ON THE LAST DAY OF SEVENTH GRADE, our drama teacher, Mr. Piper, decided to make us play Mafia. It was one of those wasted days that happen at the end of every school year. We'd finished our work, our grades had been sent to our parents, and we were all hopped up on cake and vacation.
Normally we liked Mr. Piper, even though he wore Jesus sandals in the middle of winter so the middle school auditorium always smelled like foot fungus. He used to preach about Movement, which meant us bouncing off the walls while he played bongos. "That's it!" he would tell us. "Be the snowflake!"
But that last day of class, in a weird turnabout, when our brains were already in Johnson Creek, or Cannon Beach, or just Out of Here, Mr. Piper decided to impose classroom structure on us in the form of Mafia.
If you haven't played before, it may sound cool, but it's actually kind of stupid. Everyone has to lie down on the floor in a circle and close their eyes. Then the teacher taps someone to be the hit man and someone to be the angel. He says, "Mafia, awake!" Then the hit man sits up and opens his eyes, and points to the person they want to kill. That's all they do. Sit up and point. And boom! The guy's dead.
Ah, but there's redemption. The hit man lies back down, then the teacher says, "Angel, awake! Who do you want to save?" Then they sit up and open their eyes, and if they point to the same person the hit man pointed to, then the victim gets to live. The hit man and angel keep going until everyone is dead. In between hits, when everyone has their eyes closed, Mr. Piper will announce which of us has been "saved" and which of us has been "killed," so everyone can try to figure out who the angel and the hit man are. Then the real fun begins. Everyone tries to imagine how they died.
None of us had actually watched someone's life drip away, or be shot away, so it was more about drowning in vats of lemon Jell-O, or being trampled in a herd of stampeding nutrias.
I didn't realize until later how freaky it was that everyone wanted to die.
Dying was the fun part.
I was the first one to get the tap. I didn't even need to ask if I was the angel or the hit man. I knew. Even then I had a reputation.
When Mr. Piper said, "Mafia, awake!" I pointed my finger across the circle of kids lying around, some smart-asses with their arms crossed over their chests like cadavers. I cocked my finger like a gun straight at Crock, who even then was kind of obnoxious. Then I lay back down.
After that it was someone else's turn. I heard Mr. Piper say, "Angel, awake! Who do you want to save?"
As I lay back with my eyes closed, someone else sat up and tried to undo my damage.
My turn again. Again and again I sat up and pointed. Again and again someone tried to save everyone else.
There were thirty kids in the class. Number twenty-seven I pointed to was Jaime, and number twenty-eight was Sonia. I didn't even point to the one Mr. Piper had chosen as the angel, because I knew without looking who it was.
When the bell for the end of class rang, everyone sat up and opened their eyes. Well? they wondered. They didn't need to ask who the hit man was. But the question was, when do we get to guess how everyone died?
Mr. Piper gaped at me, and at my best friend, Evan. No one had ever gotten three for three, let alone twenty-six for twenty-eight. "It's uncanny," he said. "You two must share some kind of cosmic connection." The only two we'd mixed up, it seemed, were Sonia Krajicek and Jaime Deleuze.
Ev and I talked it through on the bus home-not about the ones we'd gotten right, but the ones we'd gotten wrong. Evan thought Jaime was the last one I'd want to kill because (a) she was the first girl in our class to develop a rack (and believe me, it was a good one), and (b) he didn't think she could handle being dead. He was right about that. She was always running off crying to the bathroom because some boy had teased her about her hair or her clothes, when really they only wanted a grope. Yeah, try explaining that to a twelve-year-old girl. It's not about you. It's about your boobs.
But I countered with Sonia: Had Ev seen the way she moved, those legs sprouting up long and sexy? The way she flicked her black hair over her shoulders when she was studying her algebra book? The way she'd look at me with those soft brown eyes when she told me to fuck off? No, Sonia was the cool one. Sonia was the last one I'd ever kill.
That was years ago, before Ev had his appendix out. Before my father left, and then came back. Before we became the Gallivanters. Before Ziggy entered our lives suddenly and deserted us just as quick.
After everything was over, and only three of the four of us walked away, I kept remembering that day in seventh grade, and realized that Ev and I had been asking each other the wrong questions. It wasn't, who would we want to save last? It was, who would we want to save at all?
Every day since, I've wished that Mr. Piper had chosen me for something else.
Now, every night before I go to sleep, I feel a tap on my shoulder. But this time my role is different. He doesn't call me hit man. He whispers, "Angel, awake! Who do you want to save?"
This time I know what I have to do to make things right. Night after night, I try to call him back. Night after night, I shake the blankets off, sit up, and point.