“Watch out! The marshmallow’s going to fall!” Denice giggled as she watched her friend Katie twirling the ever-more-melty snack over the stovetop. “My mom will kill me.”
Before she could say something else, Katie slid a graham cracker underneath and saved the white goo from falling into the stove, a mess that Denice would surely have had to clean.
Denice stepped up for her turn while Katie wandered to the other side of the kitchen where they’d stashed the chocolate bars.
“When you invited me over to ‘rough’ it,” Katie said, “I thought you were nuts since, you know, it’s like thirty degrees out there. But I have to admit, this is pretty genius.”
Katie bit into her s’more. The gooey center oozed out the back of the snack. Denice laughed as her friend rushed to catch the chocolate-marshmallow concoction and cram it back between the crackers.
Denice focused on the stove and her marshmallow. She was happy Katie could spend the night. They had been friends for about a year, but the past month it had been hard to find time to get together. Freshman year was finally smoothing out it seemed.
As Katie wiped the goop from her fingers, she said, “Oh! I forgot to tell you. My mom said she could take us to a movie tomorrow when she comes to pick me up. You want to go?”
Denice spoke slowly and methodically as she tried her best to made entire circumference of the marshmallow a perfect golden brown. “I can’t. I have a…”
She paused as the mallow caught fire.
“Damn!” Denice blew out the flame before the whole thing became a sugary fireball. “I hate when they’re all charcoal. Guess I’ll have to make another.”
She grinned wide and sandwiched the blackened marshmallow between two crackers.
Katie nibbled her fingers, catching some of the chocolate that got trapped under her fingernail. “Sooo, why can’t you come see a movie tomorrow? The new Bradley Cooper movie looks awesome. I heard you totally see his butt.”
“Oh boy.” Denice rolled her eyes. “I just have a… a thing I do on Sundays.”
Katie tilted her head. “Church? I didn’t know you were religious.”
“It’s not like that.”
“No? What then?”
Denice shook her head, her cheeks flushed. Katie wasn’t her closest friend, which is why she hadn’t heard about Denice’s Sunday affair yet. Most of her friends didn’t ask about it, so Denice assumed it was best to keep it to herself.
“Seriously, Dee,” Katie said as she sat down at the kitchen table, “what is it? Are you in one of those weird cults where they talk to snakes and speak in tongues and stuff?”
Denice finished putting her s’more together and took a little bite off the corner. Her stomach was a little queasier than when she had made the s’mores suggestion.
She sighed. She wasn’t going to be able to hide her dirty little secret—Katie wasn’t going home until tomorrow.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”
She sighed, big and dramatic, and sat across from her friend. Denice took a deep breath. She could do this. It would be okay. Right?
Denice said, “Every Sunday, I… go downtown to the game store.”
Katie shook her head in a way that told Denice that she was going to have to go on.
She frowned. “I go there and I play a game with some kids. It’s no big deal, just that we’ve been doing it for a couple years.”
Katie grinned. “Who plays board games every weekend for years? Are you one of those weird chess nerds? Can you, like, play four games at the same time?”
Katie was teasing, but she was dancing closer and closer to Denice’s truth. She was using those words that Denice absolutely abhorred people calling her ever since she started going to the store.
“No, no! Okay, I’ll tell you everything, but you are going to think it is the nerdiest, geekiest thing ever. And then I’m going to have to defend it. So I just want you to have an open mind, okay?”
Katie nodded. The corners of her lips still showed a trace of a teasing smirk. What if she didn’t get it?
Denice said, “You know what, why don’t I just show you? Then you can call your mom to pick you up, and I’ll go die of embarrassment.”
Katie gave a laugh, but it was a nervous one. It said that she had no idea what Denice was trying to tell her, but clearly she was going through as many insane ideas as she could possibly fathom.
Denice led her friend into the study where her family had their computer and tons of walls of books. Katie had commented at seeing them that nobody had ever read that many books, but Denice knew for a fact that in her family, herself included, most of those books had been read at least once.
