Every afternoon she put on a sour face and tried to ignore the groups of girls laughing across the street, the hot birds singing in the live oaks, the rustling of the monkey grass as the shiny cars wooshed by her on the sidewalk. None of that interested Nora. This world was so dull to her.
In fact she felt it had rejected her. She could think of reasons why: too fat, too nervous, too shy, too weird, too snobby, too stupid. She was an ugly little girl, and that’s how she thought of herself, staring at her stomach in the standing mirror before school: as an ugly little girl. She put on her big blue hoodie to try to hide her body, sweating in the North Florida heat. She didn’t like sports and had little artistic talent. She was a lone wolf.
So she walked home gazing down at her sneakers or at the yellow iPod where she circled through her songs. She was looking for something that would block out the sounds of life, something mean and pitiful and full of hatred, something to suffer to as she bitterly recounted to herself the day’s grievances. But it was all right, she’d think after these moments of catharsis, turning into the sidewalk to her neighborhood. Her reputation at school didn’t really matter, because her real friends were waiting for her on Minecraft.
Hers was the house with the green door. No one else was home. She got a candy bar and a soda from the kitchen then climbed into bed. Propped up among a half-dozen pillows and draping her knees with her floral sheets, she opened up her laptop looking like a sleepy princess.
The whole crew greeted her; it was Friday and everyone was online. Riley and Joshua, the server admins, were building a central train station with an arced glass roof to connect everyone’s houses by rail. Parker and Sam were mining, looking for emeralds to trade with villagers. Charlotte was expanding a pasture for her field of square sheep: a lovely rustic scene.
Nora said her hellos and got to building.
In the foyer of her giant jungle treehouse she was building an aquarium, maneuvering buckets of water delicately into a cage of glass blocks. Then she would fill the tank with cod and salmon. She maintained one of the most architecturally complex bases on the server, an aerial network of treehouses, leaves, water, light. Oak bridges connected the treehouses, forming a wood halo in the canopies. She had just finished them.
Joshua teleported to her, flying around and marveling at Nora’s build.
nora these bridges!! incredible!! said Joshua.
haha thanks josh. She leaned back from her computer, blinking hard and smiling.
you all need to work hard to make your houses more beautiful he said. like my sweet nora’s…
my house is fine said Parker.
hey said Sam.
XD said Charlotte. She hated Sam. She was a Christian girl from Birmingham. Sam was a teen Satanist.
seriously sam, like THIS is architecture said Joshua.
Sam died.
oops lol forgot you’re not a mod :p said Joshua. He had teleported Sam to his position, and Sam had plummeted down to the hard floor of the rainforest. Nora smiled. She felt loved and like a queen. No one doubted her talent. If she could have raised her character’s head, she would have raised it high, then looked down from her wooden bridge to the spot where Sam had fallen with an absent, regal expression. His items were scattered in the virtual underbrush. And because Sam could not take revenge on Joshua, he took his revenge on Nora, challenging her to a friendly duel at his base. But just as she materialized in the Nether portal, he and Parker pelted her with a hundred arrows, killing her before she even loaded.
get rekt nora said Parker.
oh nora my sweet bb said Joshua. He autokilled Sam and Parker as if smiting them from the clouds.
But Sam and Parker were Nora’s closest friends, and she would never have held it against them. They knew how to have a good time. The three of them had all bonded a year and a half ago when Parker typed Dugtrio used earthquake on Japan! in chat, and Nora intercepted with inb4 it’s super effective a moment before Parker finished typing it’s super effective.
nice said Sam.
The joke was recycled from the previous year’s jokes about Haiti.
Yes, she was hardened. Cold. Merciless. Thirteen.
Though she pretended to be sixteen. How else could she win the affection of Sam, a high school senior from Baton Rouge? She often went to sleep holding that first word in her mind like a gemstone, watching the text flash across her brain while making up a deep voice for him: nice. nice. nice.
Birthdays meant a lot to Nora. She had to pay them special attention to keep up her lie. Joshua was the oldest at twenty-four; Parker was ostensibly fourteen. On Sam’s seventeenth she stayed home from school to build him a mural of Raichu sketched in pixel art and the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY SAM in golden blocks. He had said thanks. Not as nice as nice. But on Nora’s “sixteenth,” he and Parker revealed a housewife’s kitchen they’d built secretly beneath one of her giant jungle trees, black and white terracotta blocks forming the classic checkered tile, chests full of meat and vegetables, wood tables and countertops, a row of stone ovens.
now you never have to leave the kitchen lol said Parker.
