Playlist for the Dead

by Michelle Falkoff

  This meant that the process of going through Hayden’s computer should have been one of the most exciting things I could imagine. The combination of satisfying my innate nosiness and possibly finding out once and for all what had made Hayden do what he did, even if it meant confirming my own culpability—catnip, right?

  Yet I sat there staring at Hayden’s home screen for what felt like hours. I didn’t know what to do first—check his email? Read his documents? Go through his music? All of the options felt wrong, and not just out-of-order wrong, but not-okay, bad-person wrong. Like many snoops I was a private person myself, and the idea of someone going through my computer, even after I was dead, was horrifying. It seemed like everyone these days was all about letting everything hang out, but not me. I liked seeing what everyone else was doing without revealing myself in the process. And as far as I knew, Hayden had always felt the same way. Looking at his stuff now felt like a major violation.

  Not to mention that ArchmageGed could apparently show up at any time, on the computer and in real life, and if he was really Hayden, he might be pissed. Maybe he was even watching me right now, crazy as it might seem. And if there was any chance that ArchmageGed was somehow involved in what happened to Jason and Trevor . . . if he could make all those terrible things happen to them, what would he do to me?

  But, I reminded myself, this computer technically was mine now. If anyone could look at Hayden’s stuff without being overly judgmental, it was me. I really only had three options: 1) wipe the hard drive and start over; 2) leave Hayden’s stuff where it was and just start using the computer myself, without looking at any of it; or 3) dive in. Was there really any question about what I would do?

  I tried to be as methodical as I could. If it were my computer it would have been easy; I was a complete slob in real life, but my computer was perfectly organized, everything in files and folders with names that accurately described their contents. Hayden was the opposite, though—he was super tidy with his stuff, but his computer was chaos. He seemed to save everything to the desktop; it was wallpapered with files bearing titles that made no sense, or were misspelled. Dyslexia or no dyslexia, this was the computer of someone who just didn’t give a shit. I guess he figured no one would see it.

  There should be a word for the thing that reactivates guilt, the trigger that made my skin prickle and my ears turn red, that made my head almost involuntarily droop, that made my pulse race with anxiety, then slow back down when I realized nothing had actually happened. Then maybe someone could find a drug to counteract it. Of course, there could already be one, but for now I’d have to manage without it.

  I decided first to go through the documents. I reorganized the desktop so they were at least in alphabetical order, and then I started reading. All I found, though, were Hayden’s old papers from school and the typed-up responses he’d saved from his teachers. The essays themselves were gibberish; he’d tried to write papers about movies or music he’d liked, but watching him try to explain the raining frogs scene from Magnolia, for example, was painful. Because I knew him, I could tell where he was trying to take really complicated ideas out of his head and get them across to his teachers, but their responses made it pretty clear that they weren’t seeing it. The number of grammatical errors is unacceptable for writing at this level, they’d write. I saw draft after draft of each paper—he saved them all—where he tried to fix all the problems they identified. But his writing wasn’t getting any clearer. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are if you’re incapable of getting them across to your readers.

  I’m sure they hadn’t meant to be cruel, but I could imagine how he’d felt. Reading the comments, I wondered how close he might have been to flunking out, if they even did that anymore. I’d offered to help him a million times, but he’d always refused; I knew now he hadn’t wanted me to see what he was doing on his own. He was one of the proudest people I knew, and look where it had gotten him. Based on what I was seeing, college was out of the question. Why hadn’t his parents let him see a specialist? They were so insistent that no one know their kids weren’t perfect; they’d expected him to just power through it on his own.

  Next I checked his email. I anticipated it would be a gold mine; I went through all his messages looking for the word “Athena,” but I found nothing. I did find some more confirmation that the school thing was becoming a problem; apparently he’d refused to discuss it with his parents, so they’d started sending him increasingly sternly worded emails telling him he needed to get his grades up. Don’t think that we’ll continue to support you if you can’t get into college, his father had written. If we don’t see some improvement, you’ll never get anywhere, and you’ll be cut off. What kind of a job do you think you can get with grades like that? Asshole.

  What next? I logged in to his Gchat account and started going through the chat history. His cursor popped up: HaydenStevens. But when I clicked the list of people to chat with, the only person on it was me. I tried logging out and logging back in as ArchmageGed, but though Google acknowledged that a user existed with that name, the account had a different password, and after a few halfhearted attempts, I gave up trying to figure out what it was.

  I didn’t know what to do now. It was starting to seem like Hayden’s computer was going to tell me nothing more than the fact that his relationship with his parents was about as bad as I thought, and school was worse. Not exactly shocking, though. There had to be more. What was I missing?

  Then it occurred to me. His clues to me had come from the playlist; he’d put it together to tell me something. Maybe the answers would be in his iTunes library.

  Hayden’s music collection was better organized than anything else on his laptop, though we had Apple to thank for that. I could see all the bands we liked, and a bunch of the ones I wasn’t crazy about—Hayden had a thing for old metal and ’80s hair bands, so there was lots of early AC/DC and Poison before Bret Michaels got hair extensions, a tour bus, and a gaggle of groupies with fake boobs to go on TV with him.

