by Matt Ruff
By then, he was properly contrite. He confessed. He said that he was sorry and begged for another chance. He swore he would never do it again. He sounded sincere, and, in that moment, he probably thought that he was sincere.
Mom thought differently. She didn’t believe that Dad was sorry; just unhappy with the consequences of his actions. Given a second chance, she believed he would act the same way, but try to make it come out differently somehow. Which it wouldn’t.
You could make a case for giving him a second chance anyway. My mother would say that was wishful thinking. People do change, but they change in their own time, for reasons that make sense to them. They don’t change just because we want them to, or because it would be convenient to our own desires if they did.
As my mother saw it, she had three choices:
One, she could reconcile herself to marrying a serial adulterer, in the hope that he’d one day grow out of it, or that she’d someday stop caring. Like volunteering to be punched in the gut at random intervals, this was not an attractive option to her.
Two, she could declare war: Find some threat or emotional cudgel to force my father to be faithful. As I’ve already made clear, Mom has a talent for behavior modification, so I don’t doubt she could have succeeded at this, but the resulting marriage would have been miserable, hardly worth fighting for. She’d have done it if she’d had to, for my sake. Thank God, it wasn’t necessary. She had her family’s support, and then she had Zero Day; she didn’t need to marry my father.
Which left option three: Say no. Let him go. Simple.
The decision to cut my father out of her life completely—and, by extension, out of my life—was the only part she ever agonized about. It’s also the part that took me the longest to understand.
I used to think she’d done it for me. To protect me from him. But the truth is, my mother didn’t think of my father as a bad guy. A jerk, yes, and painful for her to be around, but not wicked. When I asked about him, she was honest about his shortcomings, but she never trash-talked him in front of me (it was some of my other relatives who did that). And when I decided I wanted to meet him, she told me where to look.
It wasn’t me Mom was protecting. And it wasn’t just my father who she didn’t trust. He was the wrong guy for her. She knew that. But she’d always known it—from the start, before they ever got together. It didn’t matter. She got together with him anyway. Fell for him, hard.
And even after he broke her heart, she wasn’t sorry.
“YOU CAN SNOOP, BUT DON’T BE WEIRD ABOUT IT,” DARLA said when she gave me the link to her Facebook page.
She’d been on the crew for several weeks by that point, and we’d just finished one of the best gigs we would ever work together, a fifty-person raid on the troll city of Zuul’titlan. Currently the hardest dungeon in Asgarth, Zuul’titlan takes a minimum of eight hours to complete, and even experienced raiding guilds often require multiple attempts to get through it. It’s not a place you want to bring clients to, even if they’re willing to pay overtime rates. Too frustrating.
But there’s an exception to every rule, and in this case it came in the form of the Kwan brothers, Wing and Arthur. They were engineers from Shenzhen who’d made a fortune building solar power plants in Africa, and they had a lot of eclectic hobbies, including Call to Wizardry. They didn’t play often, and when they did, they were only interested in the toughest end-level content. Every few months they’d pop up on the sherpa forum, looking to recruit an army. They paid extremely well, but they expected perfection in return. They’d been known to boot whole sherpa crews mid-raid for the mistakes of a single member, and once they’d dinged you, they’d never hire your team again.
Darla had already alienated one of our other long-term customers. To protect our relationship with the Kwans, Ray wanted to exclude her from the run. I overruled him. Darla could be trouble, but she was predictable: She only really acted out when she was bored or when the clients couldn’t keep up with her. I thought she’d be an asset on the Kwan brothers gig, and I was right. She did wisecrack a little going into it—enough to make Ray nervous—but once we got started and she saw that she was the one who was going to have to keep up, she did great.
