Page 6 of How We Play the Game
Cassius groans but joins me as I pick my way down the stairs and cross the plaza toward the theater. The theater’s aura is very different now that it’s mostly empty. There is no crowd waiting outside, no bonehead security guards keeping people out. Dozens of people are passing it by without looking. Don’t they know that this is the first all-esports theater in New York? Don’t they know Brian Juno is in there somewhere right now? As we get closer to the theater, I think for a moment that those big dark doors look like a perfectly rectangular black hole eating away at the front of the building from the inside.
Ooh, that’s a good one. I pull out my phone again and tap “black hole doors on a bright summer sidewalk. Pulls people in but no one notices. Building is hungry?” into the digitalscratch pad I use for errantGLRideas. You never know what might be a good foundation for a story.
“So,” Cass says as we approach. “How did you get your uncle to sign the permission slip for the academy? Last I checked he wasn’t too keen on you going away for the summer.”
“Oh, that,” I reply. “I lied to him.”
“Lied to himhow?” Cass asks cautiously. He also holds the door to the theater open for me, which is amazing because it proves the doors are indeed corporeal objects, and the action bathes us both in a waft of air-conditioning. There’s not much in the lobby except a pile of bags on the far side next to a sign for luggage drop-off. Wait, they’ll bring our bags to our rooms for us? Fancy.
“Lied to him as in he thinks this is an all-girls coding camp for aspiring game developers,” I say.
“Zora!”
“What?” We both walk over to ditch our bags with the rest. Where is everybody? They must be in the theater already, but I have a plan for how Cass and I will sneak up unannounced. “It’s going to have the same result anyway.” I crack open the second energy drink and take a sip. “Brian Juno gets, like, a zillion applications a year for his mentorship program, and I need something to make me stand out from the rest. Anyone can code, but the winner of his Summer Academy Royale? That’s a bingo.”
“Why don’t you just tell Clive that?” Cass sets his bag down and pauses, waiting to follow my lead for our next move.
“Because it’s not the way he thinks.”
Everybody knows of Clive Lyon. They just don’t know that they know. He’s a cautionary tale more than anything else,the top draft pick college football star who tore his meniscus days before his NFL debut and never played another game again. The boogeyman coaches invoke when they tell their guys to stretch before and after each game. The unspoken worry in the back of every player’s mind when something twinges wrong on the field.
I point toward the elevator in the back and wave Cass over to follow me. “He’s fine with me working in games, but he wants me to do it by the book. I don’t know if he thinks I’m going to engineering school or what, but he doesn’t believe in shortcuts.”
“In his defense, he is Clive Lyon,” Cass adds. “I get why he’d maybe have a thing against shortcuts.” The elevator doors slide closed, and he presses the button for the upper floor, level with the top and last row of the amphitheater.
“He also doesn’t want me anywhere near boys until I’m forty.”
That changes Cass’s tune. “Clive, my guy,” he says, shaking his head. “Ya gotta let Zora be Zora, am I right?”
Clive and I are not that far apart in age. Clive was twenty-two when our grandma died and left him the responsibility of raising a ten-year-old me, but that twelve-year age gap made him enough of an adult to give him authority. The older I get, though, the slimmer that margin starts to feel.
“Exactly, which is why I laid the groundwork for this being an all-girls thing early. I didn’t even tell him about the Iv—about that guy from Wizzcon.”
“Dang it.” Cassius snaps his fingers. “I should have set a timer. I thought we’d at least get through orientation before you brought him up, but nope. It’s been, like, ten minutes.”
“It’s relevant to the conversation!” I argue. It’s possible I may have brought up Ivan Hunt a few times since I ran into him at Wizzcon in January. But it’s not every day you meet someone with such a legendary capacity for being a dick. And that’s not just my opinion. There’s a reason Ivan Hunt disappeared for a year before showing up to compete inGuardians League Royale. He couldn’t show his face after his old team fumbled Wizzard’sGuardians League Onlinechampionship by kicking their only female player—who was Ivan’s own in-game damage partner, no less—off their team before the final match. They kicked her to the curb, sat by while she was harassed and doxxed, and did absolutely nothing to help her.
And yeah, he publicly broke off from his team in the weeks after they lost the championship and did everyone a favor by going away afterward, but our encounter at Wizzcon proves to me that he hasn’t changed. People like Ivan don’t think people like me belong in their walled-off boys’ club of elite gamers. For that, he got a laser to the face. Some people don’t deserve a second chance.
That’s what I would think about Ivan Hunt, if I thought about him at all, which I don’t.
“Uh-huh,” Cass continues. “Are we allowed to say his name or are you worried we’ll say it three times and summon him like Beetlejuice?”
“We can say his name,” I say. “It’s fine. Ivan Hunt. Bleh. See, I said it.”
“One,” Cass says with faux foreboding. Then he drops the act and sounds much happier. “But it’s nice to hear I don’t have to be jealous.”
“Why would you be jealous?” I respond. What a weird thing for Cass to say. “If there’s one crystal clear theme of my past interaction with Ivan Hunt, it’s that I absolutely, one-hundred-percent loathe him and all he stands for, from the top of his perfectly coiffed head to the bottom of whatever gamer boy nightmare hell he crawled out of. He treated me like a prop.”
“I know,” Cass says. “Also, that’s two.”
“And he thought he could charm me into partnering up with him like I don’t know who he is and what happened to the last girl he called his partner in a game. Like that’s not a whole ticker tape parade of red flags.”
“Iknow.” Cass looks at me sideways, like I’m the one who’s missing something.
“He wouldn’t have fit in here anyway,” I assure Cassius. “The academy is for the best players, not wannabe teen heartthrobs who think they can smile their way through life and get everything they want. This academy is about skill.” I punch a fist into my open palm for emphasis. “And … and merit. And ruthlessness. That’s how I made sure I’d never have to see Ivan Hunt again, and that’s what—”
The elevator dings. I step out and motion for Cass to be quiet. There’s no need to announce ourselves to the rest of the class when we can just slip in the back. I carefully open the theater doors an inch at a time to make sure Cass and I don’t make any noise when we step in. It could not have mattered less.