She looked at Katie and stuck out her pinkie. “Promise you aren’t going to laugh?”
Katie rolled her eyes and curled her pinkie around Denice’s. “Yes. Promise. Geez! You’re acting like I’m going to friend-dump you or something.”
Denice leaned down and opened one of the cabinets. She pulled out a colorful book with the words ‘Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook’ in bold gold font on the front. In multiple places, cracks ran down the center of the book’s spine.
As she handed Katie the book, she said, “So, every Sunday I go to the store and play this with a bunch of other kids. It’s pretty awesome actually.”
Katie sat down on the nearby couch to thumb through the pages. Notebook papers and sticky tabs stuck out of the pages in various places. The book looked like it had been through a war, the kind that only the oldest of school textbooks ever saw.
Denice said, “So, yeah. That’s what I do.”
She waited. A thousand different scenes played out in her head immediately:
Katie laughing hysterically.
Katie telling everyone.
Being laughed out of school.
Not being able to go on the bus without someone calling her a nerd.
Her friends not returning her calls.
Big spray-painted letters on her locker that said ‘Nerd girl’ or ‘Dork’.
Denice looked at Katie, who clearly had to be considering the weapon she had just been given and trying to figure out the best way to point it and destroy her friend.
After about a million years, Katie tilted her head. “Is it fun?”
Denice collapsed onto the couch beside Katie, saying, “It is so much fun!”
She felt, with that one question, like Katie had opened up a well-spring within her. She was excited and nearly exploding! She couldn’t get information out to her friend fast enough.
“My character’s name is Athena,” Denice said. “She’s a ranger that hates orcs, like the ones in Lord of the Rings. They’re big and green and nasty. Her parents were killed by them, so she lived in the woods for most of her life. Last week, Keith, the guy who runs our game, had us in this orc village. I think the leader of the orcs is the one that killed Athena’s parents, so she’ll be able to get revenge on them!”
Denice stopped. Breathed. Blushed a furious shade of pink.
She had never said anything as geeky as that to any of her school friends.
Katie flipped to a random page featuring a wizard calling down a rain of fire on a dragon. “How do you play?”
Denice unleashed another torrent of information about different dice and how sets of numbers represented a character’s stats. She summed up the first hundred pages of the book in under five minutes, ending it finally with, “And you don’t think this is the dorkiest thing that ever, ever existed… ever?”
Katie laughed, and it stopped Denice cold. The insults were coming, she just knew it.
Instead, Katie said, “No! It’s kinda cool actually. I mean, yeah, it’s totally geeky, but that doesn’t make it horrible. Did you really think I was going to call you a huge dork and then never talk to you again? Seriously?”
Denice put on a toothy grin. “Uh… no. Not at all. That would be stupid.”
Katie rolled her eyes and threw the book at Denice, but not viciously. “Well, you are a big dork. But not because you play Dungeons and Dragons. You’re a big dork because you thought this was so horrible you didn’t want to mention it. Geez. Whatever. I still have a giant Big Bird I got when I was six that never leaves my bed. So… why don’t you show me how you build a character? You think we could play?”
The girls spent the next hour going over the rules. By the end Katie, who wasn’t exceptionally good at math, had managed to write up an elven warrior named Bella. She swore it wasn’t after the Twilight books, that it was her favorite Aunt’s name, but Denice wasn’t sure if she believed her.
The next morning, the girls woke up late and were eating breakfast when Katie’s mom finally showed up. Katie excused herself and, not changing out of her pajamas, ran to her mom’s car.
Denice wasn’t sure what was going on until her friend ran back. She sheepishly said, “I can stay longer. Can I come watch your game? I know you guys are all totally into the middle of the giant orc village or whatever. But maybe I could ask Keith if, when there is an opening, I could try it out too?”
Denice beamed. “Or maybe I’ll start my own game. You think any of the other girls would want to play?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR – James Hatton is a freelance writer and webcartoonist. You can find his long-running minimalist comic about the gods, In His Likeness, at inhislikeness.com