Page 12 of Level Up
“Why was there a dead body?” Victory asks, scrunching up her nose.
“I was playingSteampunk 1877,and I had to kill a guy trying to rob me at gunpoint.”
Pal exhales dramatically. “Heavy.”
“Normally I don’t play really violent games on my channel,” I explain to them. “Just cozy and cutesy games.”
“Like that farming one…Starfield Valley?”
“Uh, sure,” I reply without correcting them. “Sometimes.”
“So, wait, don’t you play this, uh…Stones of Eeyoregame on your channel, though?”
“Not usually. I played it once, about a week ago, in honour of the new game coming out, but mostly I play stuff like that on my own time.”
“Yeah, and now all these jerks are coming out of the woodwork to accuse her of cheating, or ripping off this other guy’s channel,” Victory adds. “It’s such crap.”
“Gamer culture is so toxic,” Pal says with a sigh.
“Well, it’s not some monolithic thing.” I’m trying not to sound so defensive, but I’m tired of having to explain this to people. “There’s not just one ‘gamer culture’ that everyone’s a part of. There are lots of ways to be a gamer nowadays, you just have to find the people who share your values.”
To be fair, I’m not entirely sure that I’ve found mine yet.
Pal watches me for a moment and then nods thoughtfully. “You’re right. I was making assumptions based on things I witnessed in high school, and that wasn’t fair.”
“Well, high school sucks.” I give them a nod as well.
“Cheers to that!” Pal says, lifting their glass again, and Victory and I both clink ours against theirs.
I manage to steer the conversation away from my (decidedly boring) gaming drama and let the two of them tell me all about their whirlwind romance over the past three days. They really do look sweet together, and once I get a better sense for Pal’s humour, I feel much less like the butt of a joke and more like a participant in the conversation.
“You kept calling meVictoriafor three months,” Victory says, bumping Pal with her shoulder.
“Only because you’d get annoyed and scrunch up your face like—Like that!” Pal says, pointing at her when she scrunches her nose. “It’s so cute.”
“Shut up,” she says, but she’s smiling again.
“You really didn’t know that I liked you?” Pal puts their arm around her shoulders, and she leans into them. I’m surprised she’s so comfortable with them already; she usually doesn’t like when people touch her, except for me and a few close friends.
“You were always being sarcastic at me!”
Pal looks over at me with a deadpan expression. “You could see it, right?”
“Oh, absolutely,” I say with a sly smile at my best friend. “I tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t believe me.”
Pal leans in to whisper something in Victory’s ear and she smiles shyly.
“Ugh, you guys are cute,” I add, trying to play off the bitterness in my voice humorously.
“I know, right?” Pal lifts their pint with a self-satisfied grin.
Pal has this way of looking and acting like they are too cool for everyone else, but actually spending time with them tonight, I realize they are as much of a dork as Victory and me. They love anime and K-pop, weirdly enough, and they have a tattoo on their right arm of Jake the Dog with his stretchylimbs wrapped around their biceps. They also host their own small podcast where they interview local creatives from various fields, which is admittedly very cool.
I can’t say I completely get Pal, but the way they look at Victory—and the way Victory looks at them—I can tell they were made for each other.
Not that I believe in all that. True love, soulmates, crap like that. Not romantic love, anyway; my sister and I have never really been all that close, but I would still take a bullet for her. And, yes, she might accidentally freeze my heart one day, but her love would thaw it out. Probably.
The sad thing is, I want that. Not the heart-freezing thing, but themade for each otherthing.
