• Oh sure, his body came back, but it didn’t take us long to realize that something was wrong. The Gary-impersonating stranger that came back the next day had a totally different sense of humor, making everyday, fit-anywhere jokes where the real Gary always told political jokes about the current government and such. The new guy also called me by my first name, Cory, instead of Seth. Jean was one of the first ones to figure out that Gary was gone. At first, she had rushed over to him with a hug, just glad that he was there. As he greeted her, her smile slowly wavered and fell. By the time the demon had tried to talk about the weekend, Jean broke down and started crying. The imposter didn’t stick around very long after that. Cason, even though he was a weakling, leapt at the demon in an attempt to stop him. The creature only laughed and what used to be Gary melted into an ink to escape Cason’s arms before turning back into a human to run out the door.
    “Cason! Are you okay?” I asked as I went to my knees beside where he had fallen. The goth boy shuddered.
    “I touched it. It feels so…bad.” I helped him to his feet. Touching a demon wouldn’t get you infected with the virus, but whoever did manage to touch one always said that it wasn’t a pleasant experience. “It feels slimy and scratchy and wrong, all at the same time,” he whispered, shuddering again. Jean wasn’t the only one crying. People all over the campus broke down when they heard about Gary. It was like someone dying right in front of them: Gary was never coming back.

    A week later, things were almost back to normal. Jean had slowly started to hang out with Cason and me more and more often until we all sat together at lunch and whenever we got the chance. “What are you guys doing this weekend?” Jean asked while she cut up her spaghetti. She was one of the rare people that hated twirling so much that she cut everything into bite-sized pieces.
    “Videogames,” Carson and I said together. Jean rolled her eyes.
    “Jinxyouowemeacoke!” I shouted before Cason had the chance.
    “Okay, fine. You win,” he said in defeat, holding up a dollar bill.
    “Seriously?” Just as I reached for that lovely green paper, Cason snatched it back.
    “Psych!” I crossed my arms in annoyance that I’d been fooled. “Psych again. You can have it.” He tossed it in the air and it fluttered down into my spaghetti.
    “For real this time?” This time I asked after I had snatched it up.
    “Yeah. My parents finally gave me an allowance.” He opened up his wallet to reveal nineteen crisp one-dollar bills.
    “I hope the soda machines like spaghetti,” Jean said as she gently tugged the money from my hands and wiped it off with her napkin.
    “Well, they usually like Chinese food, but I guess they might like Italian,” I explained. “Soy sauce does wonders for the gears.”
    “Anyway. About the weekend…”
    “Hey; do you want to come play videogames with us?” Cason offered.
    “I was hoping you’d ask that,” she said with a grin.
    “Let’s do multiplayer on Sky Attack,” I suggested. Jean gasped.
    “You have Sky Attack?!” Sky Attack was one of the first affordable virtual reality games available to the public, and it was wickedly fun. The main goal of the game is to attack enemies from above via eagle wings that are attached to your back (you can even feel the wings on your back and beat them at will. It’s AWESOME), but there’s a free-fly mode where you can just explore the virtual world and test new techniques and ways to dive, spiral, and twirl.
    “Why would I have Sky Attack? I was only saying, ‘Let’s do multiplayer on Sky Attack’ for my own health. Of course I have it.” Jean squealed and gave me a hug.
    “Oh my gosh! I’ve wanted to play that game since forever!”
    “Then we’ll play,” Cason stated, putting a fist on the table to finalize the decision. A moment later the lunch bell rang. My knees gave way as I stood up, sending me and all the remains of my lunch to the floor. I blushed as everyone giggled and I tried to concentrate on gathering up all the stuff. As I put my tray away, one of the all-knowing lunch ladies came out with a mop and cleaned up the milk all over the floor.
    “Thanks,” I said as I went past.
    “No problem,” she said with a shrug. “That Gary kid was doing this all the time.” My blood turned to ice and splintered through my veins. “Where is he, by the way? I haven’t had to clean up messes almost all week.”
