He nods and leans over the board, going back to planning his next move.
“What’s it like being so old that friends dying is normal?” I ask, not out loud—only in my head.
“Tiring,” he answers, not out loud or in my head, but in the way his shoulders fold in on themselves like a pleated paper fan. I want to hug him, but I don’t. I can’t.
Maybe I should get Mom to find me a new counselor.
Granddad reaches out and nudges a pawn forward one square. “Your turn.”
I hate doorbells. I mean, I guess they’re useful. But I hate standing on a porch, having just pressed that little white button, unsure whether the bell even rang. Hate having to decide whether it’s better to stand stupidly in the Saturday-afternoon cold and wait or to press it again and risk being that obnoxious jerk who rings the bell over and over because they don’t hear the people inside shouting, “I’m coming, I’m coming!”
I’m about to become that obnoxious jerk when the door is flung open, revealing a tiny bespectacled boy wearing a miniature black suit jacket. Freckles dot his dark-brown skin, and I feel stupid for not realizing until this moment that black people can have freckles.
“Um—oh—I’m here to see Meg,” I tell him. “We have plans. To work on our science project.” You’d think I’d be less awkward with kids than adults, but I’m not. If Meg had been willing to work on our project during lunch hours, we could have avoided this uncomfortableness altogether.
He holds out his hand. “May I take your coat, mam-le-zelle?” His voice is quiet, but so confident that I wonder if I’ve been pronouncing mademoiselle wrong my whole life.
“Um, sure, okay.” I step inside, happy to be out of the wind that tormented me all the way here. Mom and Dad weren’t free to drive me, and I hate the bus. I slide off my brown jacket and set it gently in his hand, releasing it slowly so its weight doesn’t drag him to the ground.
A loud thud announces Meg’s arrival at the bottom of the nearby stairs. “Hi. You got that, Nolan? He likes to play butler.”
“Butler?”
“Yep. Think he saw it in an Archie comic or something. He’s been doing it all week. Keeps his suit jacket by the front door and makes us all call him Jeeves.”
“Oh. Well, thanks, Jeeves.” Nolan grins at me as he reaches on his tiptoes for a hanger. “Is he going to be—”
“He’s fine. Mom normally likes to greet my friends, but she’s got to get a thing to the accountant by Monday or something like that, so she’s glued to her computer downstairs, and I’m pretty sure we’ll get the glare of death if we interrupt her. C’mon, let’s go to my room.”
Meg’s room is like a forgotten museum storeroom, cluttered with knickknacks and piles of books and layers of dust. Since I was about six, Mom has refused to let me have dessert unless my room’s clean. Meg’s mom clearly doesn’t have the same rule. She picks up the lime-green bra lying on her bed and tosses it into the corner before plopping herself down on the patchwork comforter.
A tank on a side table houses a turtle. He rests on a rock, head poking out of the water, eyes open but not moving.
“What’s his name?” I ask.
Meg scrunches up her entire face, as if she can’t quite remember. “Snappy,” she says at last.
“Hi, Snappy,” I coo at the little guy. He still doesn’t move.
A tiny bundle of purple charges into the room and onto Meg’s lap, and Meg kisses her head. Meg’s sister’s hair is a mass of natural, flyaway curls, just like Meg’s. “I still like the cantaloupe idea,” Meg says as she starts braiding the girl’s curls together. “We could throw them off my roof, right here. I go out there sometimes. The sidewalk is right below it, so we could drop them onto that.”
“Who’s going to pay for all the cantaloupes?”
Meg is still midbraid, but the girl on her lap pulls away, thuds to the floor, then skips over to me. She hugs my leg, kisses my jean-covered kneecap, then rushes out of the room with a giggle before I even have time to feel uncomfortable about the tiny stranger who was attached to my leg and now isn’t.
Meg doesn’t even blink. “My mom will buy them,” she says. “She’ll give me anything if I just ask her on the right weekend.”
Right weekend? I’m not sure I want to know. I’m definitely not going to ask. “Okay,” I say instead. “But then who’s going to clean up the mess?”
