KAT
THE TREADMILL CREAKS AS I MOUNT IT. I HAVE GOT TO CONVINCE MOM and Dad to buy a new one. In Ottawa, I used to just run outside, but even though the streets are numbered here, I’m not confident that I won’t get lost. Plus, from what I’ve heard about Edmonton weather, winter will probably be here in a matter of days. The leaves have already started falling from the trees. And not a slow, colorful striptease like in Ontario, but a sudden, down-to-business discarding of a plain dress onto the floor.
My phone dings. It’s Mom.
We’re stopping for groceries after dinner this eve. Need anything?
She, Dad, and Granddad have gone to some conference for the afternoon, then out for supper. Their absence leaves me with the house magnificently to myself. And since I finished all my homework this morning—teachers always start the school year off easy, trying to win us over before destroying our souls—that means I get to spend my whole Saturday afternoon and evening with LotS and LumberLegs. Glorious.
I do a mental inventory of our cupboards, then slow the treadmill to a walk so I can type.
Yeast. I think we’re almost out.
Tomorrow, maybe I’ll make a loaf of bread. I haven’t done that since we left Ottawa.
I increase the treadmill’s speed and lose myself in my breathing. One dog . . . two cat . . . three fast . . . four faster . . .
After my run, I’m going to work on my underwater castle. It took us a couple of hours, but Sythlight and I managed to close up two whole rifts last night, so that should make the world more stable—no more damaged castles or shadowbeasts spawning in safe zones. For now. But I still have to fix up the gaping hole in my castle tower.
The doorbell rings, echoing hollowly down the stairs, and the castle in my head shatters from the noise. Outside, real-life noise. I hold my breath and slow the treadmill—not to stop it, but just to quiet it. Make it sound like no one’s home. The only people I know in this whole city—Mom, Dad, and Granddad—are all out for the day. Which means it’s a stranger at the door. Not even the promise of Girl Guide cookies could get me to talk to a stranger right now. Even a ten-year-old stranger.
My phone dings again. Probably Mom wondering if there’s a brand of yeast I prefer.
You home?
Not Mom. I slow the treadmill even more.
Who is this?
Another ding, a moment later.
Meg. your brilliant science partner. If you’re home let me in it’s cold out here
I stop the treadmill abruptly. Not Girl Guide cookies. But still a stranger. Knowing her name doesn’t make her not a stranger.
The doorbell rings again. My throat tightens.
Why is she here?
I focus on my breathing.
One chocolate mint . . . two . . . two . . . two . . . I can’t get my—breathing—under—control—
Ding.
I thought we could work on our science thing
She thought she could just show up and work on our science thing? Without calling ahead to make plans?
I already have plans. I’m going to go to the water cave to collect more coral rock, then use it to patch up the hole in my castle. Then I have to fix the water damage in the hall, and then I’ll finally be able to organize my armory, which I’ve been dying to do forever. I need a big block of time to do that, so I can log and chart everything in a spreadsheet and decide how best to sort it. And then watching Legs this evening. I have the entire rest of my day planned and full of glorious awesomeness.
I can’t just leave her standing there, though.
Two helium balloons . . . three peeing on plants . . .
I hop off the treadmill, take the steps two at a time, then unlock the front door and swing it open.
Meg is halfway down the sidewalk, striding away from the house, but she must hear the door open because she whirls around to face me. “Oh, I thought you weren’t home,” she calls out.
So I could have just waited and she’d have left? Crap, screwed that one up!
“Sorry, I was working out,” I say, still breathing hard, though not from the exercise.
She drops the skateboard she’s holding, hops onto it, starts speeding toward the front step, then kicks back or something and thrusts herself and the board into the air. She almost lands on the top step, but then her skateboard goes skittering out from under her, and she bashes her knee into the porch column. I lurch forward to help her, but before I can even reach out my hand, she’s already back on her feet, grinning. “Still working on that one.” She rubs her knee, still grinning, then scoops up her skateboard. “Okay if I bring this in? Don’t want it to get stolen.”
I blink at her. “You skateboard?”
“I’ve been trying it out. Stephen-the-Leaver gave this to my brother, and he didn’t want it, and I don’t believe in trashing things just because they’re from Stephen-the-Leaver. I mean, why should I deprive myself just because he’s a jerk? Anyway, I was just trying some jumps at the park down the street—it’s got some good benches for it—and I realized I was near your house and I thought I’d see if you were home, because I have this really cool idea for our science thing. You free?”
