“That was...you’re really good at that,” I manage, my lips raw.
Lucas breathes hard for a long moment, and then quietly begs, “Please don’t tell anyone.”
I push up onto my side and find him in the darkness, my fingers tingling with latent excitement. What I feel isn’t frustrated, but confused. “Why not? Lucas, your friends would totally accept you—and, you know, look: you and I could have been doing this for the past two years, instead of whatever it is we have been doing.”
“You don’t even like me.”
“You don’t like me either, what’s your point?” I retort, and it dredges a soft laugh out of him. “And maybe I would like you, if you gave me the chance.”
“You don’t get it.” His voice is tired and miserable. “My brother was this...superhero. He was athletic, smart, he dated nice girls, went to church, helped with cleaning and chores and stuff...when he was around, my parents didn’t even notice me. And then he died at the Prom Night Massacre, and now my parents don’t have anyone to notice except me.” In the dark, he heaves out a bone-deep sigh. “It was hard growing up in his shadow, but it’s even harder in his spotlight. All the expectations they had for him, they’ve transferred to me—and I’m not Gabriel. I can’t do what he did. I can’t be who he was.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Nothing is fair.” He sniffles. “I miss him. But now my parents expect me to go to law school, and church, and...and to date nice girls. My mom already gave me her grandma’s ring, because she wants me to use it when I propose to my future wife.”
“They can’t put all that on you! You have to be able to—”
“But they have put it on me.” Lucas states it flatly. “And I don’t know how to escape from it. I don’t know how to tell them...the truth. I don’t think they can take it.”
I feel bad for Lucas Coronado, something I never thought would happen, but lots of things are changing tonight—even us. With difficulty, I admit, “I was pretty sure my parents would be cool with it, but telling them I was gay was terrifying anyway. So I get it. Or, I get being scared.” My face heats up. I’m so bad at this, at knowing what to say. “But you can’t live a lie forever to please someone else, or it’ll destroy you. And you’re a good kisser, Lucas.” Now my face is really hot. “I mean, after tonight, do you honestly think you can go the rest of your life without kissing any more boys?”
“I think I’ll have to.” He gives a defeated shrug that breaks my heart. But before I can argue, the closet door explodes open again—wrenched with so much force it’s torn clean off its hinges, flying sideways down the dead-end hallway. Kenton the Vampire Bro steps into the small, stifling room.
“Hope I’m not interrupting, dudes. Nah, don’t get up.” Moving faster than I can take in, he lifts Lucas up, sending him crashing into a set of shelves. In the next heartbeat, Kenton has me pinned to the wall, my toes barely touching the floor. His chin and neck are sticky with blood, his shirt ripped and untucked, and his eyes shine like a forest fire. He’s been busy since the last time we saw each other. “Are you cheating on me, bruh? That hurts my feelings.”
“The rest of you is gonna hurt worse,” I choke out, fumbling my crucifix free from my pocket and shoving it under his shirt. Pressing the metal to his bare stomach, I hear the bright hiss, and the closet fills with the gamy odor of burnt skin. This time, Kenton is expecting the move, or he’s consumed so much adrenaline-filled blood that he doesn’t feel the pain, because he barely flinches.
“Mmm, whatever that smell is, it’s making me hungry!” Kenton laughs wildly, baring his fangs, his eyes getting brighter as he prepares to feed. My heart rising into my throat, I squeeze my lids shut and wait to be eaten.
There’s a whistling sound, then, and a loud crack as something wooden breaks apart against Kenton’s head. He turns, irritated, and I open my eyes to see Lucas standing nearby, clutching one end of a snapped broom handle in his shaky grip. “Get away from him, Dracu-loser!”
“I spent, like, twenty minutes doing my hair for this dance!” Kenton snaps, holding me up with one hand while he uses the other to smooth his coiffure. “You’re gonna pay for that, you dick!”
