and it was only when we were maybe a hundred yards short of the cabin that Simon and I took in, with a kind of cresting heartbreak and what must have been pride, that we were now three, that Darren and Gabby had disappeared during the walk back without our even noticing. Simon waved a kind of stunned good night to me and Lisa and waited a moment on the porch before turning in. We were still the coolest kids in camp that night, and he could hold on to that as long as he needed to. I think he knew there were things Darren was always going to learn faster than he could. That he’d always be running to catch up, if not falling farther and farther back. That in the end he’d be left behind.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Four second-round games for the winners; killers and survivors only. In the opener I got pulled into the game’s first player-on-player aerial battle, my giant eagles to the Hotchkiss kid’s dragonets. With the aid of graph paper and a few trig functions, I was the first to spot a small inequity in the turn radius. A hungover Darren surprised everyone with a rather elegant and economic victory over Lisa, steamrolling two other hapless campers in the process. The third match got replayed because an Italian camper, Val, had exploited a bug in the river-travel rules that enabled her to effectively teleport masses of troops. She won the replay as well, on a truly grisly display of high-level necromancy.
Simon’s match deadlocked in the medieval fantasy equivalent of trench warfare. The war turned on productivity, all four sides straining to squeeze more gold pieces out of hyperoptimized economies as play ground on for a full millennium. But Simon always played dwarves—eldritch miners with iron in their blood—and as dawn came the lines finally cracked, and the last slot in the final four was his.
The summer was peaking in the third week of July, the smell of wet trees after rain, the slow fade to darkness during evening rec period—it all seemed to have come to its fullest, long days we hadn’t been counting until now. We had the second-to-last Thursday night booze run, the last hot-fudge-sundae night in the dining hall. Most of all, it was the tournament that was measuring out the days to the end of summer friendships, the rare (three, by my count) summer flings, the whole prolonged sweet moment of it. I felt how much Simon wanted to stay in it, to drink in everything he could.
Darren was busier and busier, and more and more popular, and Simon and I fell into the habit, I guess, of being close friends. We’d go for walks sometimes, or have long confessional talks in the darkness of our shared room. Most of what I know about Simon firsthand I know from this period and a few long phone calls he made to my college dorm room.
The calls came once every two or three months. I’d go that long without even thinking of Simon, and then when the phone rang I’d know it was him. He’d want to reminisce and go through old inside jokes together, or talk about games he’d played. Mostly I was humoring him. Occasionally he’d talk about an idea for the Ultimate Game based on this or that new intellectual passion of his, Chomskian linguistics or psychological profiling or Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. Or there would be a new way of arranging menued conversations or new ways of measuring player behavior that opened and closed new branches in the story in ways guaranteed to be meaningful. And it was always the same result—a frantic brittle enthusiasm, and then he would never mention it again. In the last call he said he’d found it, yet again, but he was uncharacteristically evasive. His own idea, this time. And not to tell Darren he’d found it. I honestly didn’t feel like following up, and I didn’t. I was in college, and I’d be a different person now. It was all exactly what I was trying to get away from.
Simon’s dad left a long time ago; his mom seemed to be a step behind, working at a tragic little crafts store. He was smart, but in a way he didn’t ever quite value in himself. He was short and unpopular and had no visible means of support in the world other than that he genuinely loved computers and computer games, probably more than I