I sat on the couch next to him and picked up the controller, feeling like some sort of Amish kid on a Rumspringa. I’d played at friends’ houses before, but not enough to get good. Still, I figured I’d rather have fun sucking at Xbox than whatever the alternative might be.
“It’s standard POV shooter stuff, like Halo,” Ethan explained. “You can be a titan, a warlock, or a hunter, and then within that you can be human, a sort of Avatar-looking alien, or a humanoid machine.”
“What do you recommend?”
“Well, depends what skills you want to have. A titan’s like a big tank—you can take a lot of hits and Hulk out on people. A hunter’s faster and better at shooting, and then a warlock just sort of fucks shit up with spells, and can drain life force and stuff like that.”
As he spoke, Ethan selected the blue-skinned alien warlock character for himself. He wore a long black coat and had some sort of magnetic energy ball in his hand.
“I guess I’ll be . . . a hunter,” I said.
“Human or machine?” Ethan asked, reaching over to correct my button-pushing.
“Uh . . . human?”
“That’s the most fallible,” he said. “Just so you know.”
“I’m prepared to die quickly,” I laughed.
“That’s good, Roth, because you are going down,” Ethan said, hunching over his controller.
Within the first fifteen minutes, he’d sucked my life force three times, but I was weirdly more relaxed than I’d been in months. I think it was the fact that my mind was completely blank. No family, no school, no play, no future, and I didn’t even have to worry about whether I was impressing anyone. I was just running around some dystopian planet trying not to kill myself by accident, which was a pretty satisfyingly low mental bar. I almost forgot why I’d been afraid it would be awkward in Ethan’s house, until he reminded me.
“You’ve had, like, a lot of girlfriends, right?” he asked during a pause in play while my health bar was regenerating after a robot punched me.
“A few, I guess.” I acted like I didn’t know the actual number, which was seven. Eight if you counted Zoe Mueller, who I “went out with” for a week in fourth grade but never even spoke to.
“Would it be incredibly lame if I asked your advice on something?” His tone told me he already knew the answer to that question, but I shrugged, bracing myself.
“OK, so, Liv and I hooked up like six weeks ago,” Ethan said. “But since then it’s like . . . whenever we’re alone . . .”
I held my breath.
“. . . she doesn’t really touch me,” he finished. I could feel him looking at me but I didn’t want to see his face. It was harder to feel good about things that way.
“At all?” I asked, hitting a button to select my next weapon.
“I mean, she’ll sometimes hold my hand,” he sighed. “But if I try to kiss her, she always says it’s not a good time. Because we’re at school. But she never wants to go anywhere that’s not school. I haven’t even been to her house since the party.”
“Huh. Weird.” I was elated and leapt off a boulder onscreen in secret celebration.
“So is that normal?” Ethan deftly leapt out from behind a rock and dropped a bomb on me.
No, I thought. “I guess it depends,” I said. . . .
. . . “Yeah.” Ethan got quiet for a minute, and then out of the corner of my eye I saw him drain the rest of his beer and set the bottle down. “I know . . . she’ll never like me the way I like her,” he finally said.
“You don’t know that,” I said.
Ethan paused the game and went over to the bookcase on the right of the TV. He moved some video games out of the way on the bottom shelf, opened a hidden mini fridge, and took out two more beers. I kept avoiding eye contact.
“I just wish I knew why she started it,” he said, handing one to me. “I never thought she’d make a move. I figured I’d always like her, and she’d never look at me, and that it would hurt but it would be enough.”
I took a slug of my beer. It tasted bitter in my throat, like stomach acid.
“But this is worse,” Ethan said. “I can’t tell if she’s even my girlfriend, really. And I don’t want to ask her because if she says no . . .” He shook his head, grimacing. “I should get a titanium exoskeleton.”
“I should find a bathroom,” I said, standing up.
“Around the corner.” Ethan nodded in its general direction; his hands were busy resetting the game. “We can switch characters, and maybe that’ll keep you alive longer.”
“I don’t need your pity,” I said, forcing a laugh. My hand was already in my pocket, on my phone, pushing the power button.
“Speaking of which,” Ethan said, “This is so pathetic, but . . . if you get the chance, will you try to find out for me?”
“Find out what?” I asked, my heart racing as I felt a series of buzzes against my leg.
Ethan didn’t turn around. “What she’s doing with me, I guess.”
As soon as I got into the bathroom, I locked the door and stood at the sink, reading through your texts, each one making me feel more and more like a dick:
hey, where’d u go?
don’t have too much fun w/o me