Page 1 of Don't Hate the Player
PART I
Jake
NOBODY ACTUALLY LIKEDEmmett Franklin, but his birthday party was the most well-attended event on the fourth-grade social calendar. It didn’t matter that Emmett was kind of a dick or that he only ever hung out with Connor D. and Matt P. at school. What mattered was that every year, his parents shelled out for an entire Saturday afternoon at the Hillford Mall Arcade, which meant everyone who showed up got two fat rolls of tokens and all the pizza they could eat for what might be the greatest five hours of their young lives.
Jake Hooper knew he was only invited to Emmett’s birthday because their class had a rule that party invitations had to be given to every student in his homeroom. Even if he felt sheepish showing up somewhere he wasn’t wanted, the possibility of finally beating the high score onKnights of Darknesswas too delicious to pass up. His mom was thrilled he’d been invited and encouraged him to make some friends at the party, but the moment Jake stepped onto the arcade’s sticky carpet, he zeroed in on the big blue machine in the back—the one that would soon displayHIGH SCORE: JCHon an infinite, glowing scroll for everyone in the mall to see. That machine was his ticket to glory.
A ticket to glory that was, as Jake would soon discover, made out to someone else.
He could tell from the back of her head that she didn’t go to his school. Jake always sat in the back of the classroom and had gotten unusually good at telling people apart by their hairdos. This girl had brown, poofy hair like no one in Mrs. Ripton’s class, so Jake immediately knew he didn’t know her. She might have been in a different class or gone to a different school, but either way she was at the party, outside of the “everyone gets an invite” rule. Emmett must have liked her. If Emmett liked her, Jake was sure he didn’t.
But Jake Hooper wasn’t a quitter. Games were his thing, maybe the only thing he was serious about. His classmates called him weird and loud, and his teachers wrote on his report card that he was “distractible,” but Jake felt better about all of that when he played games. He liked the ones where he got to be a hero, kicking down bad guys and overpowering crowds of undead with a well-timed blast of fire magic. He also liked it when he got to play with his friends, who lived in other places but teamed up with him for crypt raids and group challenges. It was better, Jake thought, to win when other people could share it.
That was why Jake panicked when he got closer to theKnights of Darknessmachine. He couldn’t see the girl’s face as she played, but he could tell she was concentrating hard on landing her combos and smashing through the wights that swarmed out from the castle on the side of the screen. Thanks to his new glasses, Jake saw from a short distance that her kill tally was edging dangerously close to his own personal best, the fifth-place high score that got him on the leaderboard the last time he played.
Sometimes Jake’s mom told him to be careful of other people’s personal space. He had a habit of leaning and squinting—that was how she knew he needed glasses—and even though his vision was better now, Jake still found himself getting close to things he was interested in. In his curiosity he forgot that most people don’t really like it when they glance to the side and see a person they don’t know staring over their shoulder.
The girl noticed and did not like it. She only twitched a little, as if someone had poked her in her side, but it was enough to make her finger slip off the attack button and miss landing a powerful finishing move. After that there was no way she could catch up the flow she had going before.
“No, no, no, wait, wait, wait—UGH!”
It was like watching a car crash in a movie. In slow motion, her holy knight avatar’s health chipped down to almost nothing as her attacks failed to keep up with the game’s defending forces. Jake winced every time the squelchy sound of stabbing punctuated the enemy’s hits on the knight until the fateful phrase YOU DIED flashed across the screen. GAME OVER.
Jake was no stranger to making people lose games (that was kind of the point of going player versus player), but he’d never physically watched someone wipe out because of something he did. The girl smacked the machine with both hands and looked over at him with the same expression his dad made when Jake dropped a dinner plate or forgot to close the screen door all the way. The look said it was impossible for Jake to be as dumb as he just acted, like how was he even alive if he was going to bethatstupid.
It was suddenly very hot in the arcade, especially under Jake’s hair.
“You messed me up!” the girl hissed, apparently not trying to bring more attention to their shared shame than was absolutely necessary. “Why are you standing so close to me?”
If only Jake had a reason that didn’t sound silly. He could have said that he was nearsighted and wanted to watch her play, but his glasses gave that away as a lie. He also could have said that someone told him to tell her it was time for pizza, which was only true in the sense that it was technically time for pizza but was also mostly a lie. He defaulted to the magic word, which, if Jake had ever made a list of the words he said most often, would definitely be at the very top by thousands and thousands of points.
“Sorry.”
Next to them both,Knights of Darknessreset to the title screen and flashed bright with the game’s opening cinematic. The knight looked up at the castle, which was encased in a purple swirl of dark magic. INSERT TOKEN. The evil sorcerer stood in a graveyard and raised his hands, casting the spell that would reanimate his undead army. INSERT TOKEN.
“Sorry?I was gonna get on the board, and now I have to start over andcan you step back, please?”
Jake felt like stepping all the way out of the mall and into the reservoir across from the parking lot, but in the interest of trying to make things right, he only moved away enough to give her what his mom would consider a normal amount of space.
“Here,” he said and dug around in the front pocket of his sweatshirt. He pulled out one of his two rolls of arcade tokens and held it out to her, desperate for that to be enough to make up for his existence. One half of his perfect afternoon, traded for peace. “I just—You’re really good. You were doing really good, and I was watching. You’re definitely gonna get on the leaderboard, but I feel bad for distracting you.”
The girl picked up the roll and looked at Jake like he was an alien, which was an improvement on her looking at him like he was stupid. She glanced back at theKnights of Darknessscreen, then back at Jake.
“I’m not going to take your whole roll,” she said after clearly weighing the option in her mind. “I mean I wouldn’t be mad if you gave me a coin, but not the whole thing.” She cracked the cardboard tube in half, shook out one token, and handed the rest back to Jake. “Seriously, it’s weird that you just gave me the whole thing.”
Jake was used to being called weird, but the way she said it, with a smile that brought him into the joke, made him feel like she wasn’t making fun of him. Now that he knew she wasn’t going to ruin the rest of Emmett’s party for him, she sounded really nice.
“Sorry,” he said again, “for being weird.” And then, with a boldness he didn’t know he had, he asked if he could watch her play the next game. “I can never get that shield combo to work and you just did it, like, five times in a row. It was awesome.”
The girl smiled wider, apparently happy that he noticed her skills. “It’s not hard if you kind of count between the attacks; it’ll beep right before the shield is ready, so you have to listen, but yeah, once you hear it you gotta pull the stick right away so the knight jumps belove and abow it really fast.”
Jake had no idea what the curly-haired girl just said. “Sorry, ‘belove and abow’?”
The girl smacked her forehead with her palm. “I talk too fast. He goes above”—she pulled the stick to show Jake the move—“and below. I can show you, but you gotta stop saying sorry.”
“Really?”
“I’m in if you are. Let’s play after pizza.”
