Looking for Group

by Alexis Hall

  Kit got back to him the next morning, and they agreed to meet in Kit’s favourite tearoom before the raid.

  So there they were, in the very frilly tearoom, half-lost behind overloaded cake stands. In his anxiety, Drew had already eaten three triangular cucumber sandwiches and a macaron, and was now feeling awkward and clumsy on top of nervous. Kit, of course, looked like just the sort of boy you’d take to a tea shop—except, to Drew, he seemed a little washed out. Not quite his usual self.

  “Um.” Drew picked up a piece of Victoria sponge and hastily put it down again. “I am really sorry. I was worried and confused and overreacted.”

  Kit was silent for a while. Finally, he folded his hands on the tabletop and said, “I think it’s the worried that upsets me most.”

  Drew had always been under the impression that worrying about someone showed you cared. “What? Why?”

  “Well, I guess I’ve got used to people making me feel there’s something wrong with how I live my life. But I wasn’t expecting it from you. I thought you got me.”

  “Oh my God, I do get you. We have a thing . . . like, a real proper thing.” Drew was starting to realise this was way more serious than he’d thought—and he still didn’t entirely know why. “I just want you to spend more time with me than you do hanging out in a video game.”

  Kit blinked. His eyelashes looked a little damp. “But, Drew, we met in that video game.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to spend all our time in it.”

  “I don’t understand where this is coming from. Why are you so obsessed with how much I play HoL? You’ve played it as much as I have.”

  Drew was trying to be calm and apologetic like Morag had said, but he was really struggling with the way Kit seemed to see him. He wasn’t that sort of player and never had been. Yes, he’d taken the game seriously, but it had never been his default activity. He had lots of other stuff going on in his life, and he was a bit narked Kit couldn’t recognise that.

  “I really haven’t, mate. I’ve got three alts, plus the one I rolled with you. Even when I was raiding hard-core with Anni, I was there to do the content. I’ve actually spent more time in HoL since I met you than I did when I was the MT for the number one raiding guild on the server.”

  “But didn’t being MT for the number one raiding guild on the server make you miserable?” Kit pushed his hair exasperately out of his eyes. “Do you think maybe that the reason you’ve been spending more time in the game now than when you were with Anni is that you’re, y’know, enjoying it more?”

  Drew opened his mouth, intending to reply, but then realised he didn’t really have one. He felt a little bit cheated, like Kit had put him in a position where he couldn’t disagree, because he couldn’t explain why he disagreed, and had now got him cornered by being right about something slightly different.

  “Look, is this even about me?” Kit carefully moved the cake stand to one side so they could see each properly. “Are you genuinely worried about my gaming habits? Or are you unhappy with your own?”

  “I’m really confused,” said Drew, slightly plaintively.

  Kit reached over and took his hand—and that was such a relief that Drew couldn’t remember if he was supposed to be angry right now. “The thing is, Drew, it took me quite a long time to get comfortable with who I am. I spent the beginning of my first year trying to fit in with the university geek societies, but I never did. Whenever I told people I played HoL, they’d take the piss, and I kept getting this feeling that the only way they could feel okay with what they liked to do, was by looking down on what I liked to do.” His lips turned up ruefully. “Some of them even played the game. It just wasn’t socially acceptable to genuinely be into it. And I decided there’s no point pretending you don’t care about things you . . . do.”

  Everything Kit had said swirled around in Drew’s brain looking for things to connect with.

  “I care about you,” he blurted. “And I also care about my friends. And I really want you to like them and I really want them to like you and everything’s . . . sort of . . . bleurgh and . . . this is really important to me.”

  Kit’s thumb stoked soothingly over the back of Drew’s hand. “It’s important to me too. But I feel that whatever I do, it could . . . take something away from me. I want to be with you and I want to be part of your life, but I want to be me too. But, then, if being me is the thing that messes us up, then . . . I don’t know how to deal with that.”

  “I don’t not want . . . I mean I don’t want you not to . . . I like who you are. Can’t we meet in the middle here?”

