Mom glances at me out of the corner of her eye. Apparently I look too pathetic to have to deal with Opa, because she says, “Tell him he can come Monday evening.”
“It’s okay, Mom. He can come tonight.” If I’m going to be in a crap mood anyway, might as well take advantage of it and get an Opa interaction out of the way. It’s better than having him spoil a good day.
“Are you sure?” Mom asks.
“Message already sent,” I say, which will be true in ten seconds.
We listen to a crime podcast for the rest of the drive. A couple more YouTube comments come in, but I turn off my notifications and don’t read them.
When we get home, Mom tells me to grab the crokinole board and set it by the door, and I suspect she’s hoping what I am: that he’ll grab the board and go. Fat chance.
Mom and Opa have a weird relationship. They love each other, but they don’t ever seem to actually like each other. So, same as my relationship with Opa, I guess. Even in my annoyance, I can still taste the Apfelkuchen Opa saved for me yesterday because he knows it’s my favorite.
I could go work on a video while I wait for Opa to arrive, but if I’m on my computer when he gets here, that’s a sure way to inspire a lecture. And maybe it’s deserved, because apparently my videos are a waste of time anyway.
Instead, I sit at the kitchen table, finishing the last of my homework. I don’t have much to do, since I did almost all of it at Opa and Oma’s yesterday.
The doorbell rings as I start on the last row of math problems. I sigh as Mom plods to the door. Maybe this will be the one time when Opa will duck his head in and then leave, without needing me to basically line up for inspection or even say hello at all. Universe, after today, you owe me this much.
But after their quiet, murmuring exchange, I hear a booming, “Where’s the boy?” followed by thumping footsteps coming my way. Universe, you’re a jerk.
I shove myself to my feet as Opa enters the kitchen. He wears almost the same thing on the weekend that he’d wear on any workday—crisp gray pants, a white collared shirt, and a navy sweater vest. The only thing missing is his tie. You’d think our school was a private one with uniforms; it’s not.
“Hi, Opa,” I say.
“Hey, champ.” He pulls out a chair and slips into it, then calls to Mom, “Eva, put on a pot of tea!”
I slip back into my own seat. I guess we’ll be here awhile.
Mom walks into the kitchen and flicks on the electric kettle without a word, though she’s probably seething.
“Sammy,” she said to me once after Opa left, “if you ever shout at me to do things that you’re perfectly capable of doing yourself, I’m going to box you upside the head.”
When I asked her why she doesn’t box Opa upside the head, she told me not to talk about my opa that way, though she laughed when she said it.
“Doing your homework, I see,” Opa says, and he taps my math textbook with three firm thuds. “That’s good. All your teachers say you’re doing well in your classes. Eva, he’s like you that way!”
“What’s that?” Mom wanders over and clunks a mug and box of teabags in front of Opa, then tears open a box of maple leaf cookies as she slides into the seat across from me. She holds them out to me, and I take one. Not as good as apple cake, but Mom works long hours and I have my Twitch channel and afternoons at Oma and Opa’s, so neither of us has time for baking. Maybe I should give up streaming video games and spend my time baking instead.
“You two are going to die at fifty if you keep eating that garbage,” Opa says.
Mom twists a cookie apart and pops the entire icing-less cookie half into her mouth. “Dad, I think you were saying something nice about Sam,” she says between chewing.
“Yes, well . . .” He trails off, then clears his throat. “Sam is doing well in school. No complaints from any of the other teachers.”
I bite into my cookie whole. The maple of the icing is sweet and smooth.
Mom smiles at me. “Yes, he certainly works hard at it.”
Opa turns to me. “Now just think what you could achieve if you stopped playing all those video games.”
I stop chewing.
“Dad, we’ve been through—”
“And you’re always alone. Success isn’t only about good marks, you know. You’ve got to learn how to connect with people, how to make friends. That’s how you really succeed in this world. You do things for people, people do things for you, mutually beneficial. We call that symbiosis.”
Thanks, Opa. A reminder that I have absolutely no friends at school and that I ate lunch alone even at LotSCON is just what I need right now.
