It has been said that the Mountain West conference is “At the Peak,” and to me, nothing illustrates that more, than the fact that there are 12 teams competing in the only NCAA Division 1 conference that sponsors e-sports. Of course, since the matches are played head-to-head, Boise State has an advantage because they tint the monitors blue, and play with all blue avatars; an advantage that is confirmed in their winning of League of Legends and Overwatch, but with the Spring season being cut, next year the Mountain West has announced that they will be playing Mario Kart 8, for the Nintendo Switch. Due to the large amounts of people in the Mountain West cities suddenly having $1200 burning a hole in their pocket, every store that sells Nintendo Switch has sold out of their allotment; yes, even, Amazon. So, thus the conundrum becomes: How can these players, prospects, and ordinary people practice in order to “git gud” as the gamers would say? Well, that’s where I come in. For, you see, since I am allowed out on the streets again, finally, due to both my prison sentence being cut short, and my work being determined to be “essential,” I had the time to scope out some places. Alas, while my cough and fever are not improving as much as I had hoped since I last got back from Italy, I did manage to find some time to visit all of the Mountain West cities in order to find the easiest place to get a Switch and Mario Kart 8 location. For simplicity’s sake, I am going by the football stadium since it’s a well-defined point in most locations – San José State fans, the football stadium is that big ovoid building at the corner of E Alma Ave, and S 7th St… It’s the place where the people aren’t on Saturday’s is September. Should you get hungry during your travels, I have also managed to find a some breakfast locations in the same vicinity

Mountain

Air Force

Okay, so I lied a little; I tried to get into the university, but, unfortunately the men with guns wouldn’t actually let me get beyond the gate on S Gate Rd, and I was still a little jet-lagged having just gotten in from Frankfurt after having woken up for my 0610 flight for the Linate to Frankfurt leg (stupid weather prevented the flight from Denver to ABQ, but my loss is your gain). So, while this may not be the closest, it certainly will fit the bill. Tyler-Jay Rowland who lives at 3075 Navigation Drive, in Colorado Springs was more than willing to help out, especially since his son, Jeremiah, was grounded for a month for staying out after curfew two weekends in a row. As the falcon flies, this location is 5.2 miles away; in a car, it’s not too much further than that.

Boise State

Now, I don’t, technically, hate the way that Boise is laid out with the river running right through the center of town, but even though Maci Drew lives in the Clearwater Apartments, unit 323, which is in a straight line, only a quarter of a mile from the stadium, you will have to go the Exxtramile, to get to her apartment. Also, she would like me to point out, that times for a waitress like herself are a little rough, so please, if you’re hungry, skip Taco Bell, and eat at the Bar Gernika in downtown Boise, right next to the Central Plaza and Century Link Arena. “We have wifi” she said.

Colorado State

This is, by far, the most remarkable location; I had completely forgotten that they moved to an on-campus stadium, so I initially went to the Hughes Stadium location, and found a big pile of dirt. And not much else – well, if you exclude the trees that formed a nice line, that brought me back to my college days. Having corrected my too old Garmin in-car GPS, I found Tim Thatcher on 604 Balsam Ln; he’s a little deaf, so you might need to knock like you are ram-ing down the door. He bought the Switch after his wife of 35 years died to help him grieve and spend his retirement, “but it’s just making me too sad lately, and I’ve never been very good at vid’ya [sic] games. I still don’t know how I’m supposed to save the princess when she’s trying to beat me… That reminds me of my princess, who I lost last year. She was so kind, we met in high school, I had an onion on my belt as was the style in those days. They didn't have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.” I’ll be honest, at this point I started zoning out because, again, fever. He honestly looked really sad as I was talking to him, so you might want to try to cheer him up, since he’s just a lonely guy bein’ a dude. In a straight line distance, you’re only going .3 miles, and it’s not too much further by car.

New Mexico

This is by far the closest location to the stadium. The UNM Lobo Club is a non-essential business in the state of New Mexico, and UNM and the Athletics Department realized that funding would need to be cut dramatically throughout the state, and with the sweetheart deal they got from the legislature this year, they decided to close all athletic facilities, including the Maloof building, home of both Eddie Nuñez’s office, and the Lobo Club. I suggest using the side door closest to the field level entrance of the stadium. That’ll take you to the weight room; an alarm will go off, the code is “1892” the year the football team first played (interesting tidbit: the marching band was founded in 1889, the same year as the university); from there enter the main hallway, and go to the first door on the left after you pass the restrooms. The last time I was there, they had a vending machine that dispensed free Mountain Dew; I was howl-ing with laughter after I found that. Also, if you see Señor Manta, say “Hola!” he’s been down on his luck since his family were killed in the accident, and now he wanders the street like a lone Lobo.

Utah State

It was like a bomb went off. No one was around; maybe they were busy playing Farmer, or having a bonfire out in the dirt behind the stadium, wit their brown-eyed girls, but Jeff Field’s dorm room, Aggie Village Community building 17, first floor, third window from the right (he leaves it unlocked, so don’t worry about access) has a Switch just sitting there on the bed, as though he borrowed it from someone, but never managed to return it before he left. Go on, take it, just say that it was yours and he left it, no one will check.

Wyoming

Cowboys and Cowgirls are just different, I guess; I could not find a Nintendo Switch in town for the life of me. I found many Switchblades, Light switches, and many wooden rods, so I took my horse down to Cheyenne, and found a recently laid-off Subway Sandwich Artist called Dom, who knew just where to look. He directed me to 803 West 21st St, Suite B. He told me, “yeah, the guy who runs this storefront, has a little son, about 6 years old. He keeps a Switch in his desk’s keyboard tray for when he picks his son up from school.” Because of the ordeal in Laramie, I asked him to clarify, and he did, “yeah… Nintendo switch.” He said as he looked around shiftily. If that doesn’t work you can always try Suite C, I heard they stock Switches… oh wait, not that kind.” I was going to ask him for more information, but he entered what looked like an abandoned brick building just passed the railroad tracks, “You didn’t see me,” he said. And I also didn’t hear the gunshots that went off as I walked back to my car.