  “Where’s the middle?” Kit sounded kind of wary again.

  “I don’t know. Like, maybe could you spend a bit more time with me and my friends. And I won’t bug you about the HoL thing.”

  As far as Drew was concerned, this cut right to the heart of the issue, and for a moment, he was a little bit impressed by his own maturity and relationship-fu.

  Unfortunately, Kit didn’t look much happier than he had before. For what seemed like a long time he didn’t say anything, and then he sighed. “Well, um. I guess. Let’s give that a go.”

  It was somehow a little delicate after that, but by the time they’d eaten the rest of the cakes and finished their tea, they were deep in discussion about the mysterious yellow orb they’d found in Torment, and things were almost back to normal. Almost, but not quite.

  A couple of weeks slid by without further disaster. More by luck than by judgement, Drew seemed to have got his Kit/course/friends/HoL/pub balance about right. Which meant in practice that he only rarely felt under-Kitted or under-friended and, when he did, it was to about the same degree. Also Sanee had completely dropped the Drew Is A Loser Gaming Addict thing and was only intermittently entertained by the fact he was dating a boy now.

  Things were going well with HoL and the guild. Everyone was pretty excited for the next major content patch, which had just launched on the Public Test Realm. Back when he’d been running with Anni, they would have been over there, trying to get as familiar with the new fights as possible, but at the moment, Drew had too many other things to care about. And actually, it was weirdly fun to sort of wait and anticipate and know that they wouldn’t be downing the last boss of the expansion within the first week. And then spending the next three to six months farming it and whinging about it.

  They’d never actually discussed it, and Drew wasn’t entirely sure it had been what he’d meant, but he and Kit had abandoned their medusas at level thirteen, freeing them up to see more of his friends, and to spend more time doing boyfriend things. They’d taken to wandering around the Botanic Gardens on sunny afternoons and mellow evenings, holding hands and geeking out. Sometimes they sat under Kit’s favourite willow playing . . . well . . . it was still Torment because, seriously, that game was huge and full of words. At least, when they weren’t getting distracted by each other. Which they were. A lot. Requiring a number of hasty retreats to Kit’s room.

  Drew was vaguely conscious that something had sort of changed. He thought he remembered Kit being . . . It was hard to explain, really. More open, somehow? Happier, almost? But it didn’t seem like anything he could pin down, talk about, or fix. And, sometimes, Drew wondered if it was just his imagination.

  True to his word, Kit was spending more time with Drew’s friends. He was quiet, but quietly funny, and they liked that, and Drew was glad everyone seemed to be getting along. Kit still tended to be the first to leave things, but true to his word, Drew didn’t make a big thing about it. Even though it still bugged him a bit.

  It was fine. Really. It was basically fine.

  Until Zombicide.

  Maybe Drew was reading too much into stuff, but Sanee seemed to be making much more of an effort to give their regular Tuesday hangouts a clear structure. There’d been the Mortal Kombat Tournament and then an Eye of Argon Reading and then the Using This Damn Fondue Pot Steff Won In A Raffle In Sixth Form evening, which had hones
tly put Drew off both cheese and chocolate, at least for the foreseeable future. He felt like a dick, because this had sort of been his fault, but he was getting structured-activity fatigue. He was starting to miss the days of just sitting around chilling, even if what they’d mostly been doing while they were chilling was trying to work out what structured activity they’d do next.

  This time it was Games Night of the Living Dead. The plan was to drag out all of the zombie-themed board games from Sanee and Steff’s collection. It turned out there were quite a lot of them, especially if you included every game that had a spurious zombie expansion. Drew wore his Plants Versus Zombies T-shirt for the occasion, which Kit had found sufficiently adorable that he wanted to take it off again, and Drew hadn’t really objected, so they’d wound up being kind of late.

