text: Memories came rushing towards me as I thought about it more. The choice, the effort, the risks. Was I ready to take the chance? “You’ve got to be kidding me!” my best friend Finn said when I brought up the idea, “You’re going to die! Everyone always has! There hasn’t been a person who actually completed all the games since before we were born!” “Well, I’ll be the first,” I said, trying to make myself feel a little bit better. “Whatever,” Finn said as he rolled his eyes, “There’s the mailbox. Go put your application in there.” I walked over to the mailbox and dropped my application letter in. I watched as I threw my life away to participate in a competition. As I expected, not many people had signed up. Why would they? “So, what do we do now?” Finn asked as I came back towards him. “I don’t know? Go get some ice cream and wait for tomorrow, I guess.” The next day came by quicker than expected. By the time Finn and I got home, it was already well past midnight. “I’ll tell you the news in the morning,” I told Finn while grabbing the unique gold and red-letter lying in the mailbox. The applications always came precisely at midnight on July 12th. I sat down at the table and carefully opened the sparkly letter, trying not to rip any part of it. I pulled out the cream-colored paper inside, unfolded it, and laid it down on my marble countertop. It read: Dear Mr. Blake Champ, We have reviewed your application and made a decision based on it. The Board of the Games has decided that you would make a great contestant in the Million Dollar Games, and we cannot wait to meet you at the Games Central today at 5 pm sharp. Don’t be late, Ashley Darwin From The Board of the Games I knew I would make it, but some part of me wished I hadn’t. I rushed over to Finn’s house, forgetting I was supposed to tell him the next morning. When I arrived at his home, I walked up the stairs to his porch and knocked on his door. When he opened it, out came a disgusted looking Finn, in his pajamas. “What are you doing? You’re shirtless, look like you’ve been running, and it’s one am,” Finn said, very concerned for his friend. “Well, I-,” I started. “Wait, why are you shirtless?? That’s just creepy, man!” Finn interrupted. “I didn’t have-,” I tried to say again. “It’s one am!!!” Finn interrupted once again. “I GOT INTO THE COMPETITION AND I HAD TO LET YOU KNOW!” I yelled fast so he wouldn’t interrupt me again. “Oh. Didn’t you say you would tell me in the morning?” Finn asked, wiping his eyes. “Oh yeah. I forgot.” “Oh, then congrats! See you when you win and return! Goodnight!” Finn said, almost falling asleep. “Yeah, goodnight,” I said as I started to run back to my house. In the afternoon, I packed up my bags to go to the Games Central. I packed a couple of grey underwear pairs, a couple of t-shirts and shorts, some deodorant, a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and conditioner, some money, and my yellow racecar phone. I then took my purple leather suitcase, took it downstairs, turned off all the lights, and headed for the bus stop. I knew by watching the games each year; I was looking for a particular lime and purple bus with the words Million Dollar Games embedded on them. After about 30 minutes, the bus arrived carrying nine other contestants. Inside, one thing was shared between most of them. They were all panicking, except this one girl. This one girl was sitting on a bus seat all alone in the back of the bus. She was short, with red curly hair and freckles. She has little round black glasses and a button nose. She looked around my age and was wearing a white t-shirt, a grey cardigan, light blue ripped jeans, and some white vans. I walked over to the seat on the other side of the aisle and sat down. “Hi!” she said with a soft, gentle voice, giving me a little wave, “I’m Olivia.” “Hi, I’m Blake,” I said, having no idea what else to say. “So, are you excited about the games? My parents told me that the games have this good screen screen effect to make it look like we are dying. Isn’t that cool?” Olivia said as she started to stare out the window. “Yeah, yeah, I hope so, I’ve wanted to do these since I was a child. Dangerous things always seemed to appeal to me.” “Oh, that’s cool!” Olivia said as she smiled a little bit. When we got to the Games Central and opened the large glass doors, we walked into a room with foam pits and all workout equipment types. Standing in the corner of the lime and black rubber floored room stood a middle-aged woman with a brown clipboard and a black pen. She was wearing a pink workout bra and some black workout leggings. With a loud, booming voice, she said, “Okay! Listen up, guys! This is your first training day for the first game tomorrow. You will need to take it seriously, or some of you will die. The challenge tomorrow is the ground challenge. It is the easiest, so if you guys train today, I don’t expect any of you to die tomorrow. Tomorrow you will be placed in a rapidly sinking quicksand hole. You will be surrounded by a very slippery mud and have one tree root to grab on to. When you get out, you will sit in the small room corner until everyone is finished. You will be practicing over here,” as she pointed to a small workout spot on the left filled