A Long Way From Home

Chapter Twenty-Four: Stressful Day, Happy Ending

       "That had to be one of the easiest tests I've ever taken in my entire life," Matt said. "Like, come on! They made it multiple choice, but some of the later questions had the answers to the earlier questions. What are we, third graders?"

       Faith wasn't back in the room yet, so everything was as we'd left it. I kicked off my sneakers and sat down at my desk. "It was... pretty dumb."

        "I can't believe we spent so much time working on that stupid review packet. I mean," he pushed up his glasses before falling onto my bed, "the math questions were pretty hard, I'm glad I practiced those, but everything else?"

        I opened one of my desk drawers. "Snack?"

        Without missing a beat, he responded, "Cookies."

         I tossed him some in a blue wrapper and grabbed a vending machine pastry for myself. "The test was kind of dumb, yeah. I really expected a free response section too."

         "Why wasn't there one?"

         "I dunno. Maybe they were too scared a lot of kids would fail if there was?"

         "Fair enough, I guess." He pulled out his phone and spun it around in his hand. Half of the snack cookies were crammed into his cheek when he asked, "So the grades are up tonight, right?"

          "Mhm." I ripped open the pastry package. Glaze stuck to the sides of the plastic and coated the back of my hand as I pulled the treat out. "Dr. Bharma said that we could get them earlier if we went to her office after testing ends."

         "When's testing gonna end?"

          I shrugged. "When people are done taking the test." The clock read 11:04. It was only about an hour after testing had started. "Which won't be for a while."

           "Lame." He dumped the rest of the cookies into his mouth and threw out the package. "We can play Killbot Phantasm until Faith gets back."

         "You say that like she won't just join in when she gets here."

          He shrugged. "We've got hours to kill."

         But I was already turning the console on. I tossed Matt a controller and swiveled around in my chair. "Where did you and Faith leave off?"

         "Level 27. Just start a new game though. She'll get mad if we play over her save and make her miss stuff."

        "M'kay." The game was projected onto the blank wall across the room, and Matt and I both pivoted to face it. Bright colors and lights shone on the wall as the graphics melded from pixels into clean lines, zooming in on the game logo before shattering into the menu. I hit the 'New Game' button.

         After we chose our character classes, we played for a few hours uninterrupted. It only took us three hours to get past Level 27 and make it Level 43.

         "You'd think Faith would be further along in the game by now," I said as we entered another combat sequence.

         "She dies at least once in every fight." Matt started the round firing two spells. "And she also tries to find all of the collectables." By now, we were both lying down on the floor, leaning against our backpacks to stay somewhat upright. "Which is fair. My first time playing, I tried to find every little thing."

         "Yeah, I guess." I used two sword attacks. "Plus, we already know where the encounters are."

        Matt hummed in agreement. We played in silence for another few minutes. After having played together so long, we had a pretty solid strategy down for fights. It only took the first ten levels to figure it out, and now, we didn't even need to talk.