Page 18 of Don't Hate the Player
“Not gonna lie; I thought we were going down.” Ivan’s looking at me like I’m made of solid gold.
“A checkmate on her first match! KNOX got a checkmate on herfirst match.” I could do without Erik’s disbelieving tone, but I’ll take the accolades where I can get them. “How did you even know to pull the Shatter right then?”
“I didn’t even think before I did it! I was just like ‘he gottago’ and then WHAM.” That’s me, talking somehow even though my mouth feels like it belongs to someone else. My usual level of articulation has been substantially reduced by the sheer volume of adrenaline swishing through my bloodstream.
“Well, you killed it,” Ivan admits. “KNOX for the win.”
“KNOX didn’t listen to instructions.”
Byunki’s voice slices through the chatter as he marches his tiny, imposing body up to me in the room. He has his finger pointed at my chest, like he’s actually Klio jabbing me in the heart with his segmented sword.
“I told you not to Shatter until my signal. You didn’t listen. And you took the last shot before I could hit my Special. You stolemytank kill.”
I, um. Don’t do great when I’m being yelled at. Chalk it up to my parents having forceful personalities and my need for everyone who isn’t Audra Hastings to like me. There’s just this feeling I get when people sound mad, even if they’re not mad at me, that makes my whole midsection seize up like I’m expecting a punch. When someone actually is mad at me, it’s worse because my problem-solving brain bisects into the half that wants to throw down a handful of smoke powder and disappear and the half that wants to burst into tears.
It just doesn’t make any sense. I won the match for Fury, but Byunki still hates me. All that time I spent drilling Pharaoh’s Shatter and every possible move to help Fury win this match and he still doesn’t like me. At all. The other guys in Fury are staring at me now. Not even Ivan, who I thought was my boy, has anything to say in my defense.
I really don’t want to cry in front of these guys. Please don’t let me cry in front of Fury.
“Byunki, I’m sorry. I saw Ivan go down, and I had my Special ready. I didn’t see another way.”
“It’s not your job to see another way; it’s your job to take directions! Next time, don’t think. You’re not good at it. Just do whatever I tell you to do. This isn’t the KNOX show. It’s Fury, forever.”
Yup, there will be tears. Real tears. I need to get out of this green room now. There’s nothing left for me to say, and everyone is still quiet, so I run out and take whichever lefts and rights will get me farthest away from Fury and from him. Byunki hates me. I just got here, and I love it so much, and he’s going to take it away forever. Is this what completely fucked feels like?
I’m so deep in the backstage of the Wizzard-Claricom Arena I’m not sure I can find my way back without help. This far back there’s catering staff and event people passing by every so often, but if any player was looking for a place to be alone, this would be an ideal spot. As I turn another corner, I see a competitor sitting on a folding chair in an empty hallway. I should have guessed I’m not the only one who wants to be alone.
I try to backtrack before he notices, but my sad girl stompy feet give me away. He looks up, sees me . . . and reacts like I just pulled a gun on him. Seriously, he kind of puts his hands up and looks shocked. Relax, nerd,I’m—
“Emilia? Wh-what are you doing back here?”
Wait, what? There’s no way a random player should know my name, but something clicks for me when I hear the way he says it. I take a second look at his face and notice his big eyes refracted behind thick glasses, half-remembering his dark hair and imagining it spiked up like a fourth grader instead of falling in shaggy waves. He’s taller now, and I haven’t seen him in years, but I’d bet my ass that’s—
“I’m Jake,” he says through what still sounds like panic to me. Now that he sees I’m not going to shoot him with my invisible nothing gun, he repositions one of his raised arms to mess with his hair. That was definitely his plan the whole time, to do that with his hands. It’s very convincing.
“Jake Hooper from . . . Todd? Or Emmett’s birthday, if you remember.” He looks over his shoulder, like he’s worried someone else is going to find him talking to me. “I go to Hillford West now. I didn’t know you playedGLO, though.”
He goeswhere? It takes a second look for me to put the final pieces of the puzzle together, something I missed in my surprise at finding Jake backstage. His tournament shirt has a blue cross and a black shield. It’s the shirt I saw on the guy on the bleachers before I wiped out in practice a couple of days ago. He goes to my high school. Which means he knows me. He knows both of me.
I was wrong.Thisis what completely fucked feels like.
PART II
Jake again, Saturday
SORRY, JAKE NEEDEDa minute.
Pretty much the only good thing about being Jake Hooper was that his brain could do this thing where one second stretched out way longer than it was supposed to. Part of it was his thoughts speeding up so he went over a million things at once, and the other part was this super terrible slow-motion perception that reminded him of making a choice at the end of a Telltale game chapter, one of the big choices that changed the ending or forced him to kill off a main character he’d really have preferred to keep alive. Those choices always stressed him out, but Jake refused to cheat by pausing the game and looking up what happened in either case.
That turned out to be a good habit to get into. Slow as these moments stretched, he hadn’t figured out how to pause real life yet. Also, there were no helpful Reddit spoiler threads for making story choices like the one he was presented with right now.
On one side of the Telltale decision matrix was Emilia Romero, the exact person whose two-story image he’d fled the players’ box to avoid. His surprise at seeing her had made words tumble out of him before he even had a chance to think, and now that he had a moment to recoup, the idea of saying anything else to her seemed ill-advised and entirely terrifying. Jake’s vision snagged on Emilia as one possible focus, which seemed indulgent and made him feel as if his rib cage had swapped functions with a beehive. Jake had tried so hard not to look at her when he found out he’d transferred to her school. Just looking made him feel like he was bothering her somehow. Here in the back hallways of the Wizzard Claricom Arena, he couldn’t stop himself.
Unless! There was always the other choice. Shut down, tune out, run. There were so many things in the universe that were not Emilia Romero—there were doorways and hiding places, people, ducks, mushrooms, boats maybe—all he had to do was think about literally anything else, and he could postpone this conversation for never, completely sidestepping the part where he tripped over his own dangling heartstrings and whiffed theGLOmatch he had coming up in thirty minutes.
What made it worse was that up until he saw Emilia walk out onstage with Team Fury, of all the evilGLOteams in Pennsylvania, Jake had been having a nice day. He’d gotten up early, stopped at Dunkin’, took that nasty bus into the city, and finally met his best friends in the world. Team Unity was more of a family than his actual family was, and seeing Bob with his bald head and silly hat, Ki and Penelope completing each other’s sentences IRL, and even Matty (who was kind of a jerk but, like,theirjerk) had Jake absolutely floating with joy.
Jake hoped that by the end of the day, he’d be able to write a list in his head of the most important things that happened to him at the competition, and the thing that was happening to him right now wouldn’t even crack the top ten. Best case scenario, Unity won the match and moved on to compete next week, and that would be number one on his list. Worst case scenario, they crashed and burned, and the one thing he took away from this day was running into the girl he baby-duck imprinted on in the fourth grade, the one who didn’t even remember his name and made him feel physically and emotionally microwaved.
