by T L Costa
“Login’s fine,” I say. “Wanna play Haven? I could hook it up to the UCS pretty easy.”
“No, I can’t.” She stops, like she’s holding another word in her mouth. “Sorry.”
I grab a bag of chips, hold some out to her. “Why don’t they just ask you to beta test their system?” She stands up and arches her back. She looks good. Real good.
“I designed it.” She shrugs. “So I guess I’m biased.”
She’s so pretty. And she’s in my room. Shit. Should I have hid that magazine? Maybe take those posters off the wall? I don’t know. Sort of messy, my room. I get up and kick some dirty clothes under the bed. She smiles. Pretends to look at the screen.
“You miss it?” I hold the bag as she takes a few chips. “Gaming?”
Her eyes cloud over a little, go all distant. “Sometimes.”
“Why’d you stop?” I ask.
“It’s complicated.” Her cheeks are like this shade of pink, pink like cotton candy.
Damn, for the first time in my life I wish I went to Yale. Or maybe at least wasn’t failing Math.
SlayerGrrl touches my shoulder. My heart leaps. Oh shit. She touched me, what does that mean? Dammit. I really should have cleaned my room. Bet those guys at Yale remember to clean up their rooms before a girl comes over. I dig under the piles of crap on the floor and grab a few games. She’s gonna try and leave if I don’t think of something.
“Do you have any more of these chips?” she asks, moving to sit on the corner of my bed. My heart flies. Like, well, maybe explodes, just… quietly.
I should say something cool. I mean, there’s a girl. A hot girl. A smart, hot, gamer girl, sitting on my bed in tight jeans and a T-shirt.
Seeing her there, perched on a sea of mismatched sheets, face haloed by a wall full of band posters, makes me want to, well, redecorate, I guess. Not hole up in such a dump. Shit, wait, do I have more chips? I better. “I don’t know.”
“Oh.” She looks at the empty bag. Do I ask her to come with me to the store? No. Can’t do that, I don’t have a car.
Be brave, Ty, bold. “Let’s call for pizza.”
She puts down the bag. Her face is a mask. Shit. I can’t read it. She says, “I should get back. There’s a meal plan.”
“No!” I jump out of the seat. “We’re just getting started and you’re going to leave?”
She looks odd, tilting her head. Maybe that was the wrong thing to say. I probably sound like a cave man compared to the guys at Yale. I suck at this. But she has to stay. I look at my feet. Boyfriend. She’s got a boyfriend. Too pretty not to. “Boyfriend waiting?”
“No.” She looks like she’s been slapped. I really suck at this. “No one’s waiting. I just have a lot of work to do.”
No one’s waiting? For her? That I just can’t believe. “Well, you gotta eat.”
“I have to go.”
“OK, so.” I catch her eye. My hand shakes. I hold out a controller. Damn, she’s hot. Her eyes dance and I just want to jump right in. She needs to stay. Needs to come back. “Next time you can preach all about proper–”
“There is no next time, Tyler.” Her face clouds, like someone came along with a big eraser and just took all feeling right off of it. She doesn’t take the controller. “I’m not coming back.”
What? “Why not?”
“Mr Anderson’s rules.” She shrugs her shoulders. Her eyes look at the floor when she talks about Rick. She turns. She walks out the door. “Thanks for the chips. Good luck with the sim.”
I’m not worried about the sim. That I can handle. It’s the girl I can’t handle. I finally get to meet the girl. This girl. This girl who is sweet and who games and who’s smart as hell and I’m not supposed to see her again? My heart races. Catches in my throat.
That. Fucking. Sucks.
I walk out the door after her.
And I hear it. The thud, thud, thud in the distance. SlayerGrrl looks at me. I like it when she looks at me.
Stupid Sikorsky. My throat’s caught in that vice again. Sikorsky running their test flights over my house. Over the whole town. It rings in my ears. Thud, thud, thud.
“Can you tell what kind of chopper that is?” SlayerGrrl raises her hand up over her eyes.
“It’s a Black Hawk,” I say. Say through the thud that beats against the back of my teeth. Through the thud pulsing against the back of my skin. Through everything.
