I hop up next to her and we sit there, watching cars pull up—some moms and dads of freshmen and sophomores, some seniors and older juniors; it’s easy to tell the difference, most of the time, just by looking at the car. Here comes a Civic, all in black with tinted windows and a cheap kit job. The engine is loud, and the trim is red—looks hand painted. Before the door opens and a head pops up to call out to the gang of kids hanging around the steps, I know it’s going to be a young guy, maybe just out of high school, maybe dropped out of high school, and probably Asian. Up comes the old gold Camry. That will be a Somali mother, and as it pulls up, I spot her hijab through the windshield. She’s got her cell phone tucked inside by her ear. It’s the simplest hands-free device in the world. For some reason I find this ironic, though I don’t think it actually is.
When Jelly drops her free hand on my knee—hard—I jump a little, and she laughs.
“What?” I say.
She nods toward the front steps, and down comes Svetlana, in her heavy skirt with the insane embroidery and white denim jacket buttoned over her orange sweater. She bounces down the steps in a syncopated hop, from one foot to the other, her hair bouncing the whole way, so she seems to be made of layers of cotton and snow, of sunlight and feathers from the wings of an angel. It occurs to me that Jelly and I are sitting about three feet from the bike racks. Svetlana’s bike is there, chained up, and she’s coming this way.
Jelly shakes her head as she lets out another drag. “My god, she’s a walking arts-and-crafts fair,” she says. “I can’t believe that girl exists.” She’s looking at Svetlana, and probably noticed how intensely I was looking at Svetlana. I can’t believe she exists either, and I can’t believe that I’m about to consider possibly defending her to Jelly.
I should. But I don’t. I keep my mouth shut. At least I don’t laugh. I deserve a tiny bit of credit for that.
Svetlana rounds the corner and walks toward us, and her eyes meet mine and she actually smiles and hurries over to me. “Hi!” she says, and I know I should be careful with exclamation points, but she earns it for this one, because she’s smiling—which is in and of itself worthy of an exclamation point—and she gives me a flutter in my chest.
Forgive me. I adore her. I admire her. I think about her all the time, in this world and that one. But I am also a tremendous failure at decency and composure, especially in daylight outside of the high school with Jelly’s hand on my thigh. So I look down and mutter, “Hey,” barely audibly. I can feel Jelly’s eyes on me. I can’t look back, but I can picture her cigarette dangling from her bottom lip, like she’s stunned that this girl—this immaculate silver-haired beauty—and I are remotely associated.
Svetlana has stopped in front of us. I can see her feet. She’s wearing high-top bright-blue Chuck Taylors, laced all the way up. “Lesh,” she says, so I have to look up, and I do, and this skirt—it still makes me melt. It’s the skull with the eye, and now I can get a closer look: the pupil and cornea, the pigment specks in red and black thread, and whatever else is in there, and it’s bloodshot with red scraggly lines running from the edges into the white. It must have taken her hours. Days. It’s amazing. Anyone could see that, but not anyone could say it out loud.
I can’t. Maybe I’ll be able to soon.
I finally lift my head and say hi when my eyes are just below her face. I’m focusing on her throat, I guess, which is long and white, except where there’s a rubbed-red line on one side, probably where she’s been absentmindedly scratching while doodling in her last class, or in the library since, or wherever she’s been since last bell—maybe with her gaming friends.
Not doodling. That’s obviously not the right word at all. I doodle, and all I come up with are stick figures playing guitar or shooting themselves in the head.
“Um,” she says, because I’m an asshat and she’s uncomfortable, and I can easily save her. I can hop down from the wall, smile, and walk with her the next ten feet to her bike. I can talk to her while she unlocks it, gets on. I can walk alongside her, even, as she pushes the bike toward her house. Why not?
But I don’t.
“So, tomorrow afternoon, right?” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Okay.” I even shrug: No big deal. I’ll probably show up.
“Bye, then,” she says, and she’s even giving me a look now, because I finally risk full eye contact, just for an instant. It’s long enough to see her head cocked, like a kicked puppy. Sorry. There’s nothing especially puppylike about her. She’s tall, and strong-looking. She has the shoulders of a Russian-warrior-ice-princess, and probably the rest of one’s body too.
“Later,” I say, and while Svetlana is bent over and unlocking her chain, Jelly watches for an instant, then turns to me, her cigarette still dangling, and laughs. She throws back her head and laughs her (amazing) butt off.
I spot Deel coming down the big front steps. “There’s Greg,” I say, and I slide down from the wall. “I’m going to walk home with him.”
“You and him dating?” she says.
“What?” I say. I can’t even tell if she’s kidding. Maybe she thinks I’m gay, and that’s why she’s hanging out with me. Maybe she can tell I’m half girl.
“Relax,” she says, and she grabs my hand from the wall where it’s resting. “I’m just messing with you. See you tomorrow, Tung.” She bounces her eyebrows at the homonym that is my abbreviated family name. My face probably goes red. It definitely gets hot, and my mind is going places—parts of her body, to keep it general.
“Bye,” I say, and pull away my hand. She gives it a last squeeze as my fingers slip out of hers.
