Ragdoll Physics
I have been a hero.
I have hefted my axe and climbed the jagged mountaintop. A blizzard lashed my armor as I approached a behemoth that vomited venomous lava onto any who tried to steal its treasure. I have stared that demon in its eyes of chaos as it howled for my death. And I was not half so terrified as when I went to play some casual sports with a few video game addicts.
My heart was practically hammering out my brains as the Fury Burds trudged the sandy path to the Coliseum. It was the kind of terror I’d felt a thousand times at my high school. Like my body was about to be assaulted—by health.
In the high desert sky, clouds drifted across the sun, making the sand dull gray one moment, flashing gold the next. Oh God, please let me win that gold.
“Okay, Miles,” Soup said as we walked. “Remember, breathe in harder than you breathe out, solid arms, and keep your chin down.”
I ignored him and just focused on not throwing up again. Then he tapped me on the shoulder.
Soup pointed. “The Coliseum.”
A chain-link fence wrapped around a flat stretch of compact sand holding a few courts and an Astroturf field. It was like a tornado had swept up my least favorite things in the world and dumped them into the middle of the desert.
God I needed a Red Bull.
“Go warm up, Fury Burds!” Fezzik called.
Meeki, Aurora, and Soup went off while I tried to get a sense of my surroundings. The Sefiroths were on one half of the basketball court, looking awkward. They slapped at balls, tripped over absolutely nothing, or tried to touch their toes and fell short by a foot or two.
The Master Cheefs were on the other half of the court, looking valiant. Scarecrow dodged and shimmied around Dorothy with her big shoulders, and around Lion with his swaying mane. He dribbled the ball between Tin Man’s tall legs before performing a perfect layup, as easy as pushing a button.
In order not to aggro any of the Cheefs, I took the long way around the courts and found the muscly coach and his nipples.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Yeah?” he said, not looking at me.
“Um, could we play something easy today?”
Now he turned. He glanced at me over the top of his sunglasses, like even in a video game recovery center, this was the most pathetic question I could ask.
“I, uh, need to get a lot of points.”
He turned his back to me. “Basketball tournament today.”
Shit. Scarecrow was going to wipe the concrete with me.
I searched the courts, feeling helpless. Lots of video games have hint systems. Right then I needed a little Navi fairy floating around my head like in Zelda. A winged bouncy orb of light that could flutter to objects and give me clues about what I needed to do next.
Didiling-ding-ding-ding-ding!
I imagined my own Navi painting the Coliseum with shiny fairy dust. Which sport would ensure my blistering success? The fairy lit the peeling white paint of a square cross-sectioned with two lines.
Four Square.
I may not have been able to throw a ball, but I was pretty confident I could block one with my body.
“Can I play Four Square instead?” I asked the coach.
“No, you cannot. That’s for players with health troubles.”
Navi sailed back and twinkled above my shoulder.
Didiling-ding-ding-ding-ding! Feign an illness, Miles!
“Oh, um, I have asthma.”
“That so?” the coach said, pinching some snot out of his nose.
I made my breath ragged, so that it had a slight whistle to it. “Yeah. My dad thinks there’s something seriously wrong with me, but he’s a Christian Scientist so he doesn’t believe in medicine. That’s why I couldn’t get a doctor’s note for G-man.”
The coach stared me down. I could feel his nipples burrowing into my soul. “That true?”
Half true. I nodded.
“This facility isn’t about winning, y’know,” the coach said.
Didiling-ding-ding-ding-ding! Try threatening him!
“I know it isn’t about winning,” I said. “I just don’t want to have an attack all of a sudden and flop around on the court and then for Video Horizons to have a lawsuit on its hands.”
The coach glared at me. He pinched more snot from his nose, shrugged, and pointed to the Four Square court. “Go fill a square.”
I nodded like that was exactly what I’d expected would happen. I went to the ball rack, and grabbed what I hoped was a Four Square ball. It was raspberry-red, pocked with little star-shaped indents, and had a peeling logo of a place called Happy Sun Summer Camp.
I bounced it a few times. It felt . . . unnatural. Video games, for all of their hand-eye coordination, do not prepare you for sports. Pushing a button on a controller is a far cry from hurling a weighted sphere through the atmosphere while accounting for gravity, distance, and my damned fingers that never seemed to want to let go of the ball at the right moment.
My recovery might have been set up like a video game, but I did not have the luxury of reloading so I could try it over and over again. I had to do this perfectly the first time.
I brought the ball close to my lips and smelled the sweet rubber. “Okay, ball,” I whispered. “I need you to listen to me very carefully. My entire romantic life hangs on this game. So when you come at me, I want you to be as light and easy to predict as a bit of dandelion fluff. But when I hit you, I want you to leave my fist like a meteorite.”
