6 7
A Middle-Grade Horror
6 7
Twelve-year-old Dakota never cared about going viral — but when a TikTok trend turns out to be something far darker than a stupid catchphrase, he'll have to out-stubborn a creature that has already conquered the entire world.
Content warning
Mild peril, supernatural horror, and brief scenes of peer pressure and bullying.
“Six seven,” the boy in the video says as he sways his arms up and down like a juggler.
Next to Dakota was Jasmine, shaking with snorts of laughter as she showed him the video on her phone.
“So funny, right?” she said, mimicking the boy’s movements. “Six seven.”
Dakota smiled. “Yeah. Sure.”
“C’mon. Don’t go all old soul on me, bestie. Even you got to admit it’s funny.”
He wanted to. He’d made it a point—a New Year’s resolution—that he would do his best not to be a stick in the mud. More specifically, not to be a buzzkill. But he didn’t get it.
The boy in the video looked about their age. Around twelve. A white kid with a mop top of blonde hair puffed out like ice cream on a cone. Dakota looked at the username for the poster: Mason67. The boy’s smiling face didn’t sit right with him. Something about it gave him an uneasy feeling deep in his chest. The smile was just a bit too wide. The eyes were a bit too cold.
“I just don’t get it. What does it mean?”
Jasmine laughed. “It don’t mean anything.”
“Doesn’t,” Dakota absently corrected.
“Nobody likes a grammar Nazi,” Jasmine chided, giving him a shove in the arm that nearly pushed him out of the bus seat and into the aisle. A small gesture emphasizing their size difference. He couldn’t wait for his growth spurt. He was praying puberty would hit him soon. There was nothing fun about being a late bloomer, especially when you were the latest bloomer in your class. A boy under four feet tall.
It wasn’t that he had an old soul. Or that he was the weird nerdy kid who sat around reading all the time. It was hard to hang out with the other boys in their class when all they wanted to do was roughhouse or play sports—soccer that usually turned into rugby matches. Not that any of them knew what rugby was. He’d call them plebeians about it, but they definitely wouldn’t know what that was either.
“And nobody likes nonsense. And that’s what this is. It’s cringe.”
Jasmine made a face. Her mouth twisted like she was in pain. It vanished as soon as it appeared. “Guess you’re right. Still, you’re no fun. Anyone ever told you that?”
“Yeah. You. Every day.”
They fell into silence. The roar of the bus picked up the closer they got to school and the more crowded it became. He pulled out his book—one he was reading for fun instead of for an assignment. Jasmine went back to scrolling on her phone. Before she swiped to the next video, he saw the face on the screen. Mason wasn’t smiling. His mouth was glitched—wide, too wide, like a black hole ready to swallow him up—and he looked like he was staring right at Dakota.
He thought that would be the end of it. Another small tiff between the two of them. One that would be forgotten by lunch. Little did he know that was only the beginning.
The 67 plague—though he had to admit “plague” did seem like too strong a word; maybe “virus” would be better—spread around his school like a fruit-flavored vape pen. He couldn’t walk the halls without hearing one kid shouting it to another.
“What was the score for the Bears last night?”
“Six-seven!”
“What’s your kill-to-death ratio?”
“Six-seven!”
“How many miles can you run?”
“Six-seven!”
It was everywhere, and it was asinine. But trends came and went, and he wouldn’t fall for them again. He’d tried to keep up with it before. He remembered begging his parents for fidget spinners. Now he had a box full of them in his closet, untouched for years, only providing entertainment for the mice that their lazy house cat refused to catch. He would ride this wave out, and soon everything would be back to normal.
A month passed. Then another. And it never stopped. Worse, it became more prevalent. He started noticing other things as well. Everyone was adopting that same ice cream top haircut. Even the girls. Everyone’s eyes had a glassy, dull appearance. And no matter what you said or asked, you got the same answer—”Six-seven!”
In Mr. Adkins’s class, they were reviewing multiplying fractions. As soon as the example was on the board, Dakota groaned. He’d solved the problem in his head within seconds and knew the answer: six over seven.
But there was hope. Before the inevitable chorus from his classmates could say it, Mr. Adkins beamed at them. “Six seven!” he said, swaying his hands up and down.
This was it. Dakota knew it. The moment he’d been waiting for—the moment when it went from being the cool, rebellious thing kids did, the thing parents just didn’t understand, to the thing they reviled because grown-ups did it too.
He held his breath, watching the faces of his classmates, waiting for the look of revulsion, for the disdain of having some vital part of their rebellion stolen from them.
It didn’t come.
They smiled back. Big, toothy grins that spread so far it looked like they would tear from their faces and fly away. And they repeated back to Mr. Adkins: “Six-seven!”
Dakota didn’t. He stared, agape. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
All their heads twisted and turned to him in unison—a hive mind with all its focus boring into him. He felt the same way he did when he dreamed he’d come to school naked.
“Mr. Adkins,” he said, appealing to the highest authority in the room. “You’ve got to admit that it’s nonsense. It’s so cringe.”
All around him, faces seized up like vampires coming face-to-face with a cross. Hissing and hateful glares shot at him in a barrage. Even from Mr. Adkins.
“To the office,” he said.
“What?” Dakota wasn’t sure he’d heard right. And if he had, he wasn’t sure that Mr. Adkins was talking to him. He’d never been sent to the office for anything in his entire academic life.
“To the office. Now. Tell the principal what you’ve done.”
“What did I do?”
“Go! Now!” Mr. Adkins’s voice was dark and sonorous. It seemed to echo around the room.
No—he was wrong. It wasn’t an echo. It was the students. They were speaking with him in unison, low voices rising all around Dakota. They were the echo.
He gathered his things as quickly as he could, shoving them haphazardly into his bag. Before he left, he gave the room one last look, searching for one friendly face and finding none. Even Jasmine, who sat behind him, stared at him like he was scum.
“Hurry up,” Mr. Adkins said. “I expect you in the office in the next six-seven minutes.”
“Six-seven,” the class echoed as he walked out the door and toward the office.
