Page 32 of Don't Hate the Player
Matt takes his phone from Penny, far more gently than she snatched it from him in the first place. “Some of it is good. It kind of starts out with a bunch of assholes being like ‘I bet she’s awful, fuckin’ SJWs, Fury just has her on there for a diversity slot.’ This one guy was being loud in there. You can see his comments popping up a lot.”
Penny grabs the phone back to see who Matt is talking about. He surrenders it willingly.
“Anyway, the comments kept going through the rest of your match, so right after it ended, that guy kind of had to, uh . . .”
The live video must have shown my checkmate! I poke at the screen in Penny’s hands to scrub forward, and sure enough, the guy who was being a jerk before got completely dunked on after Fury’s win.
Okay, that tastes good. That tastes really, really good. It sucks that it took winning to shut that guy up, since it only proves what I’ve known since the first time I playedGLO—I have to be unassailably great to prove I belong in the same room as guys who are half as good. That’s something I’m used to, though. It’s the same fight I have at school, or in my extracurriculars, or literally anywhere else I occupy space in Hillford. It’s why my parents are so hard on me, I think. Theyreallycan’t find out about any of this.
“Some of the comments before you won are bad, bad,” Matt explains. “But after the checkmate, it was like”—he makes a brain-exploding motion around his head—“goddess mode, who is KNOX, yada yada yass queen, and now everyone wants to find out who you are.”
“But the bad ones were still commenting!” Penny adds, gesturing to the phone again. “What is wrong with these people? She’s just playing a stupid game, and they’re acting like Lia broke into their house and cut their dicks off!”
Matt and I explain at the same time:
“Yeah, they’re kind of—” “That’s the vibe.” “Guys are bad. I’m a guy and, like, it’s bad.”
I really do envy Penny’s confused expression. Bless anyone who’s never ventured into the gaming underbelly of the culture war.
“That’s why I keep it all separate,” I say once Matt and I stop talking over each other. “It’s the internet, Pen. They love figuring stuff out, and it’s honestly a toss-up. Some of them want to find me to tell me I’m awesome; some of them want to send a SWAT team to execute me on my couch. If they get my name, it’s easy to find out where I go to school”—I look pointedly at Penny and Matt—“and who my friends are. It’s better for everyone if nobody else knows I’m KNOX.”
“And what about Jake? Will they do that to him too?” Penny asks.
Matt snorts. “He’s literally a nerdy white guy.”
I hold my hand up. “Actually, he needs to be a secret too. My team wouldn’t be thrilled if they knew I was friends with anyone else competing in the tournament.”
“Since when are you friends with him? I have no idea who ‘Jake’ is,” Penny says. She still has Matt’s Instagram open and doesn’t ask before typing in his search bar.
“No, that’s fine, you can use my phone for that,” Matt mutters under his breath.
I lock eyes with Matt across the room while Penny searches. He looks more amused than ticked that Penny’s taken over his phone, and I try to give him a thank-you smile while she’s distracted. He shrugs in response.
“It’s Jake what?” Penny asks.
“Hooper,” I reply.
“Ugh, private profile. I can’t get a look at him.”
“Let me see.” I lean over her shoulder. The profile she’s looking at has Team Unity’s logo as its thumbnail. “That’s him. But again—I’m not really friends with him. We knew each other when we were kids, and he recognized me at the tournament, so I had to say hi and, like, bring him up to speed. It’s nothing.”
Penny raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t say it was anything. You said you were friends, and now it’s nothing. Do you trust him?”
“I do. He’s cool. I mean, he’s not, like, at all. He’s fine.” It feels weird to be talking about Jake with Penny. The world-smashing tectonic crunch of discussingGLOwith Penny was hard enough. With one of Connor’s friends here, I can’t tell her about what happened with Jake. Does that mean I’m lying?
It’s not like I can omit a negative. Nothing happened when we were in my car after the tournament. Something almost did, but the almost means it didn’t happen. I didn’t kiss Jake Hooper. See, truth! Lawful good all the way down.
“Yo, is this your setup? This is sick.” While I’ve been watching Penny cycle through Matt’s social media in an attempt to find Jake, Matt apparently got bored and started opening the drawers in my desk. He’s found where I keep my gaming PC, rigged inside a cabinet I made from taking the desk drawers out and gluing the fronts together to make a false door. You’d think I need a better hiding place, but the desk was a hand-me-down from my dad, and those drawers had been stuck for ages. My parents don’t think I have the skills to fix a stuck drawer, let alone build and hide an entire PC.
“Yep. That’s Florence,” I say nervously. I don’t like Matt having my secret cabinet open while my bedroom door isn’t closed.
“You built a computer and named itFlorence?” Penny snorts. I know she still loves me, but she’s not going to let me live a single second of my newly discovered nerdhood down, potentially ever.
“Of course, ’cause she’s the machine,” Matt says matter-of-factly. “That’s dope.”
For the second time since Saturday, I realize I’ve massively underestimated a boy in my orbit. Matt Pearson couldn’t pass a history quiz without a TARDIS, but he’s no dummy. I’d never tell him how little I thought of him before, but I am about to throw a rare compliment in Matt’s direction when my mom calls us down for lunch.
“Oh, I’m not really that hungry,” Matt says. Penny tilts her head at him like she’s looking at a picture of a puppy in a hat.
