Chapter 17
I finish the expansion campaign before Saturday, hit the new level cap, and gear out again.
The first time was to see if I could do it—to prove to the clan I was capable, that I could run raids with them.
This time is for the real prize. I finish as much of my homework as I can while I’m still in class, blaze through the rest at home, and don’t worry whether the answers are right or not.
It’s done, so I’m not lying to Mom when I say so.
Friday night, I barely sleep. It’s three a.m. before I finally doze off.
When I wake, my alarm clock says it’s ten a.m. Seven hours and I don’t feel rested at all.
I stumble out of my room and rummage through the kitchen for a breakfast of Reese’s Puffs.
I sit and eat in the silence. Anticipation starts to wake me up.
Today is the day. Today, Ikelos Lair raids Van Der Gelt Tower. Today, we become world first.
As I’m rinsing out my cereal bowl, Mom comes in from the back yard. Her arms are dirty and she’s wearing her gardening shirt, the green-and-pink one that she doesn’t mind getting sweaty in.
“I thought you’d be working today,” I say.
“I took the day off,” she says. “I thought we could spend some time together today. I just finished weeding the beds. We can go to the nursery and pick out some flower seeds to start indoors, like we used to. I bet they’ll have snapdragons. Those were always your favorite, right?”
An uncomfortable band of emotion forms around my ribs, squeezing. Anger, guilt, frustration. “Um, I’d like to, but I can’t.”
Her face falls. “Oh. Is something going on? I didn’t think you had a track meet. . . .” She turns to look at the calendar pinned to the refrigerator, where all my track meets are marked down. “Can you attend a meet if you haven’t been going to practice?”
“It’s not a meet. I have to play CoH today.”
The atmosphere instantly shifts.
“You have to play?” she says, skeptical. “Evie, you’ve been playing for hours every night since I let you on your computer. I’m starting to wonder if it was a good idea to give you that privilege back.”
I take a deep breath. Exhale long and slow through my nose. If I don’t tell her, how can she know what it means? “There’s an important event today. A raid, with my clan—the people I play with. They’re depending on me to be there. We’re trying to be the first people in the world to complete it.”
Her brow furrows. “This is why you’ve been playing so much lately?”
“Yes.”
“And this isn’t something that they can fill your spot, if you’re not there?”
I pause. “They could, if I tell them early enough.” I add quickly, “BUT it’s too late to do that, they won’t be able to get anyone today, not at the level I am with the gear I have. If I don’t show up, they’ll be screwed.”
“Hmm.” Her lips press together. She looks down at her hands. She isn’t pushing back, which I take as a positive sign.
“Can we hang out tomorrow?” I offer as I head for the door. I need to get out of here before she can say anything else that makes me feel bad. I can’t afford this kind of distraction before the raid.
“Of course,” she says, but the tension doesn’t leave her. “Evie, wait. I’d like to talk before you go back to your room.”
I stop half in and half out of the kitchen, hidden partially by the doorframe.
Mom sits at the table and motions for me to take the seat across from her.
I don’t want to. Every single cell resists.
But it will only be worse for me if I don’t do it.
I might lose my computer entirely, and today I can’t risk that.
I sit. She is quiet for a moment, watching me. I can’t make eye contact.
“I want to talk about your dad.”
I grip the edges of my seat to stay in it.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because I think there are things you don’t remember about him, and you need to know them.”
I don’t remember much of anything about him, except what he looked like, and that’s only because Mom has kept all the pictures of him on the walls, on the mantel. He had my dark blond hair, my skin tone. He was chubby, barrel-chested, and in most pictures, had scruff if not a full-on beard.
He died of lung cancer, despite not smoking a day in his life.
“Can we talk about this tomorrow?” I ask.
“Is your game that important?” She doesn’t look away from me or raise her voice. The accusation is all the more powerful for it. “This won’t take long, I promise.”
I go quiet.
“When I met your dad, he was the happiest person I knew. He was nice to everyone. He was funny. He would always help you if you needed it, and always offered even if you didn’t.
That was what everyone thought of him, because that’s what everyone saw.
I guess I didn’t expect him to be that way all the time, but it was still a surprise when we moved in together.
