We watch another video, and then the pizza is ready, and then it’s time for the livestream and Legs’s real, huggable face joins his cartoony in-game one on the big screen, so big we can see every twitch of his dark, dancing eyebrows when he’s joking, and every clench of his square jaw when he’s passionately serious.
He’s doing a rift raid with some friends, and when a wingling swoops out of nowhere, Legs and I both shriek, and Kat and Legs’s friends all laugh, but not meanly.
Kat uses a plate, and I use a napkin, and by the time we discard them on the coffee table beside the leftover pizza, the raid is over and Legs has moved on to Legs Advice Hour—a name that makes me giggle because it always prompts someone to throw questions about leg shaving into the chat. (And yes, I’ll admit it, sometimes that someone is me.) In game, Legs heads to the greenlands, where he’ll work on his base as he takes questions from the chat—never the leg-shaving questions, though—and gives brilliantly sage advice. He has bases in all the different areas of the map, but the greenlands one he’s heading to is my favorite; it has all these different-colored staircases that shoot into the sky and up to these misshapen, precariously balanced towers.
The first question he takes this time is about how to ask a girl out, and he rambles in his usual kind way about being brave and taking risks and treating people with respect as he chops down trees for wood to build a balcony for the red tower.
“Thanks for the question, man,” he says. Then he looks directly at the screen as I join him in saying, “Be awesome!”
“I love that,” I say, sighing, as I slip off the armrest where I’ve been sitting and onto the main part of the couch beside Kat.
“He says it to everyone,” Kat says, looking down at the chat log on the tablet in her lap.
“Because he wants everyone to be awesome. Here, hand me the tablet.”
Her grip on it tightens like a reflex, then loosens. “Why?”
“So we can ask a question.” I snatch the tablet out of her lap and settle it onto my own. “What do you want to ask?”
She shakes her head. “Nothing. I don’t have any questions.”
“It doesn’t have to be a real question. Last time I asked about how to woo my band partner. I don’t even play an instrument.”
She grabs a pillow and sets it in her lap like she misses having the tablet there. “That was you?”
“Good one, right? That was the first time he answered one of mine. I whooped so loud Mom thought I tripped and fell or something. So what should we ask? Maybe something about a bully? He’s pretty good at giving advice about that, though he’s better with the love stuff, don’t you think?”
She chews on her bottom lip. It’s astonishing that it isn’t chapped and bloody by now, considering how often she does that. “What if he answers our fake question instead of someone’s real one? That doesn’t seem right.”
I stop typing. “Okay, fair point. So we can ask a real question, then. What should we ask? Got any problems?”
She hugs the pillow to her chest and looks down. “No. Do you?”
The question shouldn’t throw me, since I came up with it in the first place, but it does. I glance at the chat, with its endless questions and jokes and ridiculousness scrolling by.
Last night’s party was just as much of a snore-fest as I thought it would be. Lindsey still hasn’t texted me. In fact, I haven’t gotten a single text from anyone the entire time I’ve been here. Brad used to text me all the time, but he broke up with me when I thought things were going great, and now his friends don’t text me either. And my stepdad—the only dad I’ve known—doesn’t want me because I’m not his real kid.
What could I possibly ask in this chat? Dear LumberLegs, is it my ADHD that’s scaring everyone away?
I force myself to grin at Kat. “Nope, me neither,” I say. “So, no questions, then.” Instead, I start typing into the chat box: TO THE RIFT!
Kat leans over to look. “Meg! You can’t!” She grabs the tablet from me before I can press enter.
I stare at her. “You’ve never started a chat spam before?”
“No! They’re horrible.”
“They’re not horrible. They’re power.” I grin as maniacally as I can. “Go on, do it. Press enter.”
“No,” she says, though she sounds less certain. “I’m not going to—”
“Do it. Do it, do it, do it.”
“I—fine!” She hesitates, her finger hovering over the touch keyboard, then she jams it into the enter button.
TO THE RIFT! appears in the chat.
And then, a split second later, the chat is filled with it as thousands of other viewers echo our battle cry—one of Legs’s most famous lines.
TO THE RIFT!!!!
TO THE RIFT!
to the rift
TO THE RIFT
to the RIFTTT
TO TEH RFIT
TO THE RIFT!
On-screen, Legs rolls his eyes. “Guys, not again.” He glares right at us, but his green eyes are sparkling.
I grin at Kat. “See. Power.”
“Shut up,” she says. Then she thrusts the tablet back at me, grabs a slice of cold pizza, and stares straight ahead at the TV screen. But the corners of her mouth are curved upward.
“To the rift!” I shout out loud to the room. Kat just shakes her head.
CHAPTER 4
KAT
ON MONDAY AT LUNCH, MEG APPEARS OUT OF NOWHERE AND FALLS INTO stride beside me as I head to my locker. “You going to the caf?” she asks.
I wasn’t planning on going to the cafeteria. I was going to spend my lunch in the library, playing LotS. But here’s the thing: food isn’t allowed in the library. Which means I’d have to scarf down bites of my sandwich in the hallway and hope I didn’t stand out as that freak girl who eats like a friendless, famished hobo.
But here’s the other thing: Meg didn’t explicitly ask to eat with me. She might just be making small talk. Or she might just want to walk together, and then once we step inside the door, she’ll wave a cheery good-bye, leaving me standing alone on a cliff, staring at not just a pack of wolves, but the entire extended-family reunion. A horde. And no bow or arrows anywhere in sight.
“I’m thinking about it.” It’s the most ambiguous, noncommittal answer I can conjure up.
“Great. You getting your lunch from your locker? I have to grab mine. What’s your locker number? I can meet you there in a minute.”
That’s a lot of work to go to just to walk with someone and then ditch them. One cantaloupe . . . two be brave . . .
“It’s five ninety-two.”
“By the science labs? Got it. See you in a jiff.”
I don’t particularly like this plan—waiting alone in the hallway for an indeterminate amount of time like some hopeful, jilted loser—but she scurries off before I can suggest we meet at her locker instead. I needn’t have worried, though. I’ve barely lined my textbooks up on the top shelf before Meg is back, panting over my shoulder.
“Did you run?”
“I—uh—” She breaks off awkwardly, and when I look at her, her mouth hangs open a bit—though whether from trying to catch her breath or something else, I can’t tell. “Is that weird?” The question is part challenge, part worry. Part brave gladiator, part scared child.
All those glinting wolf eyes would have leered at her as she went flailing by. Yes, it’s weird. But also brave. “No,” I say. “It’s not.”