This story came out of a collision of ideas: bam! For some reason, there were a lot of stories in the news about teenagers who killed themselves because they were gay and being bullied. “Aha,” I thought, with an eye to a murder mystery: “That would be a perfect setup. Someone murders a kid who’s gay and being bullied about it…but nobody believes it’s a murder, because it so clearly must have been suicide.”
Meanwhile, I was playing a lot of a particular MMORPG with my husband and observing that the behavior of some guilds is almost like that of a criminal organization: show up, do the job, go home, and…don’t tell anyone about it who isn’t in the business. Everyone has a role, and you better play your part.
When you’re playing the game, you don’t think about ethics. You don’t think about right or wrong. Kill a unicorn? All right. Bring back eight unicorn hearts, still beating, never mind the drop rate. All right.
You do the job, and the next job, and the job after that. You level. You raid. You bring home the blues and the purples and you sell them at the auction house. You donate to your guild. You build up honor and reputation, both the kind you get points for and the kind that means when you say you’re going to show up on a Saturday night for a raid, you do it. You don’t wig out.
That’s the ethics of the game: don’t wig out.
***
They said Charlie finished the raid, wrote a suicide note, and hung himself off the back of one of the support beams in the basement. Meanwhile, upstairs, I was still logged on because I had some crafting to do.
Two floors below me, my brother was thinking, “Gosh, that was a great instance that I just ran with my little sis; we didn’t wipe once. What better time to kill myself for being gay?”
Bullshit.
Okay, the fact was, his Facebook was filled up with posts from his classmates at high school calling him a faggot and a queer and threatening to expose him to the world. Like he wasn’t already exposed. He didn’t try to hide it; the only secrets he kept were other people’s. For example, I wasn’t supposed to know who his boyfriend was, but I did: Gary Martin.
Gary was in my grade. I’d known him since we were little. In a world where kids waved at you their last day of school saying they’d see you again in the fall, then disappeared forever, Gary was a fucking rock. He didn’t live down the street, but he was within biking distance. I was kind of embarrassed at first when I found out he and Charlie were together, because neither one of them had told me. I felt like Gary didn’t trust me. The guy who swapped homework with me. The guy who lied for me about being at the library. The guy who told me to get my hair cut and stop staring at my feet and dragged me onto the dance floor to make my super secret crush jealous (that last part didn’t work as planned, but I got to dance with him anyway). Charlie, well, he always had his secrets; I’ve always spied on him.
We didn’t find him that night. He swayed back and forth in the basement from that piece of wood, on a piece of clothes rope. In the morning he didn’t follow the routine of getting ready for school. It was loud; the sound of not running out of hot water was loud. I was late getting out of the shower because it took longer for the water to get cold and Mom yelled at me and I was surprised: I had water temperature vs. time down to a science.
So I tore off downstairs to see what the fuck Charlie was up to. I ran down the stairs two at a time, thinking, “That’s it, this time I’m going to tell him I know about Gary.” I kicked open the door, because it wasn’t me who was going to get blamed when he moved out next fall for college if there was a hole in the drywall. The door hit the wall so hard it punched a hole through it and stuck.
By then he wasn’t swinging.
Oh God I fucking screamed. I don’t remember breathing.
***
The last thing he said to me was:
Hiromage: Don’t stay up too late.
MOMONONO: Not like I wasn’t planning to sleepwak thru my lcasses anyway.
MOMONONO: *sleepwalk through my classes
Hiromage: LOL Nite, sis.
Not exactly the words of someone who was planning to kill himself.
***
I skipped school. After the cops cut him down, I sat at the computer and logged in before I could think that maybe I should remote in instead, in case of fingerprints. I searched his computer and found the email that he’d sent out to everyone in his address list—relatives, ex-girlfriends (back when he was still trying to figure things out), mailing lists, coworkers from his summer job last year. It was too indiscriminate. When I checked my email later, I found a copy in my inbox, too.