“You still grounded?” Greg asks. We’re walking along Lexington, past the gas stations at the I-94 overpass.
“Yup.”
“Sucks.”
“Does,” I say. “Verily.”
He looks at me sideways, and I smirk. It’s a Svetlana word, and now it’s a Svvetlana word and therefore a Lesh word. Greg has no idea how many people he’s actually walking next to.
“Were you just smoking with Jelly?”
“Sitting,” I say. “Just sitting.”
He nods slow and groovy, like I’m getting some jelly from Jelly.
“Just sitting,” I say again.
“She grabbed your hand when you were walking away,” Greg says. “I want a giant pop.” He veers left, into the gas station market, so I follow.
He heads for the pop machine, and I loiter in the grocery aisle. It’s full of single-serving processed food items: microwaveable cans of soup, near-instant pasta meals, pouches of jerky and cheese. I have an appreciation for cheese that requires no refrigeration, but today it’s making me woozy.
A woman who works at the market walks up the aisle toward me. I instinctively slip my hands into the deep pockets of my trench coat. She glares at me, then drops the big plastic box she’s carrying. She flips open the top and starts restocking the cans of cheese dip. I slide past her and poke at the bags of pretzels, but I’m watching her. She’s probably not long out of school. Maybe she’s in college, probably at Saint Paul College or Metro State. She’s not ugly. Her hair is blond, streaked with a slightly different blond. Her skin is a little zitty. But she’s not bad-looking at all. The way she’s squatting there, restocking cheese, the very top of her butt is showing. She’s wearing a thong.
“Tung!” Greg calls from the door. He’s pushing it open with his back, holding up his giant cup of green liquid. “We out!”
I head toward the door and glance at gas-station woman. She stands up and grabs the belt of her pants. With a shimmy and a hop on each foot, she hikes them up, and for an instant gives herself a butt lift and a wedgie.
Mom’s waiting for me at home. She’s not doing something else, keeping half an eye on the door. She’s not relaxing on the couch after a long day. She’s sitting on the couch, on its edge, watching the door when I open it. As I come in, she stands up and waves something at me.
“What’s this?” she
says, but she knows, and I know too. It’s about ten inches high, made of thin cardboard, and decorated in complex art in green, gold, and black.
“Um,” I say, because what’s the point? It says right on it what it is: it’s the cardboard sleeve that the prepaid gaming card came attached to.
Did I mention the free trial ended and I spent some of my saved allowance on a sixty-day card? They sell them at Target.
“Do you know where I found this?” she asks.
“The recycling bag,” I say, since that’s where I put it.
“Right,” she says, “and I wouldn’t have known what it is, but I was looking for this exactly. Do you know why?”
“Why,” I say as flat as I can manage. I’m pulling off my coat to hang up.
“Because one of the boys who works in the computer section,” she says, and her voice shifts into extra serious, “at my store told me you were in buying a gaming card. He said, ‘Aw gee, I didn’t know your son played this game. What server is he on?’”
“Am I in trouble?”
“Are you in … ,” she says, all out of breath and flustered. “Are you kidding? How much did you spend on this?”
“Thirty dollars,” I say, and quickly add, “of my own money.”
“Your own money,” she says. “You don’t have your own money.”
I roll my eyes. This isn’t a new conversation. Every time I spend more than a dollar, I hear about how my allowance isn’t for whatever I want. It’s for … well, I haven’t figured that out yet.
“Do you know I spoke to Tom about this?” she goes on, though I have no idea who Tom is. “I made him tell me all about this game, and besides the fact that I feel like I don’t even know who you are anymore because this game does not seem like something you’d be interested in—”
So true.
“—I cannot for the life of me understand where you are finding the time to play,” she finishes.
“Um, I’ve been grounded, remember?”
“Yes, you have,” she says, “which brings me to my next point. Did you think your father and I had this”—she waves that black card stock in my face again—“in mind when we grounded you?”
I shrug. I’m supposed to guess what they have in mind, and then remember what I guessed a week and a half later?
“So what did you have in mind?” is all I can think to say. I’m leaning on the wall near the steps now, itching to go upstairs—even itching to log on and run Svvetlana a little, despite what happened the last time I played. It’s been a weird day, and I want to wind down in a predictable environment.
“First of all, a punishment,” she says, “not some kind of gaming vacation.”
“Gacation,” I say, and I giggle.
“Shut up,” she says. “Second of all, I thought you’d have a lot of extra time to catch up in math, to keep your grades up, to really focus on schoolwork, instead of on drinking and listening to that disgusting, despicable hate-fueled garbage—”
“Point made,” I put in.
She takes a deep breath and puts her fist on her hip. “I’m not going to mention this to your father,” she says, and she’s waving the card stock again, “but I don’t want to have to mention it to you again either. Do you get what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“I mean homework,” she says. “I mean your focus will be homework, not … orcs or elves or gnomes or whatever.”
“Okay.”
“Okay won’t cut it,” she says. “Not this time. I want to see the work you’re doing, and you are not to play even one fraction of a second of that game until your work is done and I’ve seen it.”
“Seriously?” I say. “Mom, I’m not a little kid.”
