1 Ben Drowned

I will start from the beginning, both Ben and I were the same age and I am currently 24 years old while he died at 13. We met when we were 10 years old, we became very close friends and although he was very shy we were united by the fact that we both liked to play video games, including the game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask; this game is an important pillar in the history of Ben, because at some point he commented something about the game that made me feel very uncomfortable.

Ben and I went to the same class, he was a blond boy, short and slim, rather weak, his hair brushed his shoulders and his eyes were light blue. He didn't get along well with people because of his shyness, according to everyone he was the odd one in the class and three boys were always picking on him, hitting him or laughing at him on the way out of school constantly.

Sometimes they went so far as to tease him, leaving him with more serious injuries than the usual couple of bruises. Their names were: Jacke, a skinny but muscular boy, Alex, a chubby boy who had a lot of strength and finally there was Matt, you could say he was the leader of the gang, the one who bothered Ben the most and hit him the hardest. Matt was a year older, unlike all of us and he was in our class because he had repeated a grade; he was a taller kid than Ben, much stronger and with a scar on his lip that he used to brag about. He used to say that the scar was from a time he had fought a 15 year old boy and that while the boy had only left him with that scar, he had punched him in the face.

Jacke and Alex were the only ones who believed Matt, although no one dared to tell him that this was a lie.

Ben was fed up with the situation at school, and his home environment was not good either. He was the son of a widowed woman, as his father had died the previous winter in a car accident. That day it snowed and Ben wanted to go with his father to pick up some things from work but his father wouldn't let him because he had to go to class; shortly after he was informed that his father's car skidded in the snow until it crashed into a wall.

Ben's father died with his skull crushed against the steering wheel. Prior to his death, before his father left, Ben had been talking to him about the bullies at school. After calming him down, saying he would go to the school to complain, he said to Ben, I'm sure this has a wonderful ending, doesn't it? He kissed him on the forehead and laughed, not knowing that those would be his last words. His mother was left alone with him and his two younger brothers and was usually not home because she had to work. Ben's younger siblings used to stay at school until 6 or 7 p.m., as the school doubled as a daycare (as long as the parents paid an additional fee). Ben, however, was old enough to go home and know how to take care of himself, so he never stayed there.

The day Ben managed to save up enough money to buy the Majora's Mask game was one of the few days I ever saw him smile. I distinctly remember us walking to school, he suddenly pulled the cartridge out of his pocket and with a big smile he said to me:

"Hey John, look what I got!

I was very happy that he smiled, because I had never seen him do it in a sincere way. Honestly for a moment I envied him, in my family we have never been short of money, so I could not buy it, but Ben was very noble and told me that he would let me have it when he could.

During those days, Ben only talked to me about the game. More than once he said to me:

"I wish I was like Link, I could be brave and stand up to those bullies" In these cases I was uncomfortable and didn't know what to say to him.

Everyone in class knew about the bullies, I wanted to help him but I wasn't strong enough to stand up to someone like Matt.

About two days later, before entering class I was with Ben while playing Majora's Mask, I remember perfectly that he saved the game and stopped playing right at the Skull Boy part. That same day after the break between classes, Ben came looking for me in desperation because his game had disappeared from his backpack and he was sure it was Matt or one of his henchmen. He even told me that he saw Matt rummaging through his backpack during the break, I accompanied Ben to the teacher's lounge to find our teacher and stood with him as he told her what happened; and then we went to find Matt and walked into an empty classroom. The teacher went through Matt's backpack and pulled out a cartridge from which the game sticker had been removed.

To tell you the truth, I don't know what I was doing with them, but Ben was comforted that his best friend was with him at that moment. The teacher asked Ben if he was sure it had been Matt, and he said several times "I saw it!"

I heard something I honestly would have preferred not to hear: when Ben said he had seen Matt, Matt muttered, "Rest assured, you'll never see him again." He said it in a voice so cold and unfeeling that it chilled my blood for a second.

I saw the teacher and Ben out of the corner of my eye and I got the impression that they hadn't heard him, the teacher played the game back to Ben and both she and Matt went to talk to the school principal. Apparently, they were going to give him a punishment but Ben was still worried that he would get his usual beating at the end of class and the game would be stolen again, so he asked me to keep it and that he would take the game home that afternoon, that he would call me when he arrived to tell me an exact time, I readily agreed.

When we got out of class, he took the usual route to go home and I went to mine as I normally did. Ben usually got home before me, since I had to stop by my dad's work to get my house keys and the beating that the three thugs gave Ben every day didn't last more than 10 minutes, I went to wait for his call just as I opened the door, but nothing happened.

Ten minutes passed, twenty, thirty and he didn't call. I got worried, what if he was knocked unconscious, as I said before, and sometimes they would get intimate. But I could never imagine what was really going on.

I ran out to Ben's house with the game in my hand but just before I got there, on the shore of the lake in front of his house I heard some laughter, some moaning and some shouting; Ben lived in the suburbs and no one usually passed by, so I was surprised to hear all that.

