Don't Hate the Player: Part II

On one side of the Telltale decision matrix was Emilia Romero, the exact person whose two-story image he’d fled the players’ box to avoid.

Jake’s vision snagged on Emilia as one possible focus, which seemed indulgent and made him feel as if his rib cage had swapped functions with a beehive.

Worst case scenario, they crashed and burned, and the one thing he took away from this day was running into the girl he baby-duck imprinted on in the fourth grade, the one who didn’t even remember his name and made him feel physically and emotionally microwaved.

Nobody else had to tell Jake this was pathetic. He was incredible at producing that assessment from both himself and apparently everyone he’d ever met in his entire life.

“Right! Don’t let me keep you. You were probably getting in the zone down here, sorry.” That was a liberal interpretation of what Jake was doing before Emilia showed up, but he was more than happy to let Emilia keep thinking that.

I’m a master of planning ahead, but my long-lost arcade friend from fourth grade showing up at my top secret GLO tournament and telling me he goes to my school is not something anyone could have predicted, much less covered in a contingency plan.

I am a tree undisturbed by the wind. My thoughts are the surface of a placid mountain lake.

I know he’s my competition and the number one threat to my personal and professional equilibrium, but I still have room to be impressed.

He’s still glaring at the TV like it’s his next target for an anticlimactic Dasani assault.

I’d say goodbye to the rest of Fury, but Byunki’s deep in his drama, and as much as I don’t love his behavior today, I respect his commitment to brooding.

...my sweatshirt gambit actually seems to be working. Nobody would expect me to avoid the spotlight after my grand entrance onstage this afternoon, so moving through the crowd is as easy as looking like I’m someone who doesn’t want anyone paying attention to her.

Most of the cars back here are team vans or arena staff, so there isn’t a huge risk that I get hit by a rogue Honda, but if I did I’d be more concerned about someone telling my parents I died outside an esports tournament than I would about sustaining any grievous bodily harm.

Upon closer inspection, he is shivering. I’m not seeing another character through the rain; I’m seeing someone standing in front of where the other poster should be. It’s Jake Hooper, standing at the bus stop in a T-shirt, looking sixteen seconds from hypothermic collapse.

“So whatever you’re doing, I definitely think you should ditch it so we can have another date. Just kidding. Kind of.” He is not kidding at all. The audacity of this—

I think I’d assumed every gamer was like Jake, who only cared about how well I could play and always treated me like an equal he could learn from. Naive assumption...

Talking would mean we’re being cordial, which is too far down the path to friendly, and friendly is not the goal here.

Dude looked like Kevin from Sin City—and while a bespectacled comic-book cannibal was not the most charming comparison I could have made for the virtual stranger I had invited into my car, the bright light coming from the bus stop’s painfully white lamps made it the most apt.

I glance over at his face—his glasses have defogged on their own, revealing his huge, dark eyes, and I make a mental note to watch what I say around him: Sure, he looks cute when he’s wet and helpless, but there might be a devious mind lurking under all that hair. Engage but do not trust.

“Yeah, it’s this crossbow bolt that Pharaoh traps a soul in before shooting. The animation is really cool. You can only do it if at least one opposing player has died in a certain radius because the implication is he’s, like, harvesting their spirit as a weapon, which is dark but also kind of sick?”

“And against a ghost character, it’s like ping and their spectral armor totally collapses.”

Every meme, in-joke, and fandom quirk exists solely online for me, so actually speaking about it face-to-face is something I only started to do this afternoon with Fury and now with Jake, who I’ve just insulted.

He’s spot on about Pharaoh; he’s canonically four thousand years old, kind of a space lich, and loves wearing capes.

“You’re not dumb,” I say reflexively.

They’re racially ambiguous in the show, but they’re the only Latinos in Westeros and I identify with them very strongly.

There’s so much dissonance between how I feel looking at the school where I bust my butt for whatever combination of letters will make my parents happy and the lot where Connor force-feeds me matcha lattes, and how I feel laughing in my car with Jake, whose entire life is GLO.

Jake’s house—apartment, actually, now that I’m driving up to the building—is only a minute away from school, and even that proximity is stressing me out.

“Stop saying sorry.”
“Sorry.” And this time he says it with a cheeky smile.

My phone, which had so helpfully shouted directions at me through my car’s Bluetooth connection, chooses that moment to blast the chorus from “Funkytown.” Jake and I leap apart like we’ve just been accosted by the ghost of 1979.

shineedancer: don't you have enough on your plate Jake? aren't you still hyperventilating and/or recovering from the bus
JHoops: why would i hyperventilate

BobTheeQ: Not sure! Stay the course and when I can tell you, I'll tell you.
ElementalP: ominous, exciting. I like it

shineedancer: oh come on i thought we agreed to do these postmortems as a team

When they both showed up this morning, Penny smoothed over my mom’s confusion by introducing Matt as our new campaign manager. It gave him just enough clout to be allowed in my room as long as we keep the door open and Matt’s butt never touches the bed.

It sucks that it took winning to shut that guy up, since it only proves what I’ve known since the first time I played GLO—I have to be unassailably great to prove I belong in the same room as guys who are half as good.

Bless anyone who’s never ventured into the gaming underbelly of the culture war.

The world-smashing tectonic crunch of discussing GLO with Penny was hard enough.