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THE SHOWER HELPED. Clean clothes helped. And Mom’s cooking smelled so good. When I sat down to dinner, I was feeling better than I had in a long time.
“So,” Dad said, while mom was setting out the food, “what’s the work situation?”
“Complicated.”
I scooped a big helping of macaroni and cheese onto my plate and hoped he would leave it at that.
“Complicated how? Do you have a job yet? Where are you looking? What’s your plan?”
“I don’t have a plan!”
“Well, what are you doing? You’re not doing nothing. What do you do all day?”
“Lately, I’ve been writing a game.”
Dad had an answer for that, but he didn’t voice it. He blinked at me.
Mom said, “That’s nice! What kind of game?”
“It’s a role-playing game. I’m building it on a platform Ben recommended. Exelichai Game Arcade.”
Dad nodded, mute. Mom brightened at Ben’s name. My parents had a lot of respect for Ben.
“Ben recommended it?” Mom asked. “How’s he doing? Is he still with Lisa?”
“He... yeah,” I said.
“Any money in it?” Dad asked.
“Not yet. But I’m just getting started.”
He wanted to argue with me. I could see the lectures lining up behind his eyes.
But Mom put her hand on his, and he broke eye contact, and it all went away. He shook off that conversation and turned to the next worst. “What brings you here? Trouble with the apartment?”
Mom wanted more peace than that. “Tell me about your game!”
“As it happens, they’re both the same story.” I filled them in.
Mom was appropriately shocked. Dad was more on my side than I expected. “He can’t just kick you out like that! You’ve got a lot of rights.”
“I know!” I said. “He did anyway.”
“You can fight this,” Dad said. “Take him to court.”
“With what? I don’t have a lawyer. I can’t afford one! And the work will be done before I could even file a suit.”
Mom jumped in. “You’re welcome here as long as you need.”
“As long as you have a plan,” Dad said. “Get a plan. You can’t just let life happen to you!”
Dad asked Mom about something going on at church, and I got to drop out of the conversation for a moment. I stuffed my face with macaroni and tried to think of a plan.
I could probably get a job for one of the big oil companies in town. They hired programmers and I. T. techs by the handfuls. It was soulless corporate work, but it paid well. I had no idea if they were hiring or firing because of the Pandemic, but it would be emotionally and creatively exhausting even if I landed something. I’d done an internship Junior year.
That’s why I’d settled on web design. It didn’t pay as well, but it was lighter work that left more of me to me at the end of the day. I could do that again. I could build commercial websites freelance, or I could find another local shop like the one I’d worked in before.
I could go backward. One way or another. Or stay here in my parents’ house, in my room from high school. Every option felt like failure.
Dad stepped straight into my thoughts. “You said, ‘Not yet.’ When I asked about your game development paying. ‘Not yet!’ What did that mean?”
“They have a plan to pay creators for the games—or even the pieces of games—that they contribute. I’ll be able to charge people to play my game, but no one has ever heard of me. And the game is only partly done.”
“But you’re saying this game could pay your bills?”
“I’m...not. No. Theoretically, if there was demand for it and I raised the price, yeah. But that’s like winning the lottery.”
“Sounds like work to me,” Dad said. “Why are you so scared of work?”
“I’m not scared of work! It’s hard to find good work!” I shouted to a preacher.
“You work so hard sometimes,” he said. “I don’t understand. You have put in so much work making up this game. Why won’t you do the work to make it a career?”
“I don’t know how!”
“You didn’t know how to make a game until you did it. Do the rest. Do the hard work to live the life you want. It’s that easy.”
“It’s not easy.”
“Nothing’s easy,” he said. “That’s the world you’ve got.”
And that was it. Mom went to whip up a dessert, and Dad turned on the news. I grabbed my laptop and set up on the couch, working while Dad watched politics and Mom played a Harry Potter game on her phone.
It was a quiet night. I added a Midtown zone with some of my favorite restaurants and a big hotel, just to inject new places to explore. Then I started working backward, inventing Characters for each of the buildings, figuring out what they owned and whether they would be hostile or friendly. I needed to use a Reputation tracker to handle that, the way this game was going, but for now all the NPCs were hardwired to be aggressive or non-aggressive.
I was working on more enemies, looking for a mini-boss on the way to fighting the evil apartment manager, and my mind went to the big guy Mr. Hauser had stationed outside my apartment. He’d said his name outside his office. Derrick. The guy looked like a derrick.
But thinking about it now, after a night working on “The Girl with the Gun,” I made another connection.
That’s the name she’d said. I was sure of it. She’d handed me her bloody gun and said, “If Derrick comes through that door, put the magazine into him.”
I swallowed hard. Could it be the same Derrick?
What had I gotten myself into?