Nora thought it was so sweet she slipped iron into their houses while they were offline.
The day went on. She called a truce with her friends and they all went to the mines to look for the electric blue diamonds near the neon orange lava lakes. Sam and Parker had upgraded their armor and it glowed purple. To Nora they looked like enchanted knights before the caverns. They took turns calling each other fags about the color. It was a crude and pleasant world. Everyone was cruel in the same way, and with the same detachment. Above, the heavens were blue and defined, delimited by an invisible ceiling. Below, the bottom of the world was reinforced with impenetrable bedrock. The sun and the moon always rose at the same times, pixelated before a fuzzy ring of twilight, and the same three weather patterns were always cycling: sun, rain, storms, sun, rain, storms.
◆
At school the lunchroom was oppressively bright, lit by fluorescent bulbs so harsh they ate up all the soft greenish sunshine coming in from the windows. It felt like a solitary confinement chamber large enough for a giant. The girls Nora sat with merely tolerated her. She did not join in their conversations, did not even understand what they were talking about. She hid in her great blue hoodie, her hair falling in front of her face. Flags from every country hung mute and stiff from the high ceilings, their colors reflecting blurrily like disturbed lakes in the vinyl tile. She stared at them.
She was still so sleepy from the night before. Her eyes were red and dry. She got up to get a soda, seeking caffeine.
As she walked she tried not to make eye contact with anybody. She didn’t want to see people laughing at her, or to be drawn into a conversation where they would trick her into humiliating herself. It had happened before. But gazing down at her sneakers on the way to the vending machine, she saw out of the corner of her eye a doodle in a sketchbook of something vaguely familiar, a little imp on an armored shoulder, elf eyes sketched in green.
She paused, only for a moment. She went on. She got her soda. Fresh, bubbly, glowing, cold. The first sip burned her throat.
Then, on the way back: “I saw you looking.”
Nora felt her sweat mix with the condensation on the soda can. It was a Sunkist.
“I wasn’t looking,” she said, still staring at the ground.
“I think you were.” She glanced up. Two tan hands were shoving the sketchbook in her face. Behind it was a skinny little boy. He had a mole on his nose. He looked younger than a seventh-grader.
“Do you know what this is?”
Nora hesitated. “It’s a blood elf,” she said meekly. “From World of Warcraft.”
“Yep, a warlock,” the boy said. He placed the sketchbook back on the table and continued his work, outlining a lock of hair tangled in the spikes of a pauldron. He was all alone at the table. “Interesting,” he said almost to himself. Nora stood and waited for the conversation to continue with the divine patience of a nun. Happy, fearful, ready to receive God’s love. She was not thinking at all. She would have sat with him if he had offered. But the boy just kept on drawing.
◆
She felt strangely embarrassed, but gathered herself by the first classes of the afternoon. But in eighth period she saw that they had Earth Science together. There he was slouching in the second row. There he was in the sea of little bodies, his tiny frame and the big black sketchbook appearing the way new words seemed to show up everywhere after she had learned them.
The teacher indicated that each student should find a partner, and they found each other. His name was Clay. She decided not to make fun of him for it.
“So, do you play?” he asked.
“Play what?”
“World of Warcraft.”
“No. I used to.”
“Oh,” he said. They were designing terrariums, balancing soil, sand, water, and ferns in plastic fishbowls. Clay was reaching his tiny hands into the bowl and gently spreading all the soil around so it was even. He lingered there, as if feeling its texture.
“So what do you play?” he asked.
“Oh,” Nora said. She was measuring water. “I play Minecraft.”
Clay looked at her. “With Rafael?”
“No,” said Nora.
“I see,” he said. “I’ve never played.”
They said no more. His words lingered in the air for the rest of the class. Their terrarium was not as lush as the others’, whose fishbowls were full of deep pools of blue water or ferns so thick they could have been giant cocoons, but theirs might have been the most elegant, with one healthy green fern arcing against the plastic like a monochrome rainbow.
◆
Days passed. At lunch Nora sat with the same group of girls, cold and silent. She cleaned her foggy glasses and looked around. She couldn’t see Clay anywhere. He was never at the empty table.
In Earth Science they sat together again, but conversation proved difficult. They didn’t play the same games. Silent and dutiful, they took notes on the carbon cycle.