with human-sized holes and ropes attached to the wall, “and we will be training for an hour. After training, you will go straight to the room and go to bed so you can be well-rested for tomorrow.” The training went by quickly, and before you knew it, it was time to go to bed. As I turned off the lights, I couldn’t help but think about what tomorrow might bring. When I woke up to the alarm buzzing loudly, it took me a second to realize what was about to be happening. Today was the day. Today was the day I would overcome the first challenge, the easiest challenge, and be safe for the next day. I wondered how many people would die because of this game and how many people would be injured. I would not have thought many people would die because our trainer said no one should. We would have to see what the day brings. I got up, put on a black t-shirt and some blue shorts, and headed to the small rooms. Near the ooms stood people who were checking off names and assigning people to rooms. When I saw Olivia, she looked very nervous but not as nervous as the people around her. They were all shaking. I gave Olivia a quick wave before I was pushed into a room called Ground A-1. I looked around the room, and I saw a wooden platform in the corner of the room. I believed this was where we were supposed to stand after the games. There was some yellow sand lying in the middle of the room and shiny brown mud surrounding it. There was a camera in every corner of the room to show on television to a worldwide audience. After about 5 minutes of standing in the room, I heard a loud booming voice coming from a hidden speaker inside of the room, “Welcome to the 125th annual Million Dollar Games! Today is the ground game. The contestants will stand in the middle of the room, ait until their waist is fully emerged into the quicksand pit, and will then begin to get themselves out of it. This is a test or strength and knowledge. Now contestants, please make your way over to the quicksand pit and stand there. Good luck to everyone!” I made my way to the sandpit taking a deep breath in and out, and waited for my waist to be entirely under the sand. When I looked around, I saw the tree branch near the left-hand side of the room. I tried to grab it, but I continued to sink deeper. I started to panic, moving around frantically, and realizing that only made me fall faster. The yellow sand was seeping into my wide-open mouth as I tried to lay flat on my stomach. I started to float, taking deep breaths as I came back up towards the top. From there, I laid on my belly and reached for the tree branch. I grabbed hold of it, hands holding onto the splintering wood as I begin to pull myself towards the wall. I scrambled up onto the mud, one foot behind the other, almost slipping head-first back into the sandpit as I carefully made my way to the wooden platform. As I sat there, watching the cameras disconnect one by one, I heard the drums’ beating and the speaker man saying, “Kai Ju,” letting us all know he suffocated under the sand. A shiver ran down my spine as I realized signing up was a mistake, and I should’ve listened to Finn when he told me not to, but it was too late now. When the game was finished, I ran over to my friend Olivia, who was crying with her face and clothes covered with sand and mud. “I fell back in,” she cried, “I slipped off the mud and went head-first back into the sand. I almost died!” “Shh, it’s going to be okay. It’s all over, no more sandpits for you,” I said, trying to comfort her. I was not ready for the next game at all. Two days later was the air challenge. I woke up again to a calmer alarm in my small room with blue and white polka-dots pasted around my room, in the back of the Central. I got up, put on an old black t-shirt and some ripped jeans. I looked outside the curtained window, seeing the sky began to lighten with all shades of purple, orange, red, and yellow and started to yawn. I opened the door to go to the new room. I watched as the other contestants rubbed their eyes and trudged out of their rooms. I caught up to Olivia, and we walked the long path together, talking about what was going to happen in a couple minutes. When we arrived, our trainer was standing at the door with a clipboard. One by one, we all filed into the vast room, made to look like three different biomes. There was a desert, a marsh, and an arctic type place. Cameras were all places around the wall again, and microphones above them. On the ceiling, many powerful fans were waiting to be turned on. After everyone was filed in, we heard the booming voice once more “Ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to the second game of the year, the Air Challenge!! Today our contestants will face a powerful tornado and try to survive. They will use the different biomes to their advantage while trying not to be thrown anywhere they could injure them. The games will end in 30 minutes. Now I hope everyone’s ready because the games are about to start! Ready, set, begin!” The big fans started to turn on at high speed, and the leaves were beginning to move around in circles. Everyone, including me, ran to different corners of the biomed room, escaping the middle, where the tornado would soon form. People