Chapter 29 You’re Never Too Old for Drama
twenty-nine
you’re never too old for drama
I had to cancel my Saturday afternoon coffee date with Victory, since I don’t think I can leave my house today. At least not dressed in a manner suitable for public visibility.
Damien still won’t talk to me. And while I get what he’s saying—it does feel awful—I also want to strangle him because he’s doing the exact same thing to himself.
I’m following his lead, here. I can’t be the one to divulge all his personal information in order to come to his defense.
And if that’s not enough for him, then there’s nothing I can really do.
I don’t know who I’m supposed to be anymore, what I’m supposed to stand for. So maybe it’s better if I just sit down.
“I’m thinking of quitting the whole streaming thing,” I say at dinner with my family on Saturday night. (I figured I couldn’t cancel on them without Mom worrying about me, but at least I can wear sweatpants that have a huge stain at the crotch, and it doesn’t matter.)
Three sets of eyes from three generations of women turn on me, shocked, like I’ve just told them that I decided to go start a cult in the woods and only wear clothes woven from my own hair.
“What?” I respond defensively, before any of them have spoken.
“It sounded like you said you were going to quit streaming,” Mom says, watching me suspiciously.
“I did.”
“But you love doing that,” Marie says, and then frowns. “Wait, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but it’s not very mature, is it,” I say with as much nonchalance as I can feign, lifting my wine glass to my lips. I don’t let my face pinch up when I take a sip. “I think it’s about time I grow up, don’t you? I mean, I’m twenty-six, I’m not a kid anymore—”
Mom barks a laugh so loud that I can feel the table shake. “Sorry, that was just…very funny.”
“I’m not a kid!” I protest, sounding like a petulant child as I do so.
“No, of course not,” she replies, though her face keeps trying to break into a mocking smile. “But where is all of this coming from?”
“There’s just…online drama and stuff,” I tell her, dragging my fork through the herb and garlic mash on my plate. “And maybe I’m too old for all of that now.”
“You’re never too old for drama, dear,” Gram says right before a piece of glazed turnip slips right out of her chopsticks and goes flying across the table, landing next to Mom’s plate. They both carry on, unfazed.
“But other than some petty drama, do you enjoy it?” Mom asks me.
“Yeah, but there are more important things in life,” I say seriously.
“More important than joy?” She sounds completely incredulous.
“I should be finding a real job, saving money, thinking about the future.” Not having my whole life scrutinized by strangers who only want to see the worst in everyone.
“You have no idea what the future will bring,” Gram says, turning her attention to me. “You could choke on a crouton here at the table and die right now—you never know.”
“I really hope if I were choking on a crouton right here, you guys would at least try to save me.”
Gram shrugs and returns to her meal.
“Honeybum,” Mom says to me, reaching a hand over mine. “Listen to me: growing up is for suckers. Don’t do it.” She lets go of my hand with a nod. “I’m avoiding it for as long as possible.”
I sigh and look across the table at Marie, hoping for someone sane here to back me up. She must agree that I should move on from this, right? She’s always thought my obsession with gaming was silly, I can only imagine what she thinks of me making half my income from playing games online.
Although, with the new subscribers I’ve gotten over the past month, it’s more than half my income now. But that might all go away, now that I’m dating the Son of Satan, according to everyone.
If I’m still even dating him, I mean.
Fuck, I don’t even know.
I try not to let my panic show on my face when I look at my sister, but the sympathy in her eyes is not Yeah, these two are nuts, it’s Are you okay?
Marie, who thinks my interests are weird and stupid. Marie, who just broke up with her long-term boyfriend and had to move back into her childhood bedroom. Marie, who’s had to uproot her entire life at thirty-two.
She’s worried if I’m okay?
I’m pretty sure the wobble of my chin is all the answer she needs.
No.
I don’t think I’m okay.
Marie follows me up to my apartment after dinner. I didn’t invite her, but I don’t stop her, either.
She walks into the apartment like she always does, taking it all in like it’s the first time. It makes me feel self-conscious every time.
But instead of taking a seat on the couch right away, she turns to face me and opens her arms at her sides with a shrug. “Hug?”
And if that’s not the soggy paper straw that broke the camel’s back.
The floodgates are open as I rush into her arms, wrapping my own around her so hard that I briefly knock the wind out of her. I’m a sniveling mess and I know she must think I’m pathetic, but right now all I can think is that I’ve missed my sister for the past fifteen years. Maybe more.
“Do you wanna talk about it?” she asks, tucking her chin over my head even though she’s only an inch taller than I am. But I’m so hunched that it’s easy.
I nod feebly before letting go and following her to sit on the couch. Once we’re there, however, I don’t know if I can put a coherent thought together, let alone make a whole sentence.
“Is this about Damien?” She puts a reassuring hand on my back.
Yes—No. Maybe? “Sort of.” I take a steadying breath. “Well, yes, but not just about him. I mean, I don’t know if we’re okay right now, because he’s not talking to me, but also all this stuff is just making me hyper-aware of the fact that I don’t know who the fuck I am.”
“What stuff, exactly?”
I proceed to tell her about the recent Play’N drama. About everyone learning that I’m Scones’s girlfriend, and then Damien getting doxxed, and people calling me out for being with him when his dad’s so awful. And I don’t know how to fix it.
