He holds out his hand. “May I take your coat, mam-le-zelle?” His voice is quiet, but so confident that I wonder if I’ve been pronouncing mademoiselle wrong my whole life.
“Um, sure, okay.” I step inside, happy to be out of the wind that tormented me all the way here. Mom and Dad weren’t free to drive me, and I hate the bus. I slide off my brown jacket and set it gently in his hand, releasing it slowly so its weight doesn’t drag him to the ground.
A loud thud announces Meg’s arrival at the bottom of the nearby stairs. “Hi. You got that, Nolan? He likes to play butler.”
“Butler?”
“Yep. Think he saw it in an Archie comic or something. He’s been doing it all week. Keeps his suit jacket by the front door and makes us all call him Jeeves.”
“Oh. Well, thanks, Jeeves.” Nolan grins at me as he reaches on his tiptoes for a hanger. “Is he going to be—”
“He’s fine. Mom normally likes to greet my friends, but she’s got to get a thing to the accountant by Monday or something like that, so she’s glued to her computer downstairs, and I’m pretty sure we’ll get the glare of death if we interrupt her. C’mon, let’s go to my room.”
Meg’s room is like a forgotten museum storeroom, cluttered with knickknacks and piles of books and layers of dust. Since I was about six, Mom has refused to let me have dessert unless my room’s clean. Meg’s mom clearly doesn’t have the same rule. She picks up the lime-green bra lying on her bed and tosses it into the corner before plopping herself down on the patchwork comforter.
A tank on a side table houses a turtle. He rests on a rock, head poking out of the water, eyes open but not moving.
“What’s his name?” I ask.
Meg scrunches up her entire face, as if she can’t quite remember. “Snappy,” she says at last.
“Hi, Snappy,” I coo at the little guy. He still doesn’t move.
A tiny bundle of purple charges into the room and onto Meg’s lap, and Meg kisses her head. Meg’s sister’s hair is a mass of natural, flyaway curls, just like Meg’s. “I still like the cantaloupe idea,” Meg says as she starts braiding the girl’s curls together. “We could throw them off my roof, right here. I go out there sometimes. The sidewalk is right below it, so we could drop them onto that.”
“Who’s going to pay for all the cantaloupes?”
Meg is still midbraid, but the girl on her lap pulls away, thuds to the floor, then skips over to me. She hugs my leg, kisses my jean-covered kneecap, then rushes out of the room with a giggle before I even have time to feel uncomfortable about the tiny stranger who was attached to my leg and now isn’t.
Meg doesn’t even blink. “My mom will buy them,” she says. “She’ll give me anything if I just ask her on the right weekend.”
Right weekend? I’m not sure I want to know. I’m definitely not going to ask. “Okay,” I say instead. “But then who’s going to clean up the mess?”
“We can—” she starts, then pauses. “Okay, point taken. But we have to come up with something, right? We could just tell Mr. Carter we’re doing the cantaloupe and change it later.”
“Maybe we should tell him we’re doing the grass durability one.”
“Ugh, that’s so boring.” She pitches backward onto the bed, sprawling out starfish-style. She has a desk along one wall, with a twirly, orange-cushioned chair and a laptop right there in her own room. And one, two . . . five LumberLegs posters. Five of them. Two of Legs doing speed runs, one of him fighting the filthworms with a boot, one of him beside his barrenlands castle, and one simple one with his character’s head and the words “BE AWESOME” in big bubble letters.
“You have a lot of posters,” I say, because I’m great at stating the obvious.
Meg pushes her shoulders into her mattress in what I think is supposed to be a shrug. “I got them after Stephen-the-Leaver left. He would have made me get just one or two, but screw you, Stephen. You can’t tell me what to do.”
I have no idea what to say to that, so I turn the chair to face her, then perch on the edge. Meg sits up with a start. “Do you play LotS?” she asks. “Like, not just watching Legs’s videos, but actually playing?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
She shakes her head vehemently. “I prefer funny over scary.”
“You find LotS scary? You’re kidding me.” In the short time I’ve known her, I’ve seen Meg dive down multiple flights of stairs, run through the hall without worrying about staring wolf eyes, and attempt to leap—unsuccessfully—onto our front step with her skateboard. I could probably manage that sort of thing in game, but she managed it in real life.
“No, I’m not. I scream every time a wingling attacks.” True, she did squeal when one ambushed LumberLegs during the livestream. But winglings are rare and not that hard to kill.
“You could try a speed run,” I suggest, though I’m not getting my hopes up that she actually will. “You don’t usually have to fight in those.”
“Can I make my own character?” she asks.
“Of course. What else would you do?”
“An excellent question. Okay, let’s do it,” she says, getting to her feet.
“What, now?”
“Of course!” She reaches over my shoulder and taps a button on the laptop to rouse it.
I should object, probably. We’re going to have to decide on a science project eventually. But we still have almost two weeks before it’s due, and I’ve done all the rest of my homework for the weekend, so I can always spend tomorrow afternoon researching more ideas, and what if she changes her mind later? I swivel my chair to face the screen.
Meg must have at least tried to play the game once before, because it’s already downloaded on her laptop, so I just have to update it and it’s ready to go.
When I get to the character creation screen, Meg practically pushes me out of the chair, as if she’s still worried that I wouldn’t let her make her own character for some weird reason. I cede the chair to her, settling on her bed instead.
I start explaining her options—the character classes, the color choices, the starting abilities. “I spent an hour making my elf warrior,” I say. She has pale skin and pink hair and an epic battle scar that stretches all the way from her right eyebrow to her left cheek.
She ignores my comments, goes straight to the skin color menu, and scrolls down to the browns. “Blah,” she says, crinkling her nose.
I’m unsure what she’s upset about until she holds her arm up to the screen, and then I get it. There are three brown options, but none of them really match the rich brown of Meg’s skin—one’s much darker, one’s much lighter, and one’s really more like tanned white skin than brown. “Are games usually like this?” I ask. Meg laughs humorlessly. “This is actually better than usual. Usually the choice is ‘Do I want to play that one black character or not?’”