The phone was ringing off the hook already.
I started dumping a copy of everything on his system over to my backup drive. I wish I’d left the keystroke tracker hooked up to the back of his box; I figured I was pushing my luck after three months and had taken it off a month ago.
It didn’t matter whether he’d done it himself or not; someone else had killed him.
His Facebook dingled at me:
Gary Martin: Georgia? Is that you?
Charlie Campbell: TTYL.
Gary Martin: What?
I didn’t answer. My heart went out to him, but I didn’t need to be leaving more evidence than I already was. You know what they say. If you don’t want the whole world to find out that you’re doing something you’re not supposed to be doing, keep it offline.
Charlie’s stream started filling up with messages of condolence. Shock. Hurt. The news was spreading fast.
I had to stop when I saw the email in his trash from the game admins: right after he’d logged off, they’d sent him an email saying that he’d violated his terms of service and had locked his account. He must have been hacked. I sent them a message, pretending to be him, claiming that someone had hacked his account, and they unlocked it within a couple of hours, wonder of all wonders.
Meanwhile, I got everything I could off his hard drive and Internet history: then I logged into the game.
I had a perfectly plausible excuse to do so. We’d been joking around at the time, but we had had an agreement that if anything happened to either of us, we were supposed to pass out the other’s online stuff from our Last Will and Testament folders. I never wrote mine. But Charlie’s, the whole thing was handwritten and stored in a cardboard filing box under his computer desk, along with some comic books of questionable value, action figures, a signed picture of Nathan Fillion, etc. I didn’t know how long I had before the admins found out he was dead and locked his account again, so I pulled out the papers and set them in front of me.
They were arranged like a diary, with some lines crossed out, dated, and noted: Sold for 160 gold. Gave to naked elf dancing on top of elephant statue, Remington007. G. hacked account and sent to self, the brat.
The last entry was from a month ago.
I bequeath the Hand of Glory to Georgia Campbell. Hot shit.
I looked through his items on Hiromage. Nothing named Hand of Glory showed up, so I followed the instructions on his gaming will, going line by line, until I had Hiromage taken care of (including sending MOMONONO a lot of gold; you gotta pay your estate lawyer, you know?). Then I switched over to one of his alts, Raffletix.
Raffletix had an unusual purple that I didn’t recognize, something for his thief to hold in his off-hand.
Now, if you know anything about the game, you know that thieves don’t hold things in their off-hands. They hold two blades, preferably daggers, and cut your throat with one hand while stabbing you in the back with the other. Filling that slot with something else is not a winning proposition.
Yet that’s what Charlie had done. It was a candle holder called “Butler’s Candelabra.” The description said it was supposed to reveal traps on your mini-map. Okay. I could see carrying it around and using it from time to time, but…
I went online and did a search for Butler’s Candelabra. Nothing. Then I did Hand of Glory.
Ugh. Okay, a hand of glory was a candleholder made literally out of someone’s hand, lit by candles made out of the rendered fat of their corpse. And not just any hand; it had to belong to a murderer or a thief. The hand could unlock any lock, stun anyone who you showed it to, and made the holder invisible.
You know, an item like that would be pretty valuable. I went back to the game and took Raffletix out for a spin.
Our guildies knew what was going on; I’d already given them the heads up and begged them not to tell the admins until I was done passing things out the way Charlie had wanted. I signed up for an instance with a pickup group, still carrying Butler’s Candelabra.
About midway through the dungeon, which I could have run in my sleep, I activated the item.
Suddenly, the chat dialogue filled up with text about me dropping so suddenly: I’d vanished.
Hm. The name of the item had changed, too—now it read Hand of Glory.
I conked one of the other members on the back of the head with the candelabra. His character froze, and the others asked him if he was lagging or something, but he didn’t respond.
His character highlight—which is normally green, for people you can’t attack—turned blue.
I clicked on him.