“No!” I want to yell at her. “I’m not free. You can’t just show up here and expect me to be available! I have plans. That armory won’t sort itself.”
I guess our science project won’t do itself either, though. And she’s voluntarily offering to work on it. That was something my last partner never did.
“You said you have an idea?” I ask.
She grins. “Sure do. Just thought of it.”
It would be nice to have the brainstorming done and not have to worry about that part anymore. Maybe we could have our topic ready to submit to Mr. Carter by Monday—a couple of weeks early. I’d have to change my afternoon plans, though. I hate changing plans.
I take a deep breath and do my best to smile at her. “I guess now’s fine. I just have something on at five, so I have to make sure we’re done by then.” I kick myself as soon as the words leave my mouth. Five is two entire hours away. I should have lied and said it was at four. Or even in half an hour. Now I have no excuse to evacuate if things get awkward. “Come on in.”
She steps inside and leans the skateboard against the hallway wall. She’s not wearing a coat, but she strips off her fingerless orange mittens and tosses them onto a nearby chair. Then she follows me into the living room.
I gesture toward the couch, but she either doesn’t notice or chooses to ignore me, because instead she wanders over to the wall of shelves. This is why I hate spending time with people. It’s like when I started playing The Sims and didn’t realize you could turn off free will. I kept telling my Sim to go to the bathroom, but she kept ignoring me and playing on the computer and dancing and eating until eventually she just peed on the floor.
I mean, what exactly am I supposed to do now? Sit down on the chair like I had planned? Join her by the shelves? I haven’t even offered her a drink yet, which makes me a terrible host.
One lemonade . . . two chocolate milk . . .
Right, just offer her a drink. That’s something I can do. “Do you want—”
“Okay, so I was thinking about this, and what if we threw cantaloupes off the roof? I mean, not just threw them. My six-year-old brother could do that. He’s technically my half brother. Nolan and Kenzie. I call them the halflings. Of course Nolan never would throw cantaloupe. He’s a goody-goody. Who’s this?”
“I—um—what?” Is she talking about science?
She points toward the shelf. I’ve been backing away toward the kitchen to get us drinks, so I have to step toward her and lean to the side to see which picture frame she’s pointing at. “Oh, that’s my brother, Luke.”
“Is he around? He’s cute.”
“No. Toronto. University.” For the first time the words are a relief instead of a knife in my gut. The last thing I need is for her to start flirting with my brother.
“Too bad.” She sets the photo down and continues her survey of the wall. “I know the cantaloupe thing sounds simple, but you can take something that a toddler could do and make it complex, right? And epic. We could totally do that with the cantaloupe. This guy’s adorable.”
“What? My granddad?” I’ve given up on my quest to get drinks—keeping up with this girl requires my full attention—so this time I can easily see which picture she’s looking at. I try to see the adorableness she mentioned, but all I see is the rosy skin that’s since gone gray, the white hair that covered his head, the cheeks that hadn’t yet sunk into his face. I look away from the picture.
“Is that who this is? Yeah, I love the bow tie. And those eyebrows. Have you ever seen eyebrows like that before?”
“Well, sure, I mean, he lives here.” At least his eyebrows haven’t changed.
“Okay, yeah, obviously on your granddad himself. But I meant other than that. I bet you haven’t.”
“I—” I break off and bite my lip. How did we end up talking about eyebrows? This is not what I let her come in and ruin my afternoon plans for. “You were saying something about cantaloupe?”
“Have you read this book?” she asks. I shake my head without even looking at the cover, and she slides it back onto the shelf, then picks up another. “Okay, yeah, with the cantaloupe, we could get some fancy equipment and test the force of impact depending on what we throw it at—grass or concrete or wood or whatever. Or maybe . . . what’s it called . . . that speed thing . . . velocity? Depending on the weather. Like would a cantaloupe drop slower on a windy day?”
“Did you find that idea on the internet?” It didn’t come up in any of my searches.
“Nope, in my brain.” She taps her forehead, then shrugs. “We don’t have to do that. I don’t know where we’d get the equipment for it anyway. Can I borrow this? It looks good.” She holds up the book she’s been thumbing through.
