I tried to be as methodical as I could. If it were my computer it would have been easy; I was a complete slob in real life, but my computer was perfectly organized, everything in files and folders with names that accurately described their contents. Hayden was the opposite, though—he was super tidy with his stuff, but his computer was chaos. He seemed to save everything to the desktop; it was wallpapered with files bearing titles that made no sense, or were misspelled. Dyslexia or no dyslexia, this was the computer of someone who just didn’t give a shit. I guess he figured no one would see it.
There should be a word for the thing that reactivates guilt, the trigger that made my skin prickle and my ears turn red, that made my head almost involuntarily droop, that made my pulse race with anxiety, then slow back down when I realized nothing had actually happened. Then maybe someone could find a drug to counteract it. Of course, there could already be one, but for now I’d have to manage without it.
I decided first to go through the documents. I reorganized the desktop so they were at least in alphabetical order, and then I started reading. All I found, though, were Hayden’s old papers from school and the typed-up responses he’d saved from his teachers. The essays themselves were gibberish; he’d tried to write papers about movies or music he’d liked, but watching him try to explain the raining frogs scene from Magnolia, for example, was painful. Because I knew him, I could tell where he was trying to take really complicated ideas out of his head and get them across to his teachers, but their responses made it pretty clear that they weren’t seeing it. The number of grammatical errors is unacceptable for writing at this level, they’d write. I saw draft after draft of each paper—he saved them all—where he tried to fix all the problems they identified. But his writing wasn’t getting any clearer. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are if you’re incapable of getting them across to your readers.
I’m sure they hadn’t meant to be cruel, but I could imagine how he’d felt. Reading the comments, I wondered how close he might have been to flunking out, if they even did that anymore. I’d offered to help him a million times, but he’d always refused; I knew now he hadn’t wanted me to see what he was doing on his own. He was one of the proudest people I knew, and look where it had gotten him. Based on what I was seeing, college was out of the question. Why hadn’t his parents let him see a specialist? They were so insistent that no one know their kids weren’t perfect; they’d expected him to just power through it on his own.
Next I checked his email. I anticipated it would be a gold mine; I went through all his messages looking for the word “Athena,” but I found nothing. I did find some more confirmation that the school thing was becoming a problem; apparently he’d refused to discuss it with his parents, so they’d started sending him increasingly sternly worded emails telling him he needed to get his grades up. Don’t think that we’ll continue to support you if you can’t get into college, his father had written. If we don’t see some improvement, you’ll never get anywhere, and you’ll be cut off. What kind of a job do you think you can get with grades like that? Asshole.
What next? I logged in to his Gchat account and started going through the chat history. His cursor popped up: HaydenStevens. But when I clicked the list of people to chat with, the only person on it was me. I tried logging out and logging back in as ArchmageGed, but though Google acknowledged that a user existed with that name, the account had a different password, and after a few halfhearted attempts, I gave up trying to figure out what it was.
I didn’t know what to do now. It was starting to seem like Hayden’s computer was going to tell me nothing more than the fact that his relationship with his parents was about as bad as I thought, and school was worse. Not exactly shocking, though. There had to be more. What was I missing?
Then it occurred to me. His clues to me had come from the playlist; he’d put it together to tell me something. Maybe the answers would be in his iTunes library.
Hayden’s music collection was better organized than anything else on his laptop, though we had Apple to thank for that. I could see all the bands we liked, and a bunch of the ones I wasn’t crazy about—Hayden had a thing for old metal and ’80s hair bands, so there was lots of early AC/DC and Poison before Bret Michaels got hair extensions, a tour bus, and a gaggle of groupies with fake boobs to go on TV with him.
But there was also a category called “Angry/Sad Chix,” which was filled with music I knew we’d definitely never listened to together, music I hadn’t even realized he liked. Paramour, Evanescence, Skylar Grey—so that’s where she came from!—Aimee Mann, even Alanis Morissette. We’d watched a video of hers where she walked around naked, and debated the multiple meanings of the word “ironic” and whether that made her song bogus, but that was as far as it went.
No, this list had to have come from somewhere else. Someone else.
I scanned the playlists, clicking on a few at random to see if they gave me any info. Finally, I found one called mix4anme. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it had some of the Angry/Sad Chix music on it, so it seemed like it was worth listening to.
I clicked on the playlist and cranked up the volume, just listening for a while. It was a pretty cheery mix, despite where some of the songs came from; the tone overall was definitely upbeat. Very not Hayden. In addition to the Angry/Sad Chix, there were songs from MGMT, Passion Pit, Metric. He wouldn’t have come up with all of that on his own, I was pretty sure. It was music even I’d think about dancing to, and I hated dancing. This was the mix of someone who was very, very happy.
I tried to check the date he’d created it, but there didn’t seem to be a way to find out; all I could see was the last day he’d played it, which was the day of the party. Had so much really changed in one day? Sure, the party had been awful, but could it really have been awful enough to counteract the happiness that had led to this mix? I’d thought I’d understood how the party had been enough to tip Hayden over the edge, but that was before I knew there had been this sort of counterbalance.
Which meant that whatever happened upstairs at the party was much so worse than I’d realized at the time.
I had to figure out what the name of the mix meant. I looked at it over and over again, sounding it out until it clicked. Mix4anme. Mix for A and Me. What if A was for Athena? What if Athena was a person? But who?
I looked at the Gchat window again, almost wishing the Archmage would come back. I’d pretend I believed he really was Hayden and ask some harder questions. I yawned and stretched, realizing I’d finally burned off the energy from the afternoon with Astrid, and looked at the clock. It was after midnight—it had happened again. I hadn’t even noticed it was dark, let alone that I’d skipped dinner.
I’d just shut down Hayden’s laptop and was about to pack it in and go to bed when the Gchat window on my computer beeped.
Time to play Mage Warfare, it said.
ArchmageGed was back.
I TRIED TYPING BACK. Hayden, is that you? What’s going on?
But ArchmageGed was already gone. He was so annoyingly cryptic that I was starting to believe it really was Hayden’s ghost. I looked around the room, for some sort of sign that this was really happening, that I was even awake. The wizard figurine sat silently on my bookshelf, like it always did. Staring at me. I felt a chill in the air and saw goose bumps on my arms again. Did I really have a choice?
Maybe Mage Warfare was a good idea; I could really use a few kills.
I clicked on the icon.
I played on my computer for a while, as myself, and while there was something satisfying about going in and kicking ass, I didn’t see the point, ultimately—why would ArchmageGed have told me to play the game? And then, just when I was getting really irritated, my in-game chat window popped up.
Not here.
I heard the opening music of the game again, and I looked over at Hayden’s computer. Somehow the music was coming from there, even though I’d already shut it down. It was impossible, but no more impossible than the other things that were happening. I opened the laptop, unsurprised to find that it had already powered on, that Mage Warfare was already loaded, with Hayden’s character already logged in.