KAT
“HOW WAS YOUR DAY?” MOM ASKS SECONDS AFTER I WALK IN THE DOOR, in her usual fifties-sitcom way.
Peachy. I had to explain to my new science fair partner what a science fair is. Thank goodness we have a few weeks to turn in our topic choice, and until March for the final project. Hopefully that’s enough time to just do it all myself like I did last year, if need be. I should probably get started this weekend. Or tonight. I should get started tonight. One boring volcano . . . two chemical reactions . . . three sound barrier . . .
Mom waits cheerfully for my answer. I don’t bother to complain about being forced to move to this alien province or about the fact that I’m going to fail science. I know how that conversation would go.
“Why did we have to move here? Why couldn’t Granddad come to stay with us?” I would whine, like a three-year-old.
“Granddad has lived here his entire life. We couldn’t ask him to move across the country.”
“Well, I’ve lived in Ottawa my entire life.”
And then she would stare at me until I caved and admitted that Granddad’s “entire life” is more significant than my “entire life” and that of course we should have moved here.
Mom doesn’t need words to win arguments. And I don’t need words to lose them. “It was fine,” I tell her.
“That good, huh?” She glides across the kitchen and wraps her arms around me, practically smothering me. I lean into her for just a moment, letting her warmth surround me like a living, breathing afghan. She smells of apples and cinnamon, and the scent lingers in my nose when I finally pull away.
“Pies?” It’s a safe guess. When Mom’s not writing math textbooks, she’s usually lost in a cloud of flour and brown sugar.
“Mm-hmm.” She reaches across the counter to a mound covered by a checkered dishcloth and, with a flourish, reveals a circle of golden perfection.
“Is this one for us?” I lean forward and inhale deeply. Mom’s worst trait—worse even than her love of warbling ancient pop songs in the shower—is that she sometimes makes baked goods and then gives them away to other people. Like old folks’ homes and homeless shelters. Which makes it even worse, because I can’t feel sad about it since that would make me a horrible person.
“Depends on whether you and your dad behave yourselves.” With another flourish, she covers the pie back up.
“Mom! That’s just cruel. I should report you.”
“Good luck with that, dear.”
I can’t think of a single clever thing to say in response, so I just hoist my backpack off the floor and onto the table with a thud. A pity-me-for-all-the-work-I-have-to-do-and-give-me-some-pie thud. Sadly, after years of working in the textbook industry, Mom is immune to the textbook thud. She scurries about the kitchen, wiping down counters, without so much as a sympathetic glance in my direction.
I yank my math text out of my bag. “Hey, you didn’t write this, did you?” Her name isn’t in the front, but she ghostwrites sometimes, so that proves nothing.
“Let me see.” She leafs through a few pages at the front, then the back, before shaking her head. “Not one of mine. Why?”
“I started reading ahead into the next chapter on the bus, since there was nothing else to do.” Well, nothing but worry that I’d catch whatever was making the guy across the aisle cough and cough and cough, and then I’d pass it on to Granddad, and he’d cough so hard that his fragile bones would collapse in on themselves like a toppled house of cards. I hate public transit. “A couple of sections don’t make any sense.”
“I can look at it later, if you like. I’ve got to start chopping veggies.”
I should probably offer to help, but I need to decompress with something funny if I’m going to survive family dinner. Technically, almost every dinner of my life has been family dinner, but since we left Luke behind in Toronto for university and replaced him with Granddad, dinners have been different. Granddad eats slowly. And I can’t always tell if he’s joking. And I have to keep my elbows off the table; I don’t know if Granddad cares about that, but he might, so it’s best to be safe.
“We’ll be done by seven, right? Luke’s supposed to call.” On Friday evenings we play LotS together. That’s the way it’s always been. Except for last week, when he was too busy to play for the first time ever. “Frosh stuff,” he said.
He said he could play tonight, though. He promised.
“That’s perfect,” Mom says. “We can all chat with Luke.”
“Right. Of course.”
One rutabaga . . . two old folks’ home . . . three legendary sword . . .
