by Emma Mills
“Sorry. You seemed … involved,” I say.
Caris’s cheeks are flushed. Robbie’s hair is much more mussed than it was when he first greeted us.
Caris ducks her head, but before she can speak, a call bursts out from the group nearby:
“ROBERT A. FISCHMAN,” a deep voice bellows. We all turn. Gideon Prewitt is still standing with Lena under the tree, but he’s looking our way, both of his arms raised in the air like a referee declaring Goal! “BIG FISH ROB. GET OVER HERE. BRING YOUR LOVELY GIRLFRIEND. BRING HER LOVELY FRIEND.”
Robbie raises his eyebrows at us. Caris looks to me, smiles prettily, and I shrug.
So we go over.
Gideon Prewitt moves toward us when we reach the group. He shakes Robbie’s hand enthusiastically.
“You’ve got some lip gloss on your cheek, pal,” he says. “And on your neck. And—” He drops Robbie’s hand and pulls the collar of Robbie’s shirt aside, then wiggles his eyebrows at Caris. “Get it, girl.”
Caris turns redder, her cuteness intensifying.
“How was your summer, Caris?” Gideon says. “Was it great?”
She nods rigorously. “Yeah, it was awesome.” She grips Robbie’s hand. “I mean, we mostly just hung out. But it was really fun.”
“Well, then I don’t need to ask Big Fish Rob how his summer was. Must’ve been the best if he was spending time with you.” Gideon turns his gaze to me. “Who’s your friend?”
“Oh, this is Claudia,” Caris says.
“Third wheel extraordinaire,” I murmur as I reach for the hand Gideon has extended toward me.
I don’t think he’s heard me, but his grin widens as he clasps my hand. “Nice to meet you. How was your summer?”
Are you personally responsible for the quality of everyone’s summer? I want to ask, but I don’t. “Very average,” I say instead.
His eyes are bright. “Good. I guess? Is that good?” Before I can respond, he introduces me to the other guys in the group and then encompasses the girls in one sweeping gesture—“You must know these girls already, you must be blessed with their faces on a daily basis”—and then we hang out with them for a little while, until it’s close enough to next period that I want to get back.
I nudge Caris, tapping at my wrist, and she nods.
Gideon flashes me a dazzling smile as we prepare to leave, while Caris gives Robbie a quick peck on the lips, and then another, and another.
“It was great meeting you,” Gideon says to me.
“You too,” I say, and I don’t point out that today is not actually the first time we’ve met.
When Caris and I get back to the dining hall, lunch is almost over.
“Sorry,” she says. “I’ll share my cookies with you. Robbie’s mom made them. They’re my favorite.”
“That’s okay. I ate a sandwich in the woods.” As you do.
She ignores me, fumbling with the Ziploc bag and then thrusting a large, lumpy-looking cookie at me. “Just take one. They’re so good.”
It appears I have no choice in the matter. “Thanks.”
“No problem. Thank you. And thanks from Robbie.” She gives me a winning smile and then heads off.
four
Brit lit, on the whole, doesn’t turn out to be the powder keg I expected it to be. That week, we read excerpts from The Canterbury Tales. We do some critical discussion. Paige and Iris stay at their respective poles of the room, I stay in the center, and neither of them acknowledge me. By the end of the first week, I think that maybe this will be all right.
I am lulled into complacency. But then.
Then, the following week, Mrs. Dennings claps her hands and says, “We’re gonna partner up.”
Our first project of the year. A group project.
“We’re going to need groups of two and one group of three.”
I look immediately to Sam McKellar, sitting to my left, but she’s already locked eyes with Polly Allman, sitting next to her.
Okay, fine. Me, Sam, and Polly then. Group of three, locked down.
But before I can catch Sam’s eye, Polly has gestured to Kaitlyn, and they’re all nodding to one another in silent agreement.
“We’re the group of three!” Polly declares loudly, before I can beg them to reconsider.
