Chapter 10
Chloe
It took me about two minutes after Teddy’s character had been introduced to figure out what Fatima had done, and another two to decide whether I wanted to confront her about it mid-session.
I didn’t, because I apparently did have the survival instincts of a stoat, who are resourceful little guys, it turned out.
I knew better than to confront Fatima when she held Calamity’s life in her hands.
But my intact sense of self-preservation didn’t mean I wasn’t annoyed. It was just so typical of her – give her even the faintest whiff of real-world drama, and she would try to weave it into the narrative fabric of our in-game universe.
Afterwards, we all tramped down to the pub for post-game drinks as usual, sans Teddy – she’d taken off immediately after the game, citing the long drive back to the farm.
It was also raining that spectacular horizontal rain that gets inside your coat no matter how tightly you zip it, and I arrived at the bar with water dripping off my nose, looking like the world’s saddest raccoon, the way mascara streaked down my cheeks and pooled under my eyes.
Amy sidled up next to me, and I handed her a bar napkin, as if it would do anything for the sopping wet locks of blonde hair hanging down her back.
“You look like you just lost a fight in a drive-through car wash,” she said to me, her voice laced with affection, and I laughed.
“I was just thinking the same about you.”
We were all at the table – and Fatima was halfway through her pint – before I worked up the courage to bring up Teddy’s character backstory, but she beat me to the punch.
“Great job tonight,” she said. “You and Teddy really brought out the best in each other.”
I narrowed my eyes at her over the rim of my glass. “Did you seriously build a whole campaign arc just so you could get us to bond? Or are you actually sadistic and want to watch us squirm?”
“Por que no los dos?” she asked, waggling her eyebrows at me.
I groaned and let my head thunk onto the table, narrowly missing a puddle of condensation. Not that it would have made much of a difference, the state I was in.
The fact was, the game had been fun. Teddy was sharp, quick to adapt, and her sarcasm was much more enjoyable when she was pretending to be a repressed Githzerai warrior. But it was also exhausting, being thrown into a fake rivalry with someone I involuntarily had a very real rivalry with at work.
“Do you think she’ll come back?” Phil asked, and I shrugged.
“I doubt it,” I said. “Especially after El Jefe over here started pulling her strings.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Fatima said, pulling out her phone and tapping out a text. “I’ll ask her myself.”
My mouth fell open. “How do you even have her number? I only have it from her fucking email signature!”
“Game stuff,” Fatima said with a shrug. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Speaking of,” Amy said, changing the subject before I could reach across the table and strangle Fatima. “How are things at the farm? Your event plan coming together?”
I sighed, cross that I was being redirected but pleased to report that things were going well.
I told them what I’d been doing during my first two weeks, mostly during my work-from-home days – outreach to other local businesses about partnerships, building out the content calendar, and scouring every single local calendar to try to find a date for the festival that didn’t clash with something crucial.
“So, yes, it’s going well,” I summarised, “even if I am woefully underqualified.”
Jack laughed. “Isn’t that your baseline, though? Woefully underqualified but up for trying anything anyway?”
“You’re going to be fine,” Morgan said. “If you can charm the rich dickheads that fund the animal rescue, I’m sure you can wrangle one disgruntled beekeeper long enough to pull off an event and prove her wrong.”
“Thanks, Morgan,” I said, genuinely touched. “That’s weirdly reassuring.”
The next round arrived, and with it, a flurry of notifications on my phone.
One was a text from my mum, which had actually been sitting in my inbox for days.
I swiped past it like I had dozens of times, not wanting to give her the satisfaction of letting it show as read and being able to prove I was ignoring her, but also, in fact, wanting to ignore her.
It seemed I couldn’t ignore her existence altogether though:
PATRICIA
Your mum popped round earlier. She asked after you.
I didn’t say anything specific, but I thought you should know. xx
Patricia, Jack and Amy’s mum, had been a sort of surrogate mother for me since childhood, and my next-door neighbour for the first eighteen years of my life, so she was well versed in Barlow-on-Barlow conflict.
She never showed open disdain for the way my mum would talk to me, but, as I got older, I noticed that she would be intentional about trying to correct it.