Dad used to fly a Black Hawk. He was in the Air Force, part of a rescue squadron, then the Coast Guard. It used to be a great sound, until some drunk driver hit him and B on the way home from a soccer game. Leaving Dad underground and B with broken ribs. Slipped discs. And a prescription for oxy for the pain. But the doctors forgot to tell him that oxy can’t kill the pain of losing your dad. Can’t make you forget that your dad used to fly a Black Hawk every time one passes over your house.
Push it down, focus. ADHD sucks sometimes. Focus, dammit. Get her number. Get SlayerGrrl’s number. “Can I have your number?” I ask. Please say yes.
“No. The rules, remember? Look, any issues you find with the sim have to be recorded in the report file. If you talk to me, then it’s sort of like tech support.”
“I want your number, but not to talk about the sim,” I say.
“I can’t.” Quiet. But something on her face. Something in the way she holds her face tells me that she wants to.
Shit. Do I push it? “You want to give me your number, though.” She blushes. Blushes. Over me. Awesome.
“Not really,” she says. But her voice is weak. Like she doesn’t really mean it. I hope she doesn’t really mean it.
She turns and gives me a questioning look. As she walks away, down towards the bus stop, I feel light. Finally, I’ve met a girl who gets gaming, gets me, and she’s smoking hot. I pull out my phone and send Alpha and Peanut a quick message telling them that I actually met SlayerGrrl.
Then I start my search.
CHAPTER 4
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21
TYLER
Mom jumps when she sees me in the hall. Coming out of the bathroom in my pajamas.
“Tyler, oh, I didn’t realize you were home,” she says. She’s always surprised to see me. Even at midnight.
“I brought you a sandwich for dinner like five hours ago, Mom,” I say.
“Oh.” Her eyes fix on some speck of dust or something on the wall. Looking past me. Again. “That’s right, you did. I was finishing up some work on this case and, well, thanks.”
She’s still in her power suit from work. Makes her look like a woman who is kickass. She is kickass. At work, anyway. Always traveling for some big thing. At midnight, she just looks weird. “You should get changed Mom, it’s late.”
She looks back to me again. Like she’s already forgotten that I’m there. She smiles, that smile that doesn’t reach anywhere but her lips. The smile that isn’t really a smile. More of a muscle memory thing. “Right.”
I hug her. Hold her small body in close, careful not to get her blond hair stuck in the buttons of my shirt. She needs to be hugged sometimes. To remember that I’m here and that I love her and sometimes, sometimes when she hugs me back, when she cries, I think that she’s Mom again. That she’s who she was before. The mom that would take Brandon and me roller-skating every weekend in winter, who held my hand when we did the hokey-pokey, who would lift the limbo bar up higher so I could get under and feel like one of the big kids. “Love you, Mom. Go to sleep, OK?”
Her eyes are cloudy. Distant. Someplace else. “Love you too, Tyler.” She says the words. Soft, hollow, sad. And I know that she wants to mean them, but doesn’t remember how.
I guess I should go check and make sure she actually ate the sandwich that I made for her. Sometimes she takes it and just leaves it on her desk. She forgets. That’s why she’s so thin. Not good, being so thin. Not healthy.
I hear Mom close the door to her room. No. Not going to check. I can check to make sure she eats breakfast before school. T
hrowing myself down on the bed, I stretch. Nice bed. Soft.
Brandon and I would take this mattress off of the bed, drag it over to his room and build forts. We’d grab every blanket in the house. Raid the linen closet. We’d make these crazy-big forts, with secret passages and libraries stocked with pillows and flashlight and comic books. Mom never got mad, she used to stomp on the floor and pretend to be a big bad wolf, shake the sides of the fort. Brandon and I would scream and laugh and beg her not to blow our house down. She would laugh. Brandon would laugh. Sometimes when I close my eyes I can remember the sound.
I was thirteen the first time I found Brandon.