” She pauses. Her fingers pick at the tablecloth.
“He had dark times, especially in the winter. All that joy just disappeared, like it was smothered. He didn’t want to talk to his friends, or go out and do things.
He didn’t like things anymore. He’d get focused on things he normally didn’t care about, like climate change and world politics.
They made him angry. He’d be upset for days, and then the sun would come out and he’d go for a walk, and he’d seem okay again.
“That was a while before you were born. He had those times after you were born too, but you were too little to notice. I asked him if there was anything I could help him with. He always said no. I think he’d been dealing with it for so long that he didn’t realize there was anything wrong.
“When he got his diagnosis, things got better for a while. It was like . . . something immediate was happening. Things were actually as bad as he’d thought they were, so it was easier to bear.
I still can’t say I understand it, but he didn’t have one of those dark spells for a long time.
Then it . . . didn’t matter anymore.” She pauses again, but the pause drags out too long, and eventually she has just stopped speaking.
“So Dad was depressed before the cancer,” I say.
Mom gives me an inscrutable look. “I see a lot of him in you. You get focused the way he used to. You’ve lost all interest in the things you used to like.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m going to kill myself.”
She flinches. I don’t intend to hurt her, but I can’t avoid it anymore.
“I know that. But I can see the signs—”
“I’m not depressed.”
“Evie.”
My own name grates me. Using it like I’m not the only one there. Like she’s trying to manipulate me. “I was fine before Alissa died,” I say, jaw tight. “Everything that’s been happening is because of what she did. Now I’m different. Anyone would be different after that.”
“Of course. Of course they would. That’s not .
. . it’s not about what caused you to feel this way.
That wasn’t why I told you all this.” She shakes her head, trying to backtrack.
“Your dad didn’t think there was anything wrong with him, so he never knew to ask for help.
I thought he knew best. He was the one in his own head, after all.
But when we’re like this, we lie to ourselves—”
“How would you know what Dad was thinking?” I push away from the table.
“Him being happy and nice and funny could’ve been the lie.
Maybe he was happier when he was watching the news or being angry about things that actually mattered.
” I’ve never spent a lot of time thinking about him, but the sudden image of my dad as someone like me, someone who throws aside pointless things and relentlessly pursues what matters, has my heart swelling in my chest. It makes me even angrier.
“I care about the things I’m doing right now.
I’m not going to stop because you don’t get it.
I’m not lying to myself. I understand things better now than I ever did. ”
“This is what I mean,” she says, her tone appealing. “Please, Evie, I’m not trying to take anything away from you—”
I stand up. “I have to get ready for the raid.”
“Evie . . .”
I can’t hear my name even one more time. It’s nineteen steps to my bedroom. Nine steps to unplugging my computer setup, and three hundred twenty-seven carrying it all, piece by piece, out to my car.
“What are you doing?” Mom asks, watching me go.
“I’m going over to the Whitakers’ house,” I say. “Ash and I are doing the raid together.”
We had no such plans, but I don’t want to be here anymore, and I know Ash has another outlet in his wall that I can use for my power strip. I’ll set up my monitors on the floor. Mom doesn’t stop me, but as I carry my tower outside, I hear her talking to Mrs. Whitaker on her phone in the kitchen.
Ash is waiting for me on the porch when I pull into their driveway. He doesn’t ask what happened as he helps me carry my setup to his room.
“Everything okay, Evie?” Mrs. Whitaker asks me. She doesn’t follow us upstairs.
“Yeah,” I say over my shoulder. “Gotta do this raid.”
When everything is upstairs, Ash watches from his computer chair as I set it all up. The minute I’m done, he tosses me the pouch of edibles. It’s almost empty. I take one.
“So what happened?” he asks.
I recount the conversation for him. By the time I’m done, the world has gone a little soft at the edges, and so has my anger.
“I’m tired of people telling me how I should feel.
I’m tired of thinking I should feel a certain way, and I don’t.
And since when has caring about something been a bad thing? ”
“She’s worried about you,” he says.
I growl. “Yeah, I know. I feel awful about it, because I don’t know how to get my point across without making her feel bad, and then I feel guilty, and then I get mad that I feel guilty, and I do or say something that hurts her again.
