Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Cat
The next day, I arrive at Revivify at 10:55 AM . I take advantage of the few minutes I have before Andi shows up by ordering myself a large iced coffee, a breakfast sandwich, and a chocolate chip cookie the size of my face. Securing the two armchairs by the bay window at the front of the caf é , I wait for my food—and Andi—to show up.
I’m halfway through a BuzzFeed quiz on nineties-era video game music when Andi casts a shadow over me. Startling, I take in her navy-blue Henley, heather-gray joggers, and worn baseball cap. She looks softer today, and as she slings her bag off her shoulder, I catch a glimpse of her eyes: tired and bruised with low-slung hammocks. Like she spent the entire night tossing and turning instead of sleeping.
“Sorry for being late,” she says, tugging at the brim of her hat.
I check the time on my laptop. It’s three minutes past the hour. I almost ask her if everything’s okay before deciding we don’t have that kind of relationship. Instead, I point to my screen. “What sixteen-bit video game track are you?”
Sheer stubbornness keeps me from taking back the ridiculous question. I’m about to get up and look for my sandwich when Andi leans over and drifts a finger over the trackpad.
I wait, holding my breath as she clicks through question after nonsensical question. She smells like citrus and cinnamon and other warm things, and my belly somersaults. I remind myself that she’s probably wearing a pound of hair product underneath that hat.
When the final result pops up—“Peaceful Days” from Chrono Trigger —she whoops. “Damn straight,” she says, almost smiling. “Yasunori Mitsuda is only the best composer since Rachmaninoff. You know he gave himself stomach ulcers while working on this score? Terrible as it sounds, I’m glad he powered through them. The world would be a bleaker place without his music. At one point, I thought I was going to—”
She breaks off, as if suddenly realizing she’s actually gushing about something. To me, no less. “What?” I prompt.
Shaking her head, she gestures toward the counter. “I’m gonna get something to eat from Val. You want anything?”
“I’m good,” I say. Okay then.
Andi returns with a black coffee and a croissant at the same time the barista—Val, I guess—drops off my heaping breakfast sandwich. I nearly dislocate my jaw wrapping it around the two halves of the bagel. It’s not something I would ever do around polite company—I’m pretty sure there was a Bailey School Kids book titled Chubby Women Don’t Eat Real Food in Public —but around Andi, I don’t care. It’s not like her opinion of me can drop any further.
“So … Dane,” I say when I clear my first mouthful.
“Dane,” Andi repeats, tearing off a delicate corner of her pastry. “I realized the other day it’s probably a good idea for us to connect on what thoughts you had for Dane x Sentinel before I took it over. So we don’t, you know, collide or anything.”
I stare at Andi, nonplussed.
“With the storylines you already have going,” Andi adds. “For Kelsi, Evaralin, Catha, and anyone else.”
Unbelievable. She’s playing this whole meeting off as if it’s a routine check-in, a simple sync between two creatives working on the same game, when really she needs help because she’s stuck . I want to laugh in her face for being too fragile to say it like it is, but we’re in public, so I settle for smiling.
“Um, Cat?” Andi says, fiddling with her ball cap. “What do you think?”
“Sure thing, boss,” I say, honeying the ends of my words. “Let me share with you the plans I had for Dane x Sentinel before you so magnanimously saved me from having to write them. Thank you, by the way.” I lean in like I’m telling her something I’d rather not confess. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if you, with your immense talent, hadn’t come into my life.”
Andi’s jaw tightens as a spray of color, visible even against her tan skin, works its way up the sharp planes of her face. Unwilling to give her an opportunity to retaliate, I keep talking. “Here’s what I had in mind.”
For two and a half hours, we work. I have to give Andi credit: for all that I needle her, she doesn’t rise to the bait, and after another handful of snide comments, the fun wears off.
We start off by reviewing Dane’s character arc, which isn’t so much an arc as a straight line with no lifts or declinations. When I point this out to Andi, she agrees and immediately fires off an email letting the entire writing team know we’ll be reworking Dane’s backstory. I manage to hide my surprise—who knew Andi Zhang had a humble bone in her lithe body?—and for the next hour we go off on a tangent, fleshing out why exactly Dane is so impossible to get to know. We pick up and discard half a dozen threads before landing on one that feels perfect to both of us: Dane, having gone to Hell and back to resurrect their first love only to falter at the eleventh hour, visits a powerful sorcerer to have their memory of their failure erased. They join Sentinel’s party shortly thereafter, a blank slate of a half-orc. If the player puts in the work of getting to know their Spyglass better, though, they can learn of the truth behind Dane’s memory loss and—potentially—choose to either help Dane remember their first love or romance Dane themself.
It’s a more involved and romantic backstory than any other character has. When I point this out to Andi, she waves me away like she hasn’t just conceded in a major skirmish.
“I told you, I have nothing against romance in video games if it’s done well. Besides”—she levels her gaze at me—“it’s an interesting moral question: do you restore Dane’s memories, or do you pursue them yourself and let them live out their life in blissful ignorance?”
“Who says Dane doesn’t want the past to stay forgotten?” I return.
She shrugs and unwinds her laptop charger. “I wonder what more players will choose. I don’t think I could be with someone knowing they only love me because they’ve forgotten someone else.”
“So you are taking this seriously,” I say, an edge of pride creeping into my voice. Even if Andi won’t admit it, I can tell she’s caught up in this world we’ve constructed, the potential simmering between Dane and Sentinel.