“We can—” she starts, then pauses. “Okay, point taken. But we have to come up with something, right? We could just tell Mr. Carter we’re doing the cantaloupe and change it later.”
“Maybe we should tell him we’re doing the grass durability one.”
“Ugh, that’s so boring.” She pitches backward onto the bed, sprawling out starfish-style. She has a desk along one wall, with a twirly, orange-cushioned chair and a laptop right there in her own room. And one, two . . . five LumberLegs posters. Five of them. Two of Legs doing speed runs, one of him fighting the filthworms with a boot, one of him beside his barrenlands castle, and one simple one with his character’s head and the words “BE AWESOME” in big bubble letters.
“You have a lot of posters,” I say, because I’m great at stating the obvious.
Meg pushes her shoulders into her mattress in what I think is supposed to be a shrug. “I got them after Stephen-the-Leaver left. He would have made me get just one or two, but screw you, Stephen. You can’t tell me what to do.”
I have no idea what to say to that, so I turn the chair to face her, then perch on the edge. Meg sits up with a start. “Do you play LotS?” she asks. “Like, not just watching Legs’s videos, but actually playing?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
She shakes her head vehemently. “I prefer funny over scary.”
“You find LotS scary? You’re kidding me.” In the short time I’ve known her, I’ve seen Meg dive down multiple flights of stairs, run through the hall without worrying about staring wolf eyes, and attempt to leap—unsuccessfully—onto our front step with her skateboard. I could probably manage that sort of thing in game, but she managed it in real life.
“No, I’m not. I scream every time a wingling attacks.” True, she did squeal when one ambushed LumberLegs during the livestream. But winglings are rare and not that hard to kill.
“You could try a speed run,” I suggest, though I’m not getting my hopes up that she actually will. “You don’t usually have to fight in those.”
“Can I make my own character?” she asks.
“Of course. What else would you do?”
“An excellent question. Okay, let’s do it,” she says, getting to her feet.
“What, now?”
“Of course!” She reaches over my shoulder and taps a button on the laptop to rouse it.
I should object, probably. We’re going to have to decide on a science project eventually. But we still have almost two weeks before it’s due, and I’ve done all the rest of my homework for the weekend, so I can always spend tomorrow afternoon researching more ideas, and what if she changes her mind later? I swivel my chair to face the screen.
Meg must have at least tried to play the game once before, because it’s already downloaded on her laptop, so I just have to update it and it’s ready to go.
When I get to the character creation screen, Meg practically pushes me out of the chair, as if she’s still worried that I wouldn’t let her make her own character for some weird reason. I cede the chair to her, settling on her bed instead.
I start explaining her options—the character classes, the color choices, the starting abilities. “I spent an hour making my elf warrior,” I say. She has pale skin and pink hair and an epic battle scar that stretches all the way from her right eyebrow to her left cheek.
She ignores my comments, goes straight to the skin color menu, and scrolls down to the browns. “Blah,” she says, crinkling her nose.
I’m unsure what she’s upset about until she holds her arm up to the screen, and then I get it. There are three bro
wn options, but none of them really match the rich brown of Meg’s skin—one’s much darker, one’s much lighter, and one’s really more like tanned white skin than brown. “Are games usually like this?” I ask. Meg laughs humorlessly. “This is actually better than usual. Usually the choice is ‘Do I want to play that one black character or not?’”
“That sucks,” I say, which feels wholly inadequate.
“You got that right.” She frowns at the screen for a moment longer, then sits up and scrolls away from the skin color options. “All right,” she says, voice cheery again, as if shaking off systemic racism is something she’s practiced so often that she’s already an expert. “If I can’t make me, let’s go fantasy. Can’t I just—yes, here.” She clicks the randomize button in the bottom right corner over and over, and her character morphs from a blue dragonlord to a brown elf and everything in between. Then she stops abruptly. A squat dwarf knight with purple skin and bright-green hair glares out at us. “Perfect!”
