Page 24 of Don't Hate the Player
CHAPTER TEN
Emilia, Saturday
TO BE CLEAR,I did think this through, but something about the ten straight minutes of complete silence that followed the moment I pulled up to the arena bus stop and told Jake Hooper to get in my car makes me think that I didn’t think it through enough. Do I want him to talk? Talking would mean we’re being cordial, which is too far down the path to friendly, and friendly is not the goal here. I’m literally, in the actual definition of the word, not here to make friends. Jake is in my car because if I didn’t offer him a ride, he’d get a cold or something, and I didn’t see anyone wipe down the tournament stage’s keyboards between matches. He could get everyone sick. That would be terrible. This is actually so selfish of me, driving Jake back to Hillford. And because I’m doing this for selfish reasons, we absolutely do not have to talk.
Except that if we don’t talk, this whole decision has the air of a kidnapping instead of a rescue.
Listen, I didn’t force Jake to accept the ride. He was messing around on his phone when I drove over to him; I’d hoped he was hailing a car, which would save me from having to save him, but when he looked up and saw me through the window, he dropped the phone in a puddle and held his arm out as if to stop me from driving away while he scrambled for it.
“Hey! Hi. It’s me, Jake!” he said, like that wasn’t the entire reason I was at the bus stop in the first place.
“I know,” I shouted through my rolled-down window. “Get in.”
For all his stumbling over himself earlier, I didn’t have to ask him twice. He was shivering so hard it took him ages to send a final text to whoever he was talking to and dry his phone on the inside of his shirt. The heat from the car fogged up his glasses, but he didn’t make a move to clear them up with his shaking hands.
“Thanks,” he managed to say through chattering teeth. “J-just need to warm up.”
“Nope, you’ll die,” I said. It would look worse if someone saw him leaving my car after idling in front of a bus stop for a few minutes. “Let me drive you home.”
If he looked surprised, I couldn’t tell behind his whited-out glasses. Dude looked like Kevin fromSin City—and while a bespectacled comic-book cannibal was not the most charming comparison I could have made for the virtual stranger I had invited into my car, the bright light coming from the bus stop’s painfully white lamps made it the most apt.
“Okay,” Jake said, too cold to argue. He gave me his address and leaned back to let the blowing heat bring him back to life.
That was those ten minutes ago, and now we’re here on the highway. The rain has lessened up, but there’s still something creepy about driving quietly in a straight line when someone else is in the car not talking to you. If I start playing music right now, would it be too obvious that the silence is killing me?
Out of nowhere, Jake turns to me like he’d been gearing himself up to say something for the past few minutes. Maybe the silence was killing him too.
“You know, I didn’t get to see your match with the checkmate. Was it cool?”
I can’t tell if he’s asking in his capacity as my competition or my hostage, but it can’t hurt to tell him something he could easily look up on YouTube when he got home. Obviously, I have no business telling him what happened after my match, but I haven’t really had a chance to flex about my win since Byunki rained on my parade. It might be nice to put the fear of Fury in someone who could actually come up against us in competition.
“It was cool,” I begin. How much should I tell him? “I played Pharaoh since Vulcan came out with Lucafont. Used Erik’s Special to get eyes on the payload, and I got first blood. It was a slap fight at the end, but our healers double sacrificed to give me a shot at the tank.” That wasn’t exactly what happened, but the video wouldn’t include audio of Byunki’s warnings to me, and that’s a much better narrative to lay over the facts of the match.
“Smart.” Jake nodded. “Do you always play DPS?”
“What am I supposed to be, a healer?” Healers are stereotyped as the caretakers of the team, so any girl in gaming gets asked if she heals. I wouldn’t have had as hard a time as a girl inGLOif I had played a cute little field nurse, but it’s not my thing and never will be. Nothing against them, but I just resent the assumption. “Are you asking if I’m a healer because I’m a girl?”
“No! Come on.” Jake throws his hands up, offended that I was offended. “I’m a healer; I was just wondering if Fury lets you switch roles. We switch sometimes.”
I’m not talking Fury’s strategy with a competing team, but if Jake’s team is as cohesive as they are while still switching their placements, they’re better than I thought. It’s hard enough to master more than one character inGLO, let alone a completely different mechanic.
“I’m DPS. I’m always DPS.”
“You hit ’em where it hurts.”
“That’s the vibe.”
And . . . ?more silence. I’m so good at talking about stuff when it comes to my real life—dances, classes, whatever Connor and his friends are into—but why am I so bad at this when the topic is something I actually like?
Jake surprises me again by speaking up. He’s either one of those people who has to fill a silence or he’s determined to get some Fury secrets out of me. I glance over at his face—his glasses have defogged on their own, revealing his huge, dark eyes, and I make a mental note to watch what I say around him:Sure, he looks cute when he’s wet and helpless, but there might be a devious mind lurking under all that hair. Engage but do not trust.
“You used Pharaoh’s special on Lucafont? The Shatter thing? We don’t play him, so I don’t know his loadout.”
This topic is fine. Pharaoh’s loadout is a fact, not a secret.
“Yeah, it’s this crossbow bolt that Pharaoh traps a soul in before shooting. The animation is really cool. You can only do it if at least one opposing player has died in a certain radius because the implication is he’s, like, harvesting their spirit as a weapon, which is dark but also kind of sick?”
Jake’s eyes widen. None ofGLO’s healer characters have powers like that. “Wait, that’s horrible. I love it.”