Unconscious. On the floor of the bathroom. He wouldn’t wake up. I kept shaking him, listening to see if he was breathing. Then there was that noise. That noise Mom made. The one that was low in her throat as she pulled his head into her chest and started rocking. Running her hands through his hair and crying. Crying for help. Crying for God, and rocking. She couldn’t do anything but hold him and cry and lie to him. Tell him he would be fine. I picked up the phone, called 911. I waited. Waited while they loaded him in the ambulance. Waited as they loaded Mom in there, too. Mom who was glued to Brandon, who couldn’t stop begging everyone around her for help, grabbing their shirts and pulling, even as they tried to shoo her away so they could work on him. I was too young to drive. So I watched the lights and the sirens leave me standing on the driveway, alone.
Waiting.
Ani
What’s with the avocados here in Connecticut? All of the avocados I’ve seen here look like they’ve been thrown all the way from California. What I wouldn’t give for a fresh avocado with a little bit of lime. Instead, I have to settle for a grilled cheese and scoop of guacamole that looks like it was made with cornstarch and green food dye.
I grab my tray and sit next to Christy, who’s on her cell. The guy next to her is texting someone so I pull out my ereader. Might as well start on one of those novels for freshman Lit.
“Hey, Ani?” Christy puts the face of her phone down on the table next to her untouched salad. “You want to come with us tonight? We’re going to go over to Ted’s tonight to see Bill’s band. They’re like this mix of thrash and dubstep but it could be fun.”
“Bill?” the guy next to her asks.
“Yeah, he’s in our Bio lab, remember? Long hair. Comes to class on a long board.”
The guy next to her nods and then continues to text.
I say, “I’m not sure I could get in.” I passed Ted’s the other day on the way back from the bookstore. It’s pretty clearly a bar. Even if I had an ID that said I was twenty-one, no one would look at me and believe it.
“That’s crazy, you only have to be like eighteen. C’mon, Ani.” She clasps her hand together and leans over the table. “It’ll be fun.”
“I’m only sixteen, remember?” I look down at my plate so I don’t have to look her in the face. She’s sweet and supposedly really good at academics like English and History, but she seems to forget a lot of things. Sort of important things like buying her own shampoo or that her roommate is only sixteen. I could make a fake ID that says I’m eighteen, but it would take a while.
“Oh, honey.” She reaches across the table and squeezes my wrist. “I totally forgot. Well, you should try and sneak in, then.”
“I can’t, can’t really get in trouble,” I say.
“Oh my God, you have one of those dads, don’t you?” She shakes her head at the guy sitting next to her, who’s following her every movement like it’s ballet. “One of those you-mess-up-I’m-dragging-you-back-home dads. Shannon has one of those, too. Totally sucks.”
My throat dries and I open my mouth to scream, but nothing comes out. I just shake my head no and squeeze my eyes shut, ignoring the burn. Ignoring the image of Dad’s eyes and the way they looked through the glass.
“You have to promise to come out with us soon, though, OK?” she chirps.
Christy has this way about her, a sweet, wide-eyed sort of charm that helps me to look past the fact that she uses all of my toothpaste and leaves her clothes strewn across the floor. When she’s around it’s like someone placed a TV in the middle of the room at full volume. Her brilliant orange curls and smile demand to be noticed. She’s entertaining and lively and fun, but it’s as if it’s a non-interactive experience. Everything seems so one-sided. I doubt she’d recognize my voice if I called to her across a hall. She invites me out with her and her burgeoning circle of friends almost every single morning, but she forgets by the end of classes and just leaves without waiting. Living with her makes me miss Julie even more.
“Yeah, OK,” I say and look back at my book as she calls someone else on the phone.
I remember what it was like to be a champion. The rush I got as I beat everyone, everything that was thrown in front of me. I could conquer any game, any opponent, and fast. A little girl in a dark room packed with gamers watching me slaughter their friends in 3D and surround sound. They all hated me, too. They tried to hide it, but after everyone figured out that I designed World of Fire, the fact that I was also kicking ass at a national level didn’t strike people as fair, I guess. Any conversation I tried to start ended immediately after “hello.”
I wish I could have kept playing at that level.