“Who you talking to?”
I turned and found Soup, right in my shadow again.
“Okay, new rule,” I said. “If I can feel you breathing, then you’re standing too cl—” Something dawned on me. “Do you have any undeclared health issues?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Wanna play Four Square?”
“If you’re playing!”
“Great.” I squeezed his little shoulder. “Listen, buddy, pal, friend, ace. I need you to throw this game for me.”
His nose crinkled. “Like, don’t win but let you win instead?”
“Yep.”
“Okay!” He leapt onto the Four Square court.
“Thank you so mu— Okay, oops. Stay behind your line. You don’t have to stand so close.”
“We need two more,” Soup said, looking at the empty squares.
I searched the Coliseum.
“Go ask that kid,” I said, pointing to a Sefiroth who walked without swinging his arms. “And that one.” I pointed to another, lying on the asphalt, belly hanging out of the bottom of his shirt.
Soup fetched them.
“Miles,” I said to the new players, trying to sound intimidating.
“Devastator,” the kid with the stuck arms said in a pinched voice.
“Sir Arturius,” the chubby one said, nervously squeezing his hands together. “Even Final Fantasy has its blitzball, right?”
They were perfect.
“Can I be commentator?” Soup asked.
“If you do it under your breath,” I said.
I got real low, filling my square. I was a wall. I was a Halo shield. I was the little rocket ship in Galaga. I could stop an asteroid field.
The game began.
Every time Devastator or Sir Arturius sent the ball in my direction, I hammered it at Soup, who let it pass.
“Point!” I called.
Soup didn’t even have to help much. Devastator kept missing the ball with his awkward arms, while Sir Arturius tried to hit the ball back with so much force that it threw him forward in his square, leaving the back wide open for me to fill with rocketing raspberry red.
“Point!”
On my date I’d be able to tell Gravity how I had heroically won a sporting competition since we’d last met. I’d just be vague about the circumstances.
“Point!”
Devastator fumbled. Sir Arturius sweated. Soup didn’t try. And I kept winning.
Until the whistle blared.
“All players to the Four Square court!” the coach called.
I froze as the Cheefs, Sefs, and Burds gathered around us like an impending storm.
Keeping one foot in my square, I leaned in to the coach. “Uh, I thought you said this was just for kids with health troubles.”
The coach shrugged. “Maybe they all have asthma too.”
I looked at the Cheefs, sweaty from the basketball court. Dorothy spit, Tin Man cracked his knuckles, Lion tied his locks into a ponytail, and Scarecrow blew me a kiss. My confidence evaporated into the summer sky.
The coach patted my back and whispered, “You think I’m gonna give you points without you working for it?” His whistle screeched into my ear. “We’re changing today’s tournament because one of our players has asthma.”
“Lame,” Lion said.
Soup touched my love handle. “Miles? Do you have asthma? Do you need me to get you water?”
“No.”
“Okay, if you pass out, I can do mouth-to—”
“Do not finish that sentence, Soup.”
“Okay.”
Scarecrow stepped up to Sir Arturius. “Get out of there for a second.”
The kid happily obeyed, and Scarecrow moved into his square.
“Mind if I step in?” Dorothy asked Devastator, squeezing his arm.
“Okay,” he said, and exited, arms fixed to his sides.
Tin Man slapped the back of my arm. “Move.”
I gazed up at all six foot three of him. “No.”
Tin Man seemed confused. Like no one had ever said no to him before. He looked at the coach, then back at me, huffed, and then rejoined the line.
“My square,” Lion growled at Soup.
Soup hugged the ball to his chest. He looked at me, then back at Lion’s red face. “No,” he said.
I smiled and decided to let Soup sit next to me during the next assembly.
The coach put his whistle to his lips. “The tournament will begin—”
“Actually?” I put my hand into the air. “We already started. I have eleven points.”
He snorted. “There are no points in Four Square.” And he blew the whistle.
“What we playing?” Scarecrow asked, punching the ball out of Soup’s hands and spinning it between his own. “Bus Stop? Tea Party? Around the World? Shark Attack? I say Shark Attack.”
Shark Attack implied blood. Tea Party didn’t sound too bad. I was about to say so when Scarecrow lifted the ball into the air, his other fist behind it. “No fake-outs. No cherry bombs. We good?”
My stomach nose-dived right to my feet. No, we weren’t good. I needed sports experience. I needed to have joined the basketball team instead of the AV club. I needed a Red Bull. I needed to win.
Soup raised his hand. “How do you play?”
Scarecrow sighed and dropped the ball to his side. “Four squares.” He pointed to the roman numeral in the corner of each of our respective spaces. “If someone’s eliminated, everyone else cycles toward the one square. Winner is whoever spends the most time in this square. Don’t know why you guys didn’t take it, but too late now.”