“Kat?”
“Mm-hmm?” . . . four rift raid . . .
“We’ll just chat with Luke for a few minutes. Then you can politely excuse yourself and slip off to play your game with him.”
I love my mom.
MEG
OUR EMPTY HOUSE IS SO QUIET I CAN HEAR SOMETHING BANGING ABOUT IN the wind on the back porch from all the way up in my room. The stillness makes my earlobes itch. I drop my backpack on the rug and kick at my laptop on the floor, hoping it will magically turn on and blast some music into the silence, but it just groans.
When Mom and the halflings get home, the place’ll start whirring with noise, but it’ll still be boring. I’ve got to find a party or something to go to tonight. I should have asked that skinny-as-a-twig white girl who sits next to me in math class. She looks like she’d know where the good parties are at.
I flick on my phone. Lindsey is usually pretty up on party news, and she’s the last person in my call log, so I hit the call button, then put it on speakerphone and sprawl on my bed.
“Hi, Meg.” Lindsey sighs. She’s been doing that a lot lately.
“I’m so happy to talk to you, too!” I practically chirp.
“Sorry, I just—I can’t decide whether I should pack my straightener or my curling iron. What do you think?”
I lean over the side of the bed so my own mass of curls hangs to the floor. Even when Lindsey uses a curling iron, her limp red hair looks straight compared to mine. “I don’t know. Straightener.” I reach for my laptop and turn it on. LumberLegs’s gorgeous face grins out at me.
“Did you put me on speakerphone again? You know I can’t hear you when you do that.”
I swing around and grab my phone off the bed, dropping it onto the floor beside my laptop. “No.” I blow Legs a kiss. “Hey, what party are we going to tonight?”
“I can’t. I told you, I’m going to my aunt and uncle’s for the weekend. My aunt’s taking me to a fashion show.”
I’m pretty sure she told me no such thing, but she seems hangry, so I’m not correcting her. “Right, well, do you know about any parties tonight? You’re okay with me going to one without you, right?” I’m pretty sure she would be, but we haven’t been hanging out long enough for me to know for sure. One of the girls in this summer’s crowd got mad when I did that.
“Meg, no, I don’t. And I don’t care what you do this weekend, either.”
I want to spit something snarky back at her, but I know she doesn’t mean that the way it sounds. At least, I hope she doesn’t. I’m not ready for this friendship to be over yet. Not so soon.
There’s a long silence on the line, broken up only by muffled clattery noises. Probably Lindsey throwing her straightener and curler into her suitcase; she’s the type of person who would take both.
My laptop beeps at me that it needs to be plugged in soon, and I’d just switch to my tablet, but I have no idea where it is right now, so instead I rest the top of my head on the floor as I look under the bed for the cord. “Hey, did I tell you there are rumors LotSCON might be in Canada this year?” I ask as cheerily as I can.
“LotS—oh, that game you’re always rambling about? I don’t know. Probably. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you around, okay?”
“Yeah, su—” The line clicks dead.
I slap my beeping laptop closed, roll over, and stare up at the ceiling, where a tiny spider happens to be skittering across the expanse of white like it’s on a mission. I grab my pillow and whip it into the air. It zooms across the room and lands with a clatter and thud in my closet, completely missing the ceiling. Probably for the best.
Maybe I shouldn’t go out this evening. Maybe I should just lie here and watch my new eight-legged roommate make himself at home.
My phone rings, and I jolt upright. It might be Lindsey calling back. I snatch my phone off the floor.
“Evil McNastypants,” reports the screen. I blink at it for a moment before remembering I renamed him that, then jab at the ignore button. The last time he called, I had him labeled just “Jerk.”
I open my contacts, pull him up, stab at the edit button, then rename him again. “Stephen-the-Leaver.” It almost rhymes, but doesn’t, which is disappointing, but I can’t think of anything better right this minute, so it’ll have to do.
The voice-mail message notification pops up just as I hit save, and I delete the stupid thing without listening to it.
Right, it’s his weekend with the halflings. I can’t be here when he shows up. He might ask me to join them again.
