Chapter 18 Remembering it Differently
eighteen
remembering it differently
For two-and-a-half years, SconesOfAyor was my favourite streamer.
For almost a week, he was my nemesis.
For a bit over a month, he was the person I most wanted to spend time with.
And for the past two days, he’s the person I’ve been hiding from.
Because I got nerd-girl horny at him and I don’t know how to come back from that.
When I got home on Saturday, I went straight to my couch and cocooned myself in whatever blankets I could find, after texting my mother that I wasn’t feeling well enough for dinner.
I avoided my gaming computer for the entire night, instead watching Netflix on my laptop and playing Cloud Quest on my Switch.
(Because sometimes you just need to be a cloud in handheld mode.)
I managed to brave the big computer on Sunday, but I made sure to appear offline and turn my notifications off—though, not without seeing some of Damien’s messages first. I couldn’t bring myself to read them at the time, but it looked like there was word-vomit and it made me feel even more guilty.
This evening, however, I can’t stay hidden because I have a stream to do. My viewership is not high enough for me to skip a day, especially since I only stream three days a week, and video games are expensive; I need all the hits I can get, at my tier.
Or, at least, my previous tier.
I hadn’t looked at my subscriber count since the joint stream, and the newcomers from that managed to bump me into the next revenue tier on Play’N. I can get higher paying ads now, and a tip jar for subscribers to pay me directly—it’s exciting but terrifying at the same time.
Do any of these people even know what I stream? How many of them are just here to watch me fail? Are they subscribed out of pity? Am I just Scones’s pathetic friend to them? Does it matter?
I put on another mechanical keyboard themed t-shirt—this time with a retro-looking graphic of a keyboard and the words KEEB IT REAL in bubble letters—and throw a chunky cardigan over it.
I’m not going to let the fear of new subscribers stop me from being a hundred percent myself tonight, even though part of me wants to scrub away every embarrassing thing about my personality and present myself as someone who’s remotely cool.
But if being myself sends people running, then so be it.
“I think that means you’re probably doing something right.”
The usual suspects are all here tonight, and it eases some of the anxiety in my stomach to know that people who do like my streams will be watching, too. Especially since I know they all love Cloud Quest almost as much as I do, and I really need the comfort of familiarity tonight.
I ask the people in the chat if they have a preference of which level I should do this time, since I have a couple minutes before I’m scheduled to begin, and several people chime in with suggestions. Including Damien.
He suggests level thirteen, the final level. The one that makes me cry when I play it, sometimes, because it’s so beautiful and heartbreaking and hopeful at the same time. I’ve never played that level on a stream before.
There are a lot of things I’ve never done before.
At the start of the level, the world is all grey and polluted and rotten, and my little cloud has to bring it all back to life. But the cloud can get sick, can get polluted as well, and it’s nearly impossible to get ahead of the spreading rot.
In the early levels of the game, the cloud is graceful and fluffy and makes everything bloom beneath it, brings out the best in everyone.
It always reminds me of Victory, who brightens a room just by walking in, who makes the world more beautiful with her paintings and murals—who helped me to bloom and thrive after high school desiccated me.
But the cloud in level thirteen is like me. Trying to be good, trying to do the right thing, yet so often getting it wrong. It doesn’t belong here anymore. It’s defective. Broken. The cloud has lost its identity, as the toxicity of the world has infected it over and over.
Only by joining with other clouds can it heal itself—they heal each other. And eventually there are enough healthy clouds to bring life back to the ground below. This is the part that always gets me in the feels.
I don’t know how to find other clouds in real life. I don’t know how to heal myself or anyone else. If anything, when I find a fluffy cloud like Victory or Damien, I just latch on, feeding off their goodness while providing nothing in return.
Sooner or later, all the clouds will realize I’m a dead weight and drop me.
I’m not as chatty as usual in tonight’s stream, but I think it suits the vibe of this level. The chat is slow, too, even though I can see that a lot of people are watching—a lot. Way more than my streams get most days.
I manage to hold it together, though, and I don’t actually cry on camera, but as I’m wrapping things up, I see a familiar username in the chat again.
SconesOfAyor: You’re online.
To anyone else, it would just seem like a stupidly obvious observation, and if they were familiar with his dry sense of humour, it might even seem like the sort of thing he would say just to be weird. But to me, it reads a bit differently.
Maybe he thinks I’ve read his messages and ignored him—which is not quite true, since I didn’t actually read any of them. Or maybe he assumes I’ve been busy, and this is the first chance I’ve had to be online. In any case, I get his meaning: he wants to chat before I run away again.
I’m feeling emotionally raw after the game, but also too tired to keep running. As soon as I end the stream, I open our chat window to read everything he’s sent in the past forty-eight hours.
SconesOfAyor:
Hey
Are you okay?
Are we okay?