She actually laughs. “When you stop playing little kid games, you can claim you’re not a little kid.”
I grunt a little. I must be channeling Kugnar this afternoon. “Can I go?” I head up the steps.
“I am not messing around about this, Lesh!” she shouts up at me.
“Yeah, I pretty much got that,” I say. Door slam.
I fall into my desk chair, wake up my computer, and open the game launcher. Click, click, click, and there she is, bouncing and grinning, casting and wielding, ready to run. Click, click, click, and there’s Kugnar, flexing and snarling, swiping and stabbing, ready to kill.
“If I’m about to dedicate a solid chunk of time each night to appeasing Mom,” I mutter to myself, “one of you is about to get a lot less attention.”
I’ll give you one guess which.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
…………………………………………………………
CHAPTER 30
SVVETLANA
The priestess and her dangerous cohorts lounge on the stone benches near the fountain in the grassy center of the human capital city. They’re strangers here—not a drop of human blood in their three bodies—and they enjoy it. They’re not out of place, exactly; elves and dwarves are welcome anywhere in the faction’s territory. But when a young human mage, barely out of his linen robes and unable even to shield himself, happens by, he gives them a wide berth on his way into the bank.
“I’m bored,” says Dewey. He’s uncharacteristically still, lying on his back on the bench with his head in Svvetlana’s lap.
Stebbins the hunter stands and draws his bow. He looses an arrow, and it strikes and picks an apple from a tree across the clearing.
“Nice shot,” says Dewey, and Svvetlana giggles as Stebbins’s cat darts away to fetch the fallen fruit.
“So what should we do?” says Stebbins. “We’ve run every five-man a hundred times. I have more tokens of valor and emblems of honor than I know what to do with.” He sits on the bench on Svvetlana’s other side, and she takes his hand.
“We have to raid,” Dewey says, rolling onto his side. “Seriously, I like you guys and everything, and even the other members of our guild are okay.”
“But?” says Svvetlana. She looks down at his dirty, scarred, chubby face. It’s nearly impossible to see through the thick knots of hair that grow from every inch of his body, but his eyes glimmer a bit, and it makes her smile.
“But,” the dwarf paladin goes on, “if we don’t get serious and start raiding and getting the really truly epic and heroic gear, I’m outta here.”
“Aw, don’t say that,” says Svvetlana. She evens pats his head. He purrs and bounces his eyebrows.
“All right, all right,” says Stebbins, batting her hand off the paladin’s head. “She’s taken, you dirty creeper.”
“Am I?” says Svvetlana, but she’s ignored.
“Look, the guild is the laughingstock of the realm,” Dewey says, “because we have enough members, lots of us at fifty, and we just never raid. We’re supposed to progress, you know?”
“We’re not the laughingstock,” says Stebbins. “There’s no laughingstock.”
“Well, we should be,” says the dwarf.
Svvetlana shrugs. “So we’ll start raiding,” she says. She checks their faces. “Right?”
Dewey nods, somehow, on her lap. “Right.”
“Okay then,” says Stebbins. “I’ll put the word out to the guild.” His cat is back now, lying at his feet, gnawing at the bright red apple. Svvetlana can smell it, and it smells good—but it’s nothing compared to the fruit of her homeland, so full of sugar and life that her mouth waters just thinking of it.
“Tell everyone to get Vent,” says Dewey.
“Vent?” Svvetlana says. “What’s Vent? Do I have it?”
“Lol,” Dewey says. “I keep forgetting she’s a noob.”
“It lets us talk to each other,” Stebbins says. “Like, in our real voices.”
Svvetlana catches her breath and swallows hard.
“You need it to raid,” the hunter goes on. “The fights are really complicated, and without talking to each other—like, if we just typed—we’d
just wipe and wipe.”
“And if you wipe too much,” Dewey says, “you get hemorrhoids.” The priestess looks across the field at the impossibly brown and green and red apple tree. The fruit the hunter shot is back, regrown, like everything does in this world.
“I have to go,” she says.
“Aw,” the hunter says. He kisses her cheek.
“Homework,” the priestess says. “I’ll see you later.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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CHAPTER 31
LESH TUNGSTEN
“So,” I say on Tuesday morning. My hands are deep in the pockets of my trench coat. My headphones are around my neck, the volume way up so I can still hear the blistering riffs of Coalesce. Greg strolls next to me. I haven’t been looking forward to this conversation, though in a way, I have. My chest is swelling.
The morning is cold, the first truly cold morning of fall. The dry leaves on the sidewalk behind us as we walk are like the skittering feet of a giant spider, and I keep glancing over my shoulder, like I might have to cast a shield and defend myself. Finally, though, I finish my sentence that started with “so,” like most of them do, and I can see my breath float toward Interstate 94. “I have to quit gaming.”
“Oh, damn,” says Greg. “Why?”
“Why do you think?” I say, shrugging, and we stop at the corner of Concordia Avenue to wait for the light. I tell him how some dink at Target reported to my mom about me buying that gaming card. “That and I’m supposed to be grounded. I guess virtual travel is not allowed.”
Guy in Real Life Page 15