If he wanted me to join them, maybe he should have sought custody of me, too, instead of telling the judge that I’m not his real daughter. I saw the papers in Mom’s desk. He didn’t ask for custody or even for any time with me at all.
I’m too ADHD, too stupid, too not-his-own-blood for him to care about me.
I flick through my phone contacts again. Maxx, who I went to junior high with, would probably know where there’s a party tonight, but he doesn’t answer when I call. Neither does good old Greggles, who works down the street at the 7-Eleven. Finally I give in and call pot-smoking, boring Alexis, who of course has a party to invite me to. Praise Her Majesty the Queen.
I’ve been to parties with Alexis’s friends before, and like Alexis, they’re all potheads who sit around doing nothing, but at least I can do nothing somewhere else instead of here. I grab a pen and scribble down the address on the back of my hand, then run the pen over it a few more times.
A car door slams outside just as I’m hanging up the phone. Mom and the halflings.
More doors slam, and then I sit up as the frizzy-haired bundle that is three-year-old Kenzie barrels into my room, onto my bed, and into my lap, still-shoe-covered toes smashing into my knees as she throws her arms around my neck. Halfling #1.
“I just magicked you into a goober,” she says. Her natural black curls, which puff out of four little ponytails, blend with my own.
“Why thank you, Kenzie dear. I’ve always wanted to be a goober.” I pull off her pink Mary Janes and throw them onto the floor, and she rolls off my lap and starts jumping on the bed in her stocking feet, her only-slightly-ripped pink dress flapping up and down with each jump.
“Hi, Meg.” Nolan’s quiet voice drifts in from the doorway, where he stands with his backpack hanging off one shoulder and his tiny glasses slipping down his freckled, dark-brown nose. Halfling #2. He pushes his glasses up with a single finger. At six years old, he is already pure nerd. In the best way.
“Come here,” I say, and he sets his backpack down carefully in the hallway before plodding across the room. As soon as he gets close enough, I scoop him up into a bear hug, and then Kenzie launches herself on top of us, and we are a jumble of arms and legs and Kenzie-giggles.
My half siblings. The miniature-sized spawn of my mother and Stephen-the-Leaver. Nolan with skin just a shade lighter than earth brown, like our mother’s. Kenzie with skin just a shade darker, like our respective fathers. And mine. I should ask them if they’re packed for tonight. Should ask them what they’re all doing this weekend—if he’s taking them out for pizza like last time.
But I can’t bring myself to ask any of that.
“You guys want to watch LumberLegs with me?” I ask instead once we disintegrate. No, disentangle. Mom always says that if I took more time to think before I talked, I wouldn’t mess up words so much. But how can I take time to think before I think? I point at my laptop. Kenzie crinkles up her nose and flees from the room. Nolan blinks up at me with a look that says, “I don’t really want to, but I will if you want me to.”
“Get out,” I say, smacking him on the bum with Kenzie’s shoe. “Go play with your books or whatever.” He smiles gratefully at me and ambles away.
No one ever wants to watch LumberLegs with me.
My friend Larissa, from my friend group before the friendship bracelet girls (or maybe the one before that), introduced me to LumberLegs around the time Stephen-the-Leaver left. She kept telling me about this YouTuber who does play-throughs of this super-popular video game, Legends of the Stone—aka LotS—and posts the videos, and it sounded dull as heck, but then she showed me this video where Legs is trying to reach this golden crown but is so terrible at jumping that he constantly lets out these ridiculous screams that are more squeals of terror than roars of frustration as he plummets into the lava below. By the end of it we were both laughing so hard I peed myself just a little and had to spend the rest of the evening with my legs daintily crossed.
I started watching all the time, but apparently my preference for losing myself in Legs’s hilariousness over actually playing the game meant I wasn’t a real LotS fan, so she made a character for me and then couldn’t understand why it bothered me that the brown of the character’s skin was so much lighter than mine. She called me picky and went off on her “not a real fan” lecture again, so I called her racist or something and that was the end of that friendship. But I kept LumberLegs, so it was a fair trade.
