May the Best Player Win

By: Evey Ghorley

Would you kill for a grant? I know most probably say no. Well, let me put it this way: would you kill for a million dollars? When phrased like that it sounds a little more compelling, doesn’t it? Suddenly, murder doesn’t sound so dreadfully terrible.

  However you do the murder, you begin to create excuses in order to make yourself feel a bit better. Nobody is really getting hurt, and you get to live your dream! That’s not so bad!

  Well, stop right there. Just stop. I used to think that way and it didn’t land me anywhere good. I ask again, would you kill for a grant? I did. I killed Harrison Graves.

  It started like any normal fall day at college. I woke up to go to the classes I was paying fifty thousand dollars a year to hate and prepared myself to interact with all the other people who were doing the same thing. 

  They all acted like they liked each other. Everyday in class I would notice smiles flying around the room over the heads of the sleeping fools who had incorrectly thought that they could handle an 8AM lecture.

  Most of the other students were fairly stupid by my standards. Only three others really stuck out to me. My deepest instinct was just to refer to them as Girl, Boy 1 and Boy 2, but eventually I forced myself to learn their names, out of respect for their intelligence. There was Rhiannon D’Arcy (am I the only one who has to resist singing Fleetwood Mac whenever I hear that name?), Simon Rhapsody and Harrison Graves.

  They all had skills and quirks and people they were dating, whatever. It didn't matter to me. I only saw them as competition.

  In class that day, our professor told us that interviews for the million dollar Yearwood Young Genius Grant would be held tomorrow. Simon, Rhiannon, Harrison and I all exchanged glances. We all knew that we were the only four who had a chance. Every time I would catch the eye of one of them, my skin crawled and my stomach jolted.

  I so desperately wanted this opportunity that I was becoming an animal. My deepest most territorial instincts came out. 

  The majority of relatively competent people out there are most likely wondering why I wanted that grant so bad. Frankly, I don’t understand why anybody thinks that there is any other reason aside from the fact that I love money, but regardless there was in fact another reason.

  My older brother went missing six years ago and there has never been enough money lying around to hire an adequate private detective. I’ve been told that trying to find him is probably a pointless waste of time since he was successfully peddling all sorts of things when he disappeared and is most likely dead, but I don’t care. I don’t believe it. 

  I never loved anyone more than him and never will. He was the only person in the world who was able to make me feel like everything would always turn out for the best. I couldn’t let myself give up on finding him if there was a chance. Getting that grant would insure that I found him, getting that grant would save his life. I wasn’t going to let somebody else get it just so they could live out some selfish business tycoon dream…

  Who am I kidding? I would also adore living out a business tycoon dream because like I previously mentioned, I love money, but… but that isn’t what this story is about.

  So that afternoon I went home and slouched down into my favorite armchair in front of my chessboard to figure out what I was going to do. 

  My opponents were Simon, Rhiannon, and Harrison, each of whom had a weakness I needed to exploit if I was going to get that grant. Rhiannon was easy because she was sort of a party fanatic and would most likely show up to her interview hungover. If I could only get her to a party.

  I looked up at my bulletin board of flyers and invites curiously and realized that Harrison and Simon’s scholastic engineering club was hosting an event in Classroom 187 that night. I preferred to refer to it as a student body social forum when in truth, it was just a kegger. Disgusting. I’ve never been much for parties and alcohol. 

  Anyways, all I had to do was get Rhiannon to the party and she would take care of herself. As for Simon, his weakness was that he didn’t have a car. He thought he would seem like an intellectual if he road his bike everywhere since it is, quote, “much more cost efficient than those deplorable cars that you people love driving and it saves the environment. Didn’t you know?”

  Whatever. All I had to do was pop his bike tires before class tomorrow so he would have no ride to his interview and he would be late. According to the Yearwood Young Genius Grant Society, punctuality is of the highest virtue, so if all went according to plan, Simon would be eliminated by 8AM. 

  Now Harrison… Harrison was a problem. He wasn’t a snob like Simon or a drunk like Rhiannon. He was actually quite friendly and responsible, so I had to go to the deepest recesses of my mind to figure out how I could dispose of him temporarily. If he didn’t make his interview than I would surely win.