“Dad! It’s not that simple,” Mom says.
Opa turns to her. “He’s got his head in that phone all the time. You can’t make friends if you can’t even look people in the face. I walk into the cafeteria at lunchtime, and there are these clusters of kids all staring into their little black boxes, not interacting, just filling their brains with garbage. If Sam put his phone away and started talking to people, he’d make friends in no time.”
Oh, and the phone lecture again. There’s always the phone lecture. Opa doesn’t understand that my phone is the one place I do have friends. Or that his taking away people’s phones is what loses me friends.
“I’ve tried making friends. I get punched in the stomach.”
Opa’s eyes widen. I’m not sure if it’s because this is the first he’s heard of me getting beat up at school or if it’s because this is the first time I’ve ever talked back to him.
Mom’s lips purse. I’ve never told her this before either. She wants to ask more, I can tell, but she’s not going to ask with Opa here.
Opa’s eyebrows settle into decisiveness. “Sam,” he says, “there are bullies everywhere. You have to ignore them. And for goodness’ sake, stop picking at those pimples. That can’t help.”
My hand falls from my face as my mottled skin flushes hot.
“Dad, we’ve been through this,” Mom jumps in. “It’s a disorder.”
I tune them both out as she tries to explain dermatillomania to Opa for about the hundredth time. I pinch my fingers to keep them from returning to my face as Opa’s words play over in my head. There are bullies everywhere. You have to ignore them.
I stare at him as the unexpected truth of those words settles into my stomach.
“Everything is diagnosed as some disorder nowadays,” Opa says before I tune them both out again. I watch Mom’s mouth open and close, watch Opa’s eyebrows sit in their steady, unmoving place of confidence.
There are bullies everywhere. Even in families. Even in my own kitchen.
You have to ignore them.
I stand to my feet, cutting both Mom and Opa off with the movement. They turn to look at me. “I have to type up my essay for history,” I say. “It’s a requirement.”
Mom raises an eyebrow at me. She knows it’s a lie. But maybe she also knows the truth of Opa’s words, knows that sometimes the only way to ignore someone’s poison is to walk away. Even when they’re family.
“You go, Sammy,” she says. “Homework is important.”
“I don’t know why these teachers insist on essays being typed up,” Opa says. “The last thing these teens need is more screen time.”
I hurry out of the room before I hear anything more.
I should feel big, not small, for walking away from Opa’s comments, but I don’t feel like Thor or Worf or Chewbacca. I feel more like little hobbit Frodo, who’s just gotten into his canoe to paddle off to the darkest part of Mordor alone, because he doesn’t trust a soul not to steal the ring of power before it’s destroyed.
Upstairs in my room, I pull out the diamond Code signed. It’s supposed to be a glorious reminder of the one place I belong; instead, it’s turned into a symbol of how I apparently don’t belong anywhere. I throw it into the back of my closet, then thud down onto my bed, where I think about all the lunch hours I’ve sat alone. I add them up in my
head. Ten months a year—or nine and a half, I guess, since classes end halfway through June—minus Christmas break and March break. So probably thirty-six weeks a year, five days a week. That’s . . . 30 plus 150 . . . 180 days last year of me sitting alone, plus almost that many again this year. High school’s really going well so far.
When I watch Lord of the Rings, Frodo always feels like a hero for heading off to Mordor alone, knowing he can’t trust his fellowship anymore. But maybe it’s not heroic, maybe it’s stupid. He could have had the help of badass, long-lived hero king Aragorn, not to mention a sharp-shooting elf and a hilarious dwarf. But he didn’t.
At least he had Sam, in the end. I don’t even have that.
My fingers are smeared with blood. I don’t even know from what or from where.
“You’re bleeding,” I hear Leroy’s voice say in my head from earlier today, and it strikes me in retrospect that there was nothing judgmental in his words. He didn’t say it was gross or that I was gross. It was a fact: I had blood on my chin.
Now I have blood on my fingers. I don’t want it to be there, didn’t choose for it to be there, but there it is.
