The Astonishing Mistakes of Dahlia Moss

by Max Wirestone

  “Charice suggested that you and I ought to spend a little time together,” said Daniel. And he did use his normal voice, which was actually pretty great, deep and authoritative, and yet still pretty friendly. You could see how he would get cast as Jesus.

  But this answer made me anxious.

  “Why would Charice want that?”

  “She’s a little worried that you don’t like me. She wants to make sure that you and I get along.”

  There were a lot of things wrong with that sentence. For one, it had both the words “Charice” and “worry” in it, and those were things that should be paragraphs apart, if not entire pages. Possibly books. For another, the whole premise was dumb. I liked Daniel fine. I wished he would put on pants when he got up in the middle of the night, but this was a minor and ultimately solvable problem.

  But mainly, it was scary. Something was happening to Charice and Daniel. I had a terrible feeling that it might be adulthood. Even more alarming was the idea that Charice and Daniel were going to couple up forever, and then they would both disappear to New York or Los Angeles, or wherever actors who could plausibly say dumb things in Australian accents went, and where would that leave me?

  Anyway, this thought sounds very rational typed out like that, but in the moment I didn’t type it out, even emotionally, and it hit me all at once, like the words were on top of one another and also they were maybe written in Wingdings.

  “I don’t want to go anywhere with you,” I said quickly, and loudly, like a crazy person. And then I instantly followed it up with:

  “No. Yes, I’m sorry, please come along.”

  Honestly, there was no time between those sentences. You’d have to measure the pause in quantum units, like the ones physicists used to discuss the beginning of the universe.

  “Are you sure?”

  I wasn’t sure at all. I felt weird. Insecure, almost, although I couldn’t have told you why. As exasperating as Charice was, I didn’t want her changing. I had just gotten the hang of being a single twentysomething—just now!—and now friends were already leapfrogging into other stages of life.

  I didn’t say that, however, because that would be a monstrous and inhuman answer. I didn’t even really think that answer. I just felt it.

  What I said was “Sure.”

  “Banger!” said Daniel.

  Because this book is titled Astonishing Mistakes, I will be honest with you and tell you that I did absolutely no other preparation for the tournament. I plugged the hotel into Google Maps, but that was about it.

  I figured it would all work out. Probably Doctor XXX wouldn’t even show up, and if he did, I’d have a fake Aussie bodyguard to protect me. What could possibly go wrong?

  CHAPTER THREE

  There are many things to admire about Daniel, aside from his abs, his actually-pretty-good acting skills, and his apparent ability to make Charice happy.

  One of those things is his car, which totally functions. Yeah, that’s a low bar to clear, but in terms of speed and functionality, my car rates somewhere between a pangolin and an elderly horse. So Daniel’s ride—an old Ford Focus with a dangerous amount of miles—was comparatively amazeballs. Hell, he even had working heat. Heat! Truly, the vehicle of champions.

  We thus got to the Endicott Hotel right on time, and were warm, even. Despite the Endicott’s regal name, it looked less like some historic artifact of Old St. Louis and more like a Days Inn. That’s not to say it was shabby—it was just nondescript in the way that hotels are carefully designed to be nondescript. A big, cavernous lobby with beige wallpaper and gold trim. Maroon-and-black-damask carpeting. It was nice, but you could have been anywhere.

  Someone had put white plastic letters on a black sign that informed Dark Alleys players where to head for registration, although they needn’t have bothered, because the direction and flow of gamers was pretty obvious.

  In a few minutes, I would make the time to start getting nervous, but initially I was taking it all in. The people, I mean, not the place. I had never actually been to a fighting-game tournament before, and I was curious. I had watched some highlights videos here and there, but the thing about them is that you saw the gameplay but rarely the crowd.

  Surveying the place, I could see why the crowd would not be a selling point.