“Who even got all that info on him?” Marie asks, shaking her head.
“I…don’t know for sure,” I tell her. Even though I’ve had a theory swirling in my head for the past twenty-four hours.
“The only people who know his real name and that he’s SconesOfAyor are his friends and my friends, and none of them would do that…
But—We ran into Cameron the other day, and he apparently was in a class with Damien in university and knows who he is. ”
“You think he would do that?” Marie doesn’t know everything about what happened with me and Cameron, just that we were best friends for a long time and then suddenly we weren’t.
I don’t have the energy to tell her everything right now—but I’m starting to feel like maybe I could tell her one day. Like maybe she would actually listen.
“I have no idea. I don’t even know if he knows SconesOfAyor exists.” I laugh mirthlessly. “But it’s hard to be an SOA player and not know who he is. So if Cameron watches his streams and found out that Scones is dating me, and then saw me and Damien together…he could figure it out.”
“That’s still a shitty thing to do,” she says, horrified.
“I know, and I hope I’m wrong. But somebody did it. And now we have to deal with it.”
“I can’t believe people are making such a big deal of it, though,” she adds. “Like, can’t they tell what kind of person he is from his streams? He doesn’t strike me as that kind of guy.”
“That’s the thing! He may not share personal details or identifying information, but he is completely himself on stream,” I say emphatically.
“But people are acting like they have no idea what kind of person he is, what kind of things matter to him, what his values are. And I’m worried he’s going to quit streaming, which would be terrible. ”
“Quit streaming the same way you want to?” She raises an eyebrow at me, like she’s caught me in my own trap.
“You don’t get it.” I drop my face in my hands.
“Everyone wants different things from me—they want more cozy games, they want fewer cozy games. They want more Stones of Ayor, they want no Stones of Ayor. They want to know all about my personal life, then they want to judge me for it. I don’t know how to be the person they want me to be.
The person Damien wants me to be. Should I talk about him?
Should I ignore the comments? I have no freaking clue! ”
“Forget who anyone else wants you to be, for a second,” she says, firmly holding me by the shoulder. “All you can do is be you, to the best of your ability.”
“But I don’t know who that is.”
“Yes, you do, Audrey.” She looks so serious when she says it.
“You’ve always known who you are. As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been authentically yourself, to the best of your ability.
You didn’t abandon the things you loved just so the cool kids would like you.
And you realized within a year that you were in a relationship that wasn’t making you happy—some of us spend nearly a decade in a situation like that.
Because we’re too afraid to figure out who we are. ”
“You mean… You were never happy with Josh?” I ask, though I’m not sure if I’m allowed to talk about this. We haven’t talked about it since she told me they broke up.
She lowers her hand and her head, tucking a strand of light hair behind her ear.
“I thought I should be happy with him, and that was the best I could hope for,” she says.
“On paper, he was great. And I did like him, in a way. But I got tired of hiding parts of myself to fit what I thought people wanted from me.”
I watch her swallow a lump in her throat. “Hiding what?”
“You know that I played on our old N64 for years before you were old enough to use it,” she replies with a small smile. “And your Gameboy Color was mine first.”
“Yeah, but. I thought you grew out of those. Lost interest in games.”
“When I started middle school, the girls I hung out with thought games were too nerdy, or whatever, so I stopped playing. I didn’t tell anyone about the fantasy books I had hidden under my bed, either.”
“The what, now?” Why did I never snoop under Marie’s bed? (Gram’s drawers, that’s why.)
“I didn’t tell my friends anything real about me,” she continues with a sad laugh. “Not my favourite movies, or the kind of music I liked, or who I actually had crushes on…”
Neither of us says anything for what feels like an eternity, but the question is gnawing at the end of my tongue.
“I told myself I was probably bi,” she finally says, staring down at the carpet with her brow furrowed. “Because that meant I could just date guys and no one would ever have to know who I really liked. I could be…” She sighs. “Normal, for lack of a better word. It seems so stupid now, but—”
“No, I get it.” Now I’m the one rubbing her back.
“I wanted to be normal so bad,” she says as a dry sob shakes her shoulders.
“And I don’t mean straight, I just mean—I wanted to fit in and not be weird and not say the wrong things all the time and not have people look at me like I’m crazy because I did something strange without realizing it, and—and you just did all those things!
You just let yourself be weird and say strange things and hardly have any friends and I—I was so jealous.
You were a kid, and you had figured out life better than I had. ”
My shoulders shake too, but I think I’m laughing. “I’ve never had anything figured out, Marie,” I tell her. “If anything, I thought you had it all figured out.”
She laughs as well and leans against me. “I always felt like you thought I wasn’t cool enough for you,” she says. “You once called me a normie and I had to google it.”
“I’m sorry, that was clearly unfair of me; I didn’t know about your secret smutty fantasy books under the bed—”
“I never said they were smutty!”
“But you never said they weren’t—”
She pinches me in the arm and we both laugh again. “Well, maybe you can help me…un-normie myself. Help me figure this stuff out.”
“Will you help me figure out mine, too?” I ask, and she looks me in the eye.
“Of course I will,” she says sincerely. “I’ve always got your back, just like I know you’ve got mine. We’re Elsa and Anna.”