Game of Life

{ c h a p t e r . o n e }

                Third Person Point of View

        Savannah Wolfe, a fifteen-year-old high school freshman soccer player, stood quickly from her seat on her living room floor. She paused the movie she had been watching, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, after the doorbell rang several times. Only one person would repeatedly ring the doorbell to her home, and that was her best friend, Camden Short. Camden was fairly tall, making his legitimate last name a pretty nice pun. He was a little crazy, and you could definitely tell. Although he received outstanding grades throughout elementary and middle school, high school was different. Nearly everything about Camden Short changed once he started high school. On Savannah's first day, she noticed Camden sitting in a corner of the lunchroom, at a table with only two other people. This struck her as unusual, considering that every other table in the cafeteria was packed. Since she didn't really have any friends, aside from the girl who sat behind her in homeroom earlier that morning, Savannah decided to go and sit with the seemingly anti-social group of three. The two other people at the table turned out to be a couple, Brianna Reid and Tyler Long. All of them were sophomores, except Savannah, who had recently moved and therefore had not had any friends from middle school to attend the same high school as her. But from that day forward, the four of them were the best of friends.

        Once Savannah opened her front door to greet a grinning Camden, with lovebirds Brianna and Tyler cuddled up behind him, the mood for the night suddenly changed. She let her three friends inside and went to close and lock the door back, but while she was doing this she noticed a flickering street lamp on the opposite side of the street. It was pitch black dark and the lamp flickered very quickly, which made it difficult to see anything that may have been hiding in the shadows. This gave her an eerie feeling that she was being watched by some unseen force, but she brushed it aside when the light stopped flickering and she saw nothing in the now illuminated shadow.

"Hey, Savannah, whatcha lookin' at?" The question came from Brianna, who had settled down in the floor on Tyler's lap.

"Oh," She finished closing and locking the door, "Nothing."

        Savannah sat relatively close to Camden, since they had both admitted to having a crush on each other. Also, it was a little drafty in the old, Victorian-style home that Savannah lived in with her parents, so the more body heat the better. It was just then that she noticed the board game stuffed under Camden's arm.

"Hey, Cam, what's that?" She asked him.

His grin spread wider across his face as he said, "This is a game of life."

        Camden spread the board out between the couple and Savannah and himself.

"So get this, I found this really weird-looking board game in the basement the other day. Which just so happens to be why I called this meeting, aka movie night." He announced, quietly as to not disturb Savannah's parents.

        A few days ago, Camden had called Savannah to ask if the four of them could have a movie night at her house. She asked her parents, and they said that she could as long as they behaved. Mister and Misses Wolfe were not exactly fond of Camden Short, more or less because of family rivalries in the past. But since they so dearly loved their only daughter, they cancelled dinner plans that night and opted to stay home. Your father wanted to show me some extreme stock changes, was her mother's excuse. Although Savannah knew the real reason was to make sure that no teenagers were making babies in her house. The funny thing is, she wasn't even referring to her daughter when it came down to that. Even her mother knew how Brianna and Tyler were all over each other.

        So there they sat, staring down at this freaky-looking board game that Camden managed to dig up, when Tyler attempted to pick the dice up off the home space. The two dice pieces wouldn't budge.

"Whoa, dude, is this like Jumangi?" Tyler questioned Camden.

"The box didn't say it was so I'm assuming it's not." He answered.

"Then why won't the fucking dice move?" Tyler demanded.

        Just then, the dice flew up and smacked him in the eye, and then flew right back down in the same spot and on the same numbers.

Tyler rubbed his eye, "Okay, I guess it doesn't like vulgar language." He grimaced.

        Savannah giggled, and then attempted to pick up the dice. This time, they moved without hesitation.

"Oh, I get it now." Camden announced.

"What do you get?" Brianna questioned him.

"Usually, you let the youngest player roll first. Tyler isn't the youngest; Savannah is." He states.

"I swear this game is f-, I mean screwed, up." Tyler mumbles.

"Are you gonna roll or not?" Brianna asked Savannah.

        Savannah clasped both hands over the dice, shook them around a bit, and then released them onto the board. She had rolled a one on both dice. It was then that she noticed the four character pieces that were stationed at the starting point. One of those four, the shortest of the silver figures, moved two spaces. They looked down at what was written on that space. It read, Kidnapped.