Then I am blinking at the screen, at the shimmering fantasy world hovering in front of me. Legends of the Stone. LotS. It actually worked. At my Ontario school, the game was blocked. Along with pretty much every other good thing the internet has to offer. You could look up the scientific names for algae or the middle name of the first prime minister and that was about it.
I take two steps forward—or at least my fingers do. The flowers I planted last week on the sandy floor of my underwater castle wink at me, as vibrant and dazzling as any real-life meadow of blossoms. I pull out my bow and ready an arrow. If a wolf attacked me here, I would kill it. If an entire pack of wolves attacked me here, I would kill them all.
No one else is online on our server, so a rift raid probably isn’t going to happen. But I can work on my underwater castle. Or search the badlands for packs of baddies who’ve wandered up from the rifts.
A real-life sound startles me, and I glance up. A freckle-faced librarian sits at her desk, coughing delicately into the crook of her elbow. As she finishes, her eyes meet mine and my chest constricts. The game isn’t blocked, but I don’t know the rules. Maybe I’m not allowed to—I stop myself before I panic. From where she’s sitting, in front of me and to the right, she can’t possibly see my screen.
In game, I steady my bow hand. In real life, I smile at the librarian. She smiles back, then glazes over, looks down at her papers. I am safe.
MEG
“TEN HIGH FIVES!”
“What?” Lindsey doesn’t look up from rummaging in the bottom of her locker. Instead of crouching at floor level like I would, she leans over with her butt sticking out toward the chattery rush of passing students—probably on purpose.
“I got ten high fives,” I say. “That’s better than the eight from this morning, though I might have lost count because I thought I saw a guy wearing a LumberLegs shirt, but he wasn’t, or maybe he was and I went running after the wrong guy. I’m not sure. I’m pretty sure it was ten, though.”
I lean out into the hallway—farther than Lindsey’s butt—and stick my hand in the air. “High five!” I shout. Two white girls pass by in almost-matching jeans and cardigans, too lost in their conversation to notice, but the Filipino guy behind them grins through his mouthful of braces and smacks his hand against mine so enthusiastically that he forgets to aim and hits my wrist. The brown flushes a little red.
“Eleven,” I say, giving my arm a shake as I lean back against the wall of lockers. “Holy tiddlywinks, I love high school.” There are so many more people here than in my tiny junior high. And it’s Friday, so they’re all happy.
“Have you seen my lip gloss? I can’t find it and my lips are so—what are you wearing?”
I glance down at the lime-green leggings and black coverall shorts I found at Value Village. “It’s retro. And I’ll have you know that this shade of green complements my particular kind of brown.” I flash her my arm and put it against my legging. “See?”
Lindsey crinkles her tiny pink nose. “It’s weird.” She pushes a strand of her red hair behind her ear.
“You’re weird.”
She frowns. “You took your meds today, right?” she asks, then disappears back into the depths of her locker without waiting for an answer.
She’s always asking me if I’ve remembered to take my meds, like she thinks they’re some magic pill that’ll cure me of me. Ugh, blah, and sigh. I think I was better off in the spring, when I hung out with those girls who were obsessed with making friendship bracelets. Then again, maybe not. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just my ADHD that made me bored out of my mind within the first ten minutes. Just thinking about it makes me want to do jumping jacks. I stick my hand back out into the thinning river of people and snag a slap from a too-tan white guy in sweatpants and a hoodie.
Fact: guys high-five more than girls. I mean, I haven’t actually been keeping track or anything, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.
Lindsey’s face is still buried in her locker. I don’t know why I bothered to trek all the way over here between afternoon classes. If high school had just started one week earlier, I could be two halls over, hanging out with Bradley Dennis’s posse instead.
“His loss,” I say.
“Whose what?” Lindsey finally resurfaces.
“Brad’s.”
Her expression softens for just a moment. “He’s a jerk. He shouldn’t have broken up with you. Can you throw this out for me?” She deposits a crumpled piece of paper into my hand.
The bell rings for the next period right then, and Lindsey swears. “I’ve got to go.” She kisses the air at me, then turns and scurries off down the hall.
I smooth the crumpled paper against my leg, then fold it and feed it through the slot in her locker door before heading off to my science class.
Brad’s friends all chose him over me, which is ridiculous because I was closer to most of them than he was, even though I’d only known them for a couple of months and he’s known them for years. Although maybe we weren’t as close as I thought, because the last time I tried to get them to do the chicken dance with me, a couple of the guys just rolled their eyes instead of laughing their heads off as we strutted and bucked like at the beginning of the summer. Ugh. Good riddance to all of them.
I should really find some new friends, though. I’m not going back to those friendship bracelet girls. They got all annoyed when I started spending so much time with Brad, as if they couldn’t believe that I’d find my boyfriend more interesting than friendship bracelets. Good riddance to them, too.
Thank goodness none of them are in this class. I put my head down on my desk, resting it on my arms for just a moment before popping back up again. There are approximately a bajillion people in this classroom, and I could make friends with any of them. There aren’t any other black kids, but that’s no surprise. My classes are scattered with Filipino and Chinese and East Indian kids, but other black people—not so much.
The Asian guy in the back corner is wearing a Legends of the Stone T-shirt, which is awesome. It has one of those ginormous rabbit creatures fighting a filthworm, and the cartoony art style makes them look even more hilarious than they do in the game, but the shirt would be even funnier if it had LumberLegs on it, too. If he doesn’t watch LumberLegs, it might not be worth befriending him. I’m not putting up with another lecture about how I’m not a true Legends of the Stone fan if I only watch other people play and don’t actually play it myself.
That’s one good thing about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named splitting up with Mom. His rule was I couldn’t watch YouTube until my homework was done, but in the one year and four months since he left, Mom’s only enforced that rule maybe three times. So screw you, Stephen. All right, so I used his name—it’s not like he’s the world’s most powerful wizard and he’s going to abracadabra me out of existence. His only magical power is leaving.