His inventory opened up, with an empty box and a button marked “Steal.” I riffled through his stuff until I found a nice cowboy hat, a total vanity item, and dumped in the box and clicked the button. Plip! It was gone.
I looked through my inventory and didn’t see it…until I noticed an extra tab underneath marked “Stash.” I clicked the tab—and there was the hat.
After I clicked the button, his character “unfroze,” and he apologized for his computer lagging.
In the real world, I stuffed both of my hands in my mouth to keep from screaming. Oh. My. God. They still didn’t know I was there. I clicked on the character again, and his highlight turned red.
I could attack him.
I did so.
It took longer than normal (me only having one knife), but I never broke stealth. Never. None of them had any idea I was there. The chat dialogue filled up with…horror. Watching their teammate (nevermind that it was only a pickup group and they probably didn’t know the guy) being cut to death, unable to defend himself, murdered by nothing.
I giggled.
A couple of other things I should note: when I tried to look up the item in the online guides, I couldn’t find it, either under the name “Butler’s Candelabra” or “Hand of Glory.” And when I sent it to MOMONONO, I discovered another feature:
A list of character options.
At the top: Butler.
Second: Rixnaldo.
Third: Hiromage.
Fourth: Raffletix.
Fifth: MOMONONO. That is, me.
I selected Raffletix from the list…and suddenly I was Raffletix. At least, I had his character ID. I had his slotted items, as far as I could remember, and I had his skill set, which was different than mine. I switched over to Hiromage: MOMONONO was suddenly a mage, with mage robes and mage powers. Of course, I couldn’t play mages for shit, but there he was, if I’d wanted to do so.
There he was. My brother’s character. As though he were still alive.
I can’t say why that hit me worse than anything, but it did, and I spent the rest of the day curled up in a little ball around the stuffed animals I should have given away years ago, or in the bathroom, puking out my guts. I didn’t get to Rixnaldo or Butler; it hurt too much to log back on.
The medical examiner ruled it a suicide, and they held the funeral too fast. Nobody came out and said it, but I think everyone in authority assumed that it was pretty normal for gay people to kill themselves after being bullied. I mean, it was in the news all the time, wasn’t it? Okay, I can see where that might be a tempting solution to the problem of trying to figure out what had happened to Charlie, but they were wrong, and they should have listened to me.
Despite the screaming.
***
When I finally went back the following Wednesday, school was the worst. After ten minutes of condolences, people started to ask me who the bullies were who had tipped Charlie over the edge.
Even one of our guildies, Kylie, who happened to be in the same grade as me, just…assumed it. She walked next to me down the hall from English to Chemistry, holding an armload of books. “Was it Bullsworth?”
“Was what Bullsworth?” Bullsworth is what we called Todd Farnsworth, because he was a bully and had been for years.
“Who made Charlie kill himself?”
I rolled my eyes. “Charlie didn’t kill himself.”
“He didn’t? I thought he hung himself.”
“I don’t know what happened for sure. But it wasn’t suicide.”
“Well,” Kylie said carefully, “was it Bullsworth who did whatever it was that happened?”
I shook my head. “Charlie? Let Bullsworth get to him? Come on.”
Something grabbed me by my shoulder, hard. Felt like a piece of cement slamming down on me, spinning me around. Suddenly, I was looking up at Bullsworth. He was a big guy with a lot of black hair on top and hands like…uh…pieces of sidewalk. Played a lot of football. Smelled funny. Didn’t like you if you were a smartass. In Charlie’s grade when they were kids so he should have been a senior, but he was a junior now. We didn’t get along.
“Say that again,” he said.
I stood up as straight as I could with that weight on one shoulder. If I was going to die, I was going to die deserving it. “Charlie didn’t give a shit about your bullying, Bullsworth.”
“My name’s Todd.”
“Whatever.”
I tried to twist away, but he shifted his grip over to my arm and dragged me down the hallway.
