The quest marker leads me to the receptionist at the front desk, who tells me I need to continue my quest by going up to the second floor and speaking to the dean of the school. I run up the stairs, looking at the artwork, the pictures, the cases displaying replica weapons of famous dreamhunters. So many details that weren’t even in the books.
The dean greets me and gives me a handful of quests clearly meant to be tutorials—weapons training in Hothram Hall, selling and buying items in the Crossing, checking out my dorm, where I can sign up for social events.
I lose all sense of time after that. I run back and forth across campus, talking to NPCs—non-player characters—that have been made up just for the game, along with the characters I know from the books. I learn my weapon skills and choose which weapon I want to start with. A giant hammer, like Wes. A dreamhunter’s weapon says something about who they are, and a hammer is how I wish I could be: blunt. It’s not aspirational; Iamblunt at my core, but it’s not acceptable to be that way with people. It makes them uncomfortable. They don’t know how to handle it.
I’m given quests to venture outside campus, into the Sleeping City, to hunt down nightmares. I level up once, twice, three times,four times. I fill my inventory with items, figure out where to sell them all, then fill it again. I find better armor and better stats for my weapon. I pore over my skill tree to decide how I want to build Raven.
I learn how to use the world chat and start talking to other players. They have an entire dialect all their own, and figuring it out is like filling out a spreadsheet in my head of all the things I need to know to communicate the way I want. Words like mats, instance, LFG, build, spec, raid, DPS, tank, aggro. Boppers are new players. Players join clans—with clan names in brackets added under their character names—to find groups of people to do dungeons and raids. The dungeons and raids all have their own names, their own acronyms, their own nicknames. When I use these words, other players know exactly what I mean. There is no emotion or interpretation to confuse me. If I typed into the chat “LFG FM DPS,” other players would understand it as “a player who does high damage output is looking for a group for the Fenhallow Manor dungeon.”
It is exactly the way I’ve always wanted to talk to people. Bluntly.
There’s a knock at my bedroom door. I reluctantly pull myself away from the screen.
“Evie, you okay in there?” Mom asks, her voice muffled. “I got a call from school. You left early?”
The clock on my bedside table says four forty. I’ve been playing for almost five hours. My eyes hurt and my back is stiff.
“Uh, yeah, fine,” I call back. “Sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize, just... what happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Can I come in?”
“Sure.”
She cracks open the door and sticks her head in. Her gray-blond hair is falling out of its bun and she’s still wearing her dealership quarter zip. She must have just gotten home. I didn’t even hear her car pull in. “What are you doing?”
She asks it without any pretense, but my hackles still go up. “Playing a game.”
“Not looking on social media?”
“No.”
“Okay. What happened at school?”
I shift uneasily, flushing with shame. This morning at school seems so long ago now, and I was so angry and unhinged. What was I thinking, talking to a teacher like that? Even if I do think Mr. Cox is an unforgivable blowhard. “I got mad at the teacher,” I say. “He tried to take my book. I know I shouldn’t have been reading in class, but I had already put it away and he still wanted to take it.”
Mom’s brow furrows. “That’s not like you.”
I shrug. I don’t know what she wants me to say.
“Well... maybe you can talk to the therapist about it.”
“Yeah.”
“You really aren’t online?”
I turn my computer toward her. As I lift it off my legs, I realize how hard the fan is running, how hot it is. “Game,” I say.
“Oh. Okay. Well, we need to leave soon, so put some shoes and a coat on. It’s her last appointment of the day, at five thirty. Maybe on the way home, we can pick up some dinner. How about Chilly’s Chicken? We haven’t had that in a while?”
The thought of Chilly’s makes my stomach knot up. “I’m not hungry.”
“You might be later.”
“Whatever is fine.”