  There was nothing wrong with these guys, but they looked boring, businesslike, anxious. At PAX, or Comic Con or Zoth, these folks would have been exuberant and luxurious, decked out in costumes with makeup and hats. I got it; there was $20,000 on the line, and so it made sense to leave the wigs at home and bring your game face. But for an outsider, it was a little disappointing. Nothing much to look at. Although, at least I didn’t have to worry about being attacked by a guy in a mask.

  “So how is this person going to find you?” asked Daniel, back in Aussie mode. “Are you supposed to be wearing a carnation in your lapel or something?”

  With ridiculous suggestions like these, you could easily see how Daniel might be a good fit for Charice.

  “No,” I told him. “He watches my stream, so he knows what I look like. I just can’t identify him. He’ll come up to me. Although, he did mention that he was going to be wearing a green hat.”

  We scanned the crowd together. There was no one with a green hat, although there was a lanky black kid with improbably green hair. I don’t think he was cosplaying—he just had green hair.

  “I’ll go look around,” said Daniel. “If I find a guy with a green hat, I’ll tackle him.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “I’ll break his legs.”

  “No.”

  “Maybe just one leg.”

  Daniel wanted me to negotiate violence with him, but I was mostly worried about being left alone.

  “What am I supposed to do if he shows up while you’re gone?”

  “You’re in a crowded public place,” said Daniel. “What could he do?”

  “He could pull a gun on me,” I said, which only sounds nuts if you haven’t had a gun pulled on you in a crowded place before, which I have.

  “Well, if he has a gun, there’s not much I can do to stop him,” said Daniel, with altogether too good a humor. “So it wouldn’t make any difference if I was around. Besides which,” he said, tugging at the brown leather totally-not-Australian hat he was wearing, “I’m going to see if they have some kind of buffet here.”

  And, of course, no sooner did Daniel get out of sight than a guy with an olive toboggan cap entered the hotel. He was a huge guy, black, probably twice my weight, and very muscular. Or possibly fat. I don’t know, he didn’t take off his shirt. He looked like a linebacker, regardless. Or, at least, a linebacker who was slumming it, because he was a wearing a tatty black T-shirt that I guessed had to be lucky somehow, because otherwise it would have been thrown away or burned.

  I came up to him quietly.

  “Doctor XXX?” I asked.

  He gave me just the sort of look a stranger would give if an unknown person came up to them and said “Doctor XXX?” Imagine right now, that as you are reading this, a person comes up to you and says “Doctor XXX?” Consider the look you would give them. That’s precisely the look I got.

  And because I like doubling down, I repeated it.

  “Doctor XXX?”

  “Is that supposed to be some kind of code?” asked the green-capped man.

  “It’s supposed be your username in Twitch chat.”

  “My username in Twitch chat is Mike3000.”

  I actually had heard of Mike3000, or at least run across his name in my extremely cursory searching about the tournament.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “You’re really good, right? You’re, like, a favorite to win this.”

  Mike clearly liked being recognized but shrugged anyway. “Thanks,” he said. “But we’ll see. I’ve got a talent for coming in at second.” He had a body that was somehow naturally good at modesty. Whenever I try to play off being really good at something, it feels false and off-put
ting. Mike was a prodigy at half smiles and shrugs.

  “Is Doctor XXX supposed to be your partner for this event?” asked Mike.

  This was not exactly it, but it was a very reasonable guess. Dark Alleys was a two-on-two game, which was unusual for fighters, and so lots of people would be looking for their teammates. There were probably other people there who had never met their partner in real life before. Which was good, because this meant that I didn’t seem especially weird.

  I lied to Mike, just because it was easier than the truth, and said yes.

  “Is he a black guy?” Mike asked, probably curious why I had singled him out.

  “Green hat,” I told him.

  “This hat is ocher,” he told me, which is not a turn I was expecting the conversation to take. He also said it to me in a way that sounded vaguely offended. Thankfully, I didn’t have to do anything, however, because he kept talking.

  “He’s probably waiting for you at the registration table. That’s where my partner is. If I see him, I’ll tell him you’re out here. What’s your name?”