So I’m the odd one out. I scan the room, trying not to look too frantic, but panic begins to well up as everyone else pairs off around me. That “I cannot be entirely left out” desperation, that “I cannot be the only loser without a partner” dread.
Mrs. Dennings must notice. “Who still needs a partner?”
Time to accept my fate. I raise my hand. And across the room, front row, opposite corner, Iris Huang raises hers.
Iris glances around and we lock eyes. Something flashes across her face, something akin to horror, but it quickly disappears, replaced with cool indifference.
“I’m happy to work alone,” she says to Mrs. Dennings.
“No, I don’t want anyone alone on this.”
“I’d really prefer to.”
Mrs. Dennings’s lips twitch at the pushback, but she doesn’t reprimand Iris. She just casts her eyes over the group as a whole. “If you’d like, I can always assign partners—”
The class lets out a collective groan of protest that not even Iris can withstand.
“Fine,” Iris says. “Whatever. It’s fine.”
Brilliant.
* * *
I basically have to chase Iris down after class. I catch up with her at her locker, where she’s furiously spinning the combination lock.
“Hey, we should probably exchange numbers or whatever, to plan for the paper.”
Iris pulls down on the lock a little harder than strictly necessary.
“I will write the body of the paper,” she says. “You will write the introduction and the conclusion.”
“But that’s not … equal at all.…”
“I’m sorry, I’m offering to do the majority of the work here and you’re offended by that?”
“I’m not saying—”
“Intro. Conclusion.” She picks a book out of the bottom of her locker and slams the door.
“What about the thesis statement? Like, we should decide that together, don’t you think? You know, do some planning…”
“If it really matters that much to you, I’ll write the first half, and you can write the second half. Sound good?”
“But I—”
“Good,” Iris says, and walks away.
* * *
“She’s a monster,” I say that night.
“They’re all monsters,” Zoe replies, and on-screen, Zoe’s avatar, Korbinian Brodmann, raises his bow.
“No, not—” I jump aside as Korbinian spins around me, shooting half a dozen arrows in quick succession and felling the first group of beasts surrounding us. “Not them,” I say. “Iris. From school.”
I switch from my saber to my broadsword and hack at a couple more.
“Geez, where’s Alex?” Zoe says as we continue to get swarmed.
“Work. School. Who knows.”
“He said he’d play. This tank doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.”
“Alex wouldn’t tank anyway, he’s trying to level up his mage.”
Tanks play a critical role in online role-playing games like Battle Quest. They essentially function to distract monsters and bosses and allow fighters to get hits in. Alex is good at it—he’s the best tank of the three of us—and he would’ve been better than the random person we recruited online.
We finish the rest of the dungeon off pretty quickly and score our loot. Not too bad for a routine sweep, though it would’ve been faster with Alex.
“Tell me about this girl again?” Zoe says.
“Iris. She’s a nightmare. We’re writing a paper together and she won’t even talk to me.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s—” I stop, shake my head. “I don’t know, she just doesn’t like me.”
“I find that hard to believe. Everyone likes you.”
“You know we’ve been friends too long for you to lie like that,” I say, setting my controller aside. We’re in my room, Zoe on the bed with her MacBook and me at the desk on the old laptop I got from Julia. Technically it was from Julia’s husband, Mark. It’s terribly old, but it runs Battle Quest and it was free, and that’s what counts.
I’ve been playing Battle Quest ever since Will Sorenson and I broke up. To say he got me into it in the first place wouldn’t be quite right. I only ever really watched him play. It was after we broke up that I truly dove into it, and it was Julia and Mark who walked me through it. Showed me around the world of Aradana, leveled me up fast, ran me through my first dungeons.
I got Zoe and Alex into it, too, and now we’re in a guild, single-minded in one mission: battling the Lord of Wizard.