I point toward the screen. “Okay, so if you want to customize—”
“Nah. Look how badass she is!”
She does look pretty fierce. “Well, you should at least—” But she hits the start button before I can suggest she choose a non-randomized starting ability or try out the different cloaks.
I sigh and Meg grins; then we play musical chairs again as I set up the speed run. It’s easier to go onto a public server that has speed runs set up server-side than to download the mod and set it up client-side like I’ve got at home, and Meg is hovering way too close, ready to take over the instant I’ve got a speed run started, so I log her on to one of the popular servers.
Legs has it set up client-side, too, but I’ve seen other You-Tubers go onto this server. Being on it myself feels way more hectic than in their videos, though, with elves and dragonlords and dwarves scurrying past me and the chat log flying by so fast I can’t even read it and walk at the same time.
“You’re too slow. I’ve got this,” Meg says, and I have to leap out of the seat to avoid her sitting down right in my lap. By the time I’ve settled back on the bed, she’s already found the server’s speed-run menu.
“I think they’re divided by—” I break off as she clicks on one in the middle. And then she’s in a speed run. The lava bubbles up around her, and the first platform is just a sprint-jump away. “It’s w for forward,” I say. “Space to jump.”
Her character lunges forward, and she slams the space bar, leaping over the fiery gap. Almost over. Not really over at all. Her dwarf erupts into flames, and the screen reports, “You died,” in case that’s not obvious from the cartoony, charred body the camera pans out to show. Meg jabs the respawn button, and she’s back at the beginning.
“You have to—” I start to say, but she’s already off again. This time she tries to move slower, taps the space bar way too late, and walks right off the platform into the lava.
I laugh. I can’t help it.
“It’s not funny,” she says. She grimaces, and then her shoulders slump. “Apparently I’m crap at this. Like everything.”
I shake my head, and my cheeks flush hot at the words I know I’m about to say. “Epic fail,” I practically whisper, because quoting LumberLegs videos is a thing I usually do only in my head or online, not out loud.
The words hover between us, as if the heavy air has trapped them and refuses to send them on their way. Meg stares at her dwarf’s scorched corpse. I can’t see her face. Maybe I’ve gone too far.
But then she straightens and turns to me with a grin. “Epic fail!” she shouts, in a surprisingly good impression of Legs’s deep announcer voice.
I stifle the idiotic grin that’s trying to push its way onto my face. “Your timer is still running,” I say, pointing at the screen, and she swivels back around. And dies again. I could suggest she switch over to a much easier run, but I don’t. She could pout again, but she doesn’t. Instead, we both giggle.
Many deaths and cries of “epic fail” later, the screen reports her final time—forty-one minutes, eighteen seconds—and my stomach hurts from laughing.
MEG
DESPITE MY PROTESTS THAT NONINTERESTING HOMEWORK SHOULD NEVER BE done at lunchtime, Kat and I banter all week about our science project, as Kat continually insists on some boring grass thing, ignoring all my much flashier—and much better—suggestions. At last, in the middle of Thursday night, a new idea comes to me in a swirl of brilliance. I dream of my speed run. I become my purple dwarf self and try to run it, but I keep missing the final step and plunging into the lava below, and my armor gets heavier and heavier as it gets coated with more and more soot and ash, and when I finally land the jump, my eyes fly open and I know exactly what we should do for our science project. I flick on the light, grab my cell, and tap out a series of texts.
We shld do speed runs in LotS
Use them to test reaction times
Maybe after eating sugar? And before the sugar? And a little while later?
Or maybe coffee?
It’s perfect cuz the computer will time it for us
And we can use the same map every time
An easier one than the one I did
What do u think?
This idea is awesome. Kat can’t possibly shut it down like she did with all my others, which admittedly were nowhere near as good as this one. I cup the phone in my hand, staring at the screen, waiting for it to roar with a response. I’ve got Kat’s ringtone currently set to Chewbacca’s cry from Star Wars.
