KAT
MEG IS GROUNDED. APPARENTLY SHE HASN’T TURNED IN A SINGLE HOMEWORK assignment for her math class in weeks.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask her on Tuesday at school. “I would’ve helped you.”
“Math is stupid.”
“It’s not—” I start to say, then stop myself. I love math. I love that it’s predictable. And orderly. Five plus five is always ten. Always.
It’s not the same for Meg, though, I know that. I think she’d be happier if five plus five sometimes equaled twelve. Or purple.
Meg being grounded means she’s not allowed to use her phone. Or her computer. Or leave her house at all except for school. Which means no texting, no talking on the phone, no LotS. For two weeks.
Which means my evenings are quiet. Ordered. Peaceful. Studious.
Lonely.
I’d forgotten what it feels like to be lonely.
LEGENDS OF THE STONE
KittyKat has logged on.
<>Pterion: You in for a rift raid, Kitty?
KittyKat: naw, think I’ll work on my castle today
Private Message from Sythlight to KittyKat:
[]Sythlight: You okay?
KittyKat: what do you mean?
[]Sythlight: I’ve never seen you turn down a rift raid.
KittyKat: yeah, well, I’m just not in the mood today
[]Sythlight: Is Meg coming on?
KittyKat: no
LucienLuck has logged on.
KittyKat: LUKE!
LucienLuck: Hey, Katsup. Just finished an exam and need a break. Wanna play?
KittyKat: of course.
Private Message from KittyKat to LucienLuck:
KittyKat: just let me plug in my headphones and I’ll call.
LucienLuck: k
Private Message from Sythlight to KittyKat:
[]Sythlight: So . . . guess I’ll talk to you later then?
KittyKat: yep. see ya :)
KAT
LUKE HAS RESURFACED OUT OF THE CHURNING, ENGULFING WATERS OF HIS university life at the perfect time. He’s got just one exam left and his girlfriend—who I’m not supposed to tell Mom and Dad about, for some reason—has already gone home for the holidays, so he has all sorts of time to play with me.
And I have all sorts of time to play with him. Halfway through her grounding, Meg gets grounded for even longer—at least until Christmas—for some “stupid reason” that she refuses to tell me. So with Meg unable to hang out or chat or even text, and with teachers giving in to the holidays-are-nigh cheer and assigning much less homework than usual, my evenings continue to stretch out empty before me.
The server’s pretty quiet, too, aside from Luke and me. Pterion joins us for one raid, and HereAfter and Moriah for another, but Sythlight isn’t around much, which is strange. He’s usually on when Meg and I are, which I thought meant he was always on. But he’s not, apparently. At least not this week. Maybe he’s busy, or on vacation. Or dead. Now that Luke’s proven himself to be alive, maybe Sythlight’s taken his place among the unknown deceased.
He’s not dead, though. On Saturday evening, a week before Christmas break, he logs on just as Luke and I are about to start a rift raid. Luke’s invitation to him to join us appears in the chat log. And then, when he agrees, Luke’s invitation to join us in VoiceChat follows. Luke knows I don’t like talking to strangers, but apparently university has stuffed his brain so full of stupid facts he’s forgotten the important things.
You have a mic now? Sythlight types.
My heart thuds heavily. But Meg’s words swirl around my head to the same rhythm. You don’t have to marry him. It’s just VoiceChat.
Here’s the thing: I don’t like talking to strangers.
But here’s the other thing: Syth isn’t a stranger, not really.
It’s just VoiceChat. And if I say no, Luke might out me as a liar, since he’s clearly not thinking straight.
Yeah, I type into the chat. My stomach turns over. But I can’t take it back.
I already have my headset on, since Luke and I were already planning to use VoiceChat, and I barely have a chance to breathe before the call rings in my ears.
One it’s just VoiceChat . . . two it’s just VoiceChat . . .
I click “Accept call.”
“Hi,” Sythlight says. His voice is cheery and smooth, like caramel drizzled over freshly popped popcorn.
“Hi,” I croak. Three it’s just VoiceChat . . . four it’s just VoiceChat . . .
“Where’s Meg tonight?” Sythlight asks.
“Who’s Meg? You have a friend?” Luke butts in before I can answer.
“Shut up,” I say, thankful to slide into our usual banter. The routine of it creates a veil of calm that keeps the nerves at bay. “You only had friends back in Ottawa because they wanted to hang out with me.”
The line is silent as Luke tries—and fails—to come up with a clever response. University has made him weak. Sythlight ends the quiet instead of Luke. “Do you—do you guys know each other in real life?”
Luke laughs. “Kat’s my bratty little sister.”
“Oh!” Sythlight says.
“I’m not little, jerk,” I spit at Luke. “Or bratty.”
“That’s good to know,” Syth says. “I thought—well, never mind.” It’s impossible to tell for sure, but it sounds like he’s smiling. The caramel in his voice is warm and melty.
The veil of calm disintegrates, and my stomach floods with butterflies. Butterflies whose wings are laced with acid.
