Page 19 of Don't Hate the Player
It was pathetic. Nobody else had to tell Jake this was pathetic. He was incredible at producing that assessment from both himself and apparently everyone he’d ever met in his entire life. It was not very cool to have met someone once and been like “yup, we should be best friends,” and then hit puberty and have that morph into “help, I want kiss” and proceed to go absolutely nowhere with that. If his dad knew he was flipping out over a girl at school, he’d give Jake some awful Boomer lecture about how Hoopers don’t think, they just do, and no son of his was going to stand by while the girl of his dreams ignored him, blah-blah-blah . . .
Jake’s dad had clearly never met Emilia Romero. Just “doing” wouldn’t work on someone as smart as her. Also Jake’s parents’ marriage exploded when his mom cheated on his dad and left his entire family in this dust, so Jake assumed he’d learned more about talking to women fromMass Effect.
No, sorry. That was a lie. Jake played fem Shepard. He learned more about talking to gay aliens fromMass Effect. To be fair, Emilia may as well have been from another planet.
What was she even doing here? Jake had assumed Emilia didn’t even game anymore. She’d become something else in the years since he last saw her, something Jake couldn’t touch: a cool person. She played field hockey, made the honors list every quarter, and hung out with people who’d never give Jake a second glance. Just last week four girls in his grade showed up wearing the exact same outfit Emilia wore on the first day of school and hashtagged their group photo #RomeroStyle. The Romero in RomeroStyle couldn’t possibly care about regional esports.
“Jake Hooper from the birthdays, right? And the arcade.” Jake’s minute was up, and Emilia was talking to him. “You’re tall now.”
The Telltale engine of life had made Jake’s choice. That always happened when he stalled. With nowhere to go and a heart full of bees, he accepted his fate.
Sort of. He was still gearing up to actually talking.
“Yo. Buddy. You okay?” Emilia was looking at him the same way she had when they were kids, like she wasn’t sure if a puppy she found on the sidewalk was dead or just sleeping.
Not enough time. Default mode activated. “Sorry.” Jake’s brain-moment collapsed around him. “Sorry!” He already said that!Help, he thought.
“You really have to stop saying sorry.”
Jake wondered if that was the first time a girl had said that to a boy in the history of civilization, then realized he was still obligated to reply. If this wereMass Effect, fem Shepard would use the conversation choice that pointed out the obvious, so that’s what he decided to do.
“So—Okay. Hi. You remember me?” Now that he’d said something, every function in Jake’s body switched to manual control. His breathing took effort, and he had to remind himself to blink. He became aware of how weird tongues were and the weight of his own against his teeth.
“I remember you. It’s been, what, five years? I didn’t know you went to Hillford or playedGLO. I didn’t think I’d run into anyone I know here.” She checked over her shoulder, as if she was worried someone would come up behind her and see them talking. As far as Jake knew, there weren’t any rules against players mingling between matches, but it would make sense if Fury held themselves to a higher standard. They were the old testament, fire-and-brimstone gods of the Philly server.
“That works out then. Because you don’t really know me!” Jake intended for that to sound reassuring and was certain he did not achieve his goal.
“You know me,” Emilia pointed out. “That kind of counts.” Ow? Yikes. How was he supposed to take that? Guided by his experience with alien conversation trees, Jake changed the subject.
“I just know your team because Fury’s amazing. Makes total sense that you’re playing with them; if you were going to be on any team, of course it would be Fury. Like, legends only, you know? Not that I think you’re a legend. Well I mean if I would have guessed anyone I kind of know was a legend, it would probably be you, but not in a bad way? Just, like, given the context of how I know you. Which I really don’t. I just see you at school sometimes.”
From the way Emilia’s face fell, Jake guessed that he had once again managed to say the wrong thing entirely. Even though every neuron in his brain zoomed toward whichever hemisphere controlled his shut-the-hell-up valve, he felt badly enough to at least try to fix whatever he just did. Once he figured out what it was.
“I mean you’ve always been good. You’ve been kicking my butt since we were in the fourth grade, and Byunki—wow, it just hit me that you’re actually playing withtheYUNG, wow—would only bring the best to this tournament. He’s not going to call in the sandbag squad, you know? I’m not even going to ask if you just won, because I know you did.”
Finally, a smile. All it took was a monologue.
“We did win. I got a checkmate.”
“Of course you did! Jesus, on your first match? You are . . .” Oof, Jake struggled for a word. “. . . ?terrifying.” It was true, in more ways than one. Emilia seemed to take it as a compliment.
“That’s the vibe. And what about you? You’re Team Unity?”
Jake looked down at his own jersey. Right, he was also here to compete. Very soon.
“Yeah, we’re kind of up next.”
“Right! Don’t let me keep you. You were probably getting in the zone down here, sorry.”
That was a liberal interpretation of what Jake was doing before Emilia showed up, but he was more than happy to let Emilia keep thinking that. On the whole, he’d give this whole incident a B minus, with points subtracted for awkward silences and the fact that he still had not managed to regulate his breathing despite earning one (1) smile and had blinked maybe four (4) times since Emilia started talking. And he’d stopped thinking about his tongue. Well, he had stopped thinking about it until he just thought about thinking about it. Tongues. So freaky.
“The zone. Yup. I should probably head to a green room or something.” Something about that B minus emboldened Jake beyond anything he felt capable of before, even though failing the charisma check he was about to attempt would have catastrophic emotional consequences:
“I’ll see you Monday at school, though. We shouldn’t, like, spy on each other, but maybe we can get lunch and talk about the tournament?”
“That’s not a good idea.” Just like that, Emilia disappeared and in her place was KNOX. Jake, ever perceptive to the exact moment anything went south, felt his chest bees drop dead and hit whichever part of his body was the floor.
“Cool. That’s fine too, very cool. I’m gonna . . .” He would have moved around her and booked it down the hallway to save face, but his feet suddenly weighed three tons each. He was also by his own estimation two inches tall, which meant it would take him an hour just to jog around Emilia’s titanic figure.