  Then it came to me slowly like a shadowy hand on my shoulder. Ice filled the tips of my fingers and space full of lead sat in the bottom of my gut. What if I didn’t have to get rid of him temporarily? What if I did it… permanently? 

  I must have been deranged, out of my mind to think that it was a good idea, or maybe I just missed my brother. I am tortured with the memory of that moment. None of the other contestants wanted the grant bad enough to murder. They just wanted money to change their lives! But I flipped a switch and became a vicious monster and I’m not quite sure how.

  I got out of my seat and scuttled over to my cupboard under the sink. From it, I produced a small vial of white powder. It was arsenic oxide that I often used as rat poison. It was odorless and tasteless and could be easily slipped into drinks. It sort of reminded me of that scene in The Princess Bride. Know what I’m talking about? When The Dread Pirate Roberts slips iocane powder into the “Inconceivable!” guy’s wine for the battle of wits? Anyway, it was deadly and I was going to poison Harrison with it.

  That evening as I walked to the party through piles of fallen orange leaves, I took stock of what I was wearing to make sure that I seemed relatively harmless. Sabotage was a game so filthy that one had to look as clean as possible to seem uninvolved. Then I checked my cellphone for a response to the message I had left Rhiannon asking if she would be at the party. I didn’t really like pretending to be her friend but I needed to do it. Not surprisingly, she replied with a peppy message stating that she was coming and that she was “like totally stoked” with fifteen exclamation points and nine heart eye emojis. My least favorite of the emojis. I’ve always been more of an emoticon person myself anyway.

  When I reached classroom 187 with the vial of arsenic stuffed deep into my pocket, people were overflowing out into the hall by the handful. I wanted to believe that they all went to this school and were under the age of thirty, but I feared I was wrong.

  I pushed through the crowd into the lecture hall where each layer of chairs had a different folding table with snacks and drinks. Immediately, I spotted Rhiannon with a young man in the corner. The red Solo cups in their hands and the tipsy laugh Rhiannon let out gave me a sense of relief. Rhiannon was already on her way to being very drunk. 

  I turned to face the rows of seats behind me. On the fifth row up, Harrison and Simon were talking over the beverage table. Neither had drinks in their hands. 

  Simon was in his normal pompous stance and was blabbering in a stuck up manner while Harrison had his hands shoved in his pockets and was obviously trying to look for a gap in the conversation to put in his own thoughts. 

  I shoved past all of my obnoxious classmates to get up to them. I had to if I was going to poison Harrison. As soon as I approached them, I got a welcoming but vaguely confused smile from Harrison. 

  “Eloise… It’s nice to see you here,” he paused and kind of laughed breathily to himself, “but I… um… I wasn’t really expecting you to come out, you know. You don’t usually like being around people.”

  “I just elect to associate with more civilized society, that's all,” I replied, curtly. I couldn’t afford to befriend the boy I was about to poison.

  Now I know that I should probably describe how my two comrades looked that evening, as it will help you to get a picture in your mind. To put it simply, Simon was a squared jawed blond with green eyes that were simply on the prowl for the latest fad while Harrison had dark hair and eyes as well as a radiant smile that could have been used as a flashlight in a dark room. 

  “We were actually just discussing our interviews for the grant,” Simon bloviated. “Though, I suppose that it isn’t relevant to you.”

  “Nonsense. I am certainly applying for the scholarship and am working hard on what I plan to say in my interview,” I said. Harrison nodded.

  “I am too. What do you think your talking points will be? Will you be boasting your achievements or your skills?” 

  “Would it be presumptuous of me to say both?” I remarked. Harrison chuckled and Simon pursed his lips tightly. He was fiddling with something in his chest pocket when I took a glance at Harrison. He was still breathing, he was still functional. I had to wipe him out of the competition before he could do the same to me by just being so brilliant. 

  “Perhaps we should make a toast,” I said before grabbing three cups. “What would you each like to drink?” 

  “I’ll do some of that punch,” Harrison replied. Simon pointed to the unopened bottle of wine behind the punch bowl.

  “And I will do some of that wine. Only the finest for me.”