I open my bedside table and pull out a box of Band-Aids. I plaster them on my wrist, on my arm, on my face. I put a big Band-Aid across my forehead where a new pimple’s sprouted that I’m itching to empty but haven’t touched yet.
I find the bloody spot—on the back of my neck—and spread a Band-Aid over it, then take off my blood-dotted shirt and rinse off the collar before throwing it in the laundry.
I switch to a worn black shirt I love that says “Pizza and Winglings” and has a cartoon of a couple of winglings from LotS sharing a pizza on the front. When we were leaving the convention, I saw some girl wearing the same one, and it made me wish I had worn it instead of the stupid Codester shirt.
I plop down at my computer. There are multiple YouTube notifications. I should ignore them, probably. If I get another one calling me garbage and dropping my hard work to the floor like trash, it might break me for good. But I can’t help it. I click the little bell and read through the comments.
MortalWombat and asfdeLOL have declared war against each other, each proclaiming they’ll defeat the other in the battle for highest “First!” count.
Two new people have left generic “nice vid” comments, and Canuckosaurus says he (or she) died laughing.
I can still see the comment from earlier, but Opa’s ironic advice flits through my head again, and I click away from it.
I write thank-yous to the first two, then click on Canuckosaurus’s comment and reply with, “I’m very sorry for your family’s loss. Please have your ghost tell them to tell me where I should send the funeral flowers.”
A small grin creeps onto my face. I know, I know, you’re not supposed to laugh at your own jokes. Try and stop me.
I scroll back to look over the other nice comments from this morning. The “OMG THIS IS AMAZING I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!” pops out at me. It’s just above the comment that calls me ugly.
Maybe Opa is right on so many more levels than he knows. Maybe it’s not that I don’t belong in this gaming world either. Maybe it’s just that there really are bullies everywhere. The thought makes me hopeful and sad all at once.
I haven’t heard Opa leave yet, which means I’m a hostage in my own room for a while.
I click over to Twitter. “Impromptu stream in ten,” I tweet, adding a link to my channel. I post the same thing on all my other social media. It’s not on my schedule to stream today, but it’s only a problem if you say you’re going to stream at a particular time and then don’t, not the other way around. And besides, what else am I supposed to do?
I test my mic and my recording software, get my screen layout set up, open the chat, and move it to my second screen.
BlastaMasta742, one of my regulars, is already in chat.
BlastaMasta742: what are you gonna play?
Normally, I follow a schedule, but since this is impromptu, I could do anything. Though honestly, I’m not feeling up for much. I put up a generic blank screen, turn on my mic, and start the stream.
“I haven’t decided yet what to play,” I say. “Maybe some Hearthstone?” I could go for a mindless card game I’ve played a thousand times.
BlastaMasta742: you should try out your warlock rush deck
“Good idea, man,” I say aloud, then open Hearthstone and switch it to my main screen so my viewers—well, my one viewer—can see it.
I play a game, chatting with BlastaMasta742 between moves. It took some practice when I first started streaming—checking for comments periodically, then responding aloud. Well, I shouldn’t say when I first started. When I first first started streaming, there wasn’t anyone in chat at all.
At least I’ve got BlastaMasta742.
That’s more than at school.
A new name pops up in chat that I haven’t seen before.
xxMeisterFanxx: Yes! You’re streaming! Didn’t miss it! BRB!
“Uh, hi, Meister Fan. Bye, Meister Fan,” I say. What I want to say is “Don’t be a Meister Fan; they’re stupid!” But I don’t.
I take another turn. BlastaMasta742 tells me what cards he thinks I should play, and he’s usually right.
xxMeisterFanxx appears back in chat.
xxMeisterFanxx: I destroyed Leroy at the tourney today
NotLeeroyJenkins: That’s only because you had the luckiest first 3 rounds ever. The odds of that are . . . hang on, I’ll calculate . . .
I halt the cursor over the card I was planning to play next. “Mark?”