And that’s what gives me a brilliant idea. Yanking open Kenton’s shorts, I drop my crucifix into his boxer briefs, and let the elastic waistband snap back into place. With an abrupt shriek, he jolts away, releasing me so he can grab for his crotch—which is now giving off smoke and the telltale crackle of cooking flesh.
Kenton yelps and dances, jamming both hands into his shorts, his back arching as his most delicate parts are seared like ahi tuna—and Lucas doesn’t need a written invitation.
Lurching forward, he plunges the sharp end of the fractured broomstick into the vampire’s chest with everything he’s got. It’s a perfect blow, piercing beneath the sternum and angling upward to find the undead creature’s heart.
When it sinks home, Kenton looks up in horror, his face going slack. “Oh, fu—”
He never finishes. His tongue and lips shrivel, his jaw dislocating. His eyes bulge as his lids peel away; his nose collapses and craters. Kenton the human has been dead since the day he was Turned, the normal processes of decay held in check by supernatural forces, and now they’re catching back up with a hyper-accelerated vengeance. He rots at warp speed, muscles and tendons disintegrating until he collapses at our feet—nothing but a pile of dry bones and clothes from Old Navy.
Lucas and I stare—at the remains, and at each other—our bodies keyed up and trembling with leftover nerves. For the second, or third, or maybe even fourth time tonight, I can’t believe we’re still alive.
And then we’re kissing again, and it’s like I’m trying to inhale him, our mouths mashed together until I don’t know where his ends and mine begins. His hands grab my butt, and I jump up to wrap both legs around his waist, and we almost knock over a stack of cleaning supplies.
“Austin? Austin?” A familiar voice sounds in the corridor, and we break apart a half second before Taisha, Miyu, and Gabi appear in the doorway.
“Oh, thank God, Austin!” Taisha hurls her arms around me, weeping. Between halting breaths, she tells me it’s over—the vamps have all been killed or chased off. “When I lost track of you, I thought... I was so worried!”
“I’m all right,” I assure her. “Oh man, I’m glad you’re all right, too.”
“It was ugly out there.” Taisha shakes her head, wiping a tear from her eye. “Miyu saved my ass twice.”
As if on cue, Miyu interjects, “We should go. The city’s sending an emergency response team to sweep the building, and they want all the humans outside.”
“We’re right behind you.” I give Taisha a look that she reads loud and clear. With a nod, she leads the other girls back up the hallway. I turn to Lucas.
“Thanks for saving my ass—”
“You were right,” he blurts at the exact same moment. Flushing to the tips of his ears, he adds, “If there’s anything I’ve learned from my brother, it’s that I could die before my life even starts, and I like... I like kissing you. I don’t want to stop. I’m tired of being lonely.”
Smiling, my face as warm as his looks, I nod. “Me too.”
“I’m not sure I’m ready to tell everyone, though.” He swallows nervously. “And I’m definitely not ready to tell my parents. Is...is that okay? Are you...is it okay if we keep it just between us, at least...for a little while?”
“It’s okay.” I could have died kissing a bro tonight, and I’ve got a whole new perspective on life. Fishing my crucifix out of Kenton’s bone pile, I blow the dust off and slip it back into my pocket. “What happens in the closet stays in the closet.”
The joke is terrible and he flips me off, but he’s grinning when he does it.
* * *
PLAYER ONE FIGHT!
by
Eliot Schrefer
Player One, Choose Your Fighter!
Name: Blake Bailor
Height: 5' 6"
Weight: 145 lbs.
Fighting Style: Default
Strengths: Towering Self-Confidence
Weaknesses: Towering Insecurity
Difficulty: Hard
My summer of video games led right into the day I met my first boyfriend.
It’s not as dramatic as that might sound. Here’s the breakdown: I played Uppercut all summer, got well past the finger callus stage, and pretty high up the world ladder. That all ended because I had to go to my first day of high school, and that’s when I met Carson Hahn. No cause and effect at all.
