“I’ll talk to him. Explain what happened.”
“He won’t care. The game matters more to him than anything.”Like it should have mattered to me, but I neededcomfortinstead. I’ve turned down the computer volume, but I can still hear the voices of the raid party—and they are struggling. Because of me. My fault. It’s like I worked that hard to get a spot only to abandon them when raid day came. I was sent by one of the other big clans to sabotage them. That’s what they’ll think.
“If he kicks us out, then he’s garbage,” Ash says. He tries to put his arms around me, but I pull away. My skin is crawling. I don’t want to be touched.
“Evie, it’s not that big a deal. It’s a game. We took a nap because we got too high. This is ridiculous.”
I’mridiculous, is what he’s saying. Because I cared too much. I always care too much.
More messages appear in clan chat. Deep and vicious fear strikes, like those messages are spiders jumping at me, and I close out of the game. The voices from the stream are still going, though, an attack from a second direction, and I hurry to close that window too. Then there are the pings of messages in Discord, and I cannot do it, I cannot be available anymore, I need to hide.
I yank the power cord from the back of my computer. The monitors lose signal. The fans stop.
I feel like I’ve hung up the phone on a great dark being that is going to find me anyway. It knows where I am, where I live. I’ve shut off its means of communicating with me, but it canstill find me, and it will. It is inevitable.
“I should go home,” I say.
“Are you okay?” Ash follows me as I stand up. “I’m sorry I said it was ridiculous. But it’s not as important as it seems.”
“Whatever,” I say. I don’t make a move to collect any part of my computer. I don’t want to touch it. “Is it okay if I leave this here for now?”
“Sure... why?”
I shake my head. I can’t say the words.
“Are you okay to drive?” he asks.
“I think so.”
“It’s not that far. Let me drive you back. We’ll take your car, I’ll walk home.”
I don’t argue. I grab my phone and bag, but not my computer. When we get to the bottom of the stairs, Mrs. Whitaker calls from the den, “You’ve been pretty quiet up there.”
“Focusing on the game,” Ash replies. I doubt she believes him. “I’ll be right back,” Ash continues. “Evie realized once she got here that she forgot her license, so I’m going to drive her home and walk back.”
“Okay. Be safe.”
She doesn’t know what has happened. That’s how she can be so calm.
The car ride home doesn’t register. Ash walks me to the front door. The familiar crunch of gravel underfoot brings me backto my senses in a strange, stark world. Everything is wrong, but nothing is happening. The doorknob squeaks the same way it always has. The house smells like late-afternoon sunshine. Mom must in the backyard, because she doesn’t come to meet us.
“I’ll see you later,” I say to Ash.
“Wait, I meant what I said,” he says. “It was one raid, there’ll be more. And Zoo always has backups. He’s not stupid enough to think no one will ever get sick or have an emergency. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.”
“But itisa big deal,” I snap. “It’s not about the next raid, it’s aboutthis one. It wasn’t justone raid, it wastheone. We were going to win. I put everything into that. Zoo and everyone else were counting on me. I said I’d do it, and I just—I just didn’t.” It feels like barbed wire is being fed through my guts. Ash still doesn’t look as upset as he should. He isn’t panicking like I am. He isn’t sorry that he slept through it. “I thought you understood,” I say, “but you don’t.”
He makes a face. “What are you talking about?”
“Why this was important! Why it meant something to me! But you don’t—you’d rather get high, no matter what problems it causes.”
“Oh fuckoff, Evie,” he snarls. “What is this, some puritanical bullshit? Like you didn’t do the exact same thing. It was your idea to take another edible—and they’re just edibles! People get high all the time. I don’t give a shit that we missed the raid. I wasn’t theone who thought it would make a difference. Alissa’s still dead. We could win world first in every raid for the rest of time, and she’d still be dead.” He turns away from me. “Call me when you decide to live in reality again.”
He slams the door behind him.
I’m left alone with the silence of the house and the chaos churning inside me.
Chapter 19