It takes a moment for my words to stream, then for chat to update, so I play the card, then check chat.
xxMeisterFanxx: in the flesh!
xxMeisterFanxx: or the digital!
xxMeisterFanxx: electronic
xxMeisterFanxx: whatever
xxMeisterFanxx: why aren’t you clearing out your LotS base, man? Clearing out those wolves is going to be a fun time!
BlastaMasta742: ooh! yes! do that!
“Uh, I don’t know,” I say, still amazed that Mark and Leroy are actually in my chat. They live an hour away, so I figured I’d never see them again after today. They did seem to like my videos—Mark sure laughed a whole lot—but it didn’t even occur to me that they might check out my stream, especially not on the very same day. “It’d be hard to clear them out alone.”
NotLeeroyJenkins: The odds are 1 in 1024
xxMeisterFanxx: get your friend to help
BlastaMasta742: yeah, get jones
It’s Saturday night. Jones is probably out with her boyfriend or doing something people with friends actually do. “Oh, I don’t think she’s—” I stop myself. That’s Opa talking, or my scabs talking, or Code talking as he flicks my name to the floor. The fact is that Jones is more likely to spend an evening on our LotS server than anywhere else. She lives out in the boonies and can’t drive yet, so what else is she supposed to do? “Okay, let me message her.”
I pull up my chat with her and Dereck on my phone.
I’m streaming. Want to help me clear my base of those shadowwolves?
Her message comes back right away:
You mean the ones you killed me with?
Uh, yeah, those ones
Dereck’s face appears. I’m in!
There’s a pause, then Jones’s response: Give me ten minutes.
Half an hour later, I’m in the closet in my LotS castle with nothing but a flowerpot in my hand, shadowwolves snarling outside my door, and two friends armored up and on their way to grant me aid.
My stream chat has only a few people in it, but they’re people I like, and as I misjudge Jones and Dereck’s ETA and go running out of my closet and get utterly destroyed by shadowwolves, and as the chat cheers me on and laughs hysterically, I realize something: I am not alone.
A while later, once all the shadowwolves have finally been killed, Leroy and Mark start telling BlastaMasta742 all about LotSCON in chat—though noth
ing, thankfully, about my (failed) attempts to gain Code’s interest. Then Mark writes:
xxMeisterFanxx: Sam you meeting us there tmrw?
xxMeisterFanxx: how about at the shadowdragon at 10? We can go vote on the LotS expansion options.
And I hesitate for only a moment before saying, “I’ll be there.” Because I might not have gained Code’s promo today, but I think I gained something else.
Eighteen
ShadowWillow
I RUN INTO CODE ON MY WAY DOWN THE STAIRS. HE’S SITTING NEAR THE bottom, drinking a beer, clearly waiting for me, since his bedroom’s down in the basement, and he has no reason to go upstairs and no reason to be sitting in the hall by himself. Code doesn’t strike me as the type of person to need alone time—though I suppose I shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
He stands and grins at me, then accompanies me to the bottom of the stairs before saying, “Want to go hang out in my room for a bit?” He’s got a toque on again now that we’re done filming, and a hoodie, and he looks warm and sort of cuddly.
I chew my lip as I consider it. It might be nice to get to know him better, to figure out whether there could be a real spark between us, or whether we’re painting glitter on Styrofoam and hoping viewers will see it as a star.
But then he leans close to me and says, “I’ve got condoms, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I blink at him as my neck and face flush warm. Is he so famous that all he has to say is “Want to go back to my room with me,” and bam, a girl’s hooking up with him?
Or does his comment say more about who he is as a person than about his fame?
Or maybe it’s neither of those things, simply the fact that he’s twenty-one and I’m only eighteen. Eighteen, and it’s not like I’m a virgin, but I’ve only had one real boyfriend, and we broke up a year or so ago because he got accepted to University of Victoria in British Columbia, and if he was going to be across the country while I was going to be here, I didn’t see the point.
By the time I’m twenty-one, will I feel as casual about sex as Code apparently does? More important, will I have millions of subscribers like Code does?
Fan the Fame Page 18