Illustration by Steve Powers

The Dungeon Master has detention. We wait at his house by the county road. The Dungeon Master’s little brother Marco puts out corn chips and orange soda.

Marco is a paladin. He fights for the glory of Christ. Marco has been many paladins since winter break. They are all named Valentine, and the Dungeon Master makes certain they die with the least possible amount of dignity.

It’s painful enough when he rolls the dice, announces that a drunken orc has unspooled some Valentine’s guts for sport. Worse are the silly accidents. One Valentine tripped on a floor plank and cracked his head on a mead bucket. He died of trauma in the stable.

“Take it!” the Dungeon Master said that time. Spit sprayed over the top of his laminated screen. “Eat your fate,” he said. “Your thread just got the snippo!”

The Dungeon Master has a secret language that we don’t quite understand. They say he’s been treated for it.

Whenever the Dungeon Master kills another Valentine, Marco runs off and cries to their father. Dr. Varelli nudges his son back into the study, sticks his bushy head in the door, says, “Play nice, my beautiful puppies.”

“Father,” the Dungeon Master will say, “stay the fuck out of my mind realm.”

“I honor your wish, my beauty.”

Dr. Varelli says things like that. It’s not a secret language, just an embarrassing one. Maybe that’s why his wife left him, left Marco and the Dungeon Master, too. It’s not a decent reason to leave, but as the Dungeon Master hopes to teach us, the world is not a decent place to live.

Now we sit, munch chips.

“If they didn’t say corn, I wouldn’t think of them as corn,” Brendan says.

He’s a third-level wizard.

“Detention?” Cherninsky says, and stands, squats, stands, sits. He’s got black bangs and freckles, suffers from that disease where you can’t stay in your chair.

“He chucked a spaz in Spanish,” I say. “I heard one of the seniors.”

“The teacher rides him,” Marco says. Marco despises the Dungeon Master but loves his brother. I like Marco, but I’m no fan of Valentine. I’m a third-level ranger. I fight for the glory of me.

The door smacks open.

“Ah, the doomed.” The Dungeon Master strides past us, short and pasty with a fine brown beard.

He sits behind his screen, which he’s ordered us never to touch. We never do, not even when he’s at detention. He shuffles some papers—his maps and grids. Dice click in his stubby hand. Behind him, on the wall, hang Dr. Varelli’s diplomas. The diplomas say that he’s a child psychiatrist, but he never brings patients here, and I’m not sure he ever leaves the house.

“When last we met,” the Dungeon Master begins, “Olaf the thief had been caught stealing a loaf of pumpernickel from the village bakery. A halfling baker’s boy had cornered our friend with a bread knife. Ready to roll?”

“I don’t want to die this way,” Cherninsky says.

Cherninsky always dies this way—we all do—or die of something like it, but he seems pretty desperate this afternoon. Maybe he’s thinking of people who really have died, like his baby sister. She drowned in the ocean. Nobody ever mentions it.

“This situation begs the question,” the Dungeon Master says, and sips from a can of strawberry milk. “Is bread the staff of life or the staff of death?”

“What does that mean?” Cherninsky asks.

“Read more,” the Dungeon Master says. “Enrich yourself.”

“We all read,” Brendan says.

“I mean books,” the Dungeon Master says. “I can’t believe you’re a wizard.”

“Don’t kill me in a bakery,” Cherninsky says.

“Don’t steal bread.”

“What do you want? I’m a thief.”

“Roll.”

Cherninsky rolls, dies, hops out of his chair.

“So why’d you get detention?” he says.

“When did I get detention?”

“Today,” I say. “You got it today.”

The Dungeon Master peers at me over his screen.

“Today, bold ranger, I watched a sad little pickpocket bleed out on a bakery floor. That’s the only thing that has happened today. Get it?”

“Got it,” I say.

I know that he is strange and not as smart as he pretends, but at least he keeps the borders of his mind realm well patrolled. That must count for something.

“Now,” the Dungeon Master says, “any of you feebs want to take on the twerp with the kitchen utensil? Or would you rather consider a back-alley escape?”

“Back-alley escape,” Marco says.

“Valentine the Twenty-seventh?” the Dungeon Master says.

“Twenty-ninth.”

“Don’t get too attached, brother.”

There are other kids, other campaigns. They have what teachers call imaginations. Some of them are in gifted. They play in the official after-school club.

“I’ve got a seventeenth-level elf wizard,” Eric tells me in our freshman homeroom. “She flies a dragon named Green Star. We fought an army of frost giants last week. What about you?”

“We never even see a dragon, let alone fly one. You have a girl character?”

“You play with that psycho senior, what’s-his-face.”

“The Dungeon Master,” I say.

“He calls himself that? Like it’s his name?”

“He doesn’t call himself anything.”

“I heard that when he was little he hit some kid with an aluminum bat. Gave him brain damage.”

“Completely made up,” I say, though I’m pretty sure it’s true. “He’s very smart.”

“He’s not in gifted,” Eric says.

“Neither am I.”

“Good point,” Eric says, and turns to talk to Lucy Mantooth.

Most days we play until we’re due home for dinner. But sometimes, if we call our houses for permission, Dr. Varelli cooks for us—hamburgers, spaghetti—and, if it’s not a school night, we sleep over. In the morning it’s pancakes, bacon, eggs, toast.

“Eat, eat, my puppies.”

We puppies eat in the study. Since we die so often, we take breaks while one of us makes a new character.

One day, while Marco rolls Valentine the Thirty-second into being, I wander out to the parlor. Dr. Varelli sits on the divan with a shiny wooden guitar. His fingers flutter over the strings, and he sings something high and weepy. He stops, looks up.

“It’s an Italian ballad.” There is shame in his voice, but it’s not about the song.

I follow his gaze to an old photograph on the wall. A young woman poses beside a fountain. Pigeons swoop off its stone rim. Marco once told me that this woman is his mother.

“So beautiful,” I say.

“Of course,” Dr. Varelli says. “Rome is a beautiful city.”

Later, we gather in the study for a new adventure. Our characters rendezvous at an inn called the Jaundiced Chimera. We’ve all died here before, in brawls and dagger duels, of poisoned ale, or even just of infections borne on unwashed steins. But the Dungeon Master insists the place has the best shepherd’s pie this side of the Flame Lakes.

We befriend a blind man. Cherninsky steals his silver, but the poor sap doesn’t notice, so we befriend him some more. He tells us of a cave near the top of Mt. Total Woe, of a dragon in the cave, and a hoard beneath the dragon.

“Sounds dangerous,” Marco says.

“That’s the point,” I say.