  Everyone was already settled, helping themselves to Steff’s brain-cakes and immersed in a warm-up hand of Munchkin Zombies. Drew felt weirdly heart-warmed that of all the quick, opening games they could have picked to start the evening, they seemed to have deliberatedly chosen the one he’d be least upset at having missed. They moved on to Give Me the Brain, which was a long-standing favourite. Kit took to it immediately—it made him laugh so much he spent nearly the whole game behind his hand, emerging every now and then to declare, in a surprisingly convincing zombie voice, that he required the brain because he had to count the meat.

  From there, they got serious and, after a brief debate, chose Zombicide over Dead of Winter as their main game of the evening. It would have been Drew’s preference anyway because he was in more of a “kill loads of zombies” mood than “get killed by zombies while looking for petrol in an abandoned school” mood, but as it turned out, Dead of Winter wouldn’t have taken six players anyway.

  Kit was on his phone while they were unboxing and setting up, which made Drew a bit uncomfortable because it wasn’t great board game etiquette. But at the same time, they didn’t really need him, so it seemed unfair to say anything. Finally they were good to go. Sanee gave a quick rules recap—which Kit at least paid attention to—and dealt out characters and equipment at random.

  Drew was less than thrilled to realise that not only was he playing the boring, beardy survivalist whose only ability was that he was slightly better at searching rooms than the rest of the characters, but that his starting gear consisted of two frying pans that he wasn’t even allowed to dual wield. He was trying to be a good sport about it, because there was nothing worse than playing a board game with somebody who’d decided they were screwed from the beginning, but he kind of felt like he was screwed from the beginning. Everybody else would be running around racking up sweet kills with their fire axes and their bonus moves, and he’d be getting further and further behind, desperately searching a toilet for bags of rice.

  “Okay, team.” Sanee stood up and started pointing at the board, like a general in an old war movie. “Our plucky band of survivors starts here. Our objective is to get someone into the bunker here and clear it of zombies. Sounds simple enough, but we can’t open the door until we’ve taken the objective here, but we can’t get to that until we’ve taken the other objective here. Obviously zombies will be spawning here, here, here, and here. But there’s no need to panic. If we just stick together, gear up early, and take it slowly and carefully, we should be fine.”

  They were not fine.

  They had a bad spawn in the first building, and Drew got bitten by a zombie, which cost him one of his frying pans. As predicted, everyone else was getting cool shit and he just . . . wasn’t. His inventory was filling up with bottled water that was useless in this scenario, extra ammo for the guns he didn’t have, and half the components of a Molotov cocktail.

  And to top it all off, Kit was still on his phone. He had it on his lap and was doing his best to be discreet, but in a lot of ways that made it worse. Everyone had clearly noticed and was clearly being too polite to say anything. Drew kept having to nudge him when it was his turn and remind him of the rules, like for example not gunning down your allies by accident. Worse still, despite his constant distraction, Kit was having a much better game than Drew was. He’d wound up with a chainsaw in one hand and a scoped sniper rifle in the other, and had personally taken out more zombies than anyone else. He was living the Zombicide dream and didn’t even seem to care.

  Then, when they weren’t even halfway through the scenario, Drew got killed. He’d been desperately ransacking a police car, looking for any weapon better than a crowbar, when he’d found a zombie in the boot. He’d spent his last action trying to kill it, failed, and promptly had his face chewed off.

  An awkward silence fell over the table.

  “And that,” said Sanee finally, “is why you shouldn’t search when you’re playing last in the round.”

  Drew sighed. “Dude, I didn’t have a weapon, searching is my only skill, and frankly, I was kind of dead weight anyway.”

  “It’s a swingy game. All you need is one shotgun and you’re back.”

  “Yes, which is why I was searching the police car. And why I am now dead.”

  “Shall we stop?” asked Steff, before the argument could build any further. “It seems a bit unfair for Drew to have to sit out.”

  He really didn’t want that to happen. The only thing more depressing than getting knocked out of a game early was feeling like you’d wrecked everything for everybody. “No, it’s fine. You guys carry on.”

  At that moment, Kit looked from the text message he was blatantly sending. “You can take my character, if you like. I don’t mind.”

  Drew didn’t want to be an arsehole, but it kind of happened anyway. “I can tell you don’t mind. You’ve been on your phone for the whole fucking game.”

