A New Phase

Loren, a werewolf, was in no headspace to play “Werewolf” during game night, but the charm of Armand’s excitement persuaded him to participate.

The rules were simple: each night/round, the werewolf picks somebody from the village to kill, and in the morning the surviving population votes on a player to eliminate, in hopes of defeating the werewolf. Armand dealt a role card to each player. Loren turned his card over, keeping it close to his chest.

“The village of Billiamsville is small,” Armand narrated. “Those who’ve lived in small towns know that you know everybody, so we’ll start with introducing our characters.”

One player took the persona of Pascal, a defrocked priest who moved to Billiamsville with a wife who later left him for a virtuoso timpanist. Another played an angsty pre-teen who resented her parents for naming her Aubergine. Armand’s attention fell upon Loren. “And you?”

Loren, a shy college freshman who’d been enamored with Armand ever since meeting at the Acts of Kindness Club’s ice cream social, pieced together a response. He modeled his character’s backstory after his mom, Meryl: a single woman trying to make ends meet as a Chili’s line cook.

The round began. Everybody bowed their heads in sleep. “Werewolf,” Armand commanded. “Wake up.”

Loren opened his eyes and met Armand’s gaze.

“Point to who you’d like to kill.”

Loren hesitated with the command. He first chose the realtor. When Armand tried to confirm his decision, he switched to the security guard, then switched again. Eventually, Loren settled on the CalArts Claymation student visiting home for Christmas break.

“Okay, werewolf,” Armand said. “Go to sleep.”

The game continued. Everybody who lived through the night woke. Accusations flew. The graveyard shift security guard defended herself. “I couldn’t hold this job if I were a werewolf!”

The realtor was accused of emptying homes to flip and sell to corporate land developers. Aubergine was accused of hiding her changes under the guise of puberty. However, Loren’s silence marked him as a suspect. A one-vote lead put him to death.

Loren awaited a new role for round two. Given that his mom would often sit in the hallway during full moons, assuring him in a soft voice with things like, “No matter what happens, you’ll always be the sweet, caring kid I know,” he prayed to be the Pacifist.

The next game began, and Loren’s new card made his heart sink: Werewolf again.

This time—determined to impress Armand with a victory—Loren fabricated arguments against the prosecuting attorney, the travel blogger, and the arborist while simultaneously devising an order for elimination. With each kill, his senses spiked. The dorm floor’s compounded smell of pepperoni pizza and cheap weed flooded his nose as he eviscerated the sheriff and accused the arborist. “He knows these woods well.”

Despite Loren’s sudden, visible excitement for killing innocent people, nobody believed any accusations against him. “A werewolf twice in two games?” the majority argued. “It isn’t probable.”

Probability, combined with measured tactics, helped Loren win. The losers groaned and laughed. Loren eased off on wringing his hands.

However, the third consecutive round as the game’s villain felt suspicious to Loren. He refused to look up at Armand, who’d taken a seat beside him on the loveseat armrest. Longing to be something different from himself, Loren attempted to throw the game. He even made his character another obvious offshoot of his mother: Errol, a caretaker charged with a lonely child.

The round ended again in his victory. Some players voiced their skepticism about the game’s integrity. Armand insisted everything was chance, and Loren chose to believe him since—in the next round—he received the Doctor card, a role that gave him the chance to save a player while the others slept.

Still, Billiamsville’s population put Loren to death immediately and unanimously. “We have observational data,” somebody half-joked.

Killing Loren first as a precaution—treated humorously by the party—evolved into ritual. Loren felt helpless and frustrated. He wasn’t being given a chance to role-play with Armand, to contribute to the joy that revealed itself on his crush’s face as the game progressed. He spoke up after several rounds. “It’s true: I’m the werewolf. Spare me or kill me; do whatever. I refuse to hide it anymore.”

The others deliberated, then voted instead to hang Jorie, the punch-drunk boxer.

Surprised that it worked, Loren tested his confession again and again. His unflagging declaration—with occasional flairs of improvisation and confidence—made him impossible to read.

At the night’s end, Armand walked Loren across campus towards his house. Little was said, except that Loren liked the pride pin on Armand’s backpack, and how grateful he was to be invited. “Sorry if I was weird,” he added.

“Don’t be sorry,” Armand said, laughing. “As a theater major, I’m very familiar with weird.”

The two parted at the west end of campus. When Armand vanished from sight, Loren sprinted through the woods towards home, startling his mom by bursting through the back door. “I did it,” he said, out of breath, collapsing onto the kitchen tile. “I told somebody what I was, like I always said I would.”

He was too exhausted to explain the context. Meryl—furious and frightened—grounded him. She only brought it back up weeks later, as she unpackaged and plated a half-dozen slabs of thawed ground beef she’d stolen from work. “It might have been a game,” she said, “but what you did was reckless.”

Loren didn’t argue.

“Need anything else?”

He shook his head. His mom barricaded his bedroom door from the outside. As the moon’s shadow moved to reveal itself at its fullest through the boarded windows, Loren’s phone chimed with a barrage of texts from Armand.

Loren didn’t have enough time with fingers to reply to the bumbling, typo-riddled-then-corrected-request for a movie date, but all night he felt the answer inside him taking shape.