“Um—I—I guess so?” I don’t mean for it to come out as a question.
“You have any ideas?”
“For our science fair project?”
“Yeah, what else?”
“A couple.” As I start to explain the ideas I’ve researched, she finally flops down on the couch to listen, feet tucked up under her. I’ve Googled a lot, but I can’t decide if I like any of the topics I’ve found. There’s this paper you can use to separate out the different chemicals in a liquid—we could use that to determine the ingredients of different types of pop. Or test tooth decay in a variety of different liquids over time, though I’m not sure where we’d get the teeth. Or we could use cutworms to test the durability of different breeds of grass.
Meg follows along with the first two, asking questions and nodding her head. But in the middle of my explanation of cutworms, she yawns unapologetically and gets to her feet.
“I need a break. How about a house tour?” She marches out of the room before I can protest, and I have to hop up and sprint after her. She stops when she reaches the stairs—half a staircase up, half a staircase down. “Up or down?”
I wasn’t expecting to give her a house tour. I mean, I wasn’t expecting her to be here at all. “Um, down, I guess.”
She grabs the banisters and launches herself over all seven stairs, landing with a thud at the bottom.
I don’t usually swear, but a curse pops out of me.
She laughs. “You should give it a try.”
“No, thank you.” I take the stairs one at a time, holding carefully to the railing.
Downstairs, Meg keeps chattering away, examining my dad’s shelf of knickknacks. Some people who talk a lot are know-it-alls, but Meg’s ramblings are more random than lecture-y, like she never learned the difference between thinking and talking.
“Where’s this from?” She lifts a striped wooden mask with short, stubby antlers. I should tell her to put it down, but to be honest, I wouldn’t mind if she broke it. I wouldn’t be surprised if its leering grin appeared some night in my nightmares. It’s terrifying.
“South Africa.”
“Oh, cool. Have you been there?”
“No.” My parents and Luke went last summer. I refused to fly—planes are claustrophobic metal cages of gravity-defying death—so I spent those three weeks at my aunt’s farm in southern Ontario instead. Dad wanted to force me to go, but Mom talked him out of it. I overheard them talking one night.
“She’s only fourteen.” Dad.
“That’s old enough.” Mom.
“She’s going to regret it.”
“Then she regrets it. And if she does, maybe that will be enough to push her out of her comfort zone next time.”
On the first half of the trip, they went on an elephant safari, paddled in dugout canoes, and ate peanut stew. On the second half of the trip, they all got so dreadfully sick that Dad refused to eat solid food for at least a month after they got back. I didn’t regret staying behind.
I show Meg my mom’s office, the rec room, then the kitchen and bathroom back on the main floor. She prattles away throughout, picking up and asking about little odds and ends everywhere.
Upstairs, she stops to study a picture in the hallway. “Your parents still together?”
I nod.
“That’s nice. My dad left when I was four, then promptly died in a car accident three months later. So, frozen in a perpetual state of having just left us.”
“I’m sorry.” I have to say more than that. I search my frazzled brain. “Maybe he would’ve come back, though. If he had lived, I mean.”
“Maybe, but probably not. What’s in here?” She points to the closest door.
“My room.” I swing open the door and gesture for her to enter.
She steps inside. Then she squeals like a piglet.
MEG
THERE IS A LUMBERLEGS POSTER ON THE WALL. A LUMBERLEGS POSTER! HIS LotS character, with its tree-stump legs and teasing grin, winks at me as he tumbles off the side of a cliff and hurtles toward a pool of lava below. Even his in-game persona makes me want to giggle. I leap up onto the bed and kiss his perfect face.
Then I turn to grin at Kat. “I can’t believe you like LumberLegs! This is fate.” This is the moment—I have found my new best friend. Thank goodness, because Lindsey hasn’t responded to any of my texts since she hung up last night, and I’m starting to wonder if she ever will again. But that doesn’t matter now. Kat and I can swoon over Legs’s FaceCam together, and she can come to LotSCON with me, and we can both be awesome, just like Legs always says.
Kat pulls at the sleeves of her pink knit sweater so they cover her hands. “You know who LumberLegs is?” Apparently she’s never found anyone to watch with either. Maybe Legs’s millions of subscribers are actually all bots except for me, Kat, and that girl who moved away. Oh, and my old friend Larissa, but she likes the game more than she likes Legs, so she doesn’t count.