    “H-he left the school,” I stammered before running to catch up with Jean and Cason. I was glad they didn’t look too hard when I joined them, because they would have seen my ghostly white face and asked questions. So my knees had given out. So what? Everyone’s knees give out every once in a while; it just happens. Even so, I hyper-scanned through all my memories, searching for an instance where I even might have come in contact with infected blood. There was always PE, but I didn’t have PE this year and I surely would have seen signs by now if I’d gotten if from someone’s sports injury.
    My heart skipped a beat at the memory of Gary slamming into me, but I didn’t remember there being any blood. It was just an impact; it never broke the skin. Even so… “Hey, Jean? Can I borrow your mirror for a second?”
    “Sure,” she said with a quizzical look. She dug in her purse and pulled out a case of powder that had a mirror inside when she opened it. I held it in one hand and put the other hand over my eyes. After a few seconds I snatched my hand away and looked in the mirror. My pupils had been big for a second, but not any bigger than normal. I was clean. Jean turned white when I handed the makeup case back.
    “I just like watching my eyes change,” I lied. “I’m not checking for demon virus,” I lied again. Jean sighed in relief, but still looked suspicious for a moment before she decided to trust me. Cason gave me a hard look for a moment that said, you had BETTER not get the demon virus, or I’ll kill you. But I was clean and they had nothing to worry about. Everyone got scares like this occasionally, wondering if they had it just because they fainted from exhaustion or had an asthma attack. My mom had gone nuts when I got my first asthma attack. Before she called the hospital or anything, she shone a light in my eyes while I was struggling to breathe. Now, though, she just hands me an inhaler. That’s always a lot less stressful than spazzing about the possibility of having the demon virus.

    Jean curved her wings a little as she hit an updraft and rose higher over the tiny city that sprawled beneath us. By the time I flew to where she was the thermal had moved, so I had to flap to catch up with her. Cason tilted his left wing down and made a tight spiral for a few yards down before flapping to catch back up with us. “I love this game!” Jean shouted, unable to contain her joy. Even though it was her voice, it wasn’t her face. Before we’d gone into virtual reality mode, we all designed our characters to what we thought suited us best. Cason was still as skinny as a rail, but he was taller and had a brunette buzz-cut with solid blue eyes. Jean had dirty blond hair much like her hair in the real world, but of course she made herself skinnier. Girls are like that; no matter how thin they are they always want to be even thinner. Anyway, she kept her same hazel eyes but made them more vibrant.
    I made the most radical changes to my character, giving myself long black hair that was kept in a ponytail and brilliant crimson eyes to replace my boring gray ones. I dressed my character with black combat boots, jeans, and a black shirt. Once we went into virtual reality mode, I could feel the heaviness of the boots and how my new hair fell down my back. Jean was the most excited since she’d never played before. She just couldn’t get over the fact that she could feel everything that was happening as well has see and hear it. “I’m gonna do a dive. Is anyone coming with me?” I asked. Without answering, Cason pulled in his wings and started to fall. I followed after him with a scream of delight as I smashed through the wind. The town grew larger the closer we got. When we were about a hundred yards from the top-most buildings, we snapped our wings open and started flapping. Cason opened his too late, though, so he accidentally smashed into the roof. I winced when I heard something crunch, but Cason just gave an extra flap and stood up. The number sixteen flashed over his head, indicating how many life points he’d lost. In a few moments, he was back in air and level with Jean and I.
    “Man, that really hurts for a second,” he said, rubbing his leg protectively. In reality, all three of us were propped up against the edge of my bed with interceivers around our necks. The interceivers interrupt the commands going from our brain to our body and instead receive those signals and translate them into game play, so we don’t actually get up and dance if we decide to dance in the game. That could get pretty dangerous… especially when you can’t see anything in the real world until you smack into it. Only the basic voluntary functions like breathing and blinking carry over, for obvious reasons.