“Hey!” Kylie ran up behind him and started hitting him with her Chemistry book, but it didn’t seem to do anything to him, and eventually she stopped and drifted back towards class. I struggled, but Bullsworth basically dragged me along by one arm until we were at the principal’s office, then through the door (my shoes now dragging on industrial carpet instead of tile) and at the secretary’s desk.
“Mr. Farnsworth,” she said. “What are you doing?”
She sounded incredulous, like she was in a dream. I wondered what it was like, being her, and seeing Bullsworth in your office, dragging a girl behind him, disregarding the fact that he was about one cuss word away from in-school suspension. What, was he going to say that I’d been bullying him? What?
“Say it again,” he said. “Go on.”
I said, “I just said that, um, I didn’t think that Todd’s bullying caused Charlie to kill himself. Only, admittedly,” I looked at Bullsworth, “I didn’t say it that politely.”
Bullsworth dropped my arm, and my weight settled onto my feet. I touched my arm all over where he’d touched it. Not broken. Probably.
She sighed, touched a button on her intercom, and said, “Ms. Brigs? Mr. Farnsworth and Miss Campbell here to see you.”
After a few seconds, a crackly voice said, “Send them in.”
***
So there I was in the principal’s office, defending a guy who had bullied my brother mercilessly about being gay. Not my favorite moment ever, even if it did give me a chance to rant about how I knew my brother had been killed somehow.
Ms. Brigs didn’t listen. Instead, she patronizingly patted my hand. “Georgia, you know your brother was an incredibly troubled boy.”
“No, he wasn’t. Just because he was gay doesn’t mean he killed himself. I mean, lots of people get bullied and don’t kill themselves. Even gay people.”
“I know, dear. But it was well-known among the staff that he had difficulty, whenever he received a grade that he thought was under what he should have had, that he would become, well, violent. Any criticism would make him—”
“Shut up!” I yelled.
But she didn’t get mad at me. She patted my hand again and said, “It’s all right.” Then she absentmindedly gave Bullsworth detention, as if she couldn’t remember why he was in her office but knew that detention would probably be appropriate, and sent us back to class with a couple of hall passes.
“Shit,” I hissed as I started down the hall. “Shit shit shit.”
The cement-block hand fell on my shoulder again.
“Knock it off,” I said. “I did my best.”
“I know,” he said. “Thanks.”
I spun around. “Thanks? Thanks? My brother is dead and all you have to say is thanks? You’re lucky he didn’t give a crap what you said. You’d be a fucking murderer now if he had. Why couldn’t you have just left him alone?”
“He knew I was just joking.”
I punched him. I slammed him right in the solar plexus. I may hit like a girl, but I hit him with the ghost of my brother and every other soul that had died a little from his bullying and sniping and teasing. “Fuck your jokes!” I screamed. He hadn’t seen it coming and doubled over.
We hadn’t gone far enough away from the principal’s office. “Miss Campbell,” the secretary called. I sighed, then took my pen and jammed it into his side. He howled and dropped. In for a penny, in for a pound, or so they say in English class. “Stay away from me. And no more fucking jokes.”
Then I turned around and went back into the office to get what was coming to me.
***
At supper that night, after I’d had my lecture about fighting at school, I sat and picked at my chicken pot pie and thought, Okay, let’s say you want to make it look like someone hung themselves, but didn’t. How would you do that?
Mom and Dad assumed that I was distracted about various grief things and left me alone as I didn’t eat and pushed food around on my plate, my fork scraping against the plate as I dragged the tines around and around in a circle.
I kept coming back to two options:
One, he really did hang himself, for whatever reason.
Two, someone else hung him.
One, two. One, two.
I stood up. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m not hungry. I just want to sit in Charlie’s room and think for a while, okay?”
“Okay,” Mom said. “Let me know if you change your mind.” She looked tired, just exhausted. Autopilot. It pissed me off that they weren’t angry. They were sad. Charlie was their own son, and they didn’t know him well enough to know that he hadn’t killed himself. Dad just nodded at me and kept eating.