“Know who he is?” I say. “I’m going to marry him! He’s hilarious. You can be one of my bridesmaids. How do you feel about turquoise for dresses?”
“I . . . what?”
“I’m joking, don’t worry. I’m not a creepy stalker. He is awesome, though. Hey, you’re not going to move away anytime soon, are you?”
She blinks at me a few times, then shakes her head. “We just got here.” She looks unusually small, like she’s shrunk to Nolan’s size, or even Kenzie’s. Probably doesn’t help that she’s standing on the floor, while I’m still standing on the bed.
I plop down, landing on my butt on the mattress. “Excellent. Hey, Legs is livestreaming tonight, right? We should totally watch it. We could walk down to the corner store and get enough salt-and-vinegar chips and Rolos to survive an apocalypse, then pig out while we watch it. What do you say?”
Kat just stares at me.
KAT
MEG GRINS EXPECTANTLY AT ME, HER SMILE SO WIDE THAT IT PUFFS OUT her cheeks and turns her oval face round.
She wants to watch a LumberLegs livestream. Together. With salt-and-vinegar chips and Rolos.
One asparagus . . . two introvert . . .
I am not good at making decisions, at least not without a good pro-con list. If I reached for a pen and paper right now, though, I’m pretty sure she would classify me as a freak. I do a quick tally in my head instead.
REASONS I SHOULD SAY NO TO MEG:
1. The first thing that popped into my head was that, if she watched LotS with me, I could make Luke feel like I’ve replaced him. Which I’m pretty sure makes me a sociopath (the kind that lies and manipulates people, not the kind that murders prostitutes and buries them in a farmer’s field).
2. She’s probably one of those people who talks the whole way through movies and videos, as if her own thoughts were more important.
3. I told her I have a thing at five, so I have a perfect out.
REASONS I SHOULD SAY YES TO MEG:
1. I can make Luke feel like I’ve replaced him.
2. The box under my bed that already has both salt-and-vinegar chips and Rolos in it.
3. The livestream is the thing I was going to do at five.
I kneel down, push aside my blankets, and reach into the darkness for the box.
MEG
IT’S JUST A PLAIN BLACK BOX, BUT THE SOLEMN WAY KAT RETRIEVES IT FROM under the bed makes it look like ancient treasure. Like a treasure chest dug out of a spot marked X by a one-eyed pirate or a box of valuable old antiques brought down from a dusty attic, or best of all, a loot box heaved from the depths of the waterlands in LotS.
I flip open the lid.
“O! M! G! Is this your stash?”
“I bought this more for the Kit Kats, not the Rolos.” Kat points her thumb toward the bag of mini chocolate bars.
“Kit Kats? No way. You can’t really prefer Kit Kats to Rolos!”
“Kit Kat has my name in it.”
“Oh. Touché.” I tear open the bag and pull out one Kit Kat and one Rolo, studying the block letters on each wrapper. “There’s no bar with ‘Meg’ in the name. That hardly seems fair.”
She nibbles on her bottom lip for a moment before responding. “They could rename Mr. Big the Megabar.”
“I’m totally going to write to them and suggest that!” I toss her the Kit Kat, then rip open the Rolo, popping all the little pieces into my mouth at once before reaching into the box for another. “This is perfect. I’ll eat the Rolos, you eat the Kit Kats—it’s meant to be.”
She opens her mouth as if to argue, then doesn’t, which is just as well, because there is nothing she could say or do that could convince me that this isn’t a sign.
“Hey, have you seen the Legs video where he falls in lava over and over trying to get the crown?” I ask.
“Episode two of his Speed Run Fails videos? Of course. Who hasn’t?” The corners of her mouth twitch upward just a little, which I think is her equivalent of a huge grin.
“Want to watch it now?”
She looks down at the Kit Kat in her hand. “What about our project?”
“Oh . . . uh . . . right. When’s that due again?” I lift up the bag of salt-and-vinegar chips, revealing a disordered jumble of caramels, Pixy Stix, and other deliciousness at the bottom of the box.
“Well, the final project isn’t due until March—”
“Lizard balls, we’ve got loads of time. Why are we even thinking about this now?” I snatch a caramel. Not my favorite, but better than the bag of dried fruit lying pathetically in the corner.
