Under the Influence

Chapter Five: Violence is Never the Answer

There was a winding staircase in the far left corner of the room. At the top of the staircase was a hallway, long and narrow, with four doors on the left side, three on the right and one at the very end of the hall if you continued walking straight.

   On the other side of the first door on the right was a fairly simple room, and although it was a bit small, there was nothing in it so it didn’t really matter. The only reason the room was there was because there was another staircase in it, leading up to the very top floor. The second room on the right was the one containing the troll. Not just any troll, though. It was an axe-wielding troll. The troll—

   “Charlie, can you come here for a second?” Scott asked loudly, snapping me out of my thoughts. He sounded like he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He never sounded like that. Not unless something was terribly wrong.

   “Um, yeah, just a second,” I replied hurriedly, setting my pencil down on the table. I picked up the Dungeons & Dragons map I had been working on and gave it one last lingering once-over. I hated to leave it unfinished, especially since I had been working on it so diligently for the past half hour or so, but whatever Scott needed to consult with me about seemed like it was urgent. And I had been working on the map for the past few weeks, creating rooms and destroying others, so I guess I could wait a little longer to finish it. Making the perfect D&D map didn’t just happen overnight.

   “Charlie, now, please,” Scott said impatiently, and it made me wonder what kind of talk we were going to have that would require me to have to put up with an aggravated Scott. For one thing, he was very rarely this petulant.

   Oh God, this wasn’t about the birds and the bees, was it?

   “We need to talk.”

   We need to talk. Ah, one of the most hated phrases in the English language. I knew Scott was either going to tell me something extremely good or extremely bad because no one ever says “we need to talk” just because they wanted to make conversation.

   Luck was never on my side. Well, not good luck. Bad luck, on the other hand, seemed to take an unrequited liking to me and following me around like a little lost puppy. And even though I hoped it was good news Scott was itching to tell me, I knew that with my luck, it would be the exact opposite.

   Shuffling around boxes and stacks of comics so I could exit the back room and go to the main part of the store, I tried to conjure a list of all the things Scott could possibly want to talk to me about.

   Maybe he wanted to get back together with Tiffany. Nah, that probably wasn’t it. He had no reason to get back together with Tiffany; she shattered his heart into a million little irreparable pieces and then stomped on them. And if they did start dating again for some unfathomable reason—although I really hoped that they wouldn’t because I didn’t think I could handle it if she broke his heart for a second time—I had no idea why Scott would want to talk to me about it. That would just be…awkward.

   Maybe he got William Shatner’s autograph. That would explain why he was so impatient, wouldn’t it? Because he couldn’t wait to show it off to someone. Someone being myself, of course.

   I thought up a million variations of why Scott wanted to speak to me so desperately. If only I knew how far they all were from the truth.

   Scott was pacing back and forth in that small strip of space behind the counter when I reached the actual store part of the store. I walked over to him and rested my arms on the counter. He wouldn’t (or maybe couldn’t) stop pacing even after he noticed me.

   “You wanna talk here? You don’t wanna go in the back room or anything?” I asked.

   Scott shrugged half-heartedly. “I don’t see what the difference is.” The back room was more private. I suppose that was the only difference.