Table View

School	Distance Driving (mi)	Straight Line Distance (mi)	Drive/Drone Difference	Variance (from all schools)A
Air Force	8.44	5.22	3.22	0.047
Boise State	1.00	0.282	0.718	1.069
Colorado State	0.420	0.312	0.108	1.792
New Mexico	0.206	0.191	0.015	1.920
Utah State	0.444	0.305	0.139	1.751
Wyoming	47.90	40.69	7.21	4.894

A: Variance is calculated based upon DDD’s distance from the standard deviation of DDD… Why DDD? Because, DDD is King.

West

Note: SDSU currently does not field an Esports team; I am including them because it seems likely that they will in the near future

Hawai’i

Hawai’i is interesting because the Honolulu airport has a much better open air location than the El Paso airport; there’s a water path, it’s weird man, it reminds me a lot of the Tiki Room at Disn… oh, yeah, Hawai’i, Polynesia, that makes sense. Anyway, the stadium is home to the largest swap meet’s I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, I did not find any Switches, but I did find a guy swapping Macadamia Nut cookies for a few dollars, so naturally, I bought some. It started to rain, so even though many people are Rainbow Warriors or Wahine, as the women prefer to be called, I am not. I stopped in at the ‘Aeia Public Library for a spell, and my phone was dead, so I needed a place to charge for a bit. The nice librarian, Akela (“it means graceful,” I was told. After I asked, “like the wolf-spirit in Hindi myths?”), pointed out, that, “We loan out all sorts of stuff here; pots, pans, sewing machines. Believe it or not, we even rent out video game systems. Our most popular is probably the Nintendo Switch, but we also have a couple of Xbox’s and PS4’s.” I guess I looked very shocked because Akela continued, “with the military surrounding us, we, the library system, get a lot of goods from contractors who don’t want to have a lot of their goods shipped back to the mainland.” Seeing how much it cost to ship out, I completely understood, and bid ¬¬Akela aloha, and failed the Hawai’I test by passing out at the nearest Embassy Suites, in Kapolei, if I remember correctly (I probably don’t, I was tired).

Fresno State

A nice cow brought me to Clovis. Much like what happened in Las Vegas, it was not the cool one, but instead the one in California. She (I saw udders), brought me specifically to 264 Clovis Ave, and said, “what you seek, from my master, is in there.” I’m not sure if it was my fever, jet-lag, a combination of them, or something else entirely, but then the cow vanished as though she was just a thing on the internet. A stray puppy passed by me in downtown, so that was probably the highlight of the trip.

Nevada (Reno)

Look, I’ll be honest, Reno to me always makes me feel like I’m going to be leaving the city without one or both of my kidneys. I don’t know why I expect Renoirs to chew my body like a Pack of Wolves, but there you are. Diedre Thomas of 128 Keystone Ave, fell on hard times. She poured herself a glass of vodka, neat, and said, “you can have anything you want,” she paused briefly to wink at me, “for the right price.” I specifically enquired about the Switch, “Anything,” she replied. She pulled out what appeared to be a small glass bowl that looked like an incense holder, and a baggie of chalk dust, and… Oh my god, she was going to smoke cocaine. Anyway, as she pulled out the pulled out the baggie, I hastily took my leave. I then went to the airport and went to my next stop….

Nevada – Las Vegas

Can you believe parents still bring their children, like elementary school aged children to Las Vegas. And it’s not the cool Las Vegas, in New Mexico, it’s the one in Nevada; well, I guess, technically they bring their kids to Paradise, and not Las Vegas, but c’mon man, there isn’t that much difference. Anyway, head to the Excalibur hotels because Carla, the housekeeper said that on average 3 Switches get left by guests every day. I then felt really depressed while walking around the hotel, so I left to check out the Mirage, where I normally stay on these Mountain West trips. I also learned that if there’s one thing that freaks me out more than the throngs of people walking the Strip, it’s when there’s nobody around. Once the new stadium gets completed it will be vastly easier to get to the casino than at the current location.

San Diego State

I stayed with Dominic, at his house of Friars Road. I was starting to feel sick to my stomach with the lack of green chile, so it was so enjoyable to spend time with a fellow New Mexican (and my roommate junior year). He took me on a little tour: Balboa Park’s stadium (home of the former Harbor Bowl, and the first tie in UNM Football history), the USS Midway, and Ocean Beach. I had forgotten about the assignment until I looked down at my feet and found a working Switch. When it was still there after an hour, I borrowed a small boat, realised, I need a bigger boat and headed out to the Ocean. Having claimed rights, I then put it back, so you might also find it.

San José State

Look, there are a lot of people who depart from the San Jose Airport. The kids who travel on these flights are slightly scatter-brained because of the adrenaline of taking a plane ride (and passing through the checkpoint), and leave some of their electronics, and I found a shoe! A shoe! Who only puts one shoe on and then walks-off? It was an adult shoe, so it’s not like a child/toddleparent left it, no, someone made a conscious decision to leave their shoe… Maybe it was a protest? Anyway, just tell the guy that you left your Switch at the checkpoint, if he asks you what color it was say, it had yellow grips that slide off, but the screen was bounded by black.

Table View

School	Distance Driving (mi)	Straight Line Distance (mi)	Drive/Drone Difference	Standard Deviation (all schools)A
Fresno State	4.46	3.28	1.18	0.644
Hawai’i	1.420	0.696	0.784	1.001
Nevada (Reno)	2.410	1.69	0.720	1.067
Nevada – Las Vegas (SBS)b	18.426	8.93	11.258
Nevada – Las Vegas (NVS)c	2.125	0.590	1.535	0.391
San Diego State	9.861	8.08	1.78	0.252
San José State	6.575	4.60	1.975	0.164

A: Variance is calculated based upon DDD’s distance from the standard deviation of DDD… Why DDD? Because, DDD is King.
b: Sam Boyd Stadium
c: New Vegas Stadium (Allegiant Field)

Conclusion

Even if the stores are sold out of Switches, there are always places you can go to get them, some are definitely within walking distance of your house, maybe even right next door. If you do choose to do that, there are a few things to keep in mind: 1. Milk 2. Eggs, specifically from Natural Grocers, if they still have member pricing. 3. Chicken thighs
Wait, that was my grocery list for last week.