  But there was also a category called “Angry/Sad Chix,” which was filled with music I knew we’d definitely never listened to together, music I hadn’t even realized he liked. Paramour, Evanescence, Skylar Grey—so that’s where she came from!—Aimee Mann, even Alanis Morissette. We’d watched a video of hers where she walked around naked, and debated the multiple meanings of the word “ironic” and whether that made her song bogus, but that was as far as it went.

  No, this list had to have come from somewhere else. Someone else.

  I scanned the playlists, clicking on a few at random to see if they gave me any info. Finally, I found one called mix4anme. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it had some of the Angry/Sad Chix music on it, so it seemed like it was worth listening to.

  I clicked on the playlist and cranked up the volume, just listening for a while. It was a pretty cheery mix, despite where some of the songs came from; the tone overall was definitely upbeat. Very not Hayden. In addition to the Angry/Sad Chix, there were songs from MGMT, Passion Pit, Metric. He wouldn’t have come up with all of that on his own, I was pretty sure. It was music even I’d think about dancing to, and I hated dancing. This was the mix of someone who was very, very happy.

  I tried to check the date he’d created it, but there didn’t seem to be a way to find out; all I could see was the last day he’d played it, which was the day of the party. Had so much really changed in one day? Sure, the party had been awful, but could it really have been awful enough to counteract the happiness that had led to this mix? I’d thought I’d understood how the party had been enough to tip Hayden over the edge, but that was before I knew there had been this sort of counterbalance.

  Which meant that whatever happened upstairs at the party was much so worse than I’d realized at the time.

  I had to figure out what the name of the mix meant. I looked at it over and over again, sounding it out until it clicked. Mix4anme. Mix for A and Me. What if A was for Athena? What if Athe
na was a person? But who?

  I looked at the Gchat window again, almost wishing the Archmage would come back. I’d pretend I believed he really was Hayden and ask some harder questions. I yawned and stretched, realizing I’d finally burned off the energy from the afternoon with Astrid, and looked at the clock. It was after midnight—it had happened again. I hadn’t even noticed it was dark, let alone that I’d skipped dinner.

  I’d just shut down Hayden’s laptop and was about to pack it in and go to bed when the Gchat window on my computer beeped.

  Time to play Mage Warfare, it said.

  ArchmageGed was back.

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  I TRIED TYPING BACK. Hayden, is that you? What’s going on?

  But ArchmageGed was already gone. He was so annoyingly cryptic that I was starting to believe it really was Hayden’s ghost. I looked around the room, for some sort of sign that this was really happening, that I was even awake. The wizard figurine sat silently on my bookshelf, like it always did. Staring at me. I felt a chill in the air and saw goose bumps on my arms again. Did I really have a choice?

  Maybe Mage Warfare was a good idea; I could really use a few kills.

  I clicked on the icon.

  I played on my computer for a while, as myself, and while there was something satisfying about going in and kicking ass, I didn’t see the point, ultimately—why would ArchmageGed have told me to play the game? And then, just when I was getting really irritated, my in-game chat window popped up.

  Not here.

  I heard the opening music of the game again, and I looked over at Hayden’s computer. Somehow the music was coming from there, even though I’d already shut it down. It was impossible, but no more impossible than the other things that were happening. I opened the laptop, unsurprised to find that it had already powered on, that Mage Warfare was already loaded, with Hayden’s character already logged in.

  Okay, Archmage, I get it.

  I played as Hayden for a while, just to see what would happen. I wandered through the woods in the game, finding a castle I usually ignored because the mission was to go in and save a bunch of serfs I normally didn’t care about. But I was ArchmageGed now, and it was my job to do things like that. It felt strange pretending to be him, and even stranger pretending to be him pretending to be someone else, especially since I felt an obligation to honor his playing strategy and fight for good, instead of just wreaking havoc like my character tended to do.

  But it was getting me nowhere, and I was struggling to keep my eyes open. What was the point of all of this? Why wouldn’t ArchmageGed just let me sleep?

  I could almost feel the Archmage getting sick of me being so dense. Surely there was a reason he’d not-so-subtly nudged me over to playing Hayden’s game as Hayden on Hayden’s computer. I had to be missing something basic.

  Thankfully, before ArchmageGed could make me feel like even more of an idiot by doing it himself, I figured it out. I clicked on the in-game chat window and waited. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for; maybe ArchmageGed would tell me I’d done the right thing, or would give me a hint about what I was looking for. But five minutes went by, and then ten, and I looked at the clock again to see that it was almost three in the morning. I couldn’t believe how the night had flown by, but my exhaustion had passed and now I was wired—there was no point in trying to sleep. I’d have to overdose on caffeine in the morning if I wanted to make it through school.

  For now, though, it looked like I was on my own. Okay, Hayden, if you won’t come to me, I’ll find a way to you. I clicked on the chat logs. There were hours and hours of records of chats between me and Hayden, and a bunch of logs of chats with the random people we encountered in the game. Hayden was unfailingly polite to them, whereas I tended to get into online screaming matches with the strangers I encountered. But then, in addition to all the logs I was expecting to see, there were several files’ worth of chats with someone else.