I didn’t have a lot of chance to admire Darla’s form that day. The Kwans had picked me to be one of the raid tanks, so I was in front and very busy. Beating Zuul’titlan is like running a marathon. The most physically taxing part of the raid happens right in the middle, when, after fighting your way across a long series of heavily defended causeways, you enter the Plaza of Dancing Snakes, where a group of troll high priests are about to perform a human sacrifice. Killing the priests is harder than the final boss fight would be in a normal dungeon, but in Zuul’titlan, it’s just a prelude. Once the priests are dead, waves of angry troll peasants start streaming into the plaza. To advance, you must kill ten thousand of them, and if you screw up and let your raid group get wiped, the body count resets to zero.
It took three and a half hours, but we cleared the plaza on the first try. The brothers announced a fifteen-minute bio break. When I got back from the bathroom I looked around for Darla and spotted her unattended avatar standing beside a mountain of corpses, covered in gore and still panting with exertion from the fight. Then Darla resumed control and caught me looking. “Perv,” she said, and grinned.
And then it was on to the raid’s final act: a running battle up a nine-step pyramid and a showdown with the troll demigod Machu Picchu Mon. Long story short, we aced it.
Afterwards, we and the other sherpa crews went to the Game Lobby, where the Kwan brothers handed out performance bonuses. While Darla and I waited our turn, she told me she wouldn’t be around for the next few days—she was going to visit her dad, who lived in a part of Arizona where bandwidth was sketchy. “But if another job like this comes up, let me know,” she added. “I can drive into Flagstaff and find a game café if I need to.”
“OK,” I said. “I’ll hit you up on Ghost.” Meaning Ghost-it Note, an anonymous contact app popular with gamer gurls who don’t want their online acquaintances following them home. It was how Darla and I had been communicating since we’d met.
“No, wait,” she said. “Here.” She handed me a virtual calling card with her phone number, instant message code, and a link to her Facebook page.
It’s always flattering when a woman lets you know that she’s decided you’re not an ax murderer, but I’ve learned from experience not to make a big deal of it. I just nodded and saved the contact info to my system. “You can snoop,” Darla told me, “but don’t be weird about it.”
Just then I was too tired to do anything but crash, so as soon as the Kwan brothers’ money was in my PayPal account, I logged out and slept for ten hours. But the next day, after a shower and some food, I went on Facebook and finally learned Darla’s full name.
Darla Jean Covington’s Facebook page was only four years old, which meant it probably wasn’t her first. That’s not unusual. I’m hardly ever on Facebook, and I’ve still managed to accumulate half a dozen separate accounts, for business, family, and different groups of friends.
Darla’s timeline consisted largely of reposts of not-safe-for-work memes, and videos in which people did stupid, dangerous, illegal, and/or offensive things. There were also videos of Darla herself at various ages, tagged “personal.” The most recent of these, which had been posted less than an hour after she gave me her contact info, was titled “OMG — DARLA NIP SLIP & TWAT SHOT, SO EMBARRASSING!!!” I figured that was a test and didn’t click on it. Instead I scrolled down to one marked “CLASSIC: DEENIE LOSES HER SHIT AT 2,000 FEET.”
The video showed two little blond girls, one in a dress and the other in ripped jeans and a Resident Evil T-shirt, riding in a hot air balloon over a landscape of wooded hills. Deenie, the girl in the dress, was terrified of heights and kept her face buried in her hands. Darla, bored with the view, leaned against the side of the gondola and tilted her head back. “Oh my God, Deen
ie!” she exclaimed. “The balloon has a hole in it! And look, the cables are coming loose!” Deenie began shrieking, and an unseen older woman, probably the one holding the camera, said, “Darla! Darla, you stop that!” (Spoiler alert: She did not stop that.)
I scrolled down further, checking out “SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL” (teenage Darla starts a fistfight during a roller derby game), “DARLA BREAKS HER ASS, CHAPTER 99” (a demonstration of why unicycles are rarely used for stunt jumping), and “HISTORY’S SHORTEST LIGHTSABER DUEL” (Darla and one of the girls from the roller derby video try fencing with fluorescent light tubes).