But one day after school he appeared as if from nowhere, running up and grabbing Nora on her left shoulder, surprising her, hurting her a little, and she spun around alarmed and terrified, she’d had her headphones on and hadn’t heard him sprinting, it was as though he’d spawned behind her, she was alarmed and terrified and maybe a bit excited. Excited about the unexpected pleasure of being touched, no one ever touched her really, no one besides family, and for a moment she had the thought that it was about time, she was thirteen now, after all, things change, and she was so familiar from her life online with violent images of sex and female degradation that she was always thinking lately how it was about time, she’d seen it on the imageboards, how men could attack, how they came from nowhere and took you, from another room or from an alley, how as girls become women they become something to be attacked and how the violence didn’t seem so bad, it wasn’t far from love, she deserved it even, all women deserved it in some form, that was how it was. She braced herself. She deserved it but at the same time she wasn’t worthy, wouldn’t be worthy until she lost a few pounds, no one likes a fat slob, not even for something like that.
But it was only Clay. He panted in the wet sun.
She took off her headphones and screamed.
“Holy shit,” breathed Clay.
“Sorry,” said Nora.
He was so scrawny. He rested his hands on his knees, catching his breath. She could see the sweat on his pale gray t-shirt. She tried to stop thinking about porn, but the images kept flashing in her mind.
“I bought Minecraft,” he said.
“Cool,” said Nora.
They stood there on the sidewalk, each waiting for the other to speak.
“So,” said Clay, looking at her funny. “Do you want to play together?”
“Sure,” said Nora. “But why didn’t you tell me in class?”
His cheeks were so red; he was exhausted and still panting. Nora thought she could see them getting even redder. She was very sensitive to color. It was what made her a good builder.
“I,” he said, and then he seemed to abandon the thought, glancing out at the street as if wiping his mind of what he’d been thinking. “I forgot.”
There was another moment of silence. Their friendship was full of silence. She still felt the pressure on her shoulder from when he’d grabbed her, achy and warm.
“So text me the name of your server, alright?—I’ve got to catch the bus.”
And off he went running in the other direction.
◆
Clay wouldn’t be on until Saturday. All week his parents were dragging him around to board games, movie nights, dance recitals. She found herself unable to tell the server he was coming. There was never a good moment. Tonight Joshua was talking about his dog.
I’m sorry man said Riley. No one knew too much about Riley.
yeah it fucking sucks said Joshua.
How old is she? typed Nora, not knowing what else to say. She tried to imagine the dog but could only think of golden retrievers smiling on Google images, as if the Joshua she knew virtually must necessarily have a virtual dog.
It sounds like she’s lived a good, long life : ) said Charlotte.
nice observation charlotte? added Parker, breaking into one of Charlotte’s pastures to slaughter her cows. Joshua killed him again.
The remaining weekdays blended together. Nora took out a pencil from the drawer in her desk, felt the bite marks along its body where she’d been gnawing on it.
◆
Saturday she waited for Clay at the building where new players spawned, a cabin in the center of town. There he appeared, in the default character skin, in the dim living room. It was a cozy place. Bookshelves, a blue and purple rug, wooden chairs and couches, great windows that looked out over the world.
Only Riley was online. He gave a coolheaded welcome then kept working on the train station. It was becoming a beautiful, monstrous thing, a glass Kraken with railroad tentacles.
Hello. said Clay.
His character was unmoving, dumb as a newborn mammal. Nora walked him through the basics, showing him how to gather wood, build tools, swing a sword, mine. everything in this game is a block basically, think of it like legos she said. She was grateful for Riley’s indifference. He even spawned Clay some resources to get him started faster, conjuring food and iron as if from air.
Wow, thank you! said Clay.
They continued. She showed him how to craft and how to cook. Baked potatoes, bread, and meats filled up her housewife’s kitchen. He seemed to be having fun, though he was having some trouble taking to the game: something about the first-person perspective. His character paused for four whole minutes while the Minecraft moon rose and the monsters of the night spawned, zombies and skeletons and giant spiders. They attacked. Nora killed each mob as it approached, typing things like clay?? hello??? whenever she got a second.
Sorry, had to get a glass of water. Getting kind of dizzy.
She imagined his raspy voice behind the well-formed sentences, one skinny wrist resting on the edge of his laptop as he moved his mouse around his desk.
that’s fine she said. now that you have the basics we should build you your own house… you can keep a chest in mine till you’re set up. also be sure to put up torches or else more monsters will spawn.
