Off the Deep End (64)
“I’m not saying we did. It’s—”
“There’s no we in this. I have no idea what’s going on or what you’re hinting at.” I couldn’t take it anymore. “Mark, what’s going on? I don’t know anything other than my child went to walk the dog and never came home. It looked just like the Dog Snatcher took him, but I’ve said all along that that wasn’t the case. And you?” I leapt off the counter and pressed my face in front of his. “You’re the one that has made me feel like a fool this entire time. You’re the one who’s gone on and on about it being the Dog Snatcher. How there couldn’t be any other possibility even though I could name three, and now you’ve suddenly done a complete one-eighty. Had a total change of heart. What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t. I—”
“Bullshit.”
He shook his head. “I’m telling you the truth. All I’ve done this entire time is try to figure out what happened to Isaac.”
“Bullshit.” I said it again. “I saw what you did last night,” I blurted. There—it was finally out.
His eyes grew wide. He opened his mouth, then shut it. He did that twice.
I nodded and crossed my arms on my chest. “I saw you—”
He shoved his hand over my mouth. “Be quiet,” he hissed in my face. “I know what you saw me do.”
I slapped his hand off my mouth. “Tell me what’s going on.”
He took a few shuddering breaths like he was trying to breathe deep but struggling to get the air into his lungs. His entire body tensed. “Up until yesterday morning at the police station, Amber, I swear I thought the Dog Snatcher had him. Since day one. I really did. That wasn’t a lie. And I was sick about it. Truly sick about it. For so many reasons. So many reasons.” He kept repeating himself as his face crumpled like he was going to cry again. The same way he’d cried himself to sleep last night beside me while I pretended to sleep. “I just couldn’t stop thinking about all the horrible things they might be doing to him. The torture and pain he must be going through and that I was responsible for it. That I was being punished. I’ve really just been thinking I was being punished. Taking my kid away from me in the most horrific way.”
“Mark, what are you talking about?” My stomach rolled in on itself. “What were you being punished for?”
He rubbed his face with both hands as he struggled to gain control of his emotions and his voice. He’d never looked so wrecked. Even the night Isaac had gone missing. “I’ve been worried sick about Isaac since the accident and how he’s changed. I’ve hated not being able to get him to talk to me or let me inside his head. He used to tell me everything.” Sadness warbled his voice. It was true. Even adolescence hadn’t changed that. Mark was still Isaac’s best friend. “I couldn’t stand the thought of him suffering alone, you know? I just couldn’t.”
I nodded. I knew exactly how awful it felt. There was no greater torture for a parent than being unable to stop your child’s suffering. I’d sat outside Isaac’s bedroom door plenty of times listening to him cry and being completely powerless to do anything to help him. It was excruciating.
Tears glistened in Mark’s eyes. “So I downloaded Dracho and started playing it. It’s a role-playing game where you can create worlds that—”
“Mark”—I put my hand on his arm—“you don’t have to explain the game to me. I know all about Dracho.” I’d held out on letting Isaac play video games for as long as I could. Not because I bought the arguments about them making him violent, but I hated the way they allowed kids to cut themselves off from the real world. The social isolation they allowed them to create. Who wouldn’t want to live in a video game world in comparison to the real one? That’s why they were so dangerous. And I wasn’t wrong. We’d battled with Isaac about them since the first time we let him on Roblox.
“Right. Right,” Mark said like he was reminding himself who he was talking to and remembering that most of Isaac’s and my fights centered around trying to get him off his video game and into real life. “Anyway, I just thought if I could reach out to him in that world, then I might have a better chance of connecting with him. I just wanted him to have a friend, you know?” He shrugged at me as he searched my eyes for understanding. “It didn’t take long to find him, but it did take a while for us to become friends. Eventually, he let me onto his server, and that’s when we really started talking.” He exhaled slowly. “You don’t know much about video games, so it’s hard to explain, but he’d created his own world on the server, and he was doing some pretty awful things on there.”
“What do you mean? What kind of awful things?”
“He owned the server, so he created the world and controlled everything that happened there. He was the one who had the power to let you in or kick you out. Basically, you started out in the world with nothing. No food. No water. No shelter. No friends. You earned those things based on accumulating points. The only way to earn points was to . . . it was to . . .” His voiced cracked, and he stalled for a second. “Go to the school and kill students. He’d created a world on the server where you only got access to certain things based on who you killed at the school. The more popular the student, the more points awarded. The more torturous the death, the more points. Bonus points if the kid was a jock. There—”