Damn. Scarecrow was in square one. I was in square three. Scarecrow had to be eliminated and I had to survive two rounds to even have a chance at scoring.
Scarecrow spun the ball. “The ball can only bounce into your square once, and then you have to hit it into another square. We keep going like that till someone screws up. Like this.” Scarecrow dropped the ball, let it bounce once, and then punched it into my square. My knees pinched together a second too late as the ball flew right between my legs. The crowd giggled as someone tossed the ball back to Scarecrow.
“Filthy casual!” Lion secretly called into his hand.
Why do you hate me? I wanted to ask Scarecrow. I stood there like an idiot instead.
“We cool?” Scarecrow asked.
“Cool!” Soup said.
“Cheefs get a handicap,” the coach said. “Minus fifteen seconds for every minute spent in the serve square. Sefs get plus fifteen.”
At least I wasn’t in the Cheefs.
“Forty-five minutes,” the coach called, and held up a stopwatch.
“I’m taking you out first,” Scarecrow said, pointing at me.
“More like . . . No,” I said. “You aren’t.”
His neck was covered in hickeys, as dark as blackberries. He didn’t have to worry about getting to a date on Thursday. A breeze kicked up from the east, blowing sand across the court. I closed my eyes. If I could experience a miracle at a car wash, I could experience one on a Four Square court. That ball would bend according to my Gravitational pull.
Again I got low, dangling my arms between my legs like Donkey Kong.
It happened in a matter of seconds. Scarecrow gave the ball a little lift and gently bumped it into Dorothy’s square. Dorothy clasped her hands and smashed it as hard as she could into Soup’s. Soup lunged and was just able to tap it into my square. This gave me plenty of time to . . . awkwardly slap the ball back to Dorothy.
She must have been the one who’d given Scarecrow those hickeys, because she politely tapped it to him. And Scarecrow, well, he did exactly what he’d said he was going to do. He waited until the ball was an inch off the ground and then nailed it into my square.
My body dove. My arm swung. My fingers skimmed the rubber.
I missed.
The whistle screeched and the coach pointed his thumb over his shoulder.
“P’wnd!” Lion cried.
Dorothy high-fived Scarecrow.
Numb, I walked off the court. Meeki held up our egg child, which somehow looked disappointed in its father. That was it. Two hundred and fifty thousand points out the window. I didn’t even get third place, which was the minimum I needed to be free by Thursday. Game over. No date for me.
I began the walk of shame back to Video Horizons.
The whistle screeched again. “Hey, dummy.”
I turned around. The coach pointed to the corner of the number four square where a line of players wrapped around the court. “You’re not out. You just get back in line.”
“Oh!” I said, hustling back to the court. “Okay, sorry. I don’t know how to . . . Okay.”
Soup moved up a square into my spot, while Meeki handed the egg abomination over to Aurora and cycled into the number four square.
“Too pretty to game!” Lion called sarcastically.
Tin Man chuckled into his hand.
Fezzik frowned at the coach to see if he was going to do anything about it. He didn’t.
There were six players ahead of me in line. Usually I’d relish this spot. Not this time. It would take forever to get back into the game. My fate could be decided long before then.
Aurora stood outside the line, cradling her egg like it was a real baby.
“Why aren’t you playing?” I asked.
“Fingers,” she said, showing me her hand sores again.
“Right. Yeah.”
That was too bad. I thought I could probably beat her at Four Square.
On the court Soup looked at me like he’d just dropped my goldfish down the disposal, because he hadn’t kept me from getting out.
I’m sorry, he mouthed.
I mouthed, Stay in.
He looked confused.
Stay!
I had to hand it to him. Soup sure knew how to obey. I’d never seen a kid so stressed. Every time he hit the ball, he bared his teeth like he was receiving electroshock therapy. I’m pretty sure he didn’t blink for seven whole minutes.
Meeki, meanwhile, was unstoppable. She seemed almost bored, swatting the ball into the other squares like it was a cartoon bird that wanted to sing to her. She got Dorothy out, and she and Soup moved into the three and two squares. While I rocked from foot to foot in line, every other player who stepped into the four square—including Tin Man and Lion—wilted under the awesome power of mekillyoulongtime.
“Meeki the Destroyer!” Fezzik called, then grinned at the Sefiroths’ silver-haired guild leader.
The coach checked his stopwatch. “Scarecrow in the lead with eleven minutes. That’s with the handicap.”
I was up again. It was Scarecrow, Soup, Meeki, and me—squares one through four. I needed to take Scarecrow’s place in the first square and then remain there until the end of the tournament. It was time to get aggressive. It didn’t matter how low the ball came into my square. It didn’t matter how fast. I hit it back with every ounce of me that had to see Gravity again.