All the same, here’s the crux of the whole thing. I should probably save it for the end of the story and pass it off as my big revelation, so that you can put this down, rest your glasses on top, put some tea on, and say “that crazy kid, at least he learned something from all this.”
And you can still say that, I’m not stopping you. Here goes: What draws me to video games is what is lacking in my actual relationships. Video games are only joyous, and relationships are only hard.
When middle school started, I was an unapologetic gamer, but by the end it felt like I had to closet that nonsense. At the right lunch table, sure you could let loose with your Assassin’s Creed theories, but otherwise you had to pretend you didn’t spend half your nights in the Animus.
If I was around someone I wanted to impress, I’d talk bashfully about my years of gaming, how I “used to be a big dork.” This implied that I was no longer that dork. Did it work? Probably not. I still wore Minecraft tees. But as I started high school, I realized it’s not a bad way to gain some nice new friends, making sure I got teased in just the right way. It worked on Carson Hahn.
My favorite thing about one-on-one brawlers is selecting your character. Like on Uppercut, they all have numerical values for how much they’re worth, from strength and constitution down to charisma. Your dexterity isn’t “pretty good,” it’s fifteen. That’s it. You could put it on your résumé.
If Carson were an Uppercut character, I could look up his Blake Receptivity Score before making any potentially embarrassing aggro moves.
My dad thought the Uppercut stats were interesting, and for a time that made me just beam. He would whip through the character sheets I printed off the internet, squinting at them, his hand scratching through his dress shirt to the small of his meaty back. Then he’d laugh and say “Well, Blake boy, I could use these when I interview people.”
I photoshopped some blanks and printed a stack for him. He made them disappear somehow.
The best games are the ones that have a stock of ready-made characters. I don’t care if it’s some hokey low-budget tennis game, where the only difference between players is the color of their shorts. Somewhere in the game’s development, a programmer had thought about each one of these people. These characters had purpose. We should all be so lucky.
My favorite fighter across canons is Chun Li. She’s one of the regulars on the Street Fighter series, the first girl to hit the two-dimensional fighting scene, so to speak. My friends would ask, “So you’re the chick again?,” and back when I was in the closet I’d answer “she’s got great legs” (thereby affirming my masculinity and also referencing her strong kicks), but inside I’d be thinking “this girl had to struggle to make it, the world’s stacked against her, and someone killed her father,” and so on.
She’s a complex character, Chun Li. Although most virtual women wear halter tops and fuchsia thongs, she dresses in a ceremonial Chinese coat that probably has some official name I don’t know. It disguises her curves like a stiff carpet, and she wears what appear to be pit-bull collars on her wrists.
When she defeats her enemy, the game randomly shows one of two animations: she either jumps up and down and giggles or gives you this haunted look and bows her head. These are pretty much the two moods I live in.
Player Two, Choose Your Fighter!
Name: Carson Hahn
Height: 6' 2"
Weight: 180 lbs.
Fighting Style: Open palms, close range
Strengths: Soccer, Popularity
Weaknesses: Unknown
Difficulty: Hard
I met Carson during soccer tryouts. I had never really played soccer (not unless you count digital versions, obvs), but I figured I should get in shape so guys would want to have sex with me, and soccer is one of the few sports short people can play.
As I stood on the field, trying to touch my toes for twenty minutes while we waited for the coach to start things, I stealthily checked out the other guys. If I was going to finally be openly out to everyone in high school, and not just my faithful core friends, there were sure going to be some hard choices to make about who to date first.
Though, who am I kidding? I’d have definitely hooked up with most any of these guys. I’d have hooked up with most any homo homo sapiens. These new soccer teammates were giving off straight vibes, though.
Carson, though. Man, that was not a hard selection to make. Top stats, all the way. He’s tall, and plays goalie with rare talent. I can be very accurate about that because I spent the week on the bench, watching him.