1. Basque food is amazing.
2. The addresses are real, any businesses mention are real; the people mentioned or alluded to (with exception to the person who has an office in Clovis, CA; and Dominic in SD) are fake.
3. No, I do not know who lives at the addresses, and unless you can look it up in the phone book, I recommend that you don’t either. Please don’t bother them.
4. No, I am not sick… I have a lingering cough from allergies to junipemesquite pollen.
5. I have not visited Colorado Springs/Fort Collins/Laramie/Reno/San José/Honolulu, yet.
6. Information for the other cities comes from my memory
7. I remember when Park MGM was the Monte Carlo
8. Is Secret Pizza still at the Cosmo? I don’t remember seeing it the last time I was there, but that might have been because I was on the wrong floor.
9. Toss a coin to your witcher.
10. Normal people stop listing things at 10, but
11. This list goes up to 11.

This is a story about people who didn’t fit in.
It’s about a time and a place and the summer when we tried to live enough in three months to carry us through the next four years, the summer when girls my age disappeared and the summer when girls stopped disappearing and no one knew why except me – but, more than anything, it’s a story about people who didn’t belong, except with each other.
All of this happened in 1996. It was the year Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, and that made me happy since I didn’t like anyone and any small blow to the collective human ego was a Good Thing. I went through high school without friends, except for that last year. Maybe it was chance. Maybe it was the fact that Chris, who really brought us all together, only transferred in that year. I would say that we had been moving in our own circles, but we didn’t really have circles.
It’s easy to get stuck in a sort of limbo in high school now, and it was even easier back then. I didn’t fit in with the other girls because I was a nerd, and I didn’t fit in with the other nerds because I was a girl. I didn’t fit in with the other neighborhood girls because this was the 90s and their parents were afraid their precious daughters would catch the gay if they so much as talked to me, and I didn’t fit in with the other black kids because it was West San Jose and there weren’t any. I was a Venn diagram whose circles kept bouncing off each other.
Anyway, Chris sat down across from me at lunch about a week after he transferred. He was a goth, so he didn’t fit in either. He wore a leather jacket and black cowboy boots and listened to Sisters of Mercy, which was enough to convince half the parents he was a Satanist. We clicked pretty fast. He was actually a member of the International Thespian Society – he’d done some kind of theater work in and out of school before he’d moved out west.
So Chris wanted to do a school production of Dracula, the 1966 version by Stephen Dietz. The Francis Ford Coppola movie was still big with goths a few years after it came out, and Chris had sort of taken the lame romantic angle from the movie and put it into the flyers he’d made. “Love Never Dies.” Within a week he had decided he wanted me to play Mina Murray. I probably should’ve been angry with him since it was pretty clear he only wanted me for the part because it would stir up controversy. But at the same time, I had to admit I kind of liked that idea myself. I wanted to see those pinch-faced soccer moms in the audience clutching their pearls.
Josh was playing Jonathan Harker, and Chris hadn’t known him any longer than he had me, but he ended up hanging out with us outside the production. I was cool with Josh because he was cool with me as the romantic lead. A lot of kids would have bailed, but Josh was fine with it. He was on the school football team and was also sort of an idiot, but he was one of those idiots who was friendly enough he didn’t really need anything else.
Sam and Josh were a thing. She was a cheerleader, because it was expected of her, and since Josh was oddly enthusiastic about this whole Dracula thing, he roped her into being our Lucy. She had also, after three years on the squad, realized that the girl posse she went around with was awful, so she started tagging along with us after practice. We hung out at her house a few times, and it was easy to see why she had no desire to return home after school. Her mother was one of those people who would have called her Samantha instead of Sam if you’d held a gun to her head, and refused to acknowledge anything her daughter said unless she called her “mother.”
Then there was Sara, who turned out, in the end, to be the most outcast of us all. I met her purely by coincidence. My home life was uneasy. My parents didn’t fight with each other or with me, but there was a sort of chasm that had opened between us over the past year or so. Like every teenager ever, I felt they made no effort whatsoever to understand me, and instead of smoking and partying and lashing out, I nursed a quiet resentment that made me easier to ignore. It was worse after they found the magazine in my pillowcase, the one with Naomi Campbell on the cover. They never said anything about it – it just went missing, and there was an awkwardness between us after that.
I was part of this Dungeons & Dragons mailing group. How it worked was that the DM would send the five of us a page or so describing the room we were in, and what monsters were in it, that kind of thing. Then we would each send our initiative rolls and what we were doing, and Tom would sort through everything, put it in the right order, and once we had all responded, he would write the next page, describing our actions in florid detail. If you’ve ever read The Eye of Argon, it ended up reading something like that. I was playing a barbarian named Rogar, because back then you didn’t really play a woman even if you were one; the rest of the group thought I was a pimple-faced white boy named John Reagan anyway. Even so, it was a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong.
Those letters from Tom were the highlight of my week. I checked the mailbox every day when I got home from school. I was taking my reply for the week out to the mailbox and I’d just flipped up the red flag on the side when I saw Sara. She was standing on the sidewalk across the street beside a U-Haul in the driveway. Men in green uniforms were carrying furniture through the open garage door and into the house under the direction of a man I assumed was the girl’s father.
She was short and strange, with hair so blonde it was almost gray, and she wore glasses with lenses that might have been snatched from a pair of telescopes. I remember that it was a warm spring day, not a cloud in the sky, but there she was in jeans and a heavy lavender sweater, arms folded, hands in her armpits. She had a face round and pale as the moon. We stood there for what felt like about five minutes, just looking at each other, and she glanced back at her dad for a second and then walked across the street. I wanted to run. I had no idea what to do when another human being acknowledged my presence. It just wasn’t a situation that came up often enough.
“Hi, I’m Zoe,” I squeaked, finally, my throat dry as a bone, and she said, “Oh.”