My favorite was “EARL IS A GINORMOUS PUSSY,” in which Darla and three boys—Jeff, Mason, and Earl—played paintball out in the woods, capturing the action with helmet and body cams. They only had three paintball guns, all of which the boys had claimed, so Darla used a BB gun instead. I know that sounds idiotic, but their helmets had solid face shields and they were wearing heavy clothes, so the chance of maiming was minimal. Darla’s real problem was getting the boys to admit they’d been hit at all. After giving them a chance to play fair, she adapted, double-pumping the action on the BB gun to increase the velocity of the pellets and aiming for weak spots in their armor. Much of the footage was devoted to ambushes: Darla buries herself in a pile of leaves and shoots Mason in an exposed band of belly fat as he goes by; Darla waits in a tree, whistles as Jeff passes beneath her, and plinks a BB off his face shield when he looks up.
In the video’s final scene, Earl crouched behind a stone wall while Darla hectored him from the far side of a clearing, daring him to stop hiding and face her in the open. When Earl declined, Darla charged. With the video slowed to half speed, you could see the paintballs leave Earl’s gun, and see Darla do this amazing series of sideways pivots, dodging every shot while somehow keeping her balance and her forward momentum. Then the paintball gun jammed, or maybe Earl just panicked. The POV switched from his helmet cam to Darla’s as she vaulted the wall, knocked Earl to the ground, pulled down his pants, and shot him in the ass.
I rewatched that part of the video several times, then scrolled back up to the top of Darla’s Facebook page, zeroing in on a line from her bio: “Virginian by blood, Arizonan by birth, Oregonian by choice.”
Oregonian, I thought. Interesting.
Right after I first came to Berkeley, I hooked up with another online acquaintance, Suzie O’Dell, who also lived in Oregon. We’d been flirting for a while, and when Suzie found out I was moving to the Bay Area, she invited herself down to meet me face to face. The off-campus apartment I’d rented was unfurnished, and I didn’t have a bed yet, but that was OK, Suzie came prepared, driving down from Eugene with a futon mattress strapped to the roof of her car. The hookup didn’t go so well: As sometimes happens, the electricity we’d felt in cyberspace didn’t translate into real-world chemistry. We gave it our best try, but by the second day it was clear this would be a one-time visit. Suzie did let me keep the futon, though—so if the moral of the story was “sometimes wanting is better than having,” the other moral of the story was, “even when having disappoints, you can still get something useful out of it.” But in my current frame of mind, the real takeaway was simply this: Oregon is close to California. Practically next door.
Darla had said she’d be at her dad’s place for a few days, but two weeks passed with no word from her. I thought about calling to see if she wanted to work, but the gigs we were getting—level grinds, easy dungeon runs—were the sort that brought out Darla’s bad side, and meanwhile, Ray had been much happier in her absence; so I decided it would be better all around if I were patient.
Then the Kwan brothers popped up on the forum again. They wanted to take another run at Zuul’titlan, this time going for the Knights and Priests achievement, which requires you to complete the raid using only tanks and healers, no dps characters. The reduced damage output turns the marathon into something more akin to a death march: We were looking at twenty hours, start to finish. And the Kwans wanted to do it all in one day.
I rang Darla’s number and left her a message on voice mail, asking if she was up for an insane tanking job.
She called back two minutes later.
“JESUS CHRIST,” DARLA SAID, “WHY DID I AGREE TO THIS?”
“Because you were bored, and wanted to do something fun and exciting?”
“Ha ha, fuck you.”
It was the day before the raid, and we were out on the Mirage Salt Flats, busting rocks—grueling but necessary prep work. Armor degrades in combat—faster if you die, slower if you don’t—and in an hours-long battle like the Plaza of the Dancing Snakes, even plate mail will wear away to nothing, leaving you naked before you’ve murdered your last peasant. The solution is Arneson’s Clearcoat, a magical preparation that prevents armor degradation for up to twenty-four hours. Clearcoat’s main ingredient is Essence of Gygax, which can only be obtained by mining adamantium nodes. The nodes are shiny rock clusters that spawn in the Flats; each one contains several chunks of adamantium ore and has a two-and-a-half-percent chance of yielding an Essence. You need ten Essences to make one dose of Clearcoat, so we had a long slog ahead of us. But I was OK with that.