  Everything went silent.

  “I’m sorry.” Kit gazed at him, wide-eyed. “Something came up in guild.”

  There was a dull roaring in Drew’s brain. “Fuck the guild. I’m sick of the fucking guild. You’re supposed to be out, here, with me and my friends. But if you seriously want to be in an imaginary dungeon full of pretend monsters with randoms off the internet, then, y’know what? Go do that.”

  Somehow it got even more silent.

  Kit got up, tucked his phone into his breast pocket, and left the room. The door closed with a click behind him.

  For a little while, nobody moved, and then Sanee began packing up Zombicide. There was an almost funereal air about it, as if he was laying to rest a good game, taken from us too soon.

  “Are you going to go after him?” asked Steff.

  Drew hadn’t thought that far ahead. To be honest, he hadn’t really known what was going to come out of his mouth. And he was in this confused, stuck space where he felt stupid for having made a massive scene, but was sure he’d feel even more stupid if he backed down now. “He was the one being the antisocial dickhead, not me.”

  “I’m with you, mate.” Sanee glanced up from the reboxing. “You just don’t come to a thing, then not be at the thing.”

  Tinuviel was busy dividing the zombies up by type so they could go into their separate bags. “I think,” she said, “that you may be failing to account for the essentially arbitrary and constructed nature of social conventions, and for their variability between seemingly similar groups.”

  Drew was so not in the mood for this.

  “If someone gave me a quid everytime you said arbitrary, convention, or constructed, I would own all the expansions for this game by now, and there are a shitload.” Apparently neither was Sanee.

  She blinked. “I just meant that maybe he didn’t know how rude you’d think he was being.”

  Steff squeezed behind Sanee’s chair and wrapped her arms around him. “He was definitely being a bit weird, but you shouldn’t just let him walk out like that. You know the rule, Squidge, never go to bed angry.”

  There was a thoughtful moment. Then Sanee shamelessly one-eightied.

  “She’s right.” He turned his head and nuzzle-nibbled the inside of Steff’
s elbow. “That’s how we do it, and look at us. If I don’t deal with stuff when it comes up, it just bugs me forever.”

  Steff nodded. “It’s true. He got superangry at one xkcd strip and then never read it again.”

  “Fine.” Drew pushed away from the table. “I’ll go after him. Whatever.”

  Andy, who had been keeping his head firmly down since zombiegate, risked a comment. “Um, look. I’m not the biggest relationship expert here, but I kind of think ‘fine, whatever’ isn’t the best strategy for making up with someone.”

  “Okay.” Drew made a show of sitting down again. “I’ll stay. Just make up your minds.”

  Tinuviel put away the last of the fast zombies. “Andrew, stop projecting. It’s terribly clichéd. Either go after your boyfriend because that’s what you want to do. Or stay. Because that’s what you want to do. But there’s no point getting angry with us because we didn’t cause the situation and we can’t fix it.”

  Drew opened his mouth and closed it again. Pointless or not, he still felt pretty angry. And he kind of knew it wasn’t fair but . . . that wasn’t how anger worked. It just happened. And was there. He fumed helplessly for a minute or two. And, very gradually, managed to dig through everything until he realised that he was mostly upset at his friends because he’d been relying on them to tell him what to do. In fact, it wasn’t even that. He wanted them to tell him to go after Kit so he could do it without it turning into this big public statement of what a dick he’d been.

  Even if Kit had been a dick first.

  “So I’m going to, um . . . Sorry.” He got up again, grabbed his coat, and went after Kit.

  He told himself he wasn’t going to run. Honestly, he’d probably missed the guy anyway, so he’d just wind up looking stupid. Sort of like when you ran to catch a bus and it pulled away just as you got to it, leaving you breathless on the kerb with everybody staring.

  Aaaaaand he was running.

  Shit. Shitshitshit.

  He caught up to Kit at the bus stop—where, ironically, there was no bus, pulling away or otherwise. Just Kit. Still on his mobile.