After a while she asked me what was in the envelope, which I had forgotten I was holding.
“Umm. Rogar’s about to chop the hell out of an Otyugh,” I said before I could stop myself.
And she said, “Oh. That’s good.”
She introduced herself. Her name was Sara, she’d moved from somewhere I’d never heard of in the Midwest with her parents, and she’d be attending the same school as the rest of us. She sat next to me in class on Monday the next week, and just like that, I’d acquired another friend – the fourth in two weeks. I wondered what the hell was going on. Mostly I wondered if they’d play D&D with me, but I was too shy to ask. Sara just sort of lurked at the edge of the stage during play rehearsals since there weren’t any parts left, and we all hung out at her place a couple times a week because she had a Super Nintendo with Street Fighter II and Bass Masters.
Sara’s parents were kind of spacy, and whenever we showed up at her place they were always watching hockey in the living room, barely acknowledging our presence other than to say hello. They never came up to Sara’s room.
Dracula went over about as well as expected. Parents hated it, a lot of the kids thought it was great because we were so obviously trying to piss people off and they couldn’t do a damn thing about it, everybody went nuts for Jonathan and Mina’s kiss at the end, and our Renfield’s pants fell down when he ran off stage because Max, the kid playing him, was so skinny we couldn’t find a pair of pajamas that looked like something you’d wear in a Victorian mental hospital and still fit him.
It was, without a doubt, the most fun I’d ever had in high school, and we all drove around in Chris’ car afterward, blasting “Lithium” as loud as we could because he was in a big Nirvana phase at that point. We stopped at Jack in the Box and headed back to Sara’s place, where her parents were, of course, watching sports in the living room and didn’t seem to mind the chatter from upstairs. We graduated two weeks after that – except for Sara, who was in her junior year – but it seemed so insignificant in comparison, just…something that happened.
The week school let out for summer break, the first girl disappeared – actually the second, but no one wanted to say it at the time. A few months before that, a girl named Emma Bland, a year younger than I was, had vanished from her bedroom, and the police had turned up nothing in the weeks that followed. I was standing in the doorway while my parents watched the news. It was one of those moments you remember twenty years later as clearly as if it happened five minutes ago. A girl had gone missing from her home. No similarities were mentioned, but you could almost see the specter of Emma Bland hovering behind every reporter.
I hadn’t seen Chris or Josh or Sam or even Sara for a week. I suppose with school behind me and Chris’ play over and done with, I just didn’t expect to ever see any of them again. That was a past life. A weird past life where, for a brief period, I had friends. So, the morning after the news report, I was more than a little surprised when Sam called me and told me they were on their way, they were picking me up. She must have been calling on Josh’s cell phone. He was one of about three upper school kids who had one, and I remember the controversy that generated. Parents considered it disruptive, a poor reflection on the school’s reputation – some wondered if Josh had become a drug dealer. I guess this was a thing they thought happened the moment you picked up a mobile phone. In hindsight, it was probably the most ridiculous thing we ever had a school meeting about.
I flew out the door as I heard Chris’ Volvo pull up outside and ran straight across the street to Sara’s place. I knocked, but there was no answer. No lights on inside the house that I could see. I wouldn’t have thought anything was odd about this if their car hadn’t been in the driveway, but it was. I looked through the window beside the door and saw nothing. I strongly remember thinking that it was as if it were not the lights that had been turned off, but the entire house and everything in it. The lights, the television, Sara, her parents…all gone inactive, like a model house, with a model car out front. It was a strange thought, and it sent a shiver down my spine that I decided was unwarranted as I went back to the Volvo and got in the back, next to Sam, with a shrug.
“I guess she’s out,” I said, and we left it at that.
We were going to drive to Westgate Mall, but we decided there would be too many people around on a Saturday afternoon, so we went instead to this strip mall maybe half an hour’s drive from my neighborhood. It had a Regal Cinema, a Marshall’s, a Bed, Bath & Beyond and a Dave and Buster’s knockoff called FunZone that barely outlasted the turn of the millennium, and while it was still a pretty busy place, it was one of those malls that had sprung up out of nowhere and just stopped, like something half-born. It was clean and modern but development had moved elsewhere.
I asked what the agenda was, but Josh just put an arm around my shoulders and said, “Zee, the whole point of summer is that there is no agenda. Sometimes…you’ve just gotta start walking and see where you end up.”
We ended up somewhere I’d been before, though only once or twice, and never for long. This strip mall had two sides to it. One side was mostly Regal and FunZone and a couple of bigger stores, and the other was where you found some of the smaller businesses – a real estate broker, a travel agent, a FedEx store and so on. One side was lower than the other, with a parking lot that wrapped around the entire thing. You could walk around the parking lot to get to the other side, or you could take the shortcut through the strip.
The shortcut was a mostly empty space that had obviously been meant to be a sort of indoor mini-mall, but then they had abandoned the strip and no one had moved into the space. There was a working escalator so people could move through it, but there was no reason to stop. Storefronts had “Coming Soon” signs that had been there for a couple of years. There were a few clothing stores that had never happened, nothing in the windows but naked mannequins, but it seemed like they had mostly planned on the space being a food court, so there were signs for Orange Julius and that sort of thing. At the bottom of the staircase was a bare customer service desk. The whole place was creepily devoid of life and, despite the parking lot outside, silent except for our voices as we walked. It was, I thought later, the same feeling I had when I had knocked on Sara’s door earlier. Like walking through a dollhouse, or reaching for a piece of fruit, only to find that it was plastic.
I didn’t tell the others what I saw, since none of them noticed it and it happened quickly enough that I later doubted that I’d seen anything at all. I wasn’t looking for anything, but as I turned my head to listen to something Chris was saying, something vanished behind the customer service desk. For a split second, I saw something on the floor, curling and black, and then it was gone, kind of slurped behind the counter. My rational and irrational brain each offered an explanation, a debate that lasted, again, about half a second.
