Chapter Six
“WELL, THE GOOD news is they didn’t kick you out,” Cass says, clacking his chopsticks together like a hungry crab with skinny wooden claws.
His hand hovers over the few pieces left in the take-out sushi container and selects the tempura roll I mentally marked for him before we started eating.
It’s the one with the tail, and while I’m no vegetarian, I still think it’s a little messed up that they give you food with its butt out.
“I know,” I say and slide the clear plastic lid we’ve been using as a shared soy sauce reservoir across the floor.
“But they might as well have. I’m last place in a popularity contest, and every other contestant hates my guts.
Who knows what those rankings could have looked like if Brian factored in their social performance metrics or whatever.
Ugh. I hate this. I hate it here. I wish I never won that stupid battle at Wizzcon. ”
“No, you don’t,” Cassius says around a huge mouthful of shrimp. Gross. I think he senses my disapproval, since he swallows before he speaks again. “Or else you wouldn’t have met me.”
“You’re right,” I admit. “Even if you’re totally not supposed to be here right now.” Cassius gives me a quizzical look. “I mean in my dorm room, alone, with me. No boys in the girls’ dorm rooms?”
“Oh.” Cass shrugs. “Well that’s stupid. Why are they all up in everyone’s business deciding who’s a girl?”
“Good point,” I say and pick up a piece of avocado roll. “And it’s like, people are gay sometimes, Brian.”
“Not me, though,” Cass says quickly. “Just putting that out there.”
“And, like, people have all kinds of friends,” I continue.
“Friends, yeah,” Cass echoes.
“I mean”—my train of thought is picking up steam—“I don’t have friends, plural. I have you. And everyone else thinks I’m the academy’s resident Benedict Arnold.”
“Listen, I’m not sure that tracks, but either way we’re going to have to work on you making more up-to-date references.”
“Fine.” Cass knows I had a Hamilton phase that included going extra hard on the homeschool curriculum for the Revolutionary War. “A more game-adjacent example of someone who ruins everything for everyone.” I rack my brain. “Ganondorf? I don’t want to be Ganondorf.”
“You are not Ganondorf,” Cass assures me. “Though if you take Kavi and Trieu up on that makeover, you could totally cosplay a Gerudo. They’re basically an entire town of autistic black hotties.”
I’m so caught up in thinking about betrayal that I almost—almost consider cosplaying my way out of this. No, that’s ridiculous. And likely expensive.
“Anyway,” Cass continues, “if they really wanted to stop us from boning, they’d put an RA on our floor. Or, like, cameras.”
“Ugh.” I shudder. “Please, don’t give them any ideas on how to make this even more of a reality show.
” I point my chopsticks at the tray to make a claim on the last spicy tuna roll, and Cassius hums the wordless note that means he’s fine if I take it.
Don’t mind if I do. Who knew the Food Emporium had such edible sushi?
“We’d be a scandalous early season plotline.” Cass makes a full meal out of that word, “scandalous.” It’s a rare display of his latent sense of drama. “Illicit yellowtail in the middle of the night, oh my.”
“Middle” is a strong word for the part of the New York summer night we’re avoiding by staying indoors.
It’s just after eight on Sixty-Second Street; the sun is still out and burning copper in the reflected windows of the midtown skyscrapers I can see from the dorm window.
It’s a southern exposure, with a floor-to-ceiling view way higher up than anywhere I’ve lived before.
“Yeah, we should have gotten way more food,” I say. “We could have eaten it all on live stream like a mukbang and rake in the tips.”
“Then we could use the money to buy more sushi,” Cassius adds thoughtfully. “Unlimited sushi hack: Unlocked?”
“Capitalism. The word you’re looking for is ‘capitalism.’”
There’s a knock at my dorm room door, which I have propped open with the lock as a gesture of goodwill toward anyone who might find me definitely hiding in here with a boy.
“Zora?” It’s Kavi. We all have single rooms, which is excellent, but hers is right next to mine.
The top floor of this building is girls only, the boys take up two floors below us, but from the amount of activity I’ve been hearing outside in the hallway, I think there’s plenty of socializing happening regardless of where everyone keeps their stuff at night.
“Hide,” I whisper to Cassius. We scramble to our feet to hide both him and the sushi before Kavi comes in and are remarkably unsuccessful.
When Kavi presses on the open door, Cass has half a leg inside the wardrobe and my pose near the bed makes it look like I’m trying to tuck an armful of supermarket sushi trays under my pillow for a midnight snack.