begin to find hiding spots around the room as the tornado started to make its way to the desert area. The tornado picked people up and threw them across the room, making them land in all sorts of places. Soon enough, the tornado made its way to where I was standing. I started to run as fast as I could in the opposite direction, but its reach was too much. It pulled me up and away and threw me inside of a cold pond in the arctic biome. Olivia soon came after me, making a big splash in the cold pond. We swam over to where we could stand and stood there as the tornado made its way across the other biomes. Thirty minutes passed, and the fans stopped abruptly. The tornado grew smaller and smaller as we all made our way to the door. We passed bloody bodies where someone had been thrown against a big rock. One of them I recognized to be a girl named Sophia Gardenwell. Olivia and I were both freezing as we made it back to our rooms to take a warm shower and eat lunch. The fire challenge was on its way. Closer than ever. I woke up at about noon on a Saturday by the bright sun shining through my curtains. The games would not start for another hour, so I headed over to eat some lunch. After that, I headed to the training facility to make sure my grip was on point. I climbed up the ladder and jumped on the rope, swinging back and forth over the foam pit. I moved around to jump to the solid side and land on all two legs and two arms, like a cat. At about 12:50, I started to make my way to the new room, knocking at Olivia’s room first. “Olivia! Open up! We have to go, or we’ll be late,” I said as I pounded on the door. “I’m coming!” she said as she opened the wooden door. She looked like she had been crying. “What’s wrong?” “I- I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s too dangerous. They sugarcoated it for me, saying that the dangerous things were photoshopped on, and no one actually died. I don’t want to die. I don’t want it to be real. I want to go back home safe and sound,” she said as she started to cry again. “Look, we’ll ask our trainer if you can disqualify yourself, okay? Let’s get through this one challenge first, okay? You’ll do great. I promise.” This challenge was going to be a quick one. All you would have to do is swing over a rope over a burning fire. After you are done, you can exit the room. The booming voice started to talk again, making me nervous, “Welcome to the third challenge of the Million Dollar Games. This one is the favorite among the viewers because of the fire aspect. Today, the contestants will one by one swing across this firey pit and try to make it to the other side! This is a test of strength and grip. Good luck!” The first one in line was Olivia. She grabbed the white rope, with her feet still on the surface, and jumped off, giving a large swinging motion to the other side. She jumped at the top of her swing, landing safely on the other side. A couple minutes later, it was my turn, and I did the same thing. After the game was over, only three more contestants, Olivia, me, and someone named Oscar Goins, were still alive. Olivia and I made our way up to the trainer to ask if Olivia could leave the competition. “Excuse me. Olivia was wondering if she could take herself out of the competition. It’s too much for her, and she would like to leave,” I said, not knowing what the trainer would say. She looked at Olivia and me up and down and then said with a smirk, “Well, what’s the fun in that? Back to your rooms kids, and get ready for tomorrow’s training.” Neither of us knew what to say. Neither of us wanted to compete anymore and was not ready for the last game, which is always the hardest. There would be no peaceful sleeping. Today the day. Probably the last day of my life. I was so frightened. I got up out of bed and looked around. I put on a backward t-shirt and some inside out pants as I made my way closer to the swimming area. I waited for Olivia by the training facility, and when we got there, we both shared our feelings on the upcoming competition. The booming voice was heard around the room, “Welcome to the last game of the year! The three contestants are Blake Champ, Olivia Ohia, and Oscar Goin. Today, you will be locked up in a swimming area and will have to find the clear key and unlock the gates with a tiny air hole that will be covered sometimes. The first contestant will be Blake Champ. Good luck” Olivia looked at me with tears in her eyes, patted my back, and croaked a “Good luck” before closing her eyes, so she wouldn’t have to watch. I looked at the swimming area and took a deep breath. This was it. This was the moment of truth. I just had to unlock the gates, that’s all. I walked into the swimming pool and watched as they locked me up. I then began searching for the hidden key. I swam around, feeling the water around my ears, and then I saw it at the very bottom in the corner. I swam to it as my ears started to hurt, my eyes are getting red, and I needed air. I stopped for a minute and stared at the closed breathing hole and continued to swim down, and down, while my eyesight became to get darker and darker, and my arms felt like noodles. I heard the drums beat twice. Olivia screamed, “NO! BLAKE!!” And then... And then I woke up.