They set out for green plains and found a field of red poppies and yellow dandelions. Wild cattle grazing on the long grass. He started building an ugly cobblestone hut, square and simple and purely for shelter. A house for cavemen, Joshua would probably say. No flooring—just the dirt. No windows—just the torches. As Nora instructed, he dug a long hole some fifty blocks down in the corner of the house and affixed it with a ladder. It would be his mine.
After an hour his house had emerged. It was a stone yurt beside a small field of wheat, with a little blue pond, a bed, an oven, a chest, a crafting table. The image of tranquility.
A voice came from downstairs, penetrating her headphones. “Dinner in five.”
She kept playing. try to find some iron, Nora said, obviously other ore too, and watch out for lava… here actually
She gave him a bucket of water and told him how he could use it to neutralize lava and fire. How? He punched the air. no right click. Oh. She laughed, gawky. No one heard it. Clay looked up what kinds of vegetables he could grow and what kinds of potions he could brew. It’s kind of like Harvest Moon! he said.
“Nora,” came the patient voice. “Dinner’s ready.”
It was night again, in-game, and Clay was still standing out in the field like a man witnessing a meteor shower. The stars were out: white squares. She killed another monster and made Clay go in his hut. It was good to play with someone she knew from school. They would finally have something to talk about together. The others were just images, frozen in time like their Facebook photos. They had no voice of their own but the mute pressure on Nora’s brain as she read what they typed.
Riley logged off.
Great. Thanks, Nora. said Clay. I appreciate it.
Three gentle knocks on the door. She jumped and yanked off her headphones. She turned around. It was her stepbrother. He was smiling at her. He made a motion like eating with a fork, pointed downstairs, and went on.
She returned to her laptop.
ugh, family’s calling, she typed quickly. gotta eat dinner but i’ll be back in like 20. watch out for monsters!!
◆
Coming down the stairs she felt like she always did: disturbed and irritated. Her family was waiting at the table. The chandelier was bright but the other rooms were dark. They were posed as perfectly as a nativity scene, smiling at her and watching her make it down the stairs with difficulty, her legs stiff. She avoided their eyes. Her father was looking at her abstractedly, as if searching for something.
“The beast emerges!” he said, laughing.
She slid into her chair. Shepherd’s pie.
She ate silently, brooding while her stepbrother softly passed the butter. Her stepmother was looking at Nora with nervous love. She had not yet perfected the exact contours of step-parenthood, and always feared she was either too detached or too involved in Nora’s life. Both she and Nora’s father found it difficult to tell whether the girl rejected other kids or if they rejected her.
“Mom, can I go to the lake tomorrow?” said her stepbrother, interrupting the gentle web of unease. His name was Tim.
“Yes,” she said quickly.
“Why don’t you go with him, squirt?” said her father.
“No,” said Nora.
Her stepmother looked down at her plate. She had barely touched her food. Her father speared a hunk of pure beef on his fork, ate it while looking at Nora, and swallowed. “Nora doesn’t even know what a tree looks like, she spends so much time in her room!” he said. He chuckled, his wife smiled tightly, and Tim tried to hide his laughter.
“I’m just kidding, pumpkin,” said her father. He tried to ruffle Nora’s hair. She dodged.
“She’ll probably end up working with computers and making more money than both of us combined,” said her stepmother. She gave Nora a very deliberate smile. “Then who’ll be laughing?”
Nora was not laughing. She tried to contort her face into a smile, but some invisible force compelled her to frown, like a magnet inside her jaw. It probably looked more like she was baring her fangs.
“You’re more than welcome to come,” said Tim. “My friends won’t mind. It’ll make a nice memory.”
“I’ll think about it,” Nora said.
She took a big gulp of water so she had to say no more. She felt moisture return to her retinas.
Her stepmother opened her mouth then closed it again. Sometimes she acted like Nora was a feral cat that might be scared away with too much love.
Nora set the glass down on the table. “I’m done,” she said. She pushed her plate away and crawled back upstairs. Her father followed her with that still-vacant happy look. They’d been closer when she was young. Now he was totally oblivious. An oaf.
And that word Tim had uttered was still ringing in her head: “memory.” It felt opposite to nice. nice. nice. Why? She opened her door. It sometimes occurred to Nora that she might have fewer distinct memories than other people. The after-school times blended together into one fuzzy dreamy thing, the slow block-by-block development of the Minecraft city, the shining, sprawling town, the mute bodies and corresponding lines of text she called her friends.