I pull my laptop closer and roll over onto my stomach.
I don’t get why no one ever wants to watch with me. LumberLegs is hilarious and thoughtful and has like five million subscribers. Plus he’s drop-dead gorgeous, so even if they’re not into games and hilarity, at least there’s that. Since he’s a guy who plays video games for a living, you might expect him to be pale and pimply, with greasy hair and glasses, but he has sleek black hair, sharp green eyes, and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. I think he’s white, but he could be mixed, like maybe his grandpa is East Indian or something. Each week he does FaceCam Fridays, and I curl up on my bed with my laptop and laugh my pants off. Not literally, of course. Other girls don’t get it, though. The one time at a sleepover when I convinced everyone to watch the lava video, only one girl laughed the way I did, and she moved away three weeks later.
I wink at Legs on the screen, then grab my mascara and green shadow from off the floor beside Kenzie’s shoes and start smoothing on my makeup while Legs fights a venomous wereboar. There’s no time to do anything with my hair, so I fight the curls back into a ponytail. My cousins have gotten their hair relaxed since they were maybe three years old, but Mom has ranted so many times about the years it took for the frizzy straightness to grow out when she decided to stop relaxing it and go natural, and I don’t have that kind of patience. Besides, I like my curls. I just wish they weren’t so much work.
By the time Mom calls me down for supper, I am fully decked out and ready to go.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” Mom asks when I waltz into the kitchen, though she can’t really complain. I’m decent by anyone’s standards. Strappy black dress that reaches more than halfway to my knees, lime-green leggings, my favorite black cardigan with big purple buttons that cloaks my shoulders and arms, and my green high-top Converses. I can take the cardigan off when I get to the party.
“No, Mom, you’re imagining it. I’m actually wearing a penguin suit.” I grab a dough dumpling off the table. “I’ll see you later.”
Mom sets the leftover saltfish she just pulled out of the microwave on the counter and wipes her forehead with her sleeve. Kenzie and Nolan’s cartoon fills the kitchen with a punchy beat, even though they’re watching it all the way in the other room. “You’re leaving already?” Mom asks. “I made supper.”
“Yeah, it’s after six. I need to leave before he gets here!”
“Meg,” Mom sighs, but without conviction. She hates him, too. When they first split up, just the mention of his name could start her ranting for hours. Now she doesn’t bother to rant anymore. She’s already said it all. She wipes at her face again. Her makeup is wearing off, and the bags under her eyes are starting to show through. I’d throw her the concealer in my purse, but we can’t share makeup like we do hair stuff, since mine’s a darker shade of brown than hers.
“I’ll be home by midnight,” I promise. My usual curfew.
“And no city buses alone after ten.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Meg.”
“And no city buses alone after ten, I got it.” I throw an air kiss at Kenzie and Nolan in the other room, then wave my dumpling good-bye and slip out the door. I’m out of here.
KAT
“KAT, CAN YOU GRAB THE FRONT DOOR, PLEASE?” MOM CALLS DOWNSTAIRS TO me. “I just heard the car.” I hit pause. Normally I hate answering the door—and the telephone—but I have a sudden need to see Granddad, to know for sure that time hasn’t caught up to him and stopped his heart. I close the LumberLegs video I was watching and take the stairs two at a time.
When I open the door, my still living Granddad is taking his final wobbly step up onto the front porch. “Hello, Katharina,” he says. He’s always called me that, for as long as I can remember.
“Hi,” I say quietly as I open the door nice and wide for him. I wanted to see him, but now that I have, I’ve no idea what to say.
Mom says that Granddad is recovering much faster than they expected him to after the hip replacement, but I find that hard to believe. He is definitely wobbling as he takes one slow step after another through the door.
I look out the door behind him instead of at him. “Where’s Dad?” According to Mom, Dad took Granddad to his appointment, then to grab a few groceries.
“Your dad’s still at the car. I beat him here with my superhuman speed.” He grins, but the joke tastes sour to me. Like an emaciated child in Africa joking about having too much food to eat.