But I sort of became obsessed with SkyPet. SkyPet was going to be a hardware component to my World of Fire game. Basically I took one of those drones that you can control with your cell phone and switched it up a bit. I took out the inner workings of the existing drone and replaced them with better components. The most important being a cell-camera with a pivoting head, so instead of only looking straight ahead, the drone would be able to capture an all-terrain, street-level view of wherever it flew. Then the video from SkyPet would be imported into the game and the player could use it as a backdrop for a free-play level. It would be something totally new that only World of Fire could do: offer the player the opportunity to play on his or her own street, or favorite park, or wherever. They could make as many personalized levels as they wanted. I tried to write something using existing satellite imagery, but the ability for full-range, first-person-shooter vision wasn’t really possible with the aerial view. SkyPet worked beautifully. I entered World of Fire with SkyPet in the state science fair. SkyPet’s what got me the internship at Althea, and that’s what got me the job at Haranco, which is how I’m able to go to Yale. So it’s not like I wasn’t right to let competing in ILG go, but I do miss it.
In the three years that I dominated the gamer scene, my mom tormented me, begging me to stop. Even Julie, the sister I practically worshipped, didn’t understand, and would sit by and watch her friends mock me. Hate mail flooded my inbox on a daily basis; some people were jealous and others wanted pointers and secrets. Only one was ever sort of nice, sort of sincere. It was six words long, from a boy who I beat in one of the semi-final rounds the last year I played. It came about ten minutes after the game ended. It said:
Good Game.
–Tyler MacCandless (aka Tyrade)
And now that I’ve met him, now that I’ve seen how nice he is, well, it doesn’t make Mr Anderson’s rules about not having any further contact with him any easier to swallow. I didn’t think I would mind when I signed the contract, but now that the rule applies to Tyler it seems so wrong.
The season I left gaming, Tyler beat all of my records and took the national title. It was the only congratulatory email I ever got. Now he’s right here, cute and just down the road, playing my brainchild, and Mr Anderson doesn’t want me to even talk to him.
I nibble on the sandwich as I pull out my phone and check my email. Fourteen new messages, most of them crap, but there’s one from him. Tyler. I drop my fry and look around before opening it:
Hey SlayerGrrl, Rick only said you can’t talk to me, right? He’s cooler than you think. Wouldn’t really care. You should come over, play a quick game of RAGE or something. Won’t talk about the thing at all, promise. –Ty
I stare at the phone, shaking a little in my hand, and slip it back into my pocket. Reaching for my drink, I wish I never had checked my email.
CHAPTER 5
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
TYLER
“Come over tonight, I got the new Prisoner of Echelon 3. Totally going to school your ass.” Peanut’s well-padded shoulder hits me as I take a bite of my granola bar.
“You suck at Echelon, man, there’s no way,” I say and drag my chair over to make room for Alpha and his tray full of green stuff. “Can’t tonight, anyway.”
Peanut wrinkles his nose at Alpha’s lunch, making him look like a freckled rabbit. He shoves a fry into his mouth. “Why? You’re sure as hell not doing your homework.”
Alpha laughs and squeezes ranch dressing out of a tube. Hope he doesn’t get any stuck in his beard this time. He’s doing good. Trying to eat right. Wants to like tone up or something. Two days in a row he’s gone for the salad. “Bet it’s got something to do with SlayerGrrl, right? She call you back yet?”
My foot shakes. I take a swig of Dr Pepper. “Naw, man, but it’s just a matter of time.”
Peanut wags his head back and forth. Half-eaten fries spill over the table. “There’s no way. Your aura just isn’t right for that kind of girl. No way someone like SlayerGrrl ever calls a guy like you, Ty.”
“Fuck you.” I take a handful of fries from his basket. Peanut thinks he can read auras. Not sure he knows what an aura is. “She’s going to call, she like, I don’t know, we had something. I could feel it.”
“It’s called a boner, and I’m pretty sure that was all you, bud,” Peanut says.
“You’re dead wrong, man, dead wrong,” Alpha says. “She designed that game you’re testing for your friend, right? That pilot guy or whatever?”
“Yeah,” I say. Need something else to drink. Screw Peanut. He doesn’t know. He wasn’t there.
“Then she’ll call you back.” Alpha takes a fork to his salad, squirting gelatinous tomato seeds onto the table. Looking like a sea of little eyeballs. “She’s going to be too damn curious. One of the best gamers in the country is playing her new system? Hell yeah she’s calling. Remember all those feedback forums she set up after she released World of Fire?”
