Chapter 49
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Andi
I slow my bike to a stop and take my helmet off. This far southwest of the city, the air is crisp and heavy. Low-slung clouds crowd the horizon line, threatening to blanket the gold-drenched aspens lining the valley floor in snow. Behind them, Mount Elbert looms like some primordial, sleeping giant.
Lifting my forearm up, I compare my tattoo to the sweeping vista before me. It’s a perfect match.
I’m on the crest of a hill a few miles out from the main road and any sign of civilization. Despite the hordes of hatchbacks and SUVs I drove past on my way here, this spot is quiet. Undiscovered. If I close my eyes, I can almost pretend I’ve traveled back in time to when my mom and I used to come here with our overstuffed car and library books and gas station spoils.
A shadow falls over the rock-strewn path ahead of me, and I stitch my gaze skyward, searching for its source. A bird wings by overhead, a red-tailed hawk by the looks of it. I trace its journey as it alights on a gnarled tree with branches like bleached bones, then disappears beyond where my feet can follow.
I head after it anyway. A mile down into the valley, I find what I’m looking for: a line of five stores, all of them dilapidated and missing their signs with the exception of the faded arcade named Fun Zone. In times past, this tiny strip mall was accessible via car. Nowadays, it’s a dumping ground for irresponsible off-the-beaten-trail hikers and the few teenagers who’ve stumbled across it.
Finding a milk crate to sit on, I camp out under Fun Zone’s crumbling awning. Through the dusty glass, I can just make out the purple moth-eaten carpet, the disco balls still hanging from the ceiling, the thick cords that used to power the arcade machines. The colors are nowhere near as neon bright as they exist in my memories, but they comfort me all the same. This is where I played my first video game.
My phone has no reception out here—a lot of the ghost towns along the Arkansas River sit too far in the shadows of the Rockies for cell towers to reach—but I pull it out anyway. Opening a new email, I put my mom in the “To” line and start typing. With my thumbs, I tell her why I run away to be out in the middle of nowhere where no one, not even the internet, can find me. I tell her how she was both right and wrong, how the wilderness and its deserted places can be both safe and lonely, and how she taught me how to be the former but never how not to be the latter.
I share how it feels like no matter what I do, no one ever chooses me back—not my dad, not Iris, not even Sally—and how, after a while, it felt safer just to choose myself and my work over everyone and everything else. I explain how easy life was, existing like this, until I met a girl named Cat, who mouths off like none other around me and sends emails with five gazillion exclamation points and whom I fell in love with, a little … even though I couldn’t bring myself to admit it out loud until two days ago. And I explain how for a minute, for sixty whole seconds, I thought she might be the first person in forever to choose me, but I bungled up the timing and now everything is borked.
And I tell her how now my heart feels like it’s been ripped out of my chest by a monster with jagged talons and no mercy, like it doesn’t belong to me anymore even though it’s mine and I need it to stay alive. This is why I hate romance in video games , I write. Because it makes you feel things. Terrible, incandescent things that aren’t possible and ruin your ideas of what can happen in the real world. In the real world, half-orcs named Dane don’t get to fall in love days out from the apocalypse and difficult people like me don’t get chosen.
None of this would’ve happened if I’d just stuck to my guns. If I’d just said no to adding romance to Compass Hollow , I would’ve been able to definitively shut Jan down at IAX. I would’ve never reemerged as the subject of a top post on Reddit.
I would’ve never met Cat.
And my life would be worse for it, but also easier.
So I’m done. No more Cat. No more complications. No more eleventh-hour confessions that slip out of my traitorous mouth and send me bolting for the literal hills. As soon as I get back to Boulder, I’m cutting her out of my D&D table and out of my personal life. She’s too talented for me to cut out of Hollow —I’m not about to stymie her career just because I let things get complicated between us—but the bones of our work are laid. Once Brett hopefully greenlights the plot beats we’ve hammered out, I’ll put Cat back on codex entries, thereby ensuring I won’t have to see her, much less talk to her, more than once a week during staff meetings.
I tell my mom all that. Then I delete the email, put away my phone, and stare into the dark interior of the abandoned arcade.