So for the last three hours, I’ve lain here being unoriginal. I don’t know.
Crying ceased to do anything for me ages ago. I just stare, these nights. Stare at the window, until a fitful sleep drags my mind under, kicking, thrashing, silent.
· · · · · · ·
A KNOCK COMES ON MY DOOR. I GLANCE TO THE wall, at the old-timey novelty clock Dad got me for Christmas back in seventh grade. It has a quote from Shakespeare’s As You Like It—“One man in his time plays many parts”—and the comedy-tragedy theater masks below.
The clock reads 6:00 PM. A whole day gone, and I hardly noticed. Thank God for the Internet. With a little help from addictive games, I can forget myself at home, turn into a shell of my own mind. It’s nicely numbing. This weekend, I’ve been marathoning Blade-X, which, despite its unfortunate name, is not a cheap brand of grocery-store razor, but a first-person shooter involving large quantities of badly animated blood.
Another knock. “Yeah, what?” I say, as my avatar slams a crate into a metal wall. A shiny shield falls out, and I strap it onto my back.
The door creaks open. Olivia slips in and shuts the door behind her. “Hey.”
“Yo,” I say, not pausing the game.
“Have you been in bed all day?”
“Yup.”
“What do you want for dinner?”
“Not hungry.” Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten with her and Dad on Friday. I hope she doesn’t think that’s going to be normal. The energy I had the day before yesterday is long gone.
“What are you playing?” she asks, walking to my desk and sitting down.
“It’s called Blade-X.”
“Sounds, uh, stimulating.”
I don’t reply, sheathing my knives so I can climb up a water tower.
“Do you meet many people playing those?” she asks.
“I don’t have, like, a social life through gaming, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Okay,” she says. “?’Cause this whole isolation thing doesn’t seem super-fun.”
As I edge around the side of the water tower, bullets spray up at me from below. I roll to one side and start climbing the second ladder, tilting the perspective. There’s got to be an entrance here somewhere. . .
“I was glad you surfaced Friday, because you’ve seemed so mad lately,” Olivia says. “I’ve been trying to give you space, ’cause I thought it was something I did.”
I’m hardly listening. I’m dying up here. Climbing the ladders drains my energy, and dark, insect-like enemies have started swarming out the top of the water tower. I can’t fight them with my vitals bar empty—I have to get inside, somewhere safe.
Olivia continues. “But someone said maybe you were going through something, so I thought I’d ask if—”
I slam the pause button, disbelieving. “Whoa, wait. ‘Someone’? You asked someone about how to, like, fix me?”
“What? That’s not what I said.” Olivia drums her gold nails on the glass top of my desk. “Look. I know it’s not my place to tell you what to do with your time, but—”
“You’re right. It’s absolutely not.”
“But, Kat, you’ve got to get out of bed. You’ve got to eat and have an actual sleep schedule. That’s not a lot. That’s, like, bare-minimum, day-to-day stuff.”
I don’t bother replying. What is there to say? I have all the personhood of a rock these days. No appetite. No circadian rhythm. No interests, except the play. Who cares?
“And if you can’t do this stuff alone,” she goes on, “someone has to help you. I wish it weren’t me, because you hate me, for whatever reason, but—”
“Oh, shut up. I don’t hate you.”
“It’s not as if you like me,” Olivia says, her voice rising. “And I don’t know when that happened, but you know what? It would’ve been great if you’d given me some sort of memo.”
I’m quiet. As I look at her, unwelcome reminders swim up to my mind’s eye: images of us passing notes in fourth grade and climbing trees in fifth, binge-watching movies late at night in sixth grade and reading idly in the same room in seventh. Years’ worth of memories start crawling into the back of my mind whenever she hassles me like this.
I unclench my jaw and say, “I don’t like anyone.”
She stays conspicuously silent. For a second I wonder if I might’ve hurt her feelings.
Olivia looks away, out the window. I wonder for a second if she’s going to cry. I haven’t seen her cry since elementary school. Does she even have tear ducts anymore, in those neatly lined eyes?
I look back at my laptop screen and hit play.
She stands. “If you change your mind about dinner, I’m making soup.”
I hardly hear her. There it is—a crack between the water tower’s metal plates. I shoulder my way through the entrance into the dark. Finally safe.