Her life consisted of that and the fragments of information she retained from her classes, not much: Jupiter is made of gas. Parallel structure strengthens your sentences. The vertex is the absolute minimum. And the need to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Maybe she was just sleepy.
But no, she thought, resisting. My memories are meaningful. No one else is building treehouses. Not with bridges, a ring around a grove, cod swimming in the trunk of dark oak, a stable full of armored stallions. Other people don’t understand, can’t understand.
One day she would be able to articulate that it was something about the speed of life she found so distasteful. People asked her to respond, and by the time she formulated something thoughtful to say they were already confused at her silence. If she responded quickly, it just came out wrong. She did not like speaking. She was always trailing behind.
◆
Nora took her laptop to her bed, still thinking. She kept rearranging the pillows. For some reason she just couldn’t get comfortable.
But she’d have to stay like that, because Clay was blowing up the chat with things like Please just stop. and What are you doing? Nora was dead. She respawned and checked who was online: Clay, Parker, Sam, Joshua. She came down from her treehouse, untethered a horse, and galloped through the green jungle, across the tundra with its wolves and its ice spikes and Charlotte’s Christmas town, over the river swimming with black octopuses, and to the plains where Clay lived. She entered his house.
Sam and Parker were there, crouching and jumping around like little demons, placing doors and redstone traps on every empty block of space. It made movement almost impossible. Clay was trying to break the doors with his hand, far slower than if he’d used a tool. They had filled the hut with obsidian blocks, too, which were nearly indestructible without a diamond pickaxe.
She messaged Clay privately:
As she typed Parker surrounded Nora with obsidian, trapping her in the doorway. Clay’s character paused too.
Okay. he messaged back. He selected the stone axe from his inventory and broke one of the doors. Then Sam skittered through the hut to place another one.
sam cut it out said Nora, biting a fingernail.
She messaged Joshua:
could you do something about them? he is my irl friend and still learning the game
Parker used his flint and steel to light one of the doors on fire. It started spreading fast. From where she was trapped Nora could put out some of the flames with her hand. She tried to hit Parker, but he escaped through the hall of doors. Nora pressed two fingers into her neck to feel her pulse.
Joshua messaged back: hmm… I think I’m gonna keep working on my pixel art ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m drawing the chick from catherine. wanna see?
Nora’s game displayed a brown loading screen and suddenly she was in a grass valley, looking up at Joshua’s art, a gigantic half-built blonde woman in a creamy nightgown, her open arms sprawled out as if in desperation, her unfinished face looking like it’d been sliced off, her cleavage crashing into the mountains. Nora hopped in a pond, drowned herself, respawned in her treehouse. She fetched tools and weapons from her storage room then went down to get another horse.
Stop!! said Clay.
noraaaaaaaa said Joshua. do you like my caaatheerriiiiine
She knew Joshua felt possessive of her. Again she galloped through the jungle, the tundra, the river, the plains.
A wistful song from the game’s soundtrack started playing in her headphones, strings and slow piano. It mixed with the barks, clucks, baas and whinnies of the virtual animals. She could also hear Tim practicing guitar in the room over. She remembered his sorry look at dinner, the kind of look you give a loser.
so… you’re nora’s irl friend? whats your name said Joshua.
“If you want to destroy my sweater,” Tim was singing.
She got to the house again. Clay was immobile, trapped or typing. The grass and bed were on fire. It was so bright inside it looked like high noon. She broke through obstacles and started putting out the flames. From somewhere outside the hut, Parker was activating and deactivating a redstone signal, making the doors and pistons in Clay’s house flap about like fabric in strong wind. A piston crushed Clay against the ceiling. He took damage.
It’s Clay and could you guys please just leave the hut. said Clay.
lol get good said Sam.
She went outside and killed Parker. She started dismantling the redstone circuit.
lol said Joshua.
Now Sam sent her a private message:
nora why are you being such a buzzkill
She went back inside and started destroying the other blocks. Sam launched arrows at her.
Then she stopped destroying the blocks. Sam stopped launching arrows at her.
Nora pulled at her hair, made a whining sound. She pushed the black plastic of her headphones into her ears, hurting them. She was realizing she could not let Clay ruin the one life she had. What to do? Slam the laptop shut! No, impossible. Soon Parker would be back to place more doors. Sam would attack her as soon as she moved.
