The game limped on for only a few more sessions after the death of Noble Barfolomew. Harris, Jack, and Sonny simply lost interest, and Reed’s attempts to keep them exploring the Ziggurat of Utmost Evil would degenerate into gossiping about girls or staring into their phones scrolling through social media.
Reed, on the other hand, only grew more preoccupied. At first he remembered his own perfidy with the dice, his abdication of the responsibilities he’d imagined for himself as a just and impartial deity, and Opie’s anguished cries. But soon he pushed those thoughts out of his mind, and began thinking incessantly about those rolls. He saw the face of the dice that he rolled behind the screen over and over, the two and the five inscribed in garish gold and electric blue, swimming in his field of vision. And then he’d envision Opie’s rolls: twenty after twenty, defying probability.
He wrote down the numbers he and Opie had rolled on that dreary Saturday, then flipped through his math textbook and found a formula he could use to calculate the odds. He entered the string of rolls into his scientific calculator app and got a decimal point followed by a dizzying string of zeros, punctuated by an integer so remote as to be meaningless. Barfolomew’s survival had been improbable, Reed thought. Basically to the point where it was indistinguishable from the impossible.
Reed began spending his hours after school rolling his five twenty-sided dice, over and over again, late into the night. He documented his rolls, scratching out the numbers in tidy rows on his tablet of graph paper. When he wasn’t rolling the dice, he was staring at the numbers he’d written down, trying to discern a pattern in the dice rolls, looking for anything resembling the sequence of rolls that had let Noble Barfolomew survive the Ziggurat of Utmost Evil.
It went on that way for weeks. And over time, he came to conclude that some of his most fundamental assumptions about the universe had been incorrect. He came to believe that Barfolomew’s survival that Saturday afternoon hadn’t been coincidence. That the dice had not acted randomly, as he’d always assumed.
Rather, Reed came to believe that something, somewhere, had intervened. Maybe not the God that he’d learned about as a small boy in Sunday school, but rather the fundamental forces of the universe—the physics of a tumbling die, the play of gravity and the air resistance and the friction of the top of the Ikea table—had their own intelligence of sorts, a consciousness indistinguishable from the equations that governed them. And that these forces of the universe had some inscrutable purpose in keeping Barfolomew alive.
But still, he thought, still he needed more data to confirm his theory. So he kept rolling his dice, night after night, missing meals and sleep, until one evening his mother came into his room, holding his report card.
She sat down on his bed. “Your father is very angry,” she said.
Reed sat up on his bed and tried to conceal his pad of graph paper on which he’d spent the last half hour rolling his twenty-sided dice.
“You failed math? Reed, this is unacceptable. You’re a bright boy. But you’re filling your head with nonsense.”
Then his father burst in and swept Reed’s Dungeons and Dragons books off the bookshelf, along with his notes and maps detailing the Ziggurat of Utmost Evil, into a black Hefty bag. Then he turned to face Reed. “Don’t sugarcoat it, Martha. He’s filling his head with crap.” He angrily jabbed his finger at Reed. “And it’s over. Now. Give me those stupid dice and that graph paper. Right now.”
Reed tentatively pushed his pouch full of dice and the tablet filled with his accumulated data to his father, who hurled everything into the trash bag and then stormed out of Reed’s bedroom.
Then Reed’s mother looked at him, tears in her eyes. “It isn’t just your grades, Reed. The way you and your friends treated Opie—you should be ashamed of yourself.” She stood up from Reed’s bed. “I ran into Karen at the store the other day and she said that Opie hasn’t been sleeping, that he cries all the time since that day he was over here. If those books are making you treat your friends that way, there’s no place for them in our house.”
She walked out of his room then, leaving Reed alone to look at the empty space on his bookshelf where his Dungeons and Dragons books had been. He thought about the countless hours he’d spent creating the Ziggurat of Utmost Evil. And then his mind drifted back to Opie’s hot hand and his cold dice.
And he came to a conclusion.
What happened had nothing to do with Barfolomew or Opie.
It had to do with him.
These forces of the universe had wanted him to choose. They wouldn’t let him leave Barfolomew’s death to chance.
They had tested him.
And he had chosen.
Now it was time to move on, he thought.
#
Five years passed, and the name of Noble Barfolomew was almost completely forgotten. Likewise, notwithstanding the earnest inscriptions they’d etched into one another’s Eighth Grade yearbooks, the four boys had not remained best friends forever. The vagaries of high school scheduling scattered them to separate homerooms and lunch periods, and soon each found a new niche.
Jack, to nobody’s surprise, enrolled in JROTC and began sitting at the lunch table with the other olive-green suited Junior Officers. By Senior year, Jack was shouting at the Freshman cadets with quotes from Full Metal Jacketand Starship Troopers that, stripped of their ironic intent, extolled the virtues of war. Harris got into student government, and although he badly lost his class president election after campaigning on a platform of “traditional school values,” his future looked bright: after graduation he was headed to Hillsdale College on scholarship. And Sonny had spent the summer after Eighth Grade hitting the weights with his older brothers and put on 25 pounds of muscle. By Senior year he was Academic All-Conference as a hard-hitting strong safety, a team captain who was carried off the field on the shoulders of his adoring teammates after the team went 5 and 4, the first winning season of Sonny’s football career.