I lean carefully toward him. After school, I purposely changed into my softest pants and my fluffiest knit sweater, no zippers. It’s really more of a pat than a hug that I give him, but it’s still close enough to feel the jutting boniness of his shoulders. If his skin did tear off, perhaps there would be no oozing flesh underneath, only brittle bone. Like a shadowdragon—all skeleton and shadow.
Dad arrives in the front door then, blue-plaid-shirted arms laden with cloth grocery bags. “Kat, my favorite daughter!” He holds the grocery bags out to me. I roll my eyes, then take half of them.
It’s been an exhausting week, and all I want to do is disappear downstairs to the computer and work on my castle until Luke comes on and we can do a rift raid. But first I have to survive family dinner.
“How was school today?” Dad asks once we’re all sitting at the table. He adjusts his tie. He never takes it off until after dinner.
“Yes, Kat, how was school?” Mom passes me the roast turnip with a raised eyebrow that says, “I notice you don’t have any of this delicious vegetable on your plate.”
“Fine, I guess.” I scoop a spoonful of diced turnip onto my plate. Definitely not my favorite, but I’m not going to argue with Mom’s raised eyebrow, especially with Granddad sitting there watching me. I mean, he’s not watching me right this minute, but I’m sure if I started arguing with Mom, he would.
“Any major events?” Dad’s forkful of mashed potatoes hovers in front of his mouth. “Meteors? Apocalypses? Math tests?”
I don’t really want to talk about my clueless new science fair partner, but it’s either that or explaining how I almost ate my lunch in a washroom. “We had to choose partners for our science fair projects.”
“Oh? And who’s yours?” Mom asks.
“This girl Meg.” I want to sneak a peek at my phone to see what time it is and whether Luke will be calling soon, but that’s sure to earn a lecture from Mom or Dad, and then what would Granddad think of me?
“Is she nice?” Mom likes to ask questions more than she likes to eat.
I shrug again. “She didn’t know what a science fair was.”
“Well, maybe she didn’t have to do a project last year.”
Yeah. Because this isn’t her second time being a freshman. I take a biteful of potatoes.
“So what are you going to do for your project?” Dad asks.
“I don’t know. I was looking up some ideas this afternoon, but nothing popped out at me.” Last year, my partner and I did ours on how fast helium balloons deflated in different temperatures and why. I barely knew my partner, despite having gone to school with her since kindergarten, but fortunately, school wasn’t her forte and she was content to just let me do most of the work, so we didn’t actually have to spend much time together. We got an A, but I don’t think my analysis section was quite up to snuff, because we only came in eighth. This year’s will be better. Assuming this Meg girl doesn’t ruin it.
“Oh, you shouldn’t look something up, sweetie.” Mom again. “It’ll feel too rote. Make up something creative.”
“Like what?”
“We’ve got some interesting new materials we’re experimenting with at work,” Dad says. He’s an engineer of some sort. Mechanical, maybe? I’ve never been able to figure out exactly what he does, only that his company is apparently just as happy to have him doing it here as in Ottawa. “Don’t know if I could get clearance for you to run tests on it, though.”
“Why don’t you test how effective human urine is as a fertilizer?”
If anyone else said it, my response would be “Eeeeewwwwww!” accompanied by a scrunched-up nose. But my two-hundred-year-old granddad stares at me, bifocals perched on the tip of his bony nose, likely awaiting a more sophisticated response.
Fortunately, Mom saves me. “Dad,” she says, smacking him on the arm a lot harder than she should, considering that just falling down was all it took to break his hip. “Kat isn’t going to pee on a bunch of plants for her school science project.”
“Maybe not. But it would be a real showstopper.” I can’t tell if he is grinning at me or if the wrinkles in his cheeks are so deep that they yank at the corners of his mouth.
I have no idea what to say to that. My fingers itch to check my phone. I pull it out of my pocket and wrap my fingers tightly around it. “I do like the idea of plants,” I finally say.
“Can’t go wrong with plants,” Dad chimes in. “They’re timeless.”