SconesOfAyor:
Right, you’re probably having dinner with your family
I forgot. Again.
Call me when you get this, I guess
I mean, yes, please do that
There’s no “I guess”
SconesOfAyor:
So I don’t know if you’re pretending to be offline again or if you are just busy doing other things, which is fair, but if you’re there could we please talk?
If you’re not there, I hope you are enjoying whatever it is you’re doing
SconesOfAyor:
Wow, it’s been over 24 hours since you played SOA4
Are you okay???
SconesOfAyor:
I’m hoping you’re not dead and you’re just mad at me or something
In which case I hope I can apologize and make things right
If I upset you or hurt you in some way, I’m really sorry
Or if you’re embarrassed about Malcolm walking in, I’ve caught him doing way worse, it’s really fine
SconesOfAyor:
Am I making things worse?
I’m probably making things worse
SconesOfAyor:
48 hours since SOA4??
SconesOfAyor:
Wait, maybe you’re just burnt out on the game after all the speedrunning
Which makes sense and I am being a dumbass about it
SconesOfAyor:
I’m being totally weird, aren’t I?
You probably just have, you know, a life
And I’m here worried that you hate me because I kissed you
I really wanted to kiss you
Maybe I shouldn’t have said that
But it’s true
SconesOfAyor:
Please talk to me
SconesOfAyor:
I’m watching your stream right now
It’s my favourite part of the game
Sometimes I feel like I’m the broken cloud
I try to fix things and I make them worse
Like this, I think
SconesOfAyor:
I miss you
Tears sting my eyes when I reach the end of Damien’s wall of text, and I can feel the weight of everything tonight—everything from the past two days—crushing me all at once.
I’ve spent this whole time worrying that I’m too much, that I’m overwhelming, that I want him more than he wants me—meanwhile he’s sent me a goddamn novel about how much he misses me when I’m not online.
I’ve spent this whole time feeling guilty for kissing him out of the blue—not to mention…
everything else—but he wanted to kiss me, too.
As if I’m not the polluted cloud. As if I’m the one that brings life to the world.
I see the three dots bounce as he starts to type something else, but I mash the video call button before he can finish it. I can’t do this over text. I need to talk to him.
“Hi—” he says when he picks up, after a matter of seconds, still adjusting the headphones over his ears. He stops when he sees me, probably concerned that my eyes are leaking. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I reply with a sad laugh, wiping the last bit of dampness from my eyelashes. “Level thirteen just gets me, you know?”
“Maybe it was a bad suggestion. Sorry.”
“No, it’s my favourite, too.” I offer a small smile, but I don’t know what else to say. I take a breath and tuck my legs up onto the chair before continuing. “I’m sorry for…hiding for two days.”
He smiles back a little. “So, you were hiding, then.”
“I was really embarrassed, okay?”
“Malcolm really doesn’t care—”
“Not because of him, because of you,” I tell him, hugging my knees to my chest. “I mean, it’s because of me, but you’re the one I’m worried I made a fool of myself in front of—”
“You didn’t,” he says more seriously.
“I basically mauled you.”
“I think you’re remembering it differently than I am.” He laughs. “But either way, just to be perfectly clear about this: I was into it. And it seemed like you were also—”
“I was,” I say quietly.
“Then what’s the problem, exactly?”
The problem is I don’t do this. I’m bad at this. At sex stuff and talking about sex stuff. At anything that isn’t video games, really. But I don’t know how to tell him this, so I just shrug.
“Look, it’s cool if you’re not interested,” he continues. “And I want to keep hanging out like we have been, no matter what, but… Do you maybe want to go out with me? Like a date?”
I stare at the screen, wide-eyed. “Um.”
“We don’t have to do—I mean, if you don’t usually like…physical stuff, that’s fine,” he adds quickly. “Whatever you’re comfortable with. I just…like you.”
He likes me. He wants to date me. He wants to do physical stuff with me, but he’s fine if I don’t want to.
Holy heck, I think I want to.
“I don’t know,” I say quietly, nearly a whisper.
“Okay…” He looks like he’s disappointed but trying to hide it.
“No, I mean, I don’t know if I—” I swallow nervously. “Maybe I would like that stuff. With you.”
“Okay…” he says again, though the corner of his mouth lifts in a half-smile.
“Did you have something in mind, then?” I ask, and his eyebrows go up. I laugh a little, shaking my head. “Where to go on our date, smartass.”
He shrugs. “Green Bean?”
The suggestion is for me, I can tell. To make me comfortable.
And part of me thinks I should suggest something else.
Something more interesting, something more conveniently located for him.
Already I’m worrying about how to be a good girlfriend—it’s not a label I thought I’d have to worry about again, and I’m already jumping the gun.
But instead, I nod. “Sounds good.”
If I’m going on a date for the first time in years, maybe comfortable is best.