I don’t know what to say to that. I have a simple solution to that particular scenario, but I don’t get the impression that Iris is ready to have that conversation.
Rather than push her into it, I redirect her to a different subject. “Want to blow stuff up?”
She lifts her head and raises a quizzical brow. “Huh?”
“The GameStation. I have a ton of games that are nice and safely violent. You can’t even hurt players on the same side as you. Enemies only.”
To my relief, this makes her burst into laughter rather than more tears. “I’ve never played a GameStation before. I don’t even know what buttons to hit.”
“That’s the great thing about some of these games. You can just mash random shit.”
I pick out a good wargame, complete with customizable female player options, and pop it into the console. While it loads, I sit in front of the couch and motion for Iris to join me on the floor. Since it’s her first time, I set it up for the two-player team option so I can provide backup for her character.
Like a typical woman, Iris spends more time than probably necessary on customizing her character. She picks hair and eye color similar to hers, same facial features, essentially making a digital selfie.
Complete with braids, like I’d done her hair.
Since she seems to be having fun with it, I do the same to my avatar. Tattooed arms, longish dark hair, dark eyes.
When we exit the character creation screen and get into our tactical gear, Iris pouts. “Now you can’t see me under all this armor! What’s the point of letting me make it look how I want if I’m just going to be in a helmet and padded stuff?”
“Don’t worry. There will be plenty of cutscenes and stuff where you can see it. I’ll even show you how to screenshot during those scenes.”
She shoots me a dubious glance.
“Trust me. Look, it’s starting with our intro. If you see a scene you want to save, hit these two buttons together. It’ll save them to my game cloud, and we can extract them later.” I demonstrate by screenshotting a scene of her character standing after being knocked down by an explosion. The look of determination on Game Iris’s face is fierce, and I can see her looking like that tomorrow when she meets with Mr. Franklin.
They can knock my girl down, but they can’tkeepher down.
My character’s intro scene comes next, and I smile when Iris practices the screenshot by capturing an image of “me” lifting her injured character off the ground. The image is rather romantic, heroic even, and all that’s missing is a tiny Hailey character. The game doesn’t include children as playable characters—rated M for Mature, after all—but I bet I could add a picture of Hailey to the screenshot using one of my photo editing programs.
Iris flounders with the controls at first, but once we’ve played long enough for the wine to work its way out of her system, her skills improve. Soon she’s blowing heads off insurgents left and right, and she giggles with excitement when she levels for the first time.
“Okay, I have to admit that this is fun. One of the dudes I blew up even looked like the Jolly Green Gossip asshole from this morning’s press conference.”
I grip my controller tight and execute three more enemies in rapid succession. “I wish I could have punched that guy for you. Like it’s anybody’s business if you’ve dated Sloan or not—and he was just so fucking smug about it all!”
Iris laughs and takes out two more enemies. “Hey, I’ll have you know you’d have to get in line for punching him. I was about two seconds away from doing that very thing.”
The mental image of sweet little Iris punching the tall reporter has me in stitches, and I end up taking fire from a sniper in the game. My hit points are dangerously low, and while I stab the heal button, Iris chases after the gunman. She catches up to him in an abandoned warehouse and nails him right between the virtual eyes.
We play well past midnight, and if she wasn’t having so much fun with it, I’d make Iris go to bed. As it is, her eyes sparkle with joy while she plays, and she has to come to my rescue more than once when I get distracted from Game Iris by staring at Real Iris.
Finally, around one a.m., Iris yawns and stretches. She looks at her controller during a cutscene and holds it out to me. “Which is the pause button?”
“Hang on a sec, and I’ll show you. There’s a save point after this scene.”
“Cool.” She leans into my shoulder as the scene plays out. “Thanks for this, Micah. It was fun.”
“You ready for bed now?”
Iris sighs. “I guess so. But bed means sleep, which means fast-forwarding to the morning and my eventual doom.”
“Hey.” I swing my arm around her and give her a squeeze. “Just remember that I’m here for you no matter what happens. If they trash the commercial, if they cut your pay, or, God forbid, fire you, I’m here. Anything you need.”
She rests her head against me and snuggles closer. “I may have to take you up on that, at least until I find something with comparable pay. That might be tough, though, after today’s media frenzy. I don’t suspect I’ll be winning over any companies with my spunk andchutzpah. If anything, I’ll be a jobless bum for a few months while this blows over.”
“You can always be a jobless bum over here,” I murmur, stroking her hair with one hand. “I know I keep suggesting it, but I’m serious, Iris. I’d love it if you and Cleo moved in full-time. Waking up next to you on the weekends is nice, but it makes the weekdays lonely.”