“Well, Supreme Emperor of the Universe,” Syth says, “why don’t you take point? I’ll follow you.”
Okay, maybe wings laced with acid is going a little far. They’re just plain butterflies. A hundred butterflies.
“Supreme Emperor of the Universe?” Luke laughs. “What have I missed?”
“A lot,” I say. “Now hurry up and get your butt over here. Syth and I are both ready to go.” I draw up beside Sythlight at the rift. His dragonlord does a little dance. My elf warrior dances back. Just like normal, but with voices in our ears instead of words in the chat log. It’s okay. Meg was right; it’s just VoiceChat.
“Okay, okay, I’ll be there in a sec,” Luke says. “Should I bring anything special?”
Planning over VoiceChat is definitely easier than planning over regular chat. I advise Luke on what to bring, we talk strategy as he runs over, and we enter the shadowy rift in record time.
“How’s the science project going?” Luke asks once we’ve established our positions and descended far enough into the rift that we have time to talk about more than just strategy. “Have you figured out who your guinea pigs are going to be?”
My hand spasms at the unpleasant reminder, and I miss my shot. The mutant shadowwolf gallops toward us. I steady my bow, aim, and release a second shot. The arrow pierces the wolf right between his beady eyes, and he falls down dead.
“You mean besides Mom and Dad? No.” If only our test subjects actually were guinea pigs instead of people. That I could manage.
“What’s the project?” Syth asks. As I explain, he executes his tank role flawlessly, rushing in and taking several sword slashes to the face—our human shield—then withdrawing to the shadows at the perfect moment. In other words, he can’t possibly be listening to me. I keep my explanation short.
“Sounds like fun,” Syth says as he dodges a venomous wereboar, ducking out of the way just in time for me to fire an arrow into its back hoof.
“Yeah, except we have to test actual humans. The horror,” I say, aiming for sarcasm, but not quite reaching it. An idea comes to me as Luke slices the maimed beast open with his ax. “Hey, Luke, do you think you could recruit some of your friends to do speed runs?” I’ll have to check with Mr. Carter to make sure it’s okay, but I think it will be. I mean, we’ve created detailed instructions, which would allow for self-testing, and it would be good to get a variety of ages and locations anyway.
Another venomous wereboar creeps out from amid the rocks. Green poison-slime drips from its nostrils as it stalks toward Luke, backing him into a murky corner. Luke’s battle-ax ability is still on cooldown.
“Um, yeah, probably?”
My fingers pulse with adrenaline at his response and I hit the beast with an arrow, right below the neck, where its armored skin is weakest. It crumples to the ground. If Luke tested four friends plus himself, I could be halfway done with my share before Christmas break even started. Meg said she could do fifteen, leaving me only five, but if I can find a way do my fair share, then I will.
I start to explain the steps—the multiple tests, the importance of randomization, the timing—to Luke as we loot the corpses and head farther into the darkness, but he cuts me off. “Just send me an email.”
Well, of course. The tests have to be done right or there’s no point, and there’s something about the way he’s holding his battle-ax in one hand and a glittering, freshly looted sword in the other that makes me think he’s not taking notes.
“Shall we head into the depths?” Syth asks, obviously bored with my science project rambling. Obviously having no interest in me and my boring life.
I tighten my grip on my mouse. “Mm-hmm,” I say, and Luke and I follow him into the dark forest.
MEG
WHEN MRS. BROWN SETS MY MATH TEST ON MY DESK UPSIDE DOWN ON THE Monday before the holidays, I know it’s not going to be good. I flip it over immediately. Across the top is a big, red 47/100.
I stick my hand up in the air.
“Yes, Meg,” Mrs. Brown says. The jingle bells on her red sweater chime softly as she hands a test back to Chris beside me. She’s worn a different Christmas top every day this month. She must have an entire closet devoted just to snowmen and reindeer.
“Have you ever thought of marking in a different color than red?” I ask. “Red is so demoralizing. The color of blood and all that. Maybe you could mark in purple or green. I have like a million green pens at home. I could bring one in for you if you like.”
She clutches the rest of the tests to her chest and sighs. “Meg, just—be sure to study next time, would you?”
I flip my test back over to hide the angry red, and she continues up and down the aisles, bells jingling cheerily. I lean over and whisper to Chris, “She should study how to dress fashionably,” and he laughs.
Actually, I love her sweater.
And actually, I did study. Or at least, I tried. I mean, I’ve been doing my homework. I have to or Mom will never let me leave the house again. The problem is that my math textbook might as well be written in Egyptian, so I had to start just writing down random numbers, because what else was I supposed to do? But of course, since Mom thinks I’m stupid, she started looking at my notebook and eventually figured it out, and I ended up grounded for even longer.
I shove the math test into my backpack. When I get home, it’s going straight into the shredder.
“Okay, so I asked Mr. Carter,” Kat says when I stop at her locker between classes. “He said it’s okay to have Luke do some of the testing for location diversity purposes, as long as we’re doing the majority ourselves.”