Clay stood still in the middle of the hut, even though he was no longer trapped. He was probably typing. She wondered what he was doing behind the computer, if he was as upset as her, or maybe it was actually funny to him, despite what he was saying.
omg Joshua said.
facebook.com/itsclay01?fref=profile_friend_list&hc_location=friends_tab
nora why does your friend look like he’s twelve lol
Clay was still paused. Nora went pale. She did the only thing she could think of. She took the buckets of water she’d fetched from her storage room, hoping to use them to put out Parker’s fires, and dumped them all over his hut. Doors popped off their hinges, torches fell from walls, and the great flood localized in the ugly little stone hut plunged everything into darkness, then carried Clay’s body down into the hole where he’d built his mine, drowning him.
All my shit is gone. Why would you do that?
lol epic said Sam.
She felt the burning butterflies again. Sam. epic! Quiet. Mysterious. High school.
Nora said: you must not know me very well.
there she is said Sam.
And Clay logged off.
She looked around her room. The walls were painted fuchsia. The lamp was bright. The lion plushie hung limp and defeated at the end of her bed. Suddenly she yelled and smacked her keyboard three hysterical times, smack smack smack. Then she rubbed her hand. It was stinging.
“Lying on the floor! Lying on the floor!” Tim was shouting.
◆
Lunch again. Nora hid within the pack of girls she called her friends. As usual, they ignored her. She tried not to, but looked around for Clay.
He wasn’t at the table where they’d met. It seemed he didn’t sit there regularly.
She kept looking and found him in a group of boys playing a card game on one of the far tables. Only a few of them had food. The bulk of the table’s surface was cleared for cards. He was already watching her. Waiting like a predator in bushes. When their eyes met, he stood up and thrust an accusing finger at her. It was cartoonish and theatrical. His hand looked like a little paw. Around the lunchroom, some students were looking up at him, and others traced the imaginary line to Nora.
She looked away, pretending not to notice. She picked up a French fry and ate it. She chewed it for too long. It was mushy and gross. She looked up again. He was still there, frozen in the pose. Now even more people were looking at them, including the girl next to her, who exchanged amused glances with the others.
So she got up from her seat and slinked up to him. The walk over felt endless.
“What the fuck, Nora,” he said again, but now his voice and face were contorting with hurt. He sat back down. The last time she’d seen him in person he had been so earnest, so eager, and it felt weird to see his demeanor change without having seen him in between, as if their friendship were a living thing that had wilted invisibly in the desert night.
“I’m sorry,” she said stupidly.
“Did I piss you off or something?”
Most people had stopped looking.
“No,” she said. “I got carried away.” He wasn’t satisfied. “It’s how they are. I don’t know.”
He stared at her. She looked down at the sketchbook. Abstract shapes conjoined to form the silhouette of a body. He really was very talented. The cards on the table were brown-bordered with painted art. It seemed to be some kind of deckbuilding game. She listened to the din of the lunchroom, murmurs across the glossy sea of kids.
“Just don’t do it again,” he said. “Okay?”
So he planned to keep playing. Biding her time, she twirled a finger around a brittle lock of hair. He was smiling at her with an imploring look, asking her to say okay, say you won’t do it again. That’s all he was asking for. He was already so eager to forgive her. Could she do it? The gang was relentless. They were like wolves. She had never tried to resist their cruelty. And if Clay revealed their true ages, he would probably ruin her chances with Sam, who was probably 6’4” with a deep voice and, by now, stubble, my God. Those sleepy, sunken eyes. But she felt like she didn’t have an option. She sat down beside him on the red and gray bench. One of the card players glanced at her, scooting over.
“Everybody thinks I’m sixteen. If you want to play with them, you’ve got to act more mature. You’ve got to pretend to be at least fifteen and not to care what they do. Before we get on again, we’ll mess around on a public server so I can teach you how to fight other players. If you can fight Sam off, he gets less interested in just attacking you randomly.”
Clay was silent. She went on.
“Parker just does what Sam says. Joshua will always be kind of mean, but he won’t actually mess with any of your stuff like the others, as long as you don’t piss him off.”
The boy nodded, calculating.
She had the vague feeling she was ruining him. That she would make him like her, friendless, untalented, and absorbed in a world of light cruelties which were more severe than she even comprehended.
But just as a bird takes flight, she saw him finish digesting the information, and come out with a look on his face that was devious, amused, diabolical. He would become her co-conspirator.