Downstairs, into Charlie’s room. The door bopped on the wall as I barreled through it. Charlie had a tiny window onto the back yard that he used to sneak out of the house or let Gary in. I checked the sill to see if…I don’t know. Clues.
I found exactly what I should have found: evidence that people had been going back and forth through the window. Lots of fingerprints. Grooves in the dirt under the lilac bush. Dirt on the floor under the window. Grunge, actually. When Charlie moved out, Mom was going to—
Mom came by later and told me to go to bed. I did.
***
School. Bullsworth followed me around before classes started. “Look, I just wanted to—”
“Not interested,” I said. “Unless you want to meet me out by the light pole in the parking lot so I can beat you up again.”
Kylie snorted. “Beat up by a girl, Bullsworth? When did that happen?”
He stomped toward her, and she took a step back. I got between them, and he shook his head and went off down the hall. Kylie’s a born healer: stand back, keep an eye on things, make smartass comments, and attract aggro. She’s annoying sometimes. But you always defend your healer.
“Thanks,” she said. She’d been rubbing her stomach since she walked in the front door, and she was doing it again.
“You feeling all right?”
“I feel sick,” she said. “Like, heartburn.”
“Anything I can do?”
She shook her head, and I took off to History.
***
History I had with Gary. I guess…I’d been avoiding him. No matter how cool you try to be about your brother’s gay boyfriend, I still hadn’t got it all sorted out in my head, and I was afraid. I didn’t know. I didn’t know if, any second, I was going to say or do something that was going to ruin Gary’s life forever. What if I gave it all away, and he didn’t even know for sure that I knew there was something to give away? Shit. His parents would kill him. Not literally. But close.
So I’d been putting it off, trying to figure out what to do about it. Give him my condolences? Just say “thank you” if he gave me his? He hadn’t come to the funeral. He hadn’t come to the fucking funeral. How hard could it have been? “Mom, one of my classmates, who was totally not my boyfriend, died this Sunday, and I’m going to his funeral.” “Okay, Gary, as long as he’s not your boyfriend.” End of story.
I sat in my seat; he sat in his seat, next to mine, in the back row. I was shaking, I was so nervous.
Mr. Henke started droning on about the French Revolution and how they changed all the names of the months, but I wasn’t hearing any of it, really. I mean, what was the lesson we were supposed to learn? That you could try to change the names of the months, but dammit, the months were the months! July was July and Thermidor was a lie. Mr. Henke hated anything having to do with the French, even though they backed us during our revolution and took most of the brunt of being attacked by the Nazis. And he hated gay people, even though he wasn’t allowed to talk about it in class. Cripes. It was like gay = French, to him.
Gary looked at me, and I looked at him, and I knew I was running out of time to put off uncomfortable situations.
He said, “I heard you attacked Bullsworth in the hall yesterday.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I got lucky. They pretty much blew it off as part of the grieving process.”
“Good for you,” he said.
I groaned. “You don’t think he did it, too.”
“What?”
“Made Charlie kill himself.”
Gary gritted his teeth. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it before, but he looked rough and mean that morning. His clothes were wrinkled and dirty, like he’d been wearing them for days. He gritted his teeth so hard they groaned inside his mouth, and Mr. Henke looked up at us.
I made a big, gulping sniff and put my head in my hand, and Gary jerked his hand, like he’d been holding my hand and had just jerked it back. Mr. Henke’s face softened for just a second, and he went back to his explanation.
I didn’t get it. Sympathy for me, the fag’s sister. Like I said, what Charlie was, wasn’t much of a secret, and I was sure Mr. Henke had known.
I continued to act like I was walking near the cliffs of Teen Girl Loses Her Shit throughout class. Eventually, Gary leaned over and said, “Whatever Bullsworth did or didn’t do to Charlie, he was part of it. He was always part of the problem. He picked on us when we were in first grade, do you remember that?”
I did.