It’s about a billion times more suspicious than if she’d found us eating dinner on the floor like humans.
Luckily, she doesn’t bat an extended eyelash.
“I just wanted to see if you were okay after what happened. I was gonna say we should all get some dinner after the match, but you just, like, nyoomed right up Broadway once they let us out.” I watch her spot the sushi trays, to which she apparently declines to react.
“I’m fine,” I say, dumping the containers in the trash. “Thanks for asking.”
“For the record,” Kavi continues, “the general vibe is that it was pretty crummy for Brian to surprise everyone like that. No one blames you for being confused.”
“No, they do,” I respond. It’s nice of her to try and minimize the damage, but they do.
Today’s match was supposed to be a celebration, a chance for every student in the academy to reintroduce themselves to the world and start their journeys.
Instead, today ended with a fart noise, a confiscation of everyone’s video files, and a ranking based on the boring reality of how well everyone played the game.
“Well, they shouldn’t,” Kavi amends her statement. “You’re not the only one who didn’t react well to being on camera.”
“I also low-key flipped out.” Cassius backs out of the wardrobe and brings the doors together gently. “Told the guy to get out of my face, same as you. I just didn’t say, you know.”
“You can say it in real life, Cass,” I say sarcastically. It reminds me of something Ivan said earlier, about things in games not translating to reality. That was about me shooting a guy, though. This is just language.
“Personally, I think you did everyone a favor,” Kavi says. “You gave us a dress rehearsal for when we actually start competing on Wednesday, and that’s not the worst thing ever.”
“Does anyone else see it like that?” I ask.
“Not now they don’t.”
For all her blinding good looks and popular girl aura, Kavi is really nice. And funny. Ah, hell, am I forming a bond? A real-life, non-GLR alliance? A coalition, but casual? What would that even be?
Friend. The word I’m looking for is friends.
“But they might,” Kavi continues, “if you show your face at the party that’s forming in the lounge on our floor. Let people meet you, so your whole aura is less …”
“Elphaba in the first half of Wicked?” I try to finish her sentence.
“Abstract,” Kavi corrects. “No one knows who you are yet, so it’s easy to villainize you.”
Normally I would object to compulsory socializing, but she’s got a point. If I’m going to belong in this competition, I need to be someone other than who I was this morning. More importantly, I need to show people that I’m not who they think I am. Can’t do that eating floor sushi with Cass.
“Sure, I’m in. I’ll be out in a bit.”
Kavi claps her hands excitedly. “Yay! You’re totally welcome too, by the way,” she tells Cassius.
“Oh gosh, thank you!” Cassius’s smile is genuine. “But I woke up at, like, two this morning, so I’m going to bed.” Cass does look tired.
“Some other time, then,” Kavi responds, unfazed. “Come out whenever, Zora. We’ll be just outside at the end of the hall.” She waves her pinky finger at Cass before backing out the door and leaving us alone.
“That ‘we’ she keeps talking about”—Cassius says, oblivious to Kavi’s finger-flirting—“do you think that includes Ivan?”
“I mean,” I begin, “I think she means the other players, which technically includes Ivan. I highly doubt he’s out there advocating for my inclusion.”
“Do you really think he still has a problem with you?”
“Why does it matter? I have a problem with him. ‘I hate you’ is a complete sentence. Gandhi said that, I think.”
“Hey, I get it.” Cassius puts his hands up guiltily. “You know I’d never try to nudge you off a grudge.”
It’s true, he wouldn’t. Cassius accepts me exactly as I am: awkwardness, introversion, near-permanent rage, and all.
The academy is a program designed to make me change who I am to succeed.
I don’t want to let that happen, but what choice do I have?
Speaking of changing, I should probably put on a shirt I didn’t walk twenty blocks in eighty-degree heat in.
I walk over to the wardrobe and pull it back open.
I know exactly what I have in here. Six T-shirts for game days, four sleeveless tops for when I want to show these guns off, my jean jacket with all my Wizzard pins, two pairs of jeans, exactly one summer dress because Clive thought I should pack it for “girls’ nights,” and a thrift store jean skirt I’m not sure fits but looks very 2002.
I am very good at packing a lot of stuff into one bag, but if I knew I was going to be auditioning for the gaming equivalent of a K-pop competition show, I would have brought something a little more camera-friendly. Skirt’ll have to do.
“If it was just the Wizzcon stuff with Ivan, I’d be over it by now,” I say and pull a purple tank top off its hanger. Cass makes a noise of disbelief.