She blinks at me. “You were the one who—never mind. But we can’t just do the whole thing in March. Our topic’s due in three weeks. Then our proposal, and then we have to complete the experiments by the beginning of February, which means we might have to start it soon if it’s something that takes place over time, and—”
“But our topic’s not due for three weeks?” I can’t get the caramel wrapper off, and I don’t think I’ve ever tried dried fruit, actually. I drop the caramel back in the box, grab the bag, and pull out a soft, white, doughnut-shaped thing.
“Just under three weeks, actually, so—”
“So we’ve got tons of time.” The doughnut-shaped thing is chewy, but not gross. Kind of sweet, actually. “And since Legs doesn’t livestream every weekend, we should do a Legs-a-thon tonight, then the science project next weekend. Or during the week, or whatever.”
I hold out the bag to her and she pulls out a peach-colored mound, which she studies just like the Kit Kat she still hasn’t eaten. “I guess I could use a bit more time to do research,” she says. She pops the peach thing in her mouth.
“Great,” I say, picking up the epic black box of snacky goodness. “Lead on to your computer.”
“Well . . .” She pauses, either to chew or to make a decision or both. “I was going to watch on the big screen in the basement. So we could do that.”
“Even better!” I say. Then I march out of the room with my new BFF right behind me.
Having the Legs video up on the big screen is pure perfection. Normally I’m stuck watching Legs on my tiny laptop or my tablet in my room while Kenzie monopolizes the TV with her Cheery Muffincakes or whatever that show’s called. But down here in Kat’s basement, his cartoony face is big and beautiful.
And it’s not just any episode that Kat puts on. She goes right to the exact episode of his speed runs series that we were talking about, without having to search for it in her video history for a million years like I always have to.
As I settle onto the floor, grabbing a handful of chocolate bars and tossing half of them to Kat on the couch behind me, Legs starts his descent into the rift, leaping from stone to ledge to the wobbly bridge that he immediately tumbles off of, falling into the lava below with a high-pitched scream. “FAIL” scrawls across the screen in big red letters. A deep, echoey, announcer-y version of Legs’s voice reads out the word, accompanied by the ridiculous animation of Legs’s real face crying cartoon tears that I had as my screen saver for a while. I giggle and glance back at Kat, who is scrunching up her lips like she’s trying not to smile.
By the time Legs falls in lava for the bajillionth time, I’m laughing like a hyena and Kat is full-on grinning.
On his bajillion-and-first attempt, Legs finally manages to make it onto the ledge, across the bridge, through the shadowy spiky things, up the vanishing platforms, and, with a whoop of victory, reaches for the crown—as the final platform vanishes and he plunges with a scream of agony into the bottomless lava pool.
“EPIC FAIL,” says the announcer. And the screen. And me.
I turn to Kat, who stands abruptly, her grinning face turning to all business. “We should make pizza. I’ve got a frozen one. I’ll put it in before the livestream starts.” Then she rushes off toward the stairs. I trot after her into the kitchen, where I grab a pizza out of the freezer and start unwrapping it while she turns on the oven.
“Okay,” I say as I set it down on the metal tray she’s pulled out, “one thing I’ve never understood is how Legs knows when a rift is a speed run rift and when it’s just a normal rift full of monsters. They look the same from the outside.”
Her eyes widen as she takes the tray from me and sets it on the stove. “It’s a mod,” she says like it’s obvious.
“A what?”
“A mod.”
I blink at her.
“You know, it’s not part of the original game. It’s a modification someone’s made. You download it and it turns normal rifts into speed runs instead.” She glances at the oven, which is still preheating.
“But everyone does speed runs.”
“Because everyone uses the mod. Or goes on servers that use it. Legs made it popular. Or maybe it made him popular. I don’t know. Probably both.”
As we wait for the oven to warm up, she rambles about mods and whether it’s better to have them server-side or on some other side and why she likes to watch some and play others. It’s the most she’s talked all afternoon.
We watch another video, and then the pizza is ready, and then it’s time for the livestream and Legs’s real, huggable face joins his cartoony in-game one on the big screen, so big we can see every twitch of his dark, dancing eyebrows when he’s joking, and every clench of his square jaw when he’s passionately serious.