Tentacle!
No, Zee, that is a scarf. That is the sleeve of a nasty black shirt someone threw on the floor.
Then where did it go, hmm?
I put my hands on the counter and boosted myself up, looking over the customer service desk, expecting, perhaps, to see a homeless person huddled under the desk with a black shirt bundled against his chest, waiting for the obnoxious teens to pass him by…but there wasn’t anything. Not even a place where a person could have slipped out of sight. Then I heard an “Ah, shit – “ behind me, and turned to see Josh losing his grip on a marble column he’d been climbing and fall on his ass on the tiled floor, and I pushed the incident from my mind until that evening.
Nothing else of consequence happened that day – you know, we just messed around in FunZone and watched a movie at Regal and went home, the usual stuff teens in my area got up to on a summer day – but that lonely space between one parking lot and the other remained vivid in my mind as I lay in bed reading X-Men after dinner. This was back before everything came out in trade paperback format every four months or so, and I had a couple of long white cardboard boxes under the bed with everything bagged, boarded and organized by issue.
I thought of it again – what I had seen, or what I thought I had seen. It wasn’t a trick of the light, it was something, a flash of black against the marble tiles, and then it was gone, and there was nothing behind that derelict customer service desk. I made up my mind. I’d get a job. Right there at the travel agency next to the dead mini-mall. I’d investigate. I had nothing better to do all summer. My parents were fine with it – they were proud of me for taking the initiative, looking for work that would build my intrapersonal skills.
The travel agency thing didn’t work out. I got called in for an interview and the hiring manager’s face subtly, but visibly, lost its chipper expression when I told her I was there for the job. Oh, there was nothing wrong, it’s just that she was surprised, because I “didn’t sound black on the phone.” The worst part – the part that made me flash her a death glare that actually made her gasp and drop her pen – was that there was no open malice in the statement. She hadn’t meant to hurt me. It was just something she said.
I walked out before she could say anything else – for all I know, she would have given me the job anyway – and headed through the deserted space between the travel agency and the laundromat. No sign of our presence the week before, no sign of anything. I was completely alone, but I felt…I can’t explain how I felt. To say that I felt as if I were being watched wouldn’t be enough. I was out the door at the other end in about ten seconds, and from there I marched into FunZone, took an application from the front desk and filled it out right there. Places like that were always looking for summer help, so I figured my chances were good.
Turned out they needed me to start today. A couple hours after I’d turned in the application, they tossed me a blue shirt that hung on me like a tarp and stuck me in training with the guy who ran the laser tag. You couldn’t really call it laser tag because it wasn’t, so they called it Laser Attack, which was also dubious since you weren’t really attacking anything. It was some lame bullshit where five people stood on either side and fired at these green targets that moved back and forth over the other team’s heads. We had bumper cars, a virtual reality game and some kind of flight simulator that was broken about half the time. The only thing we had that really deserved the name was the go-karts, but I hated go-kart duty because it was mostly cleaning up after kids who decided to puke on the track. If you were lucky, someone else hadn’t already driven through it by the time you got the mop and bucket from the supply closet.
I’m getting ahead of myself. I got roped into that first shift without warning, so I had to call my parents to tell them where I was. They were out on a double date with some of dad’s work friends or something and didn’t expect to be back until at least 10, so I called Sam after that, who called Josh, and the two of them picked me up in his car after I was done. My feet were sore from standing all day, and I was tired and kind of pissed off – I don’t even remember about what – but as I shut the door to my room and flopped down on my bed, I thought this might work out. I had a job, I would have money for comics, and I would be able to take a closer look around the mini-mall while I was waiting for a lift home after my shift.
I was awake at six the next morning, and the memory of a strange and unsettling dream kept me from going back to bed. I walked downstairs in my pajamas and put a couple of Eggos in the toaster. There’s something peaceful about an early summer morning. It’s not yet asphalt-melting hot, and there’s no one around to bother you with small talk or questions or anything else. I sat on the couch in the living room, eating my waffles, and froze with a bite halfway to my mouth when I saw yesterday’s paper my dad had left on the coffee table.
I was reaching for it when I heard the tapping at the glass doors that opened onto the back porch. I had put a bunch of gold star stickers on the inside of the glass years ago, and no one had ever bothered to peel them off, since a field of gold stars was preferable to a bunch of adhesive crap. Through the stars I saw Sara, hand raised, fingernails tapping on the glass. I unlatched the door and pulled the stars aside, and my confused, still half-asleep expression must have been plain on my face, because she scratched the back of her head the way she did whenever she was embarrassed.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said. “So I walked around and saw you through the windows….”
“Mm,” I said, motioning her inside and closing the door again. We went back to the living room, and I offered to put some more Eggos or some toast in for her but she said she wasn’t hungry.
“What’s that?” she asked as I picked up dad’s paper and sat in his recliner, legs splayed to either side of the footrest.
“Newspaper,” I said, unsure what other answer she was looking for. She was sitting on the couch, wearing a pair of green shorts, flip-flops and a navy-blue tee-shirt with a name, a summer camp, probably, that I couldn’t even begin to pronounce. I turned the front page toward her so she could read it. “Another girl got kidnapped last night. I guess they’re finally admitting it’s three now, counting the one that went missing back in April.”
“Oh. That’s bad,” Sara observed. “Shouldn’t someone do something about that?”
I nodded, thinking – not for the first time – that Sara was a very odd girl. I didn’t mind. Most people talk to fill silence. It’s a compulsion. Complete strangers run into other in an elevator and talk about the weather, or work, or what someone’s kids have been up to. It doesn’t matter what they’re talking about. It’s like watching one of those nature specials where a pair of elephant seals raise up their heads and start honking and belching at each other. Just noise. Sara was one of those rare people who would sit with you on a Saturday morning and read comics, and the silence between you was company enough.
