Chapter 10
I hit the level cap on Monday night.
I celebrate by spending Tuesday reading Children of Hypnos book three.
By Wednesday, I’m running high-end raids to gear up.
This will take some time; the armor and weapon drops I need are rare, and I’m not the only one who needs them.
But with Alissa’s guides as a primer, I go into the raids knowing what I’m doing, and with my own skills I’m able to improvise on the fly.
One of the other raiders in the guild, a nonbinary kid who goes by Mox, sends me specs for a gaming desktop.
I have enough money saved up from working over the summers to buy it, so I tell Mom I want to get it as a birthday present for myself.
We were supposed to go out to dinner to celebrate, but it’s too hard for me to eat right now, and Alissa was supposed to go with us.
So she doesn’t argue about skipping the dinner and buying a computer instead.
It’ll take two weeks to arrive; plenty of time to set it up and get used to using it before Dreambreaker comes out.
“I have the same one,” Ash says when I show him the model I got. We sit in the school courtyard at lunch. Neither of us is eating. The tree behind us has just begun to bloom. “An older version, though. If you want to see how it runs, you could come over later today.”
I tense up. “Will your parents be there?”
“Nah. Dad’s been working late and Mom goes over to Grandma’s house until after dinner.”
The Whitakers used to eat dinner together every night around the same sturdy, gouged-up kitchen table.
“Okay, I’ll come, then.”
“Cool. I wouldn’t want to see my parents either, if I were you.”
“I don’t know what to say to them.”
“I don’t say anything. Seems to be effective.
” He hands my phone back and turns his attention to his shoes, a spotless pair of blue-and-white Air Jordans.
He could be mistaken for a sneakerhead if a person didn’t know these are the one nice pair he owns, and they’re knockoffs. “What about your mom?” he asks.
“Works late too. But that’s normal.” I lean back and turn my face toward the sun, trying to soak some of it up before it disappears behind another cloud. I’m so tired of the cold. “She keeps trying to get me to talk about things. She put me in therapy.”
“Do you like it?”
I shrug. “I’d rather be doing almost anything else.”
He seems disappointed by this answer. “Makes sense.”
“You should try it if you think you need it, though.”
He shakes his head. “Mom and Dad would want me to go to a church counselor.”
“I’ll give you the info for mine. She hasn’t talked about anything religious.”
“That’d be cool. Thanks.”
“Hey,” I say, keeping my voice light, “the other day at the church, when you said we—”
The courtyard doors open, cutting me off. A bunch of girls and boys on the track team come through with their lunch trays.
“Hey, Evie!” Haley is in front, smiling and waving. “Want to sit with—” She trails off as Ash leans forward to look past me, revealing himself. “Oh, sorry, I thought you were alone.”
I don’t know how she didn’t see Ash; he’s bigger than me, and hunkered on this stone wall like a big dark bird. But he does tend to blend in. He slides off the wall and grabs his backpack.
“It’s cool,” he says. “I’ll see you later, Evie.”
“You could stay,” I say.
His gaze cuts toward Haley and the others, all loud and bright and cheerful, then back to me. “I’m good. But thanks.”
He leaves. Haley stands there, waiting for me, looking abashed.
“I didn’t know you were friends with Ash,” she says when I get up and join her. We find seats at the bench with the others. Kylie is there, and she still won’t look at me. Aiden Marx is too, and he looks at me too much, like he’s waiting for me to do something.
“It’s a recent development,” I say.
“Are you going out?” asks Bethany. “Is he the reason you’ve been missing practice?”
“We’re not going out,” I reply, a little too fast. “I’ve been skipping practice.”
“Are you feeling okay?” Haley asks.
“Fine.”
A few of them exchange looks. I don’t care what reasons they make up.
“Ash is weird now,” says Aiden, unable to keep his mouth shut, or to say anything without a stupid smile on his face. “Guy used to be cool, then he went full Two-Face.”
I roll my eyes. “He was in a car accident and almost died, you’d probably be a little Two-Face after that too.”
He snorts, like it’s funny. “Wasn’t he drinking?”
“He was hit by a drunk driver,” I snap. “The driver’s side window cut up his face and his leg got smashed. If the other guy had been like five feet to the left, Ash would have died.”
The only reason I know all this is because I went through it all with Alissa.