“So’s urine,” Granddad says.
My phone vibrates beneath my fingertips with a message, and I push back my chair to look at it before I can stop myself. Maybe Luke’s ready to play and I can be excused and escape to safety. After they all have a chance to talk to him, of course. Ugh. I unlock the screen and check my messages.
Can’t play tonight. Sry. Next week?
“Kat? Is it Luke? Can you ask him to call your dad’s cell? We can put him on speakerphone for a bit before you go off to play.” Mom’s words wrap themselves around my chest and squeeze the air right out of my lungs. How do I tell her that Luke doesn’t have time for us? That he doesn’t have time for me?
One turnip . . . two university . . .
“Don’t be silly, Laura.” Granddad’s voice cuts off my counting. “It’s Friday night. They don’t want to talk to us old fogies. Let them go do their thing.”
When I look up, Mom and Granddad are locked in a staring match. Dad is eating the last of his potatoes, either oblivious or just refusing to get involved.
Mom sighs. “All right. You’re right, Dad. Go ahead, Kat. But tell Luke he’d better call us later this weekend.”
I grip my phone tightly, unsure what to say. Is it a lie to disappear downstairs without telling them that Luke’s abandoned me? Is it even worth disappearing downstairs if Luke’s abandoned me?
Luke’s the one who got the server set up and makes sure it’s running 24/7. And recruited people to play on it through the LotS forums. And organizes our rift raids. And knows everyone by name as well as by username.
But that doesn’t mean we need him. I don’t need to know real names to play with people. Usernames are enough.
And I can always just work on my underwater castle alone. Again.
One jelly bean . . . two underwater windows . . .
“Go,” Granddad pronounces. He literally waves me away, flapping his hand in the air like one of Mom’s dishcloths. “Those animated creatures aren’t going to kill themselves. Go have fun.”
So I do.
LEGENDS OF THE STONE
KittyKat has logged on.
[]Sythlight: Hi
KittyKat: hi
Moriah: Hi
HereAfter: hey
[]Sythlight has discovered a legendary weapon.
KittyKat: sweet, which one?
[]Sythlight: Battle-ax of Lorenzo
[]Sythlight: Shadowbeast spawned right outside my door. Practically gave me a heart attack.
KittyKat: yikes
[]Sythlight: Yeah
KittyKat has entered the waterlands.
KittyKat: there’s water pouring into my tower!!!
[]Sythlight: That’s what you get for building it underwater. ;)
KittyKat: our world’s never been so unstable before
KittyKat: rifts are usually under control
[]Sythlight: Yeah, Lucien hasn’t planned a rift raid in a while.
KittyKat: yeah, he’s been busy :(
[]Sythlight: Two new rifts spawned outside town. One in the drylands and one in the badlands.
KittyKat: that’d do it
[]Sythlight: Want to do a raid?
KittyKat: sure
KittyKat: moriah, hereafter, you up for one?
HereAfter: Sorry about to log off
Moriah: me too
Moriah: good night everyone
HereAfter: bye
[]Sythlight: Ciao
Moriah has logged off.
HereAfter has logged off.
KittyKat: have a good night
[]Sythlight has entered the badlands.
KittyKat: well, so much for that idea
[]Sythlight: Badlands rift is small. Might be able to do it with just 2.
KittyKat: really?
[]Sythlight: When the 2 are us, definitely. We’ll be done in 5 minutes. ;)
KittyKat: ha ha yeah ok. but only if I can be the archer
[]Sythlight: We could both be archers.
KittyKat: that’d be suicide! >:O
[]Sythlight: But hilarious.
KittyKat: lol it’s ok. you be the archer. I’ll tank.
[]Sythlight: jk jk. It’s fine. You be the archer.
KittyKat: you sure?
[]Sythlight: Yep. I prefer tank anyway.
[]Sythlight: Still no VoiceChat?
KittyKat: no. no mic. sorry
[]Sythlight: No problem. Typing’s fine. Ready?
KittyKat has entered the badlands.
KittyKat: yep, let’s do this