After that third girl went missing, signs went up around the neighborhood. Her face, her name, her address and what she’d been wearing when last seen. Then signs announcing a neighborhood curfew of 9 pm, which was when FunZone closed, so by the time I caught a ride with Josh or Chris or my parents and got home, my street had an eerie feeling of desolation about it. I was used to seeing kids playing well past 9 on summer break, so it felt wrong, coming home on those summer nights and seeing an empty street punctuated by street lights. Nothing in those islands of yellow light but clouds of insects. It’s difficult to describe the unique sense of dread one feels walking through the suburbs on a warm, quiet night, when anyone could be hiding behind a stand of hedges or around the corner of a neighbor’s house.
There was also something exciting about it. I think when a community is frightened but no one you know personally, or at least well, has been affected by it, it gives people something to talk about in hushed tones. You give yourself a chill thinking about it, but you don’t actually believe anything will happen to you. The next time I can remember that feeling was just after I’d graduated college, when the Beltway Sniper was all over the news, but this was different – more personal.
It was, otherwise, the only summer of my high school years that I remember with fondness. On Friday nights, we would close up FunZone as usual, but we would let some friends in through the side door – my manager, Jack, went to Asher and had a few of his frat brothers that showed up most of the time, and I invited my friends, so most nights, I had at least one familiar face to make me feel a little more at ease. We picked up some Laser Tag gear at the Kay-Bee in Westgate Mall, and once everyone had left and FunZone was locked up, we unlocked the arcade games, played those for an hour or so, then shut down everything except the main lights and chased each other around the entire building in the dark until we got bored. Sara usually just lurked, like a kraken, in the mini-golf course on the second floor – the deepest darkness in the building – and picked people off if they happened to run past. Anyone but me. We tended to form an alliance any night the two of us were there.
We didn’t think much about Emma and the other missing girls. They had become a sort of background radiation. We would hear some other school kids on summer break at the mall gossiping about someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew Ana Reyes, the second of the missing. Sometimes I caught the tail end of an evening news report my parents were watching, some connection that had or hadn’t been drawn between the three girls. There was nothing we could do about it – we didn’t know any of the girls or any of their friends. We weren’t Encyclopedia Brown. The police would find the guy, or they wouldn’t. We were all on high alert whenever we went out alone, and I’d started carrying pepper spray, but otherwise, it was just something that happened that summer. It was something those of us with some distance from the victims used, in poor taste, to scare one another while we walked back to Chris’ car at midnight on Friday nights.
By the beginning of August, I had even convinced myself that nothing was amiss in that space between Bed, Bath & Beyond and Petco. I walked through it most days to get to FunZone, since the parking lot was always a nightmare and I convinced my parents to drop me off on the other side, mostly so I could snoop, which I did, finding nothing of interest. I even managed to pry up that hatch in the floor behind the customer service desk. It was nothing – no secret passage to hell or Narnia or even the lair of a serial murderer, just a space under the floor where they stored a bunch of stuff they never used and apparently never remembered to collect when development on the mini-mall had stopped. A couple of phones they had never installed, a mess of cables and cords and power strips. It smelled of mold and was probably a fire hazard.
I let it drop after that. The place was still creepy. I still had that feeling of being watched whenever I walked through it. I told myself it was in my head, and for once, my rational brain was starting to sway the part of me that wanted a mystery to solve. It could have been a shadow. It could have been a shadow. High school summers, for me, had been more about peace and quiet than anything else. For the first time since I could remember, I was actually having fun, and I told myself I should just run with it instead of worrying about something I’d seen, or maybe not, for a split second a month ago.
With three weeks remaining in summer break, Sara and I left FunZone around eleven. We’d been on the roof with Jack and a couple of his friends, using a slingshot to fling Batman and Ninja Turtles figures off the edge, watching them shatter on the asphalt. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time. I was glad for Sara’s company. I was nervous around men I barely knew, and if none of my friends could make it to our Friday night after-hours gaming sessions, I would always head out at closing. I’ve wondered, ever since that night, what might have happened if I had left early. If we had stayed later.
Would he have been waiting?
Sara and I walked back through the darkened arcade, past the silent carousel and food court. Chris was supposed to pick us up on the other side of the mall, so we started to walk through the empty mini-mall, nothing unusual about it. I had no dreadful premonition. My spider-sense did not tingle. There was only the impact, hard against the side of my head. My ears rang and my legs turned to jelly. I collapsed, my vision blurring. I lay on the ground, stunned, the darkness at the edges of my vision slowly engulfing me until there was nothing but blackness and silence. Motes of blue light drifted in and out of my sight, and I assumed, at first, that they were the result of the blow to my head. As I sat up, feeling as if I were moving through something thick and resistant, the motes persisted.
More than persisting, they illuminated.
Sara was…gone, vanished entirely. All around me was black, a thick, tarry black that felt like wet leather on my hands as I tried to stand and again lost my footing. The leathery ground breathed beneath me; I could feel it, I could see it by the dim light of the drifting blue fireflies. I slowly became aware of another source of light. I looked up and found that the black landscape surrounding me transitioned seamlessly into a starry night sky overhead. It was not a city night, made murky and purple by light pollution. It was a black night, punctuated by countless stars, a swath of red spread out across the sky – as if a black cloth were all that separated me from a place of pure and blinding light, and someone had poked a million holes in that delicate membrane. Letting the light in. Making it bleed.
