Meet Me Here by Bryan Bliss

She makes no sound, and her body seems to fold into the shadows. I want to play so badly. I want to win.
    She sighs. “Fine. If we’re going to do this, we need to stretch first. We’re old now, and safety needs to come first.”
    She makes a show of touching her toes. As soon as I bend over, she laughs. Then she screams, “Go!” and takes off running into the darkness, laughing as she disappears.
    I move quickly, but carefully. Mallory always liked hiding just outside my vision, whispering “Snap!” when I passed and ending the game minutes after it began. But I can’t see anything now, so I move toward the road, away from Mallory’s initial line.
    I know exactly where I’m going, but I still move carefully through the darkness. There are two strategies in Snap! The first is to move, to glide across the play area like a shadow, snapping every person you come across. The second—the patient player’s tactic—is to find a spot, hunker down, and pick people off as they come by. Andthat’s what I plan to do: wait until she gets frustrated and starts hunting.
    My eyes slowly adjust to the night, and I begin to see Mallory everywhere. A bush looks like her hair on my right, and I swear her elbow is showing behind a tree twenty feet in front of me. But Snap! turns every branch breaking, every chirping insect into Mallory about to attack. I crouch down, looking across the field. Nothing is moving, so I go—probably too fast.
    I don’t see the dip in the grass and nearly fall right into it. I stagger into a crouch, breathing hard and scanning the field for any sign of Mallory. My entire body shakes with anticipation as I try not to move.
    When I was a kid, I’d hide behind trees and jump over streams. Running from, toward, invisible enemies, the kind my dad always talked about. I never thought about dying or how it would feel to be pinned down as bullets cut the air above me. Lately I haven’t been able to think about anything else. And as I crouch here, watching an ant crawl across a blade of grass, I work to slow my breathing.
    Footsteps like cannon fire come across the quiet field, and everything else disappears. To my right, a shadow moves, matching the footsteps. She sounds like a bullmoving through the field, which surprises me enough that I almost stand up and ask her if everything’s okay. Instead, I wait until she’s standing ten feet in front of me and whisper, “Snap!”
    Will turns around and yells. I do, too, which makes me wonder where Mallory is—if she’ll come running.
    “What the hell are you doing?” Will asks. And then, almost immediately: “Where’s Mallory?”
    “Me? What are you doing out here?”
    “Where’s Mallory?”
    I scan the field as casually as I can. “She’s not here.”
    “But you know where she is.”
    “Man, c’mon. I dropped her off at her house and haven’t seen her since.”
    Will studies me, but the lies now fall easily from my mouth. He looks angry and hurt. “I know you were up at the quarry,” he says.
    I try to make my voice even. “We went up there with Wayne and Sinclair. We talked about you, actually. And then your friend Steve started acting like an asshole.”
    Will nods, looks around the field. “Well, that seems about right.”
    “If you want my opinion, give her some space. Fortonight at least.” He starts to object, but I talk over him. “You can’t keep calling her. I mean, you know what she’s like.”
    He sighs and says, “She’s making me crazy. All I want to do is talk to her.”
    “So you thought you’d come search for her in an empty field?”
    He looks confused. “What?”
    “You’re in the middle of a field at midnight.”
    He thinks about this for a second and says, “So are you.”
    I hesitate, long enough to make it seem like I don’t know why I’m lying down in a field in the middle of the night. I go with the old standby.
    “I’m leaving for the army in the morning and wanted to be alone.”
    He eyes me and