    “Suicide mission!” I shouted through the wind, pulling in my wings. Jean and Cason watched me go. So far none of us had succeeded in falling to our deaths, since we always involuntarily pulled up at the last minute and ended up only being injured. At first it was hard to tell where I would land, but I soon saw that my target was a red sports car. Like most things in Sky Attack, deaths were painless. Regular, non-life-threatening injuries were the only things I would be able to feel, and even those are only a flash of discomfort. I was only a few seconds away from impact when I realized that something was wrong. In the game I was breathing fine, but I started feeling dizzy from lack of oxygen. The distraction did away with my natural instinct and I only half-opened my wings before crashing into the ground. Two almost inaudible shrieks reached my pounding ears as Cason and Jean dove down and landed beside me. A pretty large red number appeared over my head, but I didn’t care.
    “Seth! Oh gosh, are you okay? Why are you hyperventilating?” I took me a moment to realize that I wasn’t hyperventilating; I was suffocating. The receiver on the back of my neck picked up the signals to breath, but my body outside the game wasn’t cooperating. I pulled out of the game and snatched the interceiver off, gasping for breath. In a second, Jean and Cason’s body became animated again as they pulled out of the game too. Panic flooded my mind and my heart raced, screaming for oxygen that wasn’t coming. I went down on my hands and knees and gasped silently as I strained my lungs to breathe. My eyes were wide open, but it got harder and harder to see as I felt the blackout coming. Cason was down on the floor in panic, asking what was wrong.
    I silently mouthed, I can’t breathe.
    He immediately ran out the door to go find my mom and get an inhaler, but Jean was left behind to freak out. As frightening as not being able to breathe is, I was more worried about something else. Please, I begged silently, let this just be asthma. Please let this just be asthma. Please, please, please, please, please. Before Cason even got back, I felt my lungs slowly start working again and my field of vision got wider, coming back from near fainting. I was able to take longer and longer breaths until I was finally back to normal. Please let this just be asthma. I don’t want to die. A curious sound reached my ears and I turned to find Jean with her eyes closed and tears running down her face. “Jean! I’m okay! I didn’t mean to scare you… I’m sorry.” I awkwardly wrapped her in a hug and found that I had tears on my own face as well, from the sheer panic of not being able to breathe. Jean didn’t stop crying, for some reason. It took me a moment to realize that she thought I was doomed to die. “Jean, I have asthma, not the demon virus.” I pushed her back a little and put my hand on her shoulders just as Cason came running in. “Asthma. Not virus; do you hear me?” She nodded and slowly settled down.
    “Guess you don’t need this anymore,” Cason said jokingly, tossing me the inhaler.
    “Nope. It passed pretty fast.” Then I gave Cason a disapproving look. “You could have least told Jean something before you ran out and let her think I had the demon virus. Genius.”
    “Oh,” he said with wide eyes, “oops.” She gave a feeble laugh at Cason’s horrified expression and gave me another hug.
    “I don’t want to loose anyone else,” she said quietly through one last sob.
    “I don’t have the demon virus,” I mumbled, but I was telling myself more than her. After a while we had all settled down and began telling jokes and laughing again. We slowly turned our attention back to the game and resumed flying. This time, though, we actually spent some time in the busy town down below. Since we weren’t online, only non-playable characters roamed the streets, saying the same line of dialogue each time we talked to them. I’d only played online a few times because the servers quickly get crowded and force me to move to another, less populated one. Cason, Jean, and I had a great time even though it was only us roaming the streets. Our wings were tucked behind us, bouncing when we took a step and sometimes fluttering open in a stiff wind. Sometimes one of us would jump in front of a car just because we knew we couldn’t get hurt. The red numbers always appeared over our heads, but since it was free fly, there were always plenty of health packets to replenish us. And if we died, who cares? We could always come back, and that was a luxury few got to enjoy: a second chance.

    Click here for part 3!