  I could have said Dahlia, but on Twitch chat I had been telling people my name was Louise, and if he told the guy Dahlia was waiting for him, maybe he would be confused. But I didn’t really want to go around all day pretending to be named Louise, either, because the St. Louis geek community isn’t _that_ small, and it was entirely possible that I’d run into someone I knew. I split the difference and told Mike that my name was Miss Moss-Granger.

  “That’s very formal of you,” observed Mike3000.

  If I had known Mike better, I might have suggested that he was the person splitting hairs between green and ocher, but with his slightly crabby forehead and Biff McLargeHuge body, I skipped that particular snark.

  “In formal situations, I prefer to be called Dame Moss-Granger,” I told him. Which I realize now is not much less snarky.

  But Mike3000 liked the answer, because he flashed a toothy smile at me. “I’ll tell him. Good luck in the tournament today, my lady.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Same to you.”

  Mike3000 lumbered off, and I was feeling a little more confident. I hadn’t been drugged and murdered yet, and I had talked to a stranger and been here for nearly five minutes. This clearly meant I had an aura of invulnerability, and so I stopped worrying so much and headed into the main room.

  Like the gamers themselves, the main room was disappointing.

  I mean, it looked like a hotel ballroom. In contrast to other geek events I had attended, there were no giant inflatables or enormous banners. To be fair, it was a serviceable little ballroom—with a crystal chandelier and everything—but it wasn’t particularly geeky. I was honestly a little let down. Were fighting-game players so competitive they couldn’t spring for any tomfoolery? A chiptunes band? A black light? Something?

  I was wading through the crowd of people, keeping my eyes peeled for anyone with a green cap—or for that matter, Daniel, who had completely vanished—and while I didn’t see anyone I knew, I did spot a face I recognized.

  “Sunkern,” he called out.

  And I figured that, even capless, this had to be the guy.

  “Nice Guy Kyle,” I responded in kind, chat name for chat name.

  To be clear, I did not know Nice Guy Kyle at all. I had never met him before, and I honestly hadn’t even seen his Twitch channel in several years. Ages ago, I used to watch him stream StarCraft, back when I was into StarCraft, and I couldn’t believe that he knew my name.

  I had two primary reactions to Kyle: one was being a little starstruck, because I spent a lot of time watching him stream way back when. The other was a dawning awareness of the passage of time. Kyle was one of those people who had once had if not boyish good looks, at least boyishly rugged looks. But he now appeared to have suddenly hit some aging avalanche. There was a TA in college I knew who did the same thing. She went abroad to teach in Germany for a year, leaving the United States as a young maiden of twenty-seven. And when she came back, she looked forty-four.

  We all assumed that she had an amazing time in Germany.

  I hadn’t seen Kyle stream, in wow, okay, five years, but yikes, it looked like he had an amazing time in Germany. Also he had left about half of his hair there, although he appeared to have traded it in for an extra chin.

  Despite all this, my main reaction was: starstruck.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I said. “I can’t believe you know who I am! I’m a huge fan of your stream.” I hoped that there would be no follow-up questions, given that I hadn’t seen much of it in the past five years.

  “Oh, thanks! My wife has started watching you. You make losing badly at Hearthstone look like so much fun.”

  This could be interpreted as a burn, but I chose to take it a compliment. Besides which, losing at Hearthstone was a lot of fun, at least the way I did it, which often involved gin. I had more fun losing at that game than most streamers did winning.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “You don’t—” and I was going to say “play fighters,” but, again, I hadn’t actually seen his stream in five years, so who knows? Maybe he did play fighters. “You don’t usually stay in hotels.”

  That was my plan B answer. You don’t stay in hotels. What can I say, I think fast on my feet.

  But Nice Guy Kyle didn’t seem to mind. “You gotta go where the money is,” he told me. “And diversify. I can’t just keep playing StarCraft forever. I’ve got mouths to feed.”

