Chapter 15
I had, until that point, been lying to myself about my ability to return the two of us to how we’d been before Eleanor kissed me.
I couldn’t. I’d made it too clear what I wanted, had expressed myself to her too thoroughly and repeatedly, and she hadn’t responded.
Desire is vulnerability. I wanted to take back what I’d written.
I wanted to never tell Eleanor a secret again for the rest of my life, which is no way to be someone’s best friend.
Somehow, I needed to make more of myself so some of me wouldn’t belong to her.
The following Wednesday, we reconvened at Eleanor’s house to play The Sims. Eleanor and Margaret had apparently been playing the game together, which I found rude, though I had no one to whom to complain.
Eleanor’s room resembled the rest of the house: lightly colored, in a pristine state of order, air-conditioning on.
I knew she resented her mother’s insistence on maintaining their home as a public space, but she also liked to open the door and find her room airy and pure, counters spotless and curtains billowing.
Sometimes she left a single sweater on the floor in protest but otherwise struggled to violate her own sensibilities, however frustratingly they aligned with her mother’s.
Eleanor’s massive desktop computer had superior hardware, which allowed for a version of gameplay that was inaccessible on my permanently overheated laptop.
Eleanor owned every expansion pack and maintained a robust library of game modifications she’d found online and cut into the game’s standard code.
As a result, all her Sims had divinely slutty outfits and exaggerated facial features that made them resemble Bratz dolls.
Eleanor sat between us, with control of the mouse and keyboard.
Around her neck wound her favorite necklace, a thin silver chain with dangling pendant bubble letters that read Alone Time.
She hadn’t worn it in the days since my return.
I’d hung out with both Margaret and Eleanor more than once since the pool, though with neither of them alone.
The overt friction of my reentry seemed to have passed, but my previous position in the group remained elusive. More than ever before, I was third.
Margaret and I drew our seats to either side of Eleanor at her desk, wooden chairs we’d carried up from the kitchen.
The game began to load. Margaret fidgeted in her chair.
The Fourth had raised certain expectations for her.
A desirable version of summer had finally presented itself, a repeatable social arrangement.
Four girls and four boys, they were perfectly balanced—without me, I didn’t fail to observe.
They had a basement to hang out in. They had access to alcohol, necessitating exclusivity.
They couldn’t risk a party, just a select few people sneaking over, and Margaret loved to be among a select few, especially when one of them was the boy whom she wanted to see and who had not explicitly asked her to hang out since the parking lot.
But Bea and Olivia apparently preferred the uneven ratio.
They’d been hanging out with the boys by themselves, as recently as last night.
Bea had posted a selfie of herself and Olivia.
The plastic basketball hoop attached to a basement wall in the background signified the masculine presence of people not otherwise visible within the image.
“If she had a picture of them with the boys also in it, she would have posted that instead,” I said. Bea and Olivia didn’t ask other people for what they wanted, which made them less cool than Margaret in my opinion.
“True,” Eleanor said.
She had on hand-me-down burgundy mesh athletic shorts from one of her brothers, hiked way up on her hips with the elastic waistband turned over several times.
“That’s what they get for not inviting us.” She tucked a leg up into the desk. “Selfies.”
The wide rim of her shorts gapped from her thighs, leaving a darkened crescent between the fabric and her body. My eyes dragged on the shadow.
The save file Eleanor and Margaret had made together loaded onto the large, curved screen.
Every visible Sim was in some state of physical and emotional distress: one giggling maniacally in a bathtub, another in the midst of a fistfight, and a third urinating on the kitchen floor while she shouted Simish obscenities.
Margaret usually checked out of video games after the fifteen-minute mark.
Eleanor and I would play on while she looked at her phone.
This wasn’t rude of us. You’re still allowed, when you’re fifteen, to waste your friends’ time.
But Margaret hadn’t excused herself from this game.
She’d really been playing. I could see her influence in the packed household, the lingerie as outfits, and the somehow more than usually chaotic character names.
As soon as the game loaded, Eleanor let it play.