The game raged on. My fate bounced between the four of us like a raspberry-colored lightning bolt. I was Ryu, heroically punching back everything that came at me. Soup was stretchy-limbed Dhalsim. Meeki was blurrily fast E. Honda. And Scarecrow used the same move over and over again, like Blanka’s cheap-ass electric attack. It was frustrating, but now I’d figured out his trick. Low and to the left. Every time.
Finally Soup fell. He couldn’t have been happier, though, because it meant I stepped into the three square.
The coach blew the whistle. “Twenty-four minutes left! Crow in the lead with twenty-one!”
Only two minutes before Scarecrow took the gold. Every fiber of my being was electric with terror. I was going to lose. I knew I was going to lose.
The whistle screeched, Scarecrow lifted the ball, and we began again. In the crowd Soup started up a lively commentary. “Scarecrow hits it to Meeki! Meeki nails it back! Scarecrow powerhouses it to Miles, and Miles devastates it to . . . some kid I don’t know. The kid misses! Boom goes the dynamite!”
The whistle blared.
“Shut up, kid,” the coach said to Soup. “No one wants to hear that.”
Soup swallowed his lips and stared at the concrete.
Fezzik patted his sad little shoulder. “Um, Coach?” Fezzik said. “May I speak to you privately for a second?”
The two stepped away from the court to the edge of the Coliseum so that the players couldn’t hear their conversation. Get ’im, Fezzik, I thought. Also, it was nice to catch my breath for a minute. My heart was going crazy.
While Scarecrow spun the ball on his finger, Soup cupped his hands around his mouth. “Psst. Meeki,” he whispered way too loudly. “Let. Miles. Win.”
Scarecrow dropped the ball. “The fuck is this?”
I gave a little shake of my head and tried to communicate death to Soup with my eyes.
Scarecrow pointed at Meeki and stared at me. “You make an alliance with the Great Wall of China here?”
Meeki’s mouth fell open. Lion stifled a laugh with his fist.
“Her grandparents are from Vietnam,” Soup said.
“I don’t give a shit,” Scarecrow said. “You guys are cheating.”
“We’re not,” I said.
Meeki’s mouth still hung open.
“Whatever,” Scarecrow said. “I’ll beat your asses anyway.”
The smirk on his face twisted my insides. He couldn’t say something like that and still be allowed to win. I should win. This kid was getting in the way of my date and looked like he knew it. Like he could taste my heart breaking.
I didn’t want my anger to throw the game, so I channeled it into my hands. I picked up the ball. I’d get my revenge by beating Scarecrow in Four Square. . . .
But then I threw the ball at his face instead. I was expecting him to flinch and block it. I was expecting to maybe throw him off a little, make him regret messing with me. I was not expecting the ball to crunch his nose, making blood explode all over his white gangster tee.
Scarecrow covered his face and doubled forward. “Fuck!”
“Oh my God,” I said, reaching out to help. “I’m so sorry. I am so sorry.”
“Got him!” Soup said, and held up his hand.
I did not high-five him.
“Yo, Coach!” Lion called across the Coliseum.
Oh God. What had I just done? I’d just lost the game and thrown away every point I’d earned so far.
Lion kept trying to get the coach’s attention, lifting his hand high and pointing at me, but Scarecrow caught his arm and pulled it down. He pinched his nose and gave Lion a look. Then he spit blood onto the concrete.
“Hey! Miles!” Soup said, hand still raised for a high five. “You avenged Meeki’s honor!”
I still didn’t high-five him. “Scarecrow, I didn’t mean—”
Meeki shoved me. Hard. She pointed in my face and yelled, “Nobody puts princess in a castle!”
“Huh?” I said.
She grabbed Scarecrow by his collar and socked him in the mouth. He dropped to the ground like a rag doll. The whistle blared from afar as the coach and Fezzik came running. I quickly stepped behind Soup as Fezzik grabbed Meeki’s arm and the coach helped Scarecrow to his feet.
Fezzik shook his head. “Come with me, guys.”
“He called me Great Wall of China!” Meeki yelled.
He escorted her and Scarecrow to Video Horizons . . . leaving me on the Four Square court.
The coach blew his whistle. “Double disqualification. Meeki and Scarecrow.” He looked at me and pointed into the serving square. “Game on.”
I stepped up, took the ball, and awkwardly tried to spin it between my hands as three new players stepped into the two, three, and four squares.
My odds of winning had just dramatically increased.
The two best players had been disqualified.
Soup would cycle in, ready to throw the game.
The Master Cheefs times would be halved.
I lifted the ball, and . . .
TOOK BRONZE!
In a sporting competition!
The coach snorted and grudgingly stamped my scroll.
+150,000