The latest expansion is called Battle Quest: Lord of Wizard, but technically, the Lord of Wizard himself is only a character nominally. The story line is about a centuries-old pact between the Lord of Wizard and an ancient prince of Aradana who beseeched the Lord of Wizard to stop an encroaching civil war among the Aradanian people. The Lord of Wizard cast a powerful spell and brought the country peace on the condition that in a thousand years, he would return and claim one thing from the kingdom as his own. The prince, a somewhat short-term thinker, agreed.
A thousand years went by, and it wasn’t until the expansion pack came out that it became clear that what the Lord of Wizard wanted from the kingdom was the throne.
The current prince refused, things escalated, and now the Lord of Wizard has sent troops to Aradana: an army of supernatural creatures—banshees, wendigos, the undead—and the citizens of Aradana have to fight back, slay the troops, the troop leaders, and finally the army’s top general, and win the war.
That’s all fine and good (to be honest, it’s a lot like the war that was prevented in the original Battle Quest), but the real buzz about the expansion is that a series of side quests, performed in a precise order, accomplishing a very specific set of tasks and acquiring a very specific set of items, will allow you to unlock a secret story line that involves battling the Lord of Wizard personally.
We’re determined to do it. People have been very tight-lipped about it online—some say it’s because no one has ever reached that final battle, or because it’s all just a rumor. But Julia and Mark are obsessed—they follow gamers, read message boards religiously, and have online friends who are dead serious about it—and they swear it’s real.
Zoe and I play a little longer this evening, just doing random sweeps for monsters. We’ve been trying to unravel the rumored Lord of Wizard quests when the whole group is assembled, and Julia and Mark are probably still at work.
Alex shows up just as we’re winding down.
He sticks his head in my door. “You guys wanna do dungeons?”
“We could’ve used you like an hour ago,” Zoe says, one eyebrow raised.
“Sorry. Work. I can play now though?”
Zoe makes a face. “I should probably get going. I have homework, and Claude has to work on a paper with her new best friend, Iris.”
“I thought you hated Iris,” Alex says, looking at me.
“I don’t hate anyone.”
“Not even Voldemort?”
“I mean, yes, obviously. But I don’t—”
“You don’t hate the Joker?” Zoe says. “What about Darth Vader? Do you hate Darth Vader, or is it mostly, you know, like cool indifference?”
Alex leans against the doorframe. “Okay, Fuck Marry Kill: Voldemort, the Joker, and Darth Vader.”
“Geez, you guys,” I say as I go to shut down Battle Quest.
“Fuck the Joker,” Zoe says.
“What?” Alex squawks.
She shrugs. “Ledger over Nicholson, though.”
“Ew,” I say, and Google pictures of the Joker, because I don’t know what a Nicholson Joker looks like. Zoe knows more about movies than me. Movies, and art, and math, and science, and pretty much everything. Zoe’s character isn’t named Korbinian Brodmann for nothing—he’s a nineteenth century neuroscientist who categorized different regions of the brain. My character, for contrast, is named Viola Constantinople, which was literally the first name I thought of upon launching my character profile.
“Kill Darth Vader, and marry Voldemort,” Zoe finishes.
“What the hell?” Alex says. “That’s the exact wrong answer.”
I don’t want to participate, but I can’t stop myself: “Why would you marry Voldemort? Why would you not kill Voldemort?”
“I think—”
“No, literally, who chooses to not kill Voldemort?” Alex says.
“I think I could change the course of his whole life,” Zoe says simply.
“You don’t think you could change Darth Vader?” I say.
“Nah, girl, Padmé tried.”
“I feel like I would fuck Darth Vader, because he’s got like powers and stuff, you know?” Alex says. “How would the Force factor in? How would we negotiate the suit and stuff? It’s a guaranteed wild ride from start to finish.”
“I hate everything about this conversation,” I say, shutting down my computer.
“You love it. You love us,” Zoe says, and she’s right. I do.
five
Iris sends me exactly one half of a paper the day before it’s due. I have to stay up half the night trying to finish it, but I do, and we get it in on time. Hopefully, this is the last joint effort she and I ever undertake.
