing the game, for once. The first time he was stuck as an Assistant Referee, trying to prevent arguments over whether a Sniper’s suction-cup dart hit another player’s shirt. The second time he was the Shambling Horror, wandering the tunnels from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., never seeing another player. No one had bothered to tell him that the Red team won the game at 4 a.m., so he spent the whole twelve hours literally and figuratively in the dark.

But now he’d graduated to the Blue team, and he was determined to prove himself worthy. Beyond Drew (overly concerned with Tim’s immortal soul) and Chet (a big-brotherly figure as apt to smack Tim on the back of the head as dispense useful advice), Tim’s freshman experience so far had not been the cool-new-friend free-for-all he had been led to expect by the UNWG brochure, not to mention movies, TV and well-meaning but bitter guidance counselor Mr. Hancock (“Kids like you, Tim, we—you find your real friends in college. Trust me. Forg...fuck high school, Tim. Fuck it”). MiloBall was a way to change all that, or at least the Handbook told him it was, and the Handbook had not lied once yet. Sure, it hadn’t mentioned the alarmingly strong laxative effect of its “Ultimate Weston Hall Soda Fountain Suicide Recipe,” but the drink was as delicious as promised. Try as he might, Tim could not yet get his dander up over lies of omission.

It was 11:32. Three and a half hours into the game. So far no contact with the Red team, and only a brief tête-à-tête with Blue teammate Joey Fowler, who Tim determined had all the higher brain functions of a worn-down Phillips-head screwdriver (Harvard of the South my ass, Mr. Hancock, thought Tim) and would be no help in finding the MiloBall. So Tim staked a lonely claim to Tier 2 of the third floor. If the MiloBall was here, he would find it. And God help any Red player who ventured into his territory.

Even for a Friday night, F3T2—and the rest of Wintertree—was extraordinarily empty. While the majority of the dorm’s residents took the weekend either as an opportunity to retreat home to Mom and Dad or to venture downtown to try out their fake IDs, still smelling of fresh laminate, one could always count on a few of the more pious or socially maladjusted freshmen to remain in the building, reading the Bible or playing Magic or masturbating frantically and gratefully while they had sole occupancy of their rooms or gathering in the lobby to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail in one tittering, onion-scented clump (always with the homemade ethnic food, the lobby movie groups). But on MiloBall nights, the dorm seemed to empty. Surely there must have been one or two holdouts, Tim surmised, who remained in their rooms with the doors locked and the TV sound down while the Red and Blue teams waged their battles, but for the most part the game forced all those not playing the game out of the dorm and into the wild.

Where they went, Tim had no idea, and he had not been eager to find out. He had spent his first few college Friday nights in 79A, glad to have a few hours to himself (Drew was pious but well-adjusted, and so spent his Friday nights at church-sponsored social functions). But he knew that this was wrong somehow, a violation of the unwritten, unspoken contract he had made with himself when his mom dropped him off at Wintertree. On the second Friday, walking through the lobby to meet the Papa John’s driver, Tim had seen in the faces of the “Ni!”-shouting freshman hunched and slouched around the TV a reflection, and it sickened him so much that he turned on his heels and walked back upstairs, leaving a baffled and increasingly pissed-off delivery boy to wait for ten minutes before offering the large pepperoni & mushroom to the movie crew, who naturally said yes and scraped together fifteen bucks.

Tim hadn’t paused to consider that maybe this rejection of those most likely to accept him—the Groucho Marx conundrum, as he would identify it in later years—was the cause of his lone-wolf status two weeks into the semester. At some base level perhaps he knew it was perverse, but he couldn’t stand to be around those who reminded him of his own worst (as he saw them) impulses. Mr. Hancock had said he’d find in college, finally, “people just like you”—a rarity at his high school—but Tim did not want to find people just like him. The way he figured it, being just like himself was a big part of the reason high school sucked so hard, so maybe it’d be a good idea to try to make friends who weren’t just like him. Befriend the guys doing Jager shots at The Underground on Friday nights, not the guys watching Evil Dead 2 in the Wintertree lobby. It was a theory, at least.

There were 18 bedrooms, one bathroom, a study lounge and a locked room of indeterminate purpose on F3T2, arranged along a hallway that resembled four sides of an nonagon. One end of the hallway—the western end, Tim thought, but he wasn’t sure—were the stairs to the second floor (Tier 3, to be exact). At the other end, a perpetually propped-open door revealed a three-step stairway leading to Tier 1 of the third floor. F3T1, F2T3 and the stairwell were Red territory, which made Tim’s chosen beat, F3T2, a prime location for ambushing Red players trying to take the short way back to their home territories. He’d searched the hall and the study lounge for the MiloBall and poked around the walls for secret entrances (which was how he’d found the Cloak), but the Ball remained elusive. He figured he’d stay here for another thirty minutes and try to capture a Red or two before moving on and continuing the search.

It hadn’t taken long for Tim to identify MiloBall as the ideal anvil on which to forge new friendships. Attempts to join friendly-looking strangers at dinner in Weston were aborted in the grill line. Games of Ultimate Frisbee seemed to pop up spontaneously on the quad, but Tim was never there for the genesis, and felt weird about joining in the middle. The very thought of going to a frat party alone and uninvited filled Tim with more stress than he could handle. Drew had extended an open invitation for Tim to join him at his church functions, but he didn’t think Jesus was the answer this time.

What made MiloBall such an attractive option were the rules—there was a code of conduct to abide by, a clear beginning and end, a goal. The game laid out a framework for a night, a rigid structure in which Tim could be constrained but free. He worked best when he had limits placed upon him, when he knew what he had to work with and what he had to work against; the game turned the formless, infinitely-branching, terrifying possibility of a Friday night into something whose edges Tim could actually see. And of course being a member of a team was a shortcut to forming a lasting bond with likeminded souls. Prior to joining his first game, Tim had let the St. Crispin’s Day speech bounce pleasantly around his mind more than once.

Tim checked his watch—11:36. A thin, echoing sound somewhere to his left seized his attention. It sounded like someone was in the stairwell, sneaking up from the second floor. Tim crept toward the door at the end of the hall, pressing his back against the wall, as he’d seen cops do in movies, and pulling the Cloak tighter around him, as he’d seen Batman do. He passed the bathroom, the study lounge and the locked room, the footsteps—definitely footsteps in the stairwell—getting louder. He crouched to the right of the door to the stairwell, ready to tag the interloper and take him prisoner.

The footsteps stopped. Tim tensed, his tagging hand at the ready. Behind him, a previously locked door swung open on creakless hinges.

© 2008 Gardner Linn