“Of course I’m taking this seriously,” Andi snaps. “It’s my game.”
She types her password louder than she needs to and grunts at me to get back to work. Pleased that I’ve finally managed to get under her skin, I smirk and obey.
It’s squarely midafternoon by the time I look up and crack my shoulder blades. I’m impressed Val hasn’t given us the evil eye yet, but considering she keeps on delivering (free?) espressos to Andi, I’m guessing they have history. Maybe Val has a crush on Andi. I suppose I can see why someone would. When she’s in the zone (like she is right now), a small smile emerges and the left corner of her mouth lifts a little higher than the right, carving two divots like parentheses into her cheek. It’s weird how suddenly, I can’t remember a single detail about what I was working on.
“Cat?”
I blink, dragged back into the real world. Andi’s pointing at my phone, which is vibrating at the edge of the table. I catch it before it falls and swipe up on Lou’s face. “Hello?”
“Pebble! It’s been a minute.”
I jerk the phone away from my ear. “Why are you screaming at me like we’re two hard-of-hearing septuagenarians at a bingo hall?” Beside me, Andi lets out a snort that she quickly hides behind her coffee cup.
“I’m out. At a rave,” Lou deadpans.
“Really?”
“No!” he shouts again. “I met someone last night. He’s like me. We spent the night playing Scrabble while watching Love Is Blind .”
As much as that sounds like a terrible date to me (while I love love, Love Is Blind is just a tad too contrived and straight for my tastes), I can tell how much Lou is bouncing off the walls. Grinning, I get up and wander toward the waiting area outside the bathroom to put some space between Andi and me. “What’s his name? Where’d you meet him? What’s he like?”
“His name is Guy,” Lou says happily. “He’s in the aerospace program at CU Boulder, getting his PhD. We met at the vintage market pop-up on Pearl. We—get this—reached for this gorgeous celadon butter bell at the same time. I let him have it, but afterward, he asked if he could take me out for a drink. He’s, ugh, I don’t know—”
A sniffle, wet and nasal, clogs up the line. Is Lou … crying? Lou doesn’t cry. As far as I know, lawyers don’t cry. “Hey, Lou, take it easy,” I murmur. “What’s going on?”
“This is ridiculous, I know, but he feels like my person, Cat.” He laughs, and the strangled noise makes me wince and smile at the same time. “Anyway, I promise I’ll give you the details later, but I called because he’s in the bathroom right now and he’s going to take me to the observatory soon and I wanted to ask if you’d be able to swing by the apartment to feed Stray. You know how picky she gets, and she wasn’t eating earlier today. You’re not spending the day with Sal or anything like that, are you?”
Why would I be …? In the nick of time, I remember Lou doesn’t know about Sally’s and my arrangement. “Uh, no. Not hanging with her.” I glance over at Andi, who’s frowning at her laptop like she’s considering punching it. “Yeah, that’s fine.”
“Thanks, Pebble. You’re the best.”
We hang up. I take a moment to go through my phone’s notifications. Buried among a handful of robo-texts, I find a missed voice mail from Sally. “Hey, C. Coworkers are insisting I go out with them tonight to celebrate the deal we closed yesterday. You wanna come, practice pretending to be a couple? On the downside, lawyers. On the upside, the club we’re going to is so loud, you can just smile and nod the whole time.”
Dread blooms in my chest until I realize Sally has a point. Thus far, we’ve only fake dated around a bunch of D&D nerds who are all pretending to be other people. We’ll need to level up our game if we’re hoping to pass my parents’ and sister’s scrutiny. My mind made up, I reply with a thumbs-up emoji, then trudge back toward the front of the caf é .
“Who’s Pebble?” Andi asks as soon as I plop down.
“Huh?”
Shutting her laptop, she tilts her head at me. “Your friend shouted Pebble as soon as you picked up.”
“Oh.” I pluck at my sleeves. “Me. I’m Pebble. I wear hoodies a lot because I run cold. One time I was sitting on the couch when Lou—that’s my roommate, whom you met at the dim sum place—made a joke about me looking like a pebble. ’Cuz compared to conventional beauty standards, I’m round and short, I guess.” The back of my neck warms. “Anyway, he asked if he could start calling me that and I said yes, and ever since then, the name’s stuck.”
I start shoving my things into my bag, sure that I don’t want to see whatever expression Andi’s wearing. She’s probably laughing at me for being round and short, for having a cutesy nickname and believing in things like happy endings for the heroes of doom-and-gloom video games. She’s probably wondering what on earth Sally sees in me, how the same accomplished, beautiful, brilliant person could possibly be romantic with both her and me, albeit at different times, without something like magical amnesia or, I don’t know, fake dating making such a miracle possible.
Except, now that I think about it, Andi’s the miracle, not me. Andi hates hearts, stars, and unicorn farts, so how did she and Sally ever get together? (Or ’Ris, for that matter, whoever that is?) Sally’s more businesslike than romantic, and Andi … well, Andi’s about as romantic as a colonoscopy on Valentine’s Day.
I wonder if she’s ever even fallen in love.
“Was that a question?” Andi asks.
My eyes widen. Have I been talking out loud this entire time? Clipping my bag shut, I hold it in front of me like a shield and back away. “No. Never mind. I didn’t say anything. Or if I did, forget that I did. Sorry. I mean, I’m not sorry, since I didn’t say anything. Gotta feed the cat.”
Without saying goodbye, I dash out of Revivify.