It’s a futile hope, though. I know when Mrs. Dennings holds us back after class, the week after the papers are due.
“I wanted to speak with you both privately before I hand papers back,” she says quietly, though we’re the only ones in the room and have taken seats in the desks closest to hers. “I’ve had you both before. I know you’re very bright students.” She picks up a paper off the stack on her desk. “But I was surprised by the quality of the work you handed in.”
I see the grade printed at the top of the page, and it sets off a Klaxon in my brain. I can’t afford to do badly in a class. Literally. I need a scholarship for college, so every little bit counts. Any little screwup could put that in jeopardy.
“What exactly are the issues?” Iris says curtly.
“I think the main thing is a real lack of cohesion,” Mrs. Dennings says, not unkindly, and then outlines a number of other problems that make me regret Iris asking.
I stare down at my desk. I can see Iris in my peripheral vision, sitting up straight, her hands clasped in her lap.
When Mrs. Dennings finishes, Iris speaks: “Is there anything we can do to make it up? A revision? An extra credit assignment?”
Mrs. Dennings purses her lips for a moment. And then: “Yes, in fact. There is.”
* * *
The halls are deserted when we get out of the lit room, lunch having started already. Iris pushes past me.
“Hey—” I start, and I’m not sure what I’m about to follow it up with, if the words watch where you’re going or don’t take this out on me or this is your fault, too will actually leave my lips, or if they’ll shrivel up and die upon one look from Iris.
She doesn’t give me the chance to find out, whirling around and beating me to it: “This is all your fault, you know.”
Our next unit is Shakespeare. And conveniently, the drama department at Danforth Prep is doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream as their fall production. In conjunction with PLSG.
So in addition to rewriting our paper, Iris and I have been “strongly urged” to audition for extra credit.
“At least we get a chance to make it up,” I say. Overwhelming relief is my main feeling at the moment—maybe the semester’s gotten off to a rocky start, but this one failure won’t haunt my transcript forever.
“We shouldn’t be in this position in the first place. We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t fucked up.”
“I didn
’t know what you were trying to say! Your thesis made no sense, and you didn’t give me enough time to rework it.”
“Like I’d let you rewrite something I wrote. Like I’d trust you with that.”
It comes out before I can stop it: “I don’t get why you don’t like me. You don’t even know me enough to not like me.”
“I don’t need to know you.”
“Just because I—” Overheard you getting brutally dumped. I stop short.
“Because you what?” Iris says.
“Nothing.”
She looks away. “This is your fault,” she says again. “If you had finished earlier, we could’ve fixed it, I could’ve fixed it. But now we’re being High School Musical-ed, and it’s all your fault.”
“We’re what?”
“High School Musical. In the third one, they get in trouble, and the English teacher makes them work on the school play?”
She looks so angry, for a moment it’s hard to comprehend that she’s describing a Disney Channel franchise to me.
“You know the policy here, don’t you?” she says. “If you audition, you have to work on the play. So no matter if we get parts or not”—or not will be the case for me—“we have to work on the show. One bad paper and our semester is fucked.”
“It’s not … fucked.”
“Yeah, maybe if you don’t have anything else going on in your life, but in case you haven’t noticed, I actually do stuff around here.”
“I do stuff,” I say.
“What do you do?” Iris says. “I mean, besides take up space. What do you actually do?”
I open my mouth to speak but then shut it again. I have never met anyone with such a highly concentrated meanness in them.
“What?” Iris spits. I’m not intimidated—well, maybe I am, a little—but it’s more of a bone-deep desire to avoid confrontation. I have a general life tenet that I feel can be applied to pretty much anything—worth it or not worth it. And fighting back is not worth it in this moment.
So I just shake my head. Iris’s lip curls in disgust, and she turns and walks away.
six
Auditions for A Midsummer Night’s Dream are held at Danforth Prep. It’s a bigger school than PLSG, with a brand-new arts building, and I find myself there after school on Tuesday.
