your GPA up, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be lucky enough to get into a fine university like your brother.”
So then we shake on it, just like two businessmen. And I get back to my computer and start working on my moves, because I’m going to have to play flawless. Or, as Mrs. Lawson, my English teacher would insist, flawlessly.
4.
The rest of the semester I worry about screwing up and having Dad take back my ticket to San Diego. So I go to all my classes (mostly) and do my homework (as fast as possible, mostly in other classes) and concentrate on getting a seat in English and history behind Brit so I can stare at her the entire class without being too obvious. Even if it’s just the back of her soft, shiny hair, I watch the way the light plays off as if it were some hypnotic kaleidoscope. And for at least that moment, the Starfare game playing in the back of my mind goes on pause.
A couple of weeks after Dad agreed to give me the cash I get an IM from my brother.
3-PointShooter: Hey
ActionSeth: Hey
3-PointShooter: Good going
ActionSeth: ?
3-PointShooter: Heard u got the old man to cough up the dough to send u to some tourney
ActionSeth: Yeah pretty amazing
Garrett, he’s not into gaming like I am, but at least he understands. When I was about nine a friend of his lent us his Nintendo 64 and we started playing Mario Kart. At first Garrett, who was fourteen, killed me, but I spent every waking hour working on it and after a couple of weeks I started winning. It was the first time I had beaten him at anything and he just shook his head and laughed and claimed it was unfair, that I was practicing too much. I think it bothered him a bit until I showed him the times I was posting online—I was in the top hundred in the country on a couple of courses.
We IM a little bit more about nothing much and then he wishes me luck at the tournament.
I’m spending every extra hour I can online, trying to get it together for Nationals. It’s a Wednesday night and I’m at Mom’s. I’ve drawn a game against this kid from Korea. No one famous—they would never mess around playing against crap Americans, but he’s got a really high rating and I’m just barely hanging on. I’m not even sure why I’m struggling. I’ve won at least twenty games in a row and feeling like I’m on my way to a really good showing at Nationals. And then this. The action is incredibly fast and I’m pounding on the keyboard, wheeling the mouse and trying to keep track of three fronts at once.
In an intense game like this, you’re in so deep the room around you just disappears. When you’re in the middle of a battle, and your fingers are flying across the keyboard, you’re not looking at the screen, you’re not playing at a game, you’re IN the game. Like those science fiction movies where someone gets sucked up in a wormhole or drops through a hole in time. It’s sort of like that. You get that same sense of being pulled into this other world. It’s not as though you believe your body has gone anywhere, but your mind, your consciousness is actually sucked through the screen. And you’re not alone.
Not by a long shot. Sure it’s a world with all of these strange creatures and complicated rules, but it has dimensions and textures and players who become friends and geography you have to learn the way you know your neighborhood and the way to and from school. And if you’re good, like I am, then you move through this world with the kind of confidence that Kobe Bryant shows when he cuts to the basket, or when Payton Manning goes back to pass from his five-yard-line with ten seconds on the clock. That’s why it’s simply not acceptable for someone to start knocking on my bedroom door when I’m into a tough game, any more than you’d expect Kobe or Payton to stop, right at that critical moment, and chat up a couple of spectators. I know it might sound conceited, when I talk about these sports superstars, but that’s the way it is.
So naturally Mom pounds on my door at the worst possible time.
“Seth! Seth!”
Out of the corner of my eye I see something unexpected on the northeast corner of the map. Crap, crap crap! Somehow he’s got three cruisers completely armed and moving in formation and that just seems impossible. I had a spybot up there just minutes ago. Unless he had them cloaked. But how?
“Seth! Why didn’t you pick up the phone?”
This comes at me like a voice shouted from a distant mountain across miles of canyons on a foggy morning.
Then I see movement on the opposite corner and OMG it’s another three cruisers that come out of nowhere and I’m thinking, maybe this is one of the Korean pros slumming on an American server. Playing under a pseudonym just to yank someone’s chain. Like mine, because I’ve never, ever seen anyone develop that much firepower that quickly and I realize I am totally screwed.
“Seth, it’s someone from your school.”
Maybe I could distract him with a direct attack right at his home base, but that would be suicidal.
“It’s a girl.”
It’s like the screen blinks and when I look at it for a second it’s not a 3D world but just a flat screen with a dozen blinking blips. I suddenly hear the game’s sounds, which are usually lost in the background, like the computer’s fan. First the crunching sound when one of my land fighters gets crushed. Then the clattering of an army marching on pavement, sounding like hail on a roof.
“What did you say?” I shout.
“Seth, open the door. You know I hate talking through a closed door! It’s a girl from your school. Her name is Bret or Brit, I couldn’t really tell.”
I was going to lose the game anyway.
5.
The only reason Mom isn’t freaking over a call from a girl is my older brother Garrett. I once did a count of his Facebook friends: 298 girls and 87 boys. Garrett Gordon, high school jock exemplar. Minor: tennis doubles, third round state. Major: shooting guard, 19.6 point average. Hobby: going steady with beautiful girls.
Garrett’s been hanging out with a series of girls since eighth grade. So many I gave up trying to keep them straight years ago and just call them all Kimberly. That makes me right about half the time. Kimberly is always pretty and perky and active in school—she’s got the lead in the school play, or is a varsity cheerleader, or has a room full of tennis trophies. And naturally, my brother is always there to give me advice about how to hook up with a Kimberly of my own. And to say I have no interest in the Kimberlys would be a lie. Kimberly looks amazing, I can vouch for this, even when she’s flat on her back on my dad’s sofa, with her hair and makeup mussed, popping up with a gasp when I burst through the door and turn on the light at 2 a.m. back from a night of gaming over at Eric’s.
“Crap,” I said simultaneously with my brother, who was cursing me, and I’m fast enough on the light switch to be unsure if what I saw was a naked torso or a near-naked torso or a semi-naked torso. The image was stuck on my eyes like when you shoot a flash photo in a dark room, and I was happy to have it there, because I would want to examine it carefully, as soon as I got through the living room and into my bedroom.
“Sorry,” I muttered, as I shuffled through the now darkened room, knowing the way by feel.
“Jesus,” I heard Kimberly sigh. “Garrett, I really,