In spite of all this, I was certain that I was awake. It didn’t have the feel of a dream, even a vivid one. The landscape was strangely familiar. Here was a jutting surface of black leathery flesh that could have been the customer service desk. The things I thought of as trees were distributed as regularly as the columns in the empty mall. There was a hill, in the same place the escalator had been. I felt my stomach heave at a sound nearby. The sound of something eating. I reached out to steady myself against one of the trees, my hand pressing into its soft, subtly warm surface.
I was looking at a wall of glistening black with half a man sticking out of it. I recognized the jeans he was wearing. I had seen them for an instant before he’d slammed the crowbar into the side of my head, and I saw that too, lying on the ground nearby. A writhing black tentacle wrapped around the man’s waist. I heard the fleshy wall crunching and slurping as he vanished into it, inch by inch.
Something leaned down over me.
The thing was also part of the wall. Or all of this, the trees, the wall, the slithering black tentacles in the dark, was part of this thing. It was shaped something like a girl, in the same way a clay figure can be shaped like a girl, or even a cloud – and though it was larger than Sara, so much larger, its voice was the same. Now it came from everywhere, because the girl-thing in the wall had no mouth where one should have been. No face. Only eyes, dozens of eyes, the eyes of goats and cats and men and fish, opening everywhere on its body, all looking at me. Blinking, separately. I swayed on my feet and felt my lips curl into a horrid grin.
“I’m sorry.” I felt a tentacle curl around my wrist, its suckers brushing against my skin.
“You gonna eat me too?” I croaked.
“No.” The tentacle recoiled as if offended. “He would have hurt you. What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t watch out for you?”
I said nothing. The sound of a snapping bone made me retch all over again. Something slithered in the darkness and a rubbery black tentacle thick as a tree trunk, its luminescent suckers as large as plates, wrapped gently around my waist. Sara was hugging me. My mind slipped further away, rational thought and reason drifting out on a black, black sea. I must have gone entirely limp, because I was staring up into the night sky, eyes unblinking. I felt her looming close beside me, watching me with her hundred mismatched eyes…waiting for me to say something.
“What happens now?” My voice sounded dull and flat and distant.
“No more girls go missing,” the voice said beside my ear. “I said something should be done about it.”
I don’t remember if anything else was said between us. I’ve tried to fill in that blank, but I just can’t. I remember the red stars and the dark between them. I remember the immeasurable leathery blackness of Sara, since I couldn’t think of anything else to call her. The squirming sensation of being looked at intently by dozens of eyes. I remember waking up late the following morning in a hospital bed and being questioned by half a dozen suspicious cops who turned my every word inside out and shook it for hidden meaning. You would think I’d bashed someone over the head with a crowbar.
Chris was briefly suspected of perpetrating the attack. He told me later that he had found me, sitting with my back against the customer service desk, staring blankly ahead. There was no attacker. There was no Sara. The police would have concluded that the attack had never happened at all – just a teen looking to get some attention – if not for the discarded crowbar and my head injury. The minor concussion, they said, might have been responsible for the memory loss, but I can’t be sure. I can’t be sure.
Nothing happened for a week. I spent another night in the hospital, was discharged in the morning, took a week off work that turned into two weeks before I finally called Jack and told him I wasn’t coming back. Everyone, even Chris, assumed the attacker had been scared off by his arrival, that it would only be a matter of time before another girl was taken, but I knew. I couldn’t tell anyone – who would have believed a word of it? If I wasn’t flat-out crazy, it would have been the concussion, or a nightmare, or…whatever. I might have convinced myself of the impossibility of what I had seen, what I thought I had seen, if not for what happened after.
Sara’s family moved away. I hadn’t seen her in a week, and the others, I guess, thought she just wasn’t up to saying goodbye. Maybe that was true. In a sense. I did some digging in the local papers. Her mother and father, always watching sports, always greeting Sara’s friends with a cursory hello, had moved here from Fresno, and had no memory whatsoever of the past few months. They had simply woken up a week after the attack in an unfamiliar house, most of their belongings still packed in boxes and stacked in the garage. How must that have felt? I had lost a night. How do you recover three months of your life, unremembered? They had no children.
The second thing that happened that week didn’t stand out at first. A science teacher from Leland High had gone missing, and other than a brief mention in the paper, nothing came of it until the police searched his house and found the locked door in his basement, and the well-lit, pristine, refrigerated room behind it. Emma, Ana – they were all there, five girls, each drained of blood and locked in her own freezer, lined up against a wall like Barbies on a store shelf. The blood was neatly stored beneath a metal sink in a collection of airtight, labeled plastic containers. A sixth girl, Ellie Parker, was still alive, malnourished and chained at the wrists and ankles. And that was that. Her testimony put any doubts to rest that the homeowner was in fact the kidnapper, the murderer, who had terrorized a small swath of central California in the summer of 1996. His face was all you saw on television for a month. Now that the monster had been found, the victims of the monster weren’t much more than a footnote. No other girls were kidnapped before the end of summer, and it was assumed that the killer had fled. Perhaps his “habit” had become too conspicuous. Maybe he was worried his absences from class would be matched up to the timetable of the girls’ disappearances. I knew he’d never be seen again in San Jose or anywhere else.
I believe they are still looking for him. It’s no longer an active investigation, but they still expect him to turn up somewhere, eventually. I’m glad they are wrong. In hindsight it feels almost anticlimactic. The end came suddenly and nobody got any closure except me, because nobody else had been there and even if I wanted to tell them what happened, what would I say? I went to a shrink for a while, on and off. Of course I did. If I had said what I wanted to say, what would have happened then? We didn’t all keep in touch after that summer, but most of us did. Chris, Josh, Sam – no one crashed and burned. Maybe we didn’t end up staggeringly wealthy, but we did all right, and that is also a Good Thing.
I think about Sara often. Sara, who was, I think, both ancient and young, and had come from very far away, and reached out a hand, so to speak, in the hope that someone would take it, and help her belong.
I wonder, if she comes back someday, if she pulls the stars aside and invites me to her home, will I be able to refuse her? Will I even want to?