“So I don’t care whether he deserved it in particular this time or not. I’m just saying, Georgia, good for you for standing up to him.”
I reached out and touched his arm. “Thanks.” This time, I put my head on the desk and left it there until the bell rang.
***
I finally worked myself up to logging in again and got a shock: they’d deleted Charlie’s account. The whole thing. I sent an email from his email account protesting the deletion to the admins, then…didn’t know what to do. Our guild didn’t have anything scheduled until next weekend, and who knew whether we’d still go, without Charlie. I mean, yeah, other people could do the mage thing in his place, but it seemed disrespectful. I wondered if I should try to organize an online funeral for him. Maybe if the admins got back to me, I’d ask them if we could just have Hiromage’s corpse for a few hours. Yeah. That’s what I’d do. I sent out messages around the guild, setting up a funeral during our regular raid time.
At his real-life funeral, it had seemed like he was faking it. Like he’d been about to sit up any second. I felt like I hadn’t been able to say goodbye yet. Also because I knew he’d been killed, and I hadn’t been able to get anywhere with that. How can you put someone to rest if you can’t rest about it? But also because…the best parts of him weren’t in that box. They were online. If you didn’t know Charlie online, you didn’t know him at all.
You didn’t know his stupid jokes. The way he would sing heavy metal songs with stupid lyrics related to whatever raid we were in..I am troll-fart man, na na na na na na naa naaaa naa. The way he would be able to break down any situation at a moment’s notice and hand out tasks that would keep us all alive. The way he would dance in real life, down in the basement, howling with victory, when we pulled something particularly fantastic off.
Charlie was rock solid. Charlie never wigged out. Charlie made us take breaks and go to bed on time. If you didn’t have your homework done and he found out about it, you were kicked from the guild for a week. Charlie knew what everything was worth and what it would sell for without having to look it up. Charlie was the kind of guy who could run around in a dress with a bunch of barbarians and never be afraid to lithp for laughs. Charlie had no qualms about handing off the best shit to you, to anybody in the guild, whoever needed it. Charlie was there.
Too bad Gary’s parents would never let him play. If he was online, it was because he’d sneaked on. But that was his parents, always thinking that if you could make the outside do what you wanted it to do, the inside would follow along like an obedient, trusting little lamb.
I don’t mind keeping secrets. But it’s always made Gary a little sick.
I messed around with Butler’s Candelabra—a.k.a. the Hand of Glory—for a while, but I didn’t care for it. I mean, how long can you run around going, “Oooh, I just stole something from someone who didn’t even know I was there?” Sure, it’s amusing the first few times…but it’s so overpowered that it sucks the fun out of things. I’m no power gamer; I’m in it for the fun. And the sneaking. When you sap someone over the back of the head, pick their pockets, and run away giggling, what makes it fun is knowing that you outwitted someone. They had the chance to catch you and missed it. Having godlike powers over the other players in the game? Meh.
I seriously considered destroying it. I would have, if it hadn’t been the only clue I had. I deleted the hat, anyway.
I wasn’t sure what would happen if I logged on as one of the other characters on the list, but I had to know if they knew anything. Here was the stupid story that I couldn’t get out of my stupid head:
Charlie had bought or won the item off Rixnaldo. The item was illegal. Who makes up illegal game items? Hackers. I had half convinced myself that hackers had murdered Charlie and would be after me next. But why? Wouldn’t hackers want people to spread their stuff around, so they could collect more information and spread whatever viruses they wanted?
Thinking of that, I checked my security, but it all looked okay, at least on my end. Maybe they were screwing around with the game servers, using the users to infect the game itself. Could happen.
In fact, if I looked at the question of trying to hack the game servers as a kind of raid, that’s how I would have handled it: Don’t attack the boss directly. Send in minions to distract him, then sneak up behind him and stab him in the back for massive damage multipliers.
So why kill Charlie?