  I liked Nice Guy Kyle, then and there. I mean, I liked him before, but I was reminded exactly why I had gotten addicted to his channel in the first place. Yes, he looked a bit like Jabba the Hutt, and was wearing a sickly blue T-shirt that was easily two sizes too small, but he was a friendly Jabba. He was like an enormous plush toy—a Tickle Me Jabba—and even if he looked like he belonged on the training poster a nightclub would use to keep out undesirables, he was one of the good undesirables. He was one of us.

  “So, what’s it like at the upper tiers of Twitch royalty? Are you making crazy money?”

  Kyle sighed and somehow looked even older. The question alone seemed to make him bald a little.

  “Making money on Twitch is hard. Never gets any easier.”

  “Really?” I asked. “But the scene has gotten so much bigger.”

  “Yeah,” said Kyle. “But so has the competition. There’s always somebody younger coming around the corner, with faster reflexes and better ideas.”

  “You’re losing your edge,” I told him. This was not an insult so much as a reference—Kyle, as I remembered him, played a lot of LCD Soundsystem.

  “I’m losing my edge,” he said, smiling. “Hey,” he said. “You should meet my wife.”

  At which point I was sort of clobbered by this pear-shaped woman who looked like she was auditioning for Miss Hannigan in a terrible production of Annie. Not physically clobbered, mind you, she just sort of thundered onto the scene. It was more of a psychic clobbering.

  “Salutations,” she said. I got the impression that this was out of habit, the way she always began conversations. Because the next line was spoken with a real glimmer of recognition. “Hey, it’s that lady who always loses!”

  She had a voice like a cartoon villain. Broad, is what I am saying. She frankly wasn’t any less weird-looking than her husband, but I had had years to become inured to Kyle’s weirdness, and this lady was coming at me all once. Peculiar face, tight blond ringlets that were decades out of style. And it was less that she was fat, and more she collected fat in odd places—she had tremendous thighs and no buttocks at all. She was perfectly matched to Kyle—so much so that creationists could have plausibly used her as a case for intelligent design.

  “I don’t always lose,” I told her. “Last night I went seven and three.”

  This is, in case you don’t play Hearthstone Arena, technically still losing, but it’s at least losing with dignity, which I don’t always manage.

  “Good for you,” she said. �
��You’ll get there eventually!”

  “This is Tricia,” said Kyle, then pointing to a baby carrier that I had somehow failed to spot in my first assessment of her, “and that little harlequin next to her is Undine.”

  “Call me Dahlia,” I said. How could I not? I was so among my people now—baby Undine was wearing a onesie with a Magikarp on it, which is really the perfect shirt for a creature that can’t do anything.

  “Oh. My. God,” I said when I saw their baby, which is the normal human response to a tiny baby. And this kid was tiny. So tiny that it struck me that Tricia’s body shape was probably because she had recently given birth.

  “How many days old is she?”

  “Twelve?” Kyle wasn’t entirely sure on this point, and Tricia didn’t volunteer an answer. This was fine, because I was involuntarily cooing. I don’t even like babies; just cooing.

  “Oh. My. God.” What can I say? You don’t run into a lot of twelve-day-old people. It’s not a big demographic.

  “Do you want to hold her?” asked Tricia. “I can take her out of her carrier if you want to hold her.”

  In retrospect, it does seem a little weird that Tricia was going to risk waking up her baby so that she could hand her over to a stranger. But certain ladies could be real pushers about babies. They’re like coke dealers, but for infants. You like this cocaine? No? How about you hold it for a second? How about this: smell the cocaine. Breathe it in deep.

  Anyway, I did not want the cocaine. Or a baby, although I could understand the appeal of each. Separately, not together, although who knows?

  “Maybe later,” I told her. By this I meant “absolutely not,” but it sounded softer. I coo at babies, as a normal person does, but that’s where I draw the line.

  “You seem like you’d be great with children,” said Tricia, pusher.

  “I’ll let you ladies talk,” said Kyle. “I’ve got to go register and find my partner.”