He’s doing a rift raid with some friends, and when a wingling swoops out of nowhere, Legs and I both shriek, and Kat and Legs’s friends all laugh, but not meanly.
Kat uses a plate, and I use a napkin, and by the time we discard them on the coffee table beside the leftover pizza, the raid is over and Legs has moved on to Legs Advice Hour—a name that makes me giggle because it always prompts someone to throw questions about leg shaving into the chat. (And yes, I’ll admit it, sometimes that someone is me.) In game, Legs heads to the greenlands, where he’ll work on his base as he takes questions from the chat—never the leg-shaving questions, though—and gives brilliantly sage advice. He has bases in all the different areas of the map, but the greenlands one he’s heading to is my favorite; it has all these different-colored staircases that shoot into the sky and up to these misshapen, precariously balanced towers.
The first question he takes this time is about how to ask a girl out, and he rambles in his usual kind way about being brave and taking risks and treating people with respect as he chops down trees for wood to build a balcony for the red tower.
“Thanks for the question, man,” he says. Then he looks directly at the screen as I join him in saying, “Be awesome!”
“I love that,” I say, sighing, as I slip off the armrest where I’ve been sitting and onto the main part of the couch beside Kat.
“He says it to everyone,” Kat says, looking down at the chat log on the tablet in her lap.
“Because he wants everyone to be awesome. Here, hand me the tablet.”
Her grip on it tightens like a reflex, then loosens. “Why?”
“So we can ask a question.” I snatch the tablet out of her lap and settle it onto my own. “What do you want to ask?”
She shakes her head. “Nothing. I don’t have any questions.”
“It doesn’t have to be a real question. Last time I asked about how to woo my band partner. I don’t even play an instrument.”
She grabs a pillow and sets it in her lap like she misses having the tablet there. “That was you?”
“Good one, right? That was the first time he answered one of mine. I whooped so loud Mom thought I tripped and fell or something. So what should we ask? Maybe something about a bully? He’s pretty good at giving advice about that, though he’s better with the love stuff, don’t you think?”
She chews on her bottom lip. It’s astonishing that it isn’t chapped and bloody by now, considering how often she does that. “What if he answers our fake question instead of someone’s real one? That doesn’t seem right.”
I stop typing. “Okay, fair point. So we can ask a real question, then. What should we ask? Got any problems?”
She hugs the pillow to her chest and looks down. “No. Do you?”
The question shouldn’t throw me, since I came up with it in the first place, but it does. I glance at the chat, with its endless questions and jokes and ridiculousness scrolling by.
Last night’s party was just as much of a snore-fest as I thought it would be. Lindsey still hasn’t texted me. In fact, I haven’t gotten a single text from anyone the entire time I’ve been here. Brad used to text me all the time, but he broke up with me when I thought things were going great, and now his friends don’t text me either. And my stepdad—the only dad I’ve known—doesn’t want me because I’m not his real kid.
What could I possibly ask in this chat? Dear LumberLegs, is it my ADHD that’s scaring everyone away?
I force myself to grin at Kat. “Nope, me neither,” I say. “So, no questions, then.” Instead, I start typing into the chat box: TO THE RIFT!
Kat leans over to look. “Meg! You can’t!” She grabs the tablet from me before I can press enter.
I stare at her. “You’ve never started a chat spam before?”
“No! They’re horrible.”
“They’re not horrible. They’re power.” I grin as maniacally as I can. “Go on, do it. Press enter.”
“No,” she says, though she sounds less certain. “I’m not going to—”
“Do it. Do it, do it, do it.”
“I—fine!” She hesitates, her finger hovering over the touch keyboard, then she jams it into the enter button.
TO THE RIFT! appears in the chat.
And then, a split second later, the chat is filled with it as thousands of other viewers echo our battle cry—one of Legs’s most famous lines.
TO THE RIFT!!!!
TO THE RIFT!
to the rift
TO THE RIFT
to the RIFTTT
TO TEH RFIT
TO THE RIFT!
On-screen, Legs rolls his eyes. “Guys, not again.” He glares right at us, but his green eyes are sparkling.
I grin at Kat. “See. Power.”
“Shut up,” she says. Then she thrusts the tablet back at me, grabs a slice of cold pizza, and stares straight ahead at the TV screen. But the corners of her mouth are curved upward.
“To the rift!” I shout out loud to the room. Kat just shakes her head.