I looked around and then, I saw it: those thugs were kicking something, something that was lying on the ground. After straining my eyes a bit, I saw that it was Ben, who was emitting moans of pain and was I covered my face with my hands. Fear paralyzed me and I stood still, watching. I saw Matt pick up a wooden stick and yell at Ben:

"You were saying you saw me take your nasty game, weren't you? Take it easy, you're not going to see anything again!" Then he raised his hand and drove the stick into Ben's right eye.

I couldn't hold back the whimper and tears welled up in my eyes as Matt pulled the stick out and drove it hard into Ben's other eye. I fell to my knees on the asphalt and vomited as I heard Ben's cries of despair. I wanted to get closer, but the feeling of fear running through my body prevented me from doing so. I looked up, wiped away my tears, and as I saw more clearly, I noticed that everything was covered in blood. Matt's clothes and Ben's face were stained with a red substance that gushed out of his eyes. And then I heard it. Even though I was 10 meters away from them, I heard Ben say in a cracked voice:

"You shouldn't have done that."

Matt grabbed Ben by the neck and lifted him up, throwing him into the lake and squatting beside him.

Grabbing him by the neck, he plunged his head into the water. Matt laughed as he watched an eyeless Ben, his lungs filling with water, I saw his life slipping through his hands, but on Jake's and Alex's faces was an expression of terror. I heard them say:

"Stop! That's enough!" They tried to stop him, but Matt kicked both of them and they pulled away from him.

Soon after they had him underwater, calling him all kinds of names, Matt let him go. He stood up and looked at him. Jacke and Alex were gone, and fearing someone might see him, he ran off. I imagine he was going home, because once he disappeared from the morbid scene, I paid no attention to where he was going. I approached Ben on shaky legs, crying, and shook him. I hugged him as tightly as I could and cried. I don't know how long I stood there, crying as I hugged him, I just remember all the time trying not to let go of the Majora's Mask game I still had in my hand. I stood there, sobbing until the police arrived. A neighbor of Ben's had called them when she heard those screams in the lake. And this I could never forgive myself for, not helping my best friend is something I still have nightmares about.

They took me home, and once I was there, I took a shower, and as I was wiping off Ben's blood, I realized that Zelda's cartridge was also stained. A few tears escaped and I wiped it off with a rag. Underneath the thick layer of blood, there was a word written, "Majora." That word wasn't there that morning when Ben gave me the game, but I overlooked it, as it wasn't what I was most concerned about at the time. I left the game on the nightstand, as I wanted to keep the last memory I had of it.

The next day I woke up and the game was not on my bedside table, and although I looked for it I could not find it anywhere, nor had my parents seen it. I didn't want to think too much about it, but I got even more depressed than I already was for not having any memory of him. The next few days I spent all day giving statements to the police about what happened, which didn't allow me to distract myself about Ben and everything that happened.

Matt wasn't put in jail because he was a minor, but they were planning to put him in a juvenile facility. Three days later, I learned of his death. They said his eyes had popped out of their sockets I was playing a video game, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and a picture of the cartridge came on the TV, a picture of the same cartridge that disappeared from my bedside table days before, with the same letters written on it! That cartridge disappeared after the crime. Hearing this, a feeling of terror and curiosity ran through my body.

That's when I started researching Ben, and discovered that both Alex and Jacke had died in a similar way to Matt. I knew that Ben was behind all this, that he had a craving for revenge, but I hoped that he would stop after killing his executioners, although to my misfortune, I was wrong: there were more deaths, people who had nothing to do with what had happened. After a while, the massacre slowed down, they were no longer committed so frequently. I managed to talk to people and they described to me what the game was like and how it differed from the original. Ben liked to play with their minds; he wanted them to feel fear. Someone who had the game let me play it once. I looked at the empty game. If that hadn't happened, my name would be there, and underneath Ben's name. As the screens went by, I noticed that in one part it said:

"You met a terrible end, didn't you?" That reminded me of that story he told me with tears in his eyes, the one about the talk before his father had left home to meet a deadly fate.

There was one part, I was told, and that didn't come out to the other players. Only to me.

When Link was burning, a dialogue appeared below, where it said:

"Even though you didn't help me, I don't hold a grudge, friend" This part made my eyes water.

Maybe you guys think my reactions were too sentimental, but it's not easy to see your best friend die when you're only 12 years old.

The deaths caused by the game had come to an end but every now and then, Ben would commit some crime through it. The old man who sold the game to the user who bought it was the grandfather of a now dead child. The boy left the game in his house, and wanted to get out of there so he would not remember it anymore, besides selling some of his belongings. I managed to talk to the old man, following the lead of the game.

I can't stop thinking about what could have saved him; we could have continued playing together, but no. Despite that, after 12 years, I've realized that I can't go on living with this guilt on my back, it's eating me up inside. But before I rush to my death and end this once and for all, I felt the need to set the record straight about Ben, the friend I could never save.

The friend whose death I could have prevented, but didn't out of fear.