Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Andi
Near midnight, I leave Heartrender behind and promptly plant my right foot in a plastic container full of gelatinized pad see ew; the driver must’ve delivered it without me noticing. After Cat tromped off, I forgot about feeding myself and spent the rest of the evening working. Hunger doesn’t bother me when I’m in the zone, and it’s too late now to indulge in noodles that have said hi to the bottom of my shoe, so I chuck the takeout and head down to the garage where my motorcycle is parked.
This deep into the night, it’s only a twenty-minute ride to my apartment outside of Boulder. Despite the chill in the air, I drive without my jacket on, letting the wind play along my bare arms and shoulders. The hours I keep are so long that when I am outside, I want to feel nature on every square inch of me. I’d go without a helmet if I could get away with it.
As always, my place is exactly how I left it in the morning. The lights are off, the sheets are rumpled, and new molds are evolving in my kitchen sink. This last bit grosses even me out, so I suck it up and plunge my hands in some soapy water, apologizing all the while to my fuzzy friends. It’s not that I’m unhygienic. I change my clothes and wash my hair, clean the lint trap and take out the trash. It’s just that I don’t see the point of putting on a show if there’s nobody to see.
Done with the dishes, I wipe my hands on the back of my jeans and fish out my phone to dial my mom. It’s past eleven where she’s at—she left Candlewood Springs, Colorado, where I grew up to move out to Temecula, California, a year ago—but she’s a night owl, like me. Sure enough, she picks up on the second ring. Her voice saying my name is like a lighthouse, bright and blaring and reminding me to keep my distance.
“Andi? You eat yet?”
“Sure, Mom. It’s past midnight.” I collapse into bed. Lolling my head to the side, I rest my phone on my cheek. “How was your day?”
“Okay, okay. Work okay?”
I think about my confrontation with Cat earlier this evening, the way the tops of her cheeks bloomed with anger. “Work’s great. Busy.”
“You hear from Iris lately?”
I must shift, because my phone slides down and hits my collarbone. Pulling it back up into place, I bite down on the edges of my tongue. “No.”
A sigh velvets the connection between us. “Shame. I would’ve liked to see you end up with someone like her.”
Iris. I was with her for all of college and then some; then, the week I turned twenty-four and landed the Aftermath job, she left me. Even though we’d already picked out wedding bands together. Even though I’d chosen Aftermath in part because she needed us to be in Seattle. Her reason? A last minute, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that had come along for her to work for the government of Ethiopia as a health policy researcher. “I’d be shaping an entire country’s future, Andi,” she said. “You understand, right? Long distance is too hard, and … we’re young. I’m supposed to be trying out new things and choosing me over other people.”
“Over us, you mean,” I corrected. “You’re choosing you over us.”
In the end, I moved to Seattle alone, where I worked my twenties away until I’d written the perfect, romanceless game.
My mom sniffs. “What about the other one? The one you dated after Iris? I remember you said she moved to Colorado too.”
Grinding my molars together, I move my phone to my other cheek. “It’s over, Mom. Why hang on to the past?”
“Ai, Andi,” my mom says. “I just wish things had turned out differently.”
I close my eyes. This again. I call my mom every week because otherwise she’d talk to no one, but these days, my patience meter is so low I can barely get through five minutes. “Mom—”
She clears her throat. “It’s late. Go to sleep, eh? Good night.”
The line clicks and goes dead.
I sigh. Once upon a time, I would’ve called my mom my best friend. She gave me free rein as a kid, didn’t believe in curfew or vegetables, and took me out into the desert, where we’d camp for days, drinking Mountain Dew while howling at the moon. She pretended not to notice when I stayed up late to read books by flashlight under the covers and even bought me my first journal. “For my little writer,” she said.
Then I attended one games design lecture in college, and overnight, my heart was made up. Nothing could beat the sense of power and achievement that accompanied creating an entire world and watching a player lose themself in it. How do you tell a story using a handful of buttons and two joysticks? More importantly, how do you make a player forget they’re being told a story at all?
The only downside to my epiphany was that all of a sudden, my mom and I were fighting all the time. Over my major, my summer internships, my sprawling forearm tattoo of the Colorado Rockies, which I’d gotten in a fit of inebriated anger but didn’t regret. By my senior year, we were barely speaking to each other. Graduation passed in silence. The very next day, I emptied my mom’s trailer of all my childhood things and moved in with Iris.
Things have scarcely improved since then—as evidenced by the way my mom looked at me in the weeks after I left Seattle and moved back in with her. Sometimes I wonder, if my dad had stuck around, how I would’ve turned out differently. Would I still love games, or is my hobby-turned-career just a manifestation of the gaping hole he left behind, as my therapist thinks? Would my mom hate what I do less? Would she hate what I do at all?
I shouldn’t care what she thinks. My dad didn’t care what we thought when he left my mom and me behind. Iris didn’t care what I thought when she boarded her plane to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. So how come I can’t stop caring?