and the nondescript middle-range types were standing. Where the girls congregated. He tried to imagine that it was a dungeon he could explore, or at least that there was a treasure chest involved. He tried to imagine it was made of asterisks and dots and ampersands, and in his mind he was the plus sign. He breathed in the concentrated smells of beer and sweat that accumulated. He watched the other students arriving, meeting their friends, going upstairs, or spilling out onto the lawn behind the house to trample the pachysandra and decapitate the agapanthus blossoms.
If the house were a dungeon then it was upside down, and the treasure and the mad wizard would be on the top floor. He climbed the stairs, stepping between and over two girls having a conversation about field hockey.
By eleven thirty Simon was in a curious state, not sleepy but hazy from the heat and damp air and mist of alcohol that surrounded the house. He wandered down the hall, straying vaguely toward quiet and cool air. The truth was, high school was almost more than he could stand, and he was not a wimp except in the most strict and physically literal sense of the term. He had never been to a party like this and it struck him as a little bizarre, like a feverish nightmare version of school. It was the exact same mass of people, but they had all shown up in the middle of the night, and now there were no teachers and everyone stood in the hallways talking as loudly as possible, and there were no classes except lunch, or else the classes were all different and he hadn’t ever studied for any of them. The house was a new one, a huge three-story box on a low hill. Until a few years ago there was a small one-story house on the site, a dirty pale blue with a permanent accumulation of newspapers out front, whose owners were somewhat mysterious. They’d disappeared, and the whole lot was bulldozed, and the new house was canary yellow, maybe four times the size of the old one, with curious classical touches—columns and broad steps out front, a temple to a pagan god remembered only for its class connotations. On the way in, Simon had rapped on one of the columns with his knuckles—hollow. The third floor seemed to be all guest rooms and half baths, like a dormitory.
He crept into one of them, wary of disturbing a couple, but it was empty. He went to the window. His own parents owned a liquor store and lived across town in a house not unlike the one this one had replaced. It was near the end of the school year. He looked down across a wide green lawn scattered with stray revelers, and out over the maze of old trees and amber-lit streets of Newton that he’d biked through to get here, a great, tangled, supremely lazy serpent that had fallen asleep and would never rise again. He could see the stars. He was probably, literally, farther off the ground than he had ever been in his life. At the back of that labyrinth was his future, the college he’d go to if he could afford to, the faces of the friends he’d make, a made-up world where people would be glad to see him every day—everything that would happen to him when he left Newton. He tried to picture it and couldn’t. Something would come along—he’d take up smoking or learn a foreign language—and it would make him a new person. Or would it? All he could see from here was a kind of tunneling into himself, an excavation of more and more chambers full of skeletons and gold and magic, lands of kings and queens and monsters. It was the thing he was good at, and what was to stop him doing it the rest of his life?
He was less popular than ever, but he’d also discovered a fact even Darren hadn’t, which was that they were not the only ones playing Realms. There were about thirty players now from around the school, and together they’d played more than a thousand times. They weren’t just making Realms for themselves now; other people believed and other people cared. That was going to matter.
I saw Simon, leaving, which I remember distinctly, even though it was the first night I ever drank enough to throw up, and it may have been the night of