When my mum would gloss over an accomplishment at school, Patricia would make me a special meal to celebrate.
And when I would leave school crying about something I knew my mum would call inconsequential and not worth my effort, I’d head straight to the Evans house instead.
I’d even come out to Patricia before my own mum, not that it had been much of a surprise to either of them.
She’d worn nothing but cheesy pride T-shirts for a month after.
I tapped out a thank-you before opening my email notifications; there was one waiting from Simone. I skimmed over it quickly – something about the paperwork I still hadn’t filed – before turning my phone face down on the table, wishing both problems away.
Amy caught the gesture. “Everything okay?”
I shrugged, deciding not to get into my work mishap just now. “Just Sarah Barlow doing her regularly scheduled, guilt-driven outreach. Wants to ‘catch up’, even though we haven’t spoken in, like, months.”
Amy nodded knowingly, but Morgan raised an eyebrow. “You going to ring her back?”
“Eventually,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. “I just … I wanna have an actual update before I talk to her. I need to know which way things will go at the farm.”
“Isn’t that verdict months away?”
I nodded, my mouth pressed into a thin line. “Sure is.”
Fatima cocked her head. She and Morgan didn’t have the context about my mum that the others did. “Is she really that bad?”
“Not bad, just … unimpressed.” I took a slow sip of beer. “She wants me to be doing something ‘important’ with ‘that brain’ of mine, which is her way of saying she’s disappointed I didn’t move to London and become the first Oscar-winning neurosurgeon billionaire or whatever.”
Morgan frowned. “But you’re great at what you do. You were just telling us about it.”
“Yeah, but she doesn’t care.” If anything, working at the farm was worse – it was what she had done all these years, after all, and her own regrets in life were almost certainly what made her so hard on me.
I understood it – I’d experienced it enough to know the nature of the problem inside and out – but that understanding didn’t make it any less frustrating.
I changed the subject back to the game, and we spent another hour at the pub, laughing too loudly and eating chips dipped in ketchup and vinegar. Amy looped her arm through mine as we left, walking out into the (thankfully now clear) night.
“You know, you should just talk to Jen if you’re having trouble with Teddy,” she said. “She’s the boss, right? She’s the one that hired you. And if you can’t do your job because Teddy’s giving you shit, Jen should deal with it.”
I shook my head. “Jen already has enough to deal with. Plus, Teddy hasn’t been that bad, really; not since that first day, anyway.
I’ll just … figure it out.” What I didn’t say was that I knew my issues with Teddy weren’t because I couldn’t do my job.
It was a weird dynamic – a misunderstanding, really – and the only way to deal with it was to dig in and get my hands dirty.
As we reached the crossroads where we all went our separate ways – Fatima, Morgan, and Jack back to the house, Phil and Amy to theirs, and me back to my own flat – Fatima held up her phone and whooped.
“Told you!” she said, then passed the phone around for us to see. “Teddy’s in for next week.”
My stomach did a strange flip, but I put on as unbothered a smile as I could manage for the others.
“That’s great,” I said. “She’ll be a good addition.”
Fatima narrowed her eyes at me, no doubt seeing straight through my bullshit.
But I glared right back, not ready to give her the satisfaction of seeing me squirm.
She’d have enough of that during the game if Teddy was indeed locked in.
Instead, I just gave her a hug goodbye, making my way around the group, and then headed home.
As I walked the last few blocks to my flat, I tried to figure out what it meant that Teddy wanted to keep playing with us.
Did she want to be friends, maybe? Or was she just co-opting mine?
Part of me was relieved that she was choosing to be around me, and another part was mildly horrified that I’d have to keep roleplaying this backstory Fatima had written us.
But mostly, I just felt a weird sense of anticipation.
Maybe things would be okay. Maybe I didn’t need to push for any kind of resolution with Teddy, because we were already moving towards some kind of equilibrium, and I just had to let it happen.
I tipped my head back and let the night air clear my head, my steps lighter than they’d been in ages.
If Teddy wanted to join because she was ready to mend fences?
Great. If she wanted to go toe-to-toe in a fantasy arena instead of in real life?
Well, I was more than up for the challenge. We were on my turf.
I smiled into the darkness. Let the games begin.
* * *