I was at her house when they got the call that Ash was at the hospital, I rode with them there, holding Alissa’s hand in the back seat because she needed to hold on to something.
She looked sick and kept sucking in air.
The doctors didn’t take too long to tell us that Ash was going to be fine, despite a lacerated face and a shattered right leg.
“Will he be able to play soccer again?” Alissa had asked through her tears. “He loves soccer.”
“Eventually,” said the doctor. “But not this season.”
And so the school had lost its star soccer player in his senior year. Ash had only just started to walk normally again before Alissa died.
Aiden fully laughs now. “Why are you getting so mad about it? I was just asking a question.”
The same tunnel-visioned rage I felt at the church service fills me again. It comes up so hot and fast I can’t do anything to stop it.
Haley leans in before I can act. “Maybe if your questions weren’t so stupid, Evie wouldn’t get so mad.”
Aiden rolls his eyes, says, “Wow, good one,” but goes back to his food. It takes a few minutes for me to calm down, and even when I do, I feel like I could get angry again for the smallest reason. The conversation turns to the upcoming track meet this weekend.
Before, in my head, I was fully prepared to participate in the meet.
There was no question about it. A track meet was coming up, I ran track, I would run in the track meet, just like I always had.
Now I wondered what could possibly convince me to go, because that track meet would mean time I wasn’t on CoH, and I cared about CoH way more than I cared about a track meet.
The game felt so much bigger and more important.
I was so good at it. I was good at track too, but never the best. Maybe I could get a college scholarship, but how long would I run after that? What was I really working toward?
The talk around me suddenly seems very distant. It’s nice that they’re sitting with me, trying to include me, but they don’t understand where I am. They might miss Alissa, but they don’t miss the piece of themselves that went with her. Nothing unrecoverable was taken from them.
“Are you going to be at practice tomorrow?” Haley asks me, drawing me back.
“Uh, I don’t know. Why?”
“My mom ordered black armbands for us. We’re going to wear them at the meet on Saturday, but I was going to pass them out tomorrow.”
“Black armbands.”
“For Alissa.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t have to wear one if you don’t want to,” she says. “No pressure.”
The whole table waits for my answer. If I don’t go to the meet, it won’t matter. If I do, I’ll have to wear one. It’ll look strange if I don’t. It’s just a black armband. I doubt I’ll even notice it’s there.
“Sure,” I say, and they all leave me alone after that.
For the rest of the day, I feel sick inside, twisted up. I don’t know what’s caused it. Luckily, no one tries to talk to me again; nothing I said back to them would be nice.
We don’t have practice today, so there’s nothing to skip. When I pull into my driveway, I remember what Ash said about checking out his computer. The Whitakers live in walking distance, so I drop my bag inside and lock up before cutting across my backyard.
The day has gone cloudy again, and cold enough that the neighbors aren’t out.
I feel like I’m alone in the world. I notice birds flitting between the trees, squirrels dashing across the ground, a windsock fluttering in an adjacent yard, a neighbor’s dog watching me through the fence. I walk lightly, making almost no noise.
I read something once that people with autism and ADHD and anxiety and other mental issues would have been the hunters in a hunter-gatherer society.
They weren’t issues then—they were assets.
Our brains are wired for awareness, pattern recognition, routine.
We can pursue goals with single-minded ferocity.
As society changed, these traits became less and less necessary.
Hindrances, in fact, in a world where you have to sit at a desk for seven or eight or nine hours a day and be productive productive productive.
My brain starts screaming and the only way to get it to stop is to find an escape.
We were made for survival, but now the thing we have to survive is ourselves.
As I walk, I pretend I am that hunter. I have no self, only instinct.
The cold heightens my senses. I pull my hair out of its ponytail, letting it blow across my face.
Energy builds in my legs, arms, core, urging me to run.
I hold back. I’m almost to the Whitakers’, and I don’t want Ash to see me come out of the trees at a dead sprint, like something’s wrong.
I cross a deserted street and approach the Whitakers’ front door.
They have a big white two-story house with black shutters.
Alissa and I used to sit and listen to music on the porch swing.
We climbed the elm tree in the front yard.
The window above and to the right of the front door is her room; when we were younger, we’d sit up there and tell scary stories about the people in the cars who passed by late at night.
As we got older, our conversations turned to our classmates and our futures.