“Have Luke what?” I don’t know what she’s talking about half the time.
“I told you. I asked Luke when I was VoiceChatting with him and Syth—”
“Wait. Wait! You were VoiceChatting with Syth? I thought you were just—”
“The bell’s going to ring,” she says, cutting me off. “I’ve got to get to class.”
“But—”
“Talk to you at lunch,” she says, then disappears into the mass of students flowing by. She is basically the worst. And the best. And the worst.
At lunch, I catch up to her in the hall and punch her in the arm. “Dude,” I say, “I can’t believe you made me wait an entire class to find out what happened with you and Syth. That’s mental cruelty.”
“What do you mean?” She frowns at me like she has no idea what I’m talking about. “What did happen with me and Sythlight?”
“That’s what you’re supposed to tell me!”
We’re in the hall by then, at Kat’s locker. She opens it and starts sorting through her books, casually, as if she didn’t just tell me that she went on the forbidden VoiceChat with a guy she doesn’t like to talk about, but who, even though she refuses to admit it, she is clearly head over heels in love with. She doesn’t say anything.
“You are infuriating!” I say as dramatically as I can, then march off to our lunch spot, leaving her to sort her boring textbooks in peace.
KAT
I TAKE A MINUTE TO ORGANIZE MY STUFF BEFORE I FOLLOW AFTER MEG.
The thing is, I know exactly what she’s talking about. But I refuse to make a big deal of it, for multiple reasons:
1. It actually isn’t a big deal. Like she said, it’s just VoiceChat. It was just a rift raid. We’ve done dozens upon dozens of rift raids.
2. Syth lives near Toronto, which means he’s not here.
3. When things become a big deal, my chest constricts, and I can’t remember how to breathe.
4. Syth didn’t listen to my science project explanation.
MEG
WHEN KAT ARRIVES AT THE STAIRWELL, SHE IGNORES MY GLARE AND TUCKS herself in beside me, cross-legged on the floor.
“It was fine,” she says quietly. “He’s a good tank. It was nothing special.”
My mind whirls with a thousand different questions—What does he sound like? Did he make any jokes? Did you turn on video? What were you wearing? Can you please recite every single thing he said from start to finish?—but something about the solemn, almost sad way she says it makes me bite my tongue. Seriously, I don’t ask a single probing question. “I’m growing as a person, everybody!” I want to announce to the group. If only I could grow a little in body, too. Stupid short gene.
“But it was fine?” I say. “You went on VoiceChat and you were fine?”
Her mouth quirks into a half smile. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.”
“Cool,” I say.
Roman interrupts us. “You guys in this round?” He gathers the cards strewn about the circle, stacks them, and begins to shuffle.
Kat shakes her head and answers for both of us. “Meg and I have some science stuff to talk about.”
“We do?”
She scrunches her nose at me like a bunny. “Ha-ha, hilarious.” Then she rummages through her knapsack and slides out a red folder. “Here’s the email I drafted for Luke,” she says, handing it to me. “And the step-by-step instructions we wrote. You’ll need them for the tests you do.”
I flip the folder open, study the pages of tiny black text, flip it closed again. Kat’s head is buried in her knapsack. She reemerges with a slim white box, which she holds out in my direction.
“Sugar cubes,” she says, then narrows her eyes. “Don’t eat them.”
“What do you think I am? A horse?” I give a loud whinny, and Grayson laughs. He’s playing cards, but he must be listening to us, too.
Kat’s mouth stretches into a fake, impatient smile. She points to the red folder in my hand. “I’ll email that to you, too. Do you think your mom would let you go on the computer just to print it out? If you lose it, I mean?”
“I won’t lose it,” I snap. I’m tired of people treating me like a child.
“Sorry,” Kat says, bumping her shoulder into mine. “You’re right. I’ll stop being all overbearing. I just want to do well, you know?”
“Yeah,” is all I say. Because contrary to popular belief, I want to do well too. I grab my own knapsack and start to slip the red folder into it, then stop. If I put the folder in here, next to my science book, then end up shuffling my books around and putting the science book back in my locker, I might pull the red folder out with it, not even noticing. It’s the kind of thing I do—the kind of thing my ADHD does.
I whip open the red folder, pull out the perfectly smooth white piece of paper with our instructions, and start to fold it—one . . . two . . . four times. Then I slide it along my leg, down into my shiny black hooker boot. Grayson cocks his head at me, puzzled, as the guys start badgering him to take his turn. Kat just nods. She gets it. This is the only way I can think of to make sure I actually take it home. Well, short of eating it and pooping it back out again, which probably wouldn’t be particularly effective.
I pick up the little white box beside me on the floor, tear it open, pull out a grainy white cube, and pop it into my mouth, pulverizing it with the first bite.
Kat rolls her eyes at me, then sticks out her hand, palm up. With exaggerated solemnity, I place a glittery cube in the center of it.
“Neigh,” she says, deadpan. Then she pops it into her mouth and chomps down with a satisfying crunch.