She didn’t pause to assess the situation or provide her Sims with instructions.
She preferred to see what would happen if the avatars were left to follow their game-generated inclinations before she started telling them what to do.
She also sensed Margaret’s mood and so made a cheerful announcement: Margaret’s boy had recently sent her a picture of his visible erection inside a pair of sweatpants.
“Well, obviously I need to see that,” I said with a degree of enthusiasm meant for Margaret but that I belatedly realized Eleanor might consider hurtful. Then I wished she would.
I eyed the picture Margaret held in front of me for what I hoped was the right amount of time.
The sight of the hard line against soft fabric had a nonzero effect on me.
Evidence of desire is difficult to witness unscathed.
My neck felt hot, and looking at the picture while both Eleanor and Margaret looked at me produced a high hum in my brain.
Any arousal in front of them felt like a risk of injury.
I removed my gaze from the screen. Eleanor waited for my reaction.
“Boys are fools,” I said. “Imagine putting your genitals out into the universe.”
But Eleanor didn’t seem reassured. If anything, she appeared angry, maybe that I’d implied she might require reassurance.
“I haven’t decided what to send back,” Margaret said, putting her phone away, and I realized she might have been planning to send him an equivalent image of herself. None of us had any idea how to reverse course from the opinion I’d just expressed, so instead we began to watch the Sims.
One of them was about to give birth, which created an existential problem for her housemates.
A household could contain a maximum of eight Sims. When you attempted to add a ninth, the game would prompt you to select one of the existing Sims to move out.
Or you could murder someone in advance to make room.
“You want to bring a child into this messed-up world?” I joked, but the thought of a tiny digital baby crying unattended scraped me internally like a fine metal comb.
Eleanor, who always knew when I wasn’t really kidding, shot me an irritated look and then began the process of voting someone off the island with Margaret.
I didn’t try to intervene further. This was Eleanor’s house, Eleanor’s computer, and Eleanor’s game with Margaret.
I’d been present for thirty seconds and so far said exclusively the wrong things.
They’d probably gotten a Sim pregnant on purpose to facilitate this murder scenario.
I wanted to seize the mouse and solve every problem.
I wanted to feed all the Sims and tell them to go to sleep.
I wanted to get up from this desk and leave.
“I think we should get rid of Pizzarina,” Margaret said. “Because she’s the least good-looking.”
Eleanor shook her head. “We should get rid of the Sim that the other Sims like least.”
“No! We can’t get rid of Clarissa,” Margaret protested.
All eight of them were variously entangled with each other, but Clarissa had a number of thrilling hate courtships underway. She was Enemies with Benefits with half the house and therefore too central to its drama to be eliminated.
“You’re right,” Eleanor agreed. “We need the Sim with the least relationship points total, of either positive or negative value.”
She reached for a pencil and paper to start recording each Sim’s relationships.
I looked at Margaret because I knew that she hated and immediately grew impatient whenever Eleanor tried to implement a systematic approach to a problem, but Margaret didn’t look back, and when I returned my eyes to the screen, I had the sinking feeling that Eleanor had just withdrawn her gaze from my face.
Only then did I hear her start to scrawl across the paper as she took down numbers.
That’s how easy it is to wrong someone when you aren’t properly talking to them.
Then, while Eleanor was still penciling in and comparing the feelings of eight pretend people, the game came to a decision for her.
A purple notification box appeared. Kitten, the Sim who’d been left to her own devices in the bubble bath, had transitioned from Very Playful into Hysterical and was now in the process of Dying from Laughter.
The Grim Reaper showed up in the bathroom to mop the floor and collect her soul.
Margaret cheered, took pictures, and posted them with the caption: me.
“You could restart from your last save,” I suggested to Eleanor. “If you want to finish your calculations.”
I thought this was a friendly offer, but she gave me a haughty look. Cheat codes to print money or manufacture moods were one thing. She drew a different line.
“It’s against the spirit of the game,” she replied. “To try to take back what you’ve done.”