I was equipment manager, which really meant bench-warmer (soccer doesn’t have much equipment, you might have noticed). I made myself Carson’s cheerleader. I couldn’t help it.
Whenever he glanced to the sidelines, I would give him a big wave, and from time to time he would wave back, confused at first and eventually energetically, his already big hands made four inches longer by his gloves. (I can be accurate about their size, as well, because I had his extra pair in my lap and ran my hands up and down the fingers.)
After practice, Carson and I would sometimes hang out with Lisa from the girl’s team. I guess she was his girlfriend? They never used that word, though. Lisa was technically an A+ amazing human being, totally funny and charming, but she’s also one of those people who are “friends with people for what they can do, rather than who they are,” or so I enlightened Carson.
She and I would playfully pull him between us as we walked, and he would let out these peals of baritone laughter. Soon everyone on both soccer teams knew that Carson, Lisa, and I would be together forever.
I haven’t talked to Lisa for ages.
One time after practice, we raided the old yearbooks that Coach kept on his shelf. Carson showed us a picture from two years ago, when he was in ninth grade, so we could see how out of shape he used to be. He gave us these sad eyebrows, like it was some tragedy, but I knew the true message was “I’m so hot now, huh?” Couldn’t disagree with that.
Carson and I seemed a perfect match. Take it back to Street Fighter: he was the Ryu to my Ken; two men from distant worlds, but alike in force and power. Ken and Ryu were tied by an intense bond, alone in their deep characterizations amidst a shallow avalanche of sumo wrestlers and capoeira artists and well-endowed marines.
There was an awesome backstory there—they studied under the same master when they were young, only Ken left Japan to train in freewheelin’, cigarette smokin’, sexually saucy America. Ryu, on the other hand, calmly kept about his business being the most amazing fighter in the world.
The two meet for the first time in years, only now they’re battling to the death. Powerful stuff. People say that video games have recently become more cinematic, and I say “bullshit!” Games have had screenplays for years.
One night, Carson and I kissed in front of the gym while Lisa was inside getting her homework out of her locker.
Round One. Fight!
Carson and I tangled for the weekend following that kiss.
His parents were out of town, and we basically spent two days in their bed. Sunday night, I asked if he wanted to meet up before first period the next day and he hemmed and hawed and then said, “I’m
not sure if I’m gay,” as if that was an answer to my question about first period. Who are you kidding, buddy?
I answered in what I thought was a very caring manner, full of soft words and understanding. But inside I was imagining Carson and me in our Manhattan apartment years from now, sipping cocktails off of cork coasters on blond wood tables, laughing about that time Carson said that he “wasn’t sure if he was gay.”
What a silly thing to say! Some things in life are obvious, and Carson’s being into me is one of them. At least it’s obvious to me.
When I walked into the cafeteria before first period the next day, Carson was sitting with Lisa, head down, avoiding my eyes.
He may think she’s funny, but she’s not.
Round Two. Fight!
The problem with Carson and me was that I couldn’t ever tell who won. There had obviously been a battle, and I sure as hell felt beaten, but I didn’t see how that meant he had won.
Maybe winning doesn’t apply to relationships, like as a concept? I mean, I had performed really well, I thought, really done all the moves right. Carson just needed some time to come to terms with who he was, and all that groovy stuff.
And it’s not as though Lisa and I were fighting over Carson. She sure as hell didn’t win Carson through any charms of her own. She just happened to be what he was attracted to. My loss was coded in from the start.
I spent the next half of the school year doing this trick where I appeared never to notice Carson Hahn and simultaneously obsessed about him at all moments. When I was supposed to be writing in-class essays, half the time I’d actually be imagining the scene when Carson returned.
My head bowed against a strong headwind, eyes clenched in disavowal, I would cross my arms and face away from him. He would appeal to me, ask to team up again, and promise to begin to see, to really see, all the good in me that no one in the world had yet seen. He would be sorry for what he had missed the first time around. He would be sorry he left.
Out Now Page 3