  Someone named Athena.

  So Hayden had another friend in the game, one I’d never known about, one significant enough that he’d used the name Athena as his password. I couldn’t wait to find out more.

  I decided to go back to the beginning. It had started last summer.

  ArchmageGed: How lovely to meet such a fair maiden.

  Athena: And thou as well, good sir.

  Nauseating, but not shocking. Hayden had this thing about being courtly to female characters, as if the game were some extension of the Arthurian legend and not the thinly veiled excuse for violence it really was. It was the only place where he was willing to take the risk of actually talking to girls. Most of the time it bit him in the ass—there were tons of dudes who created weak-looking female characters to trick saps like Hayden into letting their guard down so they could steal their weapons or beat them up in the most humiliating of ways. If Trevor had been in the game, that was probably what he would have done; my initial reaction was to think that Hayden was being set up.

  ArchmageGed: I see thou has accumulated much gold. Art thou as crafty as thou art beautiful?

  Athena: I do not believe thou hast chosen the right adjective. Though I am but woman, I have studied the art of swordsmanship since I was a little girl. Every piece of gold I possess was hard fought. Athena is, after all, the goddess of war.

  ArchmageGed: Forgive me, my lady, for making such an unfair assumption. I can see thou possesseth great skill.

  She’d let him off the hook for that minor misstep; his chivalry, for once, was being rewarded. And while her player history bore out her claims about being good with a sword, it also indicated that she might really be a girl: she spent a lot of her accumulated gold on jewels and armor that looked like dresses. And she was definitely playing the fair maiden in those early chats with Hayden. It was enough to make me gag a little, but clearly they thought it was super cute. They carried on for hours; it was the flirtiest I’d ever seen Hayden. Whoever this girl was, she really seemed to like him. I didn’t yet know what role this Athena had played in Hayden’s decision, but I was starting to suspect it might be a big one.

  I kept reading. They finally dropped the Lancelot/Guinevere-speak and started sounding like normal people after the first chat session.

  ArchmageGed: I had a great time talking to you yesterday, but trying to remember all those “thous” and “dosts” was giving me a headache. Would it be okay if I was just myself today?

  Athena: More than okay. I was starting to worry I’d have to find an Olde English dictionary. But you were doing a great job.

  ArchmageGed: Thanks! I’m not usually a words person. It was fun to think of it like a puzzle.

  Athena: I know what you mean. I would have kept going, just to keep talking to you. This is better, though.

  They were like this at first, flattering each other a little, both wanting to make it clear that there was something there but without having to say it too openly. That broke down pretty fast, though, and after a week or so of chatting they started getting real.

  ArchmageGed: Sometimes I worry that I’ll always feel as alone as I do now.

  Athena: Me too. But it makes me feel less alone to know that you feel the same way.

  It was so fucking sad. I hadn’t known Hayden thought that; we’d been around each other for such a long time that I’d felt like it would be a betrayal to admit to him how lonely I was, even with him as my friend, and it turned out he’d felt the same way the whole time. It made me think I could have been helpful, if I’d just spoken up. Even as I discovered there were other reasons Hayden might have made his decision, it still seemed even more my fault.

  Still, I needed to know the whole story. I kept going, and so did the chat transcripts.

  ArchmageGed: It’s so weird that we’ve never met, and yet I feel like I really know you.

  Athena: You do know me. You know me better than al
most anyone.

  ArchmageGed: Do you really think so? Do you think it’s possible for us to know each other as well as we think we do, even though we don’t even know each other’s real names?

  Athena: If I tell you a secret, will you promise not to make fun of me?

  ArchmageGed: I would never do that. If you really know me, you have to know that.

  Athena: I told my friend I had a boyfriend.

  There was a pause in the transcript; I could only too easily imagine Hayden sitting in his room, completely freaking out, not knowing what to say. Finally:

  ArchmageGed: Not to sound like an idiot, but did you mean me?

  Athena: LOL. Of course I meant you. Did that freak you out?

  ArchmageGed: No. It just made my day. My week. My year? You were serious?

  Athena: As a heart attack.

  Which meant that by the time school started, Hayden had his first girlfriend.

  And he hadn’t told me.

  I didn’t know what to think. My gut reaction was to be offended; we were best friends, and while he tended to be shy about revealing personal things—I’d always seen him as cryptic, but really, I knew how much of it was shyness—I had trouble imagining he’d hide something so significant from me.

  But in some ways I could understand why. Because all I could think about was the possibility that Athena wasn’t really who she said she was. The voice in the transcript seemed real, and she was saying all these really open and honest things to Hayden, so much so that I felt a little ashamed reading them, like I was eavesdropping on a private conversation. Which I basically was. But I couldn’t help but think of that Catfish thing where people used the Internet to totally humiliate people who thought they were in love. I didn’t think Ryan and his buddies were computer-savvy enough to trick Hayden in Mage Warfare, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t some other unscrupulous person out to scam him. Hayden knew me well enough to know that I’d at least ask the question, and I was sure it was a question he wasn’t interested in discussing, let alone finding out the answer to.