This is the 1999 class: 1. Brock Berlin, Florida/Miami: Berlin was easily the most heralded quarterback in the inaugural Elite 11 class--the 1997 Sophomore of the Year, the 1999 Offensive High School Player of the Year, and the 2000 Gatorade National High School Football Player of the Year. A Louisiana native, he committed to Steve Spurrier’s Florida Gators, who also had future NFL quarterbacks Jesse Palmer and Rex Grossman on the roster. Berlin was the third string quarterback his freshman year behind Palmer and Grossman, who both split time as Florida’s starter. In Berlin’s sophomore year, Spurrier went with the less-heralded Grossman as the starter, who led the team to the Orange Bowl. Berlin had the opportunity to start the game after Grossman was benched for violating team curfew, but Grossman was put in the game late in the first half and was brilliant, throwing for four touchdowns. By then, Berlin had already announced his intent to transfer; a few days after the Orange Bowl, he made it official, announcing he would move to Miami. He sat out the 2002 season and was named the starter for the 2003 campaign, but he was unable to match the heights of Ken Dorsey’s tenure in Coral Gables. Berlin beat his former team early in the season, but struggled often and was temporarily benched for Derrick Crudup. As a senior in 2004, he was much better, ending his season with another win over Florida. Berlin went 19-5 as a starter for Miami, but went undrafted in the 2005 NFL Draft. He briefly saw time on the rosters of the Miami Dolphins, Dallas Cowboys, St. Louis Rams, and Detroit Lions, and even started a game in 2007 for the Rams. In 37 college games, he threw for 5,752 yards, 47 touchdowns, and 25 interceptions; in two NFL games, he threw for 159 yards and one interception.
2. Matt Cassel, Southern California: You all know this one by now. A career backup behind Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart at USC, Cassel won two national titles, but he attempted fewer passes (33) than the Trojans won games in his four years there (40). The Patriots surprisingly took him in the seventh round of the 2005 NFL Draft and kept him on the bench for three years behind Tom Brady; when Brady went down with a torn ACL at the start of the 2008 season, Cassel filled in brilliantly, throwing for 3,693 yards, 21 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. He parlayed that success into a starting role with the Kansas City Chiefs, where he played well early before a quick decline in his final two seasons there. Stints with the Vikings, Bills, and Cowboys have been demonstrably less successful than his early career. In 34 college games, he threw for 192 yards and one interception; in 93 NFL games through this week, he has thrown for 16,051 yards, 97 touchdowns and 73 interceptions.
3. Casey Clausen, Tennessee: Brother of Chicago Bears backup Jimmy, Casey Clausen was a four-year starter for the Volunteers, taking over for A.J. Suggs midway through his freshman season. Although Tennessee didn’t reach the national championship heights under Clausen that they did under Tee Martin, the Volunteers won eight or more games in Clausen’s four years under center. He was named the 2002 Citrus Bowl MVP after throwing for three touchdowns and running for two more in a blowout over Michigan. Clausen went 34-10 as a starter, including a 14-1 record on the road. He went undrafted in 2004, but played briefly for the Kansas City Chiefs and NFL Europe’s Amsterdam Admirals. In 47 games, Clausen threw for 9,707 yards, 75 touchdowns, and 31 interceptions.
4. Matt LoVecchio, Notre Dame/Indiana: Third on the depth chart entering his freshman season, the New Jersey native quickly found himself the Fighting Irish starter after Arnaz Battle's season-ending injury and Gary Godsey's ineffective play. With fellow Elite 11 participant Jeff Smoker's touchdown pass putting Notre Dame on the brink of collapse, LoVecchio was inserted as the starter and was brilliant, throwing for 11 touchdowns and only one interception. Notre Dame won LoVecchio's first seven starts before a blowout loss in the Fiesta Bowl. He was named the starter his sophomore season, only to lose the job to Carlyle Holiday after two ineffective starts. He transferred from Notre Dame after new head coach Tyrone Willingham arrived with a different offensive scheme, moving south to Indiana. LoVecchio spent two seasons as Indiana's starter--in a backfield with BenJarvus Green-Ellis, who would transfer to Mississippi after Gerry DiNardo was fired--on two putrid Hoosier teams. He had a tryout with the New York Giants after graduating, but never made an NFL roster. In 37 games, LoVecchio threw for 4,996 yards, 28 touchdowns, and 21 interceptions.
5. Chance Mock, Texas: The native Texan's career, really only limited to a brief spell as a starter his junior year, was sandwiched between two future NFL quarterbacks--one an all-time great at the college level. Redshirted in 2000, he was a backup to Chris Simms his first two years and threw just nine passes total. After a brilliant spring game, he entered his junior year as the starter over redshirt freshman (and future Texas legend) Vince Young. Mock played well as a junior--his interception ratio that season is still a school record--but Texas went with the more mobile Young midway through the season. Instead of transferring his senior year, he stayed on as the backup, but threw only 21 passes. He played briefly for the Arizona Wranglers in the 2006 season as their backup behind John Fitzgerald. In 29 games for Texas, Mock threw for 1,613 yards, 17 touchdowns and two interceptions.
6. John Rattay, Tennessee/Arizona: Brother of NFL's Tim, Rattay left Tennessee after only one semester and transferred home to Arizona. He stayed at Arizona through the 2001 season, transferring to Pasadena City College to try and revive his career elsewhere. He ended up walking on back at Arizona, but never played again. His career was limited to 385 yards passing, two touchdowns and two interceptions in seven games in 2001.
7. Chris Rix, Florida State: The California native was the on-again, off-again starter for four years at Florida State in a period that started their post-national championship decline. After a redshirt year in 2000, he was quickly inserted into the starting lineup as the Seminoles lost more than two games for the first time since 1986, but inconsistency plagued him throughout his career. He lost the starting job to Adrian McPherson temporarily his sophomore year, then was suspended for the 2003 Sugar Bowl after missing an exam. McPherson's dismissal set Rix up as the unquestioned starter his junior year in 2003, but Rix was again benched after suffering an ankle injury in 2004. He holds the ignominious distinction of losing to Miami five times in four years. Rix went undrafted in 2005, although he did receive an invite to the San Diego Chargers' rookie camp that year. The 2001 ACC Freshman of the Year, Rix threw for 8,390 yards, 60 touchdowns and 40 interceptions in 43 games.
8. Jeff Smoker, Michigan State: Of "Clockgate" fame, Smoker played four years for the Spartans. Best known for his game-winning touchdown passes against Notre Dame as a freshman and against Michigan in the controversial game his sophomore year, Smoker started most of Michigan State's games from 2000 to 2003; he was suspended for five games his junior season after struggling with substance abuse issues. He was a sixth-round pick by the St. Louis Rams in 2004, and also spent time with the Eagles and Chiefs before a brief Arena League career. In 41 games, he threw for 8,932 yards, 61 touchdowns and 39 interceptions.
9. Jon Van Cleave, Louisiana-Lafayette: Thrust into a starting role as a true freshman when quarterback Derek Dyer left the program, Van Cleave played three seasons for the Ragin' Cajuns before walking away from football the spring before his senior season. The Texas native threw for 5,267 yards, 24 touchdowns and 30 interceptions in 30 career games.
10. Zac Wasserman, Penn State/California: The California native was a big grab for Penn State, but never played a game. After redshirting his freshman year, he left Penn State in the spring of 2001 after his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. He was linked to Hawaii and San Jose State after a year at Los Angeles Valley Junior College, but ended up walking on at Cal. In August 2003, it was reported Wasserman would transfer to Central Arkansas with two years of eligibility remaining, but it appears he stayed at Cal to finish his degree and left the football program.
11. Roman Ybarra, UCLA/Idaho State: Ybarra walked on at UCLA in 2000 and was redshirted, but quit the team as a redshirt freshman the following August. The California native transferred to Idaho State after a year at Palomar College. In five games for the Bengals, he threw for 842 yards, three touchdowns and five interceptions.
If I had to rank them in order of success, I’d put it like this: 1. Matt Cassel 2. Casey Clausen 3. Brock Berlin 4. Jeff Smoker 5. Chris Rix 6. Matt LoVecchio 7. Chance Mock 8. Jon Van Cleave 9. John Rattay 10. Roman Ybarra 11. Zac Wasserman