” I sit back on the floor, throw my arms up, let them fall limp.
I laugh at the noodle-y feeling of them, at my own hopelessness.
“What am I supposed to do? I can’t win.”
Ash slides out of his chair and joins me on the floor. The way he slides is pretty silly, and I know he does it to make me laugh. “I think we’re all trying to survive right now,” he says. “You gotta do what you gotta do. You can apologize later.”
“Easy for you to say. Your coping mechanism is weed.”
He laughs. I laugh. It’s a feedback loop of giggling that I can’t stop. We fall against each other, then topple to the floor, and then we’re kissing. I float happily away from my twisted-up emotions. It’s so nice to close my eyes and be here now, touching him.
“I’m glad you’re here with me,” he says. The words float through the dark space I occupy like beautiful silver moths, dreamlike, glinting and gone.
“Me too,” I say, unsure if I am replying to something he really said or something I only think he said.
His fingers are soft on my cheeks, my neck, in my hair, down my back.
I lose track of the boundaries of my body for a while; only when they start to come back to me, joined by the roughness of the carpet and the ache in my hip from lying here like this, do I check the clock.
It’s half past twelve; plenty of time before pre-raid prep.
“I don’t want to come down yet,” I say, grabbing the pouch where we discarded it by my computer. “Just get me to the raid and I’ll be good.”
Ash grabs the gummy out of my fingers before it reaches my mouth. “Not a whole one. You’re asking for trouble.”
He carefully tears it and gives me one side. We each eat half. He pulls me onto the bed, where we stretch out on top of the covers. We face each other. I brush a strand of Ash’s hair off his forehead. He bunches mine up around my face, like the ruff of a fur coat.
“Everyone acts like it’s only bad things that come out of death,” he says, running his thumb along my cheek, “but good things happen too. Like this.”
Yes, good things can happen too. I can find a purpose, and a person who cares, and a place to go when everywhere else feels wrong. This doesn’t all have to be bad; I wish my mom could see it. Maybe I’m not happy in this moment, but I’m certainly not sad.
I start to lose the sense of my body again. I love that I’m not afraid or uncomfortable being touched when I’m with Ash, and the edibles are just a nice bonus. I nest against his chest, pressing my face to the warm skin of his neck. I could stay here forever.
“I could stay here forever,” I tell him. He replies, but his voice is very far away. My eyes are so heavy. I get my phone out, set an alarm just in case, then curl against Ash and close my eyes.
But I can’t sleep. My thoughts have picked up speed.
I sink into the heaviness of my body, willing my mind to slow, but it doesn’t, it can’t.
I need to get up, to check the internet connection on my computer.
Ash isn’t moving, though, so I shouldn’t worry about it.
A nap is the better idea. But what if I can’t fall asleep?
What if I just lie here until my alarm goes off?
I roll over. Ash’s hand is warm on my thigh and—Mom would be mad if she found out I was taking these edibles and—I will see my name on the Van Der Gelt Tower raid after we win today and—Alissa slept in the room down the hall and—Mrs. Whitaker is down—what time—the room is warm—
My thoughts trip—
Too fast one to another—
Can’t keep up—
Getting dizzy when I move—
Stay still, stay down—
Eyes closed—
Turn, Ash—
Not stopping—
When does it fade—
I came down faster before—
Please stop—
Alissa in the river—
Stop stop stop—
What was the last thing I said to her—
Phone screaming—
Blue windbreaker—
STOP—
She’d laugh if she saw this—
My mouth and eyes are full of cotton. My neck is cricked at an odd angle over Ash’s arm. He’s snoring. I sit up, remembering how to use my arms and hands, remembering that I have legs and feet.
I’m so glad it’s over. It didn’t seem like it ever would be. Like someone had hacked into my mind and caused everything to go haywire, broken it permanently. I didn’t think an extra half a gummy could throw me into the pits of hell like that.
My phone alarm didn’t wake me up, though, so we must not have been asleep very long. I search around and find the phone buried under the small of my back. I wake up the screen.
The time is 5:13 p.m.