Reed turned things around academically in Eighth Grade and found an aptitude for statistics and computer programming. He joined the high school computer engineering team and won first-place in the State Science Fair with his final project: a three-dimensional computer model of the motion of a tumbling die. His simulation won rave reviews from the judges for its remarkable complexity, taking into account the physics of the bounce of the die, as well as the effects of gravity, air resistance, and friction. Based in part on this success, he had been admitted to the University of Illinois’s prestigious Computer Engineering program during early admission. By then, he hadn’t thought of Dungeons and Dragons in many years, and he certainly didn’t connect his path in life to the death of Noble Barfolomew.
As for Opie, his mother moved them out of their dismal living conditions to a somewhat nicer apartment in Reed’s school district. Reed began to see Opie in the hallways between classes. Opie now stood close to six feet tall, his head shorn to a dark stubble, and he wore slightly less unflattering black-framed glasses. By then his acne had faded, and his middle school awkwardness had curdled into a seething, unfocused hostility. He’d begun to pal around with Danny Driscoll, the two of them haunting the hallways wearing long black trench coats, the uniform of troubled high school outcasts from time immemorial, and emanating an aura of old cigarette smoke, omnidirectional scorn, and general bad vibes.
From time to time, Reed would pass Opie in the hallway, long black coat billowing behind him. Each time, Reed would avert his eyes and try to suppress the images of his long-discarded 20-sided dice showing the numbers two and five. But each time, he could feel Opie’s glare bore into him from half a hallway away.
By spring of their senior year, the entire class had collectively begun to sense the mortality of their high school experience, and the customary social distinctions began to fall away. Reed had struck up a friendship with the great crush of his middle school years, Suzy Jenkins, and one unseasonably warm day in the middle of March, the two skipped their Computer Science lab to go hang out at the customary Ditch Spot—a copse of spindly trees on a high ridge near the edge of campus.
When they got there, they found Danny and Opie puffing on a joint. Reed felt his stomach drop and saw again, in his mind’s eye, the two and the five he’d rolled five years ago, dancing before his eyes as if they’d been burned into his retina. He tried to steer Suzy away, but instead Suzy called out to them. “Hey, can we get a hit off that?”
Opie exhaled a huge cloud of marijuana smoke, then wordlessly held the joint out. He stared directly at Reed as Suzy took the joint. After she took a hit, he smirked.
“I’ll bet you never knew that me and the brain here used to be buddies,” Opie said, ostensibly addressing Suzy but staring with cold amusement at Reed.
Reed’s throat went dry. He swallowed hard, then forced a laugh. “That’s right. We used to play Dungeons and Dragons together.”
Suzy choked out her hit of smoke, then laughed. “The two of you? Dungeons and Dragons? For real? That game with elves and wizards and shit?”
She offered the joint to Reed, who waved it off. Then she tentatively handed it to Danny, who took the joint, then wordlessly sauntered down the ridge back toward the school, giving Reed a hard bump with his shoulder in the process.
Opie chuckled as he watched Reed fume from the blow. “Yeah. Reed killed my wizard. It was five years ago today. The Ides of March.” He took a few steps toward Reed. “I’ll bet you don’t even remember.”
Reed shrugged and tried to brush it off. “When was that? Seventh Grade? Who wants to remember.”
Opie leaned his face in close into Reed’s, a mirthless grin on his face. Then he asked, “What did you really roll? Behind that screen?”
For the first time in almost five years, it all came back to Reed. Opie’s hot hand. His cold one. The faces of the dice, stubbornly refusing to let him off the hook. The primal and inexplicable forces of the universe, all bearing down on him that day, forcing him to make his choice.
His racing thoughts were interrupted by Suzy. “A wizard, huh? What was his name.”
Opie held his gaze on Reed for a second longer. Then his now-customary smirk fell away, replaced by a look of almost unfathomable sorrow, and Reed could briefly discern the face of the boy Opie once had been.
Then Opie answered Suzy’s question.
“Noble Barfolomew.”
Suzy was silent for a moment, then scoffed. “Noble Barfolomew?”
They stood in silence for a moment.
Then Suzy let out a peal of high-pitched stoner laughter. “Holy crap, you two were such fucking dorks.”
She continued to laugh as Reed and Opie looked at one another, the two of them now sharing the deep shame of their middle school years.
And then Opie began to laugh. A soft chuckle at first, but soon he was laughing until he was bent over, holding his stomach, tears rolling down his face. A moment later, Reed joined him in his laughter. And the two of them stood there in the Ditch Spot, laughing together, knowing that they would soon go their separate ways, forever scattered by the vast and unknowable forces of the universe.
And that was the last the name of Noble Barfolomew was ever spoken. So it was on that day that he truly died.
RayDorl.com 
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