“How was it really, with your dad?” I asked. “You must have been having a pretty good time, since you stayed so long.”
“The first week was great,” Darla said. “Dad’s got this little wind racer he built himself—you know, like a sailboat on wheels? Near where he lives there’s a dry lake bed, kind of like this but without the giant scorpions, and if the wind’s right, you can get the racer up to seventy, eighty miles an hour, easy.”
“That does sound like fun.”
“It was, until I tipped it making a turn and broke the mast.”
“You OK?”
“Scrapes and bruises.” Darla shrugged. “But that put an end to the races.”
“You stayed to help fix it?”
“I helped Dad put a new mast on, but me staying, that was more about pissing off my mom.” She paused, sizing up a node on the ground in front of her. To mine it you hit it with a pickax; the UI judges your form, and if your aim is off, it can take half a dozen swings. Darla never needed more than three.
“Your mom’s in Arizona, too?”
“No, she moved back to Lynchburg after the divorce.” Darla swung her pickax—WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!—and frowned as the node fractured into three chunks of ore, but no Essence. “My parents have one of those ‘mature’ divorces where they pretend to still be friends, even though they can’t stand to be in the same part of the country. The day after I was supposed to go home, she called him, and when she found out I was still there, she got jealous. She tried to play it like she was upset about the racer crash, but really it was just, ‘How come Darla never overstays her visits with me?’ She started calling every day to see whether I’d left yet, and so of course then I had to stay. It’s like this game we play, Who’s the Bigger Bitch? I always win. So what about your parents? They divorced?”
“Never married. Separated, though, since before I was born.”
“Whose fault was it?”
“His fault,” I said. “But her call.”
“Interesting. So your mom’s a bitch too, then.”
“I wouldn’t call her that. Mom’s a badass, yeah, but—”
“A badass is just a bitch you happen to like.” Darla grinned. “I guess that explains why you have the hots for me, huh? Don’t deny it, I know it’s true.”
This was my cue to say something like, “I wasn’t going to deny it,” and then swing the conversation around to how San Francisco is a convenient stopover if you’re driving between Oregon and Arizona. But instead I said, “You think you remind me of my mother?”
“Don’t I?”
“The two of you are nothing alike.”
“Really? I’m not a badass?”
“You are, and I like that you are, but you’re . . .” I fumbled for a way to frame the distinction that wouldn’t come off as an
insult. “. . . a different flavor of badass.”
“Ooh, a different flavor!” Darla laughed. “And what about my cousin? You like his flavor, too?”
“Your cousin?”
“Earl. The ginormous pussy.”
“I liked the video.”
“Yeah, I know you did. Fun fact about YouTube: Not only can you see how many times a video gets watched, you can also track what part people are looking at. Somebody was really interested in the last thirty seconds of that paintball game . . . So what was it that turned you on? Earl’s bare ass, or me pumping a BB into it?”
When someone’s trying to embarrass the shit out of you, sometimes the best strategy is just to embrace it. “Does it have to be either/or?” I said.
“I knew it,” Darla said. “Total perv.” She turned away, shaking her head, and swung her pickax again. WHAM! WHAM! “Fuck.” One chunk of ore. No Essence.
I had better luck with my next node, though it took me five swings to crack it. When the rock finally fell apart, nestled among the ore was a glowing pile of silver dust. Already bound to me, the Essence of Gygax shimmered and vanished into my inventory. “Sorry,” I said, to Darla’s sullen stare. “I’d share if I could.”
“Yeah, whatever.” She scanned the horizon.
“Want to go find some griefers to kill?” I asked, guessing that was what she was looking for. “Or some innocent players to grief on?”
“I’d love to, but that would only drag this misery out longer . . . How many of these rocks do we have to smash?”
“With a two-point-five percent drop rate, you should expect to farm around four hundred nodes to get all ten Essences. Of course that’s the straight average. Depending on the RNG, it could be—”