Page 17 of How We Play the Game
“You’re right,” I admit. “Even if you’re totally not supposed to be here right now.” Cassius gives me a quizzical look. “I mean in my dorm room, alone, with me. No boys in the girls’ dorm rooms?”
“Oh.” Cass shrugs. “Well that’s stupid. Why are they all up in everyone’s business deciding who’s a girl?”
“Good point,” I say and pick up a piece of avocado roll. “And it’s like, people are gay sometimes, Brian.”
“Not me, though,” Cass says quickly. “Just putting that out there.”
“And, like, people have all kinds of friends,” I continue.
“Friends, yeah,” Cass echoes.
“I mean”—my train of thought is picking up steam—“I don’t have friends, plural. I have you. And everyone else thinks I’m the academy’s resident Benedict Arnold.”
“Listen, I’m not sure that tracks, but either way we’re going to have to work on you making more up-to-date references.”
“Fine.” Cass knows I had aHamiltonphase that included going extra hard on the homeschool curriculum for the Revolutionary War. “A more game-adjacent example of someone who ruins everything for everyone.” I rack my brain. “Ganondorf? I don’t want to be Ganondorf.”
“You are not Ganondorf,” Cass assures me. “Though if you take Kavi and Trieu up on that makeover, you could totally cosplay a Gerudo. They’re basically an entire town of autistic black hotties.”
I’m so caught up in thinking about betrayal that I almost—almost consider cosplaying my way out of this. No, that’s ridiculous. And likely expensive.
“Anyway,” Cass continues, “if they really wanted to stop us from boning, they’d put an RA on our floor. Or, like, cameras.”
“Ugh.” I shudder. “Please, don’t give them any ideas on how to make this even more of a reality show.” I point my chopsticks at the tray to make a claim on the last spicy tuna roll, and Cassius hums the wordless note that means he’s fine if I take it. Don’t mind if I do. Who knew the Food Emporium had such edible sushi?
“We’d be a scandalous early season plotline.” Cass makes a full meal out of that word, “scandalous.” It’s a rare display of his latent sense of drama. “Illicit yellowtail in the middle of the night, oh my.”
“Middle” is a strong word for the part of the New York summer night we’re avoiding by staying indoors. It’s just after eight on Sixty-Second Street; the sun is still out and burning copper in the reflected windows of the midtown skyscrapers I can see from the dorm window. It’s a southern exposure, with a floor-to-ceiling view way higher up than anywhere I’ve lived before.
“Yeah, we should have gotten way more food,” I say. “We could have eaten it all on live stream like a mukbang and rake in the tips.”
“Then we could use the money to buy more sushi,” Cassius adds thoughtfully. “Unlimited sushi hack: Unlocked?”
“Capitalism. The word you’re looking for is ‘capitalism.’”
There’s a knock at my dorm room door, which I have propped open with the lock as a gesture of goodwill toward anyone who might find me definitely hiding in here with a boy.
“Zora?” It’s Kavi. We all have single rooms, which is excellent, but hers is right next to mine. The top floor of this building is girls only, the boys take up two floors below us, but from the amount of activity I’ve been hearing outside in the hallway, I think there’s plenty of socializing happening regardless of where everyone keeps their stuff at night.
“Hide,” I whisper to Cassius. We scramble to our feet to hide both him and the sushi before Kavi comes in and are remarkably unsuccessful. When Kavi presses on the open door, Cass has half a leg inside the wardrobe and my pose near the bed makes it look like I’m trying to tuck an armful of supermarket sushi trays under my pillow for a midnight snack. It’s about a billion times more suspicious than if she’d found us eating dinner on the floor like humans.
Luckily, she doesn’t bat an extended eyelash. “I just wanted to see if you were okay after what happened. I was gonna say we should all get some dinner after the match, but you just, like, nyoomed right up Broadway once they let us out.” I watch her spot the sushi trays, to which she apparently declines to react.
“I’m fine,” I say, dumping the containers in the trash. “Thanks for asking.”
“For the record,” Kavi continues, “the general vibe is that it was pretty crummy for Brian to surprise everyone like that. No one blames you for being confused.”
“No, they do,” I respond. It’s nice of her to try and minimize the damage, but they do. Today’s match was supposed to be a celebration, a chance for every student in the academy to reintroduce themselves to the world and start their journeys. Instead, today ended with a fart noise, a confiscationof everyone’s video files, and a ranking based on the boring reality of how well everyone played the game.
“Well, they shouldn’t,” Kavi amends her statement. “You’re not the only one who didn’t react well to being on camera.”
“I also low-key flipped out.” Cassius backs out of the wardrobe and brings the doors together gently. “Told the guy to get out of my face, same as you. I just didn’t say, you know.”
“You can say it in real life, Cass,” I say sarcastically. It reminds me of something Ivan said earlier, about things in games not translating to reality. That was about me shooting a guy, though. This is just language.
“Personally, I think you did everyone a favor,” Kavi says. “You gave us a dress rehearsal for when we actually start competing on Wednesday, and that’s not the worst thing ever.”
“Does anyone else see it like that?” I ask.