  I tried not to laugh as I checked the label. I can proudly say that I would not consider Franzia the finest. Regardless I poured a glass for myself so that I could easily identify Harrison’s drink. Before I handed each of them their cheap red cups of cheap fruity beverage, I turned my back and reached into my pocket. I retrieved the vial of arsenic and dumped the whole container into Harrison’s punch.

  Neither boy noticed as they had distracted themselves by chattering about some game called Settlers of Catan. It was almost too easy with these two. Maybe they weren’t so smart. I turned around with the cups balancing between my arms and my hands.

  “Who is going to make the toast?” I asked, blowing a loose hair out of my face.

  “I can do it,” Harrison said as he took his cup. 

  “Surprise, surprise,” muttered Simon. The egg was on his face, however, when he overestimated how much he could slosh his wine around in that tiny plastic cup and managed to lose his grip on the glass. As the wine fell and splashed all over the floor, I had a spiritual moment of revelation.

  I deserved the Yearwood Young Genius Grant. I was smart enough to create all this disorder, to devise this plan and if I got away with it, there would be no limits to the things I could accomplish. I was going to find my brother.

  Amongst the kerfuffle of Harrison mopping up the floor and Simon wiping off his strange velour shirt, I had to turn around to cover my smile.

  I poured Simon a new glass as an excuse to have my back turned. At one point I thought I felt something on my back and spotted movement out of the corner of my eye, but I was too distracted. I wrote it off as part of the clean up chaos.

  “Well, let’s try that again shall we?” said Harrison. I grabbed all three cups off the table, careful to hand Harrison his poisoned punch and Simon his fresh glass of Franzia Cabernet Sauvignon.

  “A toast,” Harrison began, holding the goblet of his demise in front of him like a scepter. I licked my lips in anticipation, in madness because I had gone crazy. I felt like a vacuum cleaner with the way emotions were swirling around inside me. I clenched my jaw as Harrison continued, “to our years of hard work to get to this point and may the best player win!”

  All the air was sucked from the room as Harrison held the glass to his lips. The only thing I could get myself to do over my own jangling nerves and shaking hands was drink my own wine so that I wouldn’t seem suspicious. Simon watched both Harrison and I in an unusually dubious manner. 

  Harrison pulled his cup away from his mouth and just like that, he dropped to the floor, coughing.

‘I did it!’ I thought. I ignored the disarray ensuing around me because this was my moment of victory! Friends rushed to Harrison’s side, other students fled from the scene because they smelled trouble. It didn’t matter to me, I had triumphed! I would save my…

  But then it hit me like exhaustion. You don’t feel it until it is too late. My throat and stomach tangled up together and the pain made me want to scream. I’m not ashamed to admit that I immediately vomited all over the tiles of the classroom.

  I fell to the floor wondering what was happening to me. My throat was sealing up and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of my own beating heart and screaming thoughts! 

  ‘How did this happen?’ I wondered. I had been so careful.

  But then I looked up at Simon. His malicious smile told me everything I needed to know. Images suddenly ran through my mind. Him fiddling with something in his pocket? He was grabbing his own poison. Spilling his wine? So he could add the poison to my cup while I was refilling his. Why? I drew a blank. I stared up at his face, knowing very well that his victorious, wicked, twisted grin may have been the last thing I ever saw. 

  “Why?” I rasped, trying to get one last wheezy breath. Simon smirked and leaned down next to me. 

  “May the best player win, Eloise. That’s how the game works,” he whispered. In a strange way, it was sort of soothing to know that as I faded into black, I had lost to a worthy opponent. 

  The Yearwood Young Genius grant was a way to give a million dollars to the smartest one there. Apparently, Simon Rhapsody was much smarter than I. He had known I would be there to poison Harrison and he had known that I was his only other real competitor, so he wiped me out. He took his queen and knocked over my king in a devastating checkmate.

  Driving myself to insanity over money had gotten me and Harrison murdered. I could have had a life and a family. I could have graduated and found my own success. I could have made peace with the loss of my brother. 

  Wedding photos, college graduation, holding my baby for the first time, owning my first home, I never got to do any of that because of my lust and my greed. I took that all away from Harrison too. He was a just a sweet, innocent boy with dreams and a heart just like me and I killed him for nothing. For nothing.

  So I ask you one last time, Would you kill for a grant?

  I did and I ended up dead.