Maybe it wasn’t the hackers. Maybe it was the game runners themselves, spotting someone breaking the rules of the game so egregiously that they…broke into his mind and brainwashed him into killing himself. And I’m next. Sheesh. Or maybe Charlie had figured out who the hackers were and had threatened to tell the admins. I don’t know.
I wasn’t ready to give up, so I switched over to Rixnaldo’s ID, after first searching to make sure he wasn’t actually on. I wandered around the capital city, trying to get someone to talk to me, and pretended like I had a couple of rare items that I wanted to sell, to attract attention. Nothing.
I got bored and switched over to Butler, the original owner (and programmer?) of the item. That’s when all hell broke loose.
***
Where did you get that from?
The message popped up in my chat window, from user CornMustard.
What?
Don’t fuck with me, CornMustard said. The hand.
I got this fair and square. I was about ready to log off. I was scared and angry at the same time.
It belongs to ME!!!
My brother gave it to me.
There was a long pause. I friended CornMustard. He was still on.
It wasn’t his to give.
/shrug. If someone else wanted it, I wasn’t about it give it up that easily. I looked through Butler’s items, then noticed he, too, had a stash tab. I popped it open and…
In-game letters. From Hiromage. I read the latest one.
B, I don’t want her to know. Promise me she’s never going to find out.
Find out what? I started sending the letters to my character as fast as I could. A split-second later, CornMustard logged out, and a flashing red border showed around my character portrait. I friended “Butler” and was rewarded with the information that he’d just logged on. Letters started disappearing from the stash tab faster than I could copy them. I opened them up and took screenshots instead, cursing the time it took to dump each one in a word processor file. Then they were gone. I switched over to MOMONONO, screenshotted the rest of the letters, and logged out.
Mom yelled at me, “Georgia! Kylie’s here!”
“Coming, Mom.” I saved the files in three different locations and mailed them to myself twice, then powered off my screen. I ran downstairs, grabbed Kylie in a big, girlish hug, then pulled her upstairs with me. I didn’t bother to look glad to see her, just…unsurprised.
When we got upstairs, I closed the door of my room and said, “What’s up, buttercup? Because have I got some news for you.”
Kylie stared at me. I couldn’t interpret the look on her face, only that it contained bad things. It was the kind of face you get when someone’s about to tell you that someone you love is dead. I remember it from the mirror.
“What?” I said again, this time with more panic in my voice.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
“What?” I asked. “Who?”
The look on her face got worse, and she didn’t say anything.
“Who, Kylie? I’m sorry if I’m being dense here, but I had no idea that you were…um, having sex with anyone.”
“It was Charlie,” she said.
“What?” I yelled. I blinked a few times. She didn’t say anything. I walked over to the door, stuck my head out, and said, “Sorry, Mom. We’re okay.”
“Okay, sweetie,” she said.
I closed the door very carefully.
Kylie was crying.
I sat next to her on the quilt, which was black and pink and something that I’d thought was cute when I was thirteen. I put my arm around her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”
“You don’t believe me, either,” she said.
“I…don’t know. I thought, from emails of his that I read, that he was, um, done with that part of his life a while ago.”
“I thought so, too. But.”
“But what?”
She shook her head and gave me that dead-person look again.
“Come on, Kylie. You’re my healer. I watch out for you first, you know that. If you say that Charlie’s the father, then…I don’t know. I guess I’ll just have to step up for him. Although you’re not my type; I’m more of the wish-Gary-wasn’t…”
I drifted off. Shit, shit, shit. I’d said too much. I’d said too much.
“They broke up,” she said.
I just about yelled again, but Kylie slapped her hand over my mouth, and it shocked me so much that I had time to inhale, stop, and think about it. “They broke up,” I repeated through her fingers.
She took her hand away and put it over her belly, rubbed it. “About a month ago.”
“About a month ago,” I repeated stupidly. I should never have taken off that keystroke recorder.
“Because Charlie was cheating on him.”
“Because Charlie was cheating on Gary?”
“On Gary,” she agreed.
“How do you come into