“Come on, Kat,” I whisper. “Wake up.” I don’t know how she can be sleeping when I’m having an Aristotle-apple moment! Or was it Einstein? Newton? Hercules? It can’t be Hercules, because there was that Disney movie about him and I don’t think there was an apple falling in it. If the apple guy was Canadian, I’d probably know. I should get a book about him, and one about Hercules, too.
I crinkle my nose in disgust at the silent phone, set it on my side table, and flick out the light. In the distance, a car alarm blares. The window by my bed breathes frosty air into the room, like Kenzie’s favorite Disney princess, Elsa, is turning the world to ice. Winter is coming. I wrap the covers tight around my shoulders.
I have just found a comfortable resting place on my lumpy pillow, preparing to drift back into the imaginary land of sleep, when the Wookiee roar comes. I snatch up my phone, counter-arguments ready to fly off my tongue—or out my fingers—then let my battle-ready face dissolve into a grin as I read her text.
I wish I’d thought of that.
CHAPTER 5
MEG
I MUST HAVE ACCIDENTALLY TURNED OFF MY ALARM DURING MY middle-of-the-night texting, because I wake up late Friday morning, which makes me miss my usual bus, which makes me late for math class, which makes my math teacher, Mrs. Brown, decide that I need to spend my lunch hour in her office going over problems that make less than zero sense. Which means I don’t get to talk to Kat in person until science class, when I slip into the seat in front of her and beam. “It’s perfect, right? You think it’s perfect?”
She clicks her pen over and over like she’s anxious or maybe just thinking, but she nods. “It’s definitely better than helium balloons.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about, but I don’t care. “Awesome. We can tell Mr. Carter today, then.”
She stops clicking abruptly. “We can’t tell him today. We need to do more research.” She starts clicking again.
“No way. Someone else might steal the idea.”
“No one’s going to—”
“LotS is basically the most popular game in the universe,” I point out. “Anyone could think of it. We’ve got to get our idea in first. Today.” I don’t know how she can even think when she’s clicking her pen like that. It’s like a chicken pecking on your brain.
“But—”
“Shh, class is starting,” I say, pointing to Mr. Carter, who’s started writing on the board. “And give me that.” I snatch the pen-chicken out of her ha
nd, tap her on the forehead with it, then grin at her before turning around to try to pay attention to whatever weird diagram Mr. Carter is drawing. Our idea is brilliant, and our project is going to be amazing. Even Kat can’t deny it.
At the end of what has to be the longest science class in the history of time, I grab Kat’s arm and pull her across the room. “Mr. Carter!” I say when we’re almost at his desk. “We have our science fair project idea.”
He looks down at us—everyone looks down at me, but he’s taller even than Kat—and beams. “A whole week early. That’s great. Let’s hear it.”
“You know the video game LotS? Legends of the Stone, I mean? Well, there are these things in it called speed runs. It’s a mod, and they’re timed and stuff—Kat can probably explain it better than I can.”
Kat chews her lip, and for a moment I’m worried she might back out or change her mind or something, but then she clears her throat and rattles off this perfect explanation of how we can have people eat sugar and then test the impact on their reaction times using LotS speed runs, because they’re timed and we can choose an easy one to use on everyone for consistency, and Mr. Carter nods along because it all sounds epic. I mean, as epic as a science project can get.
When Kat finishes, Mr. Carter gives us an actual thumbs-up. “That sounds great, ladies. Edgy and modern, but still scientific. I like it. And a whole week early. Good job.” Then he babbles on about questionnaires and testing and other random things that we’re supposed to keep in mind or something, and then Kat and I are finished and heading out the door.
“So when do you want to start working on the proposal?” Kat asks as we step into the hall.
“The proposal?”
“Yeah. You heard Mr. Carter. It’s due in a few weeks. We should get started right away, since we’ll need to do some research on sugar and reaction times before we can write it.”
I shake my head. “No way. No. Way. We just handed in our idea. And Mr. Carter loved it. Now we get a break.”
She purses her lips but doesn’t say anything.
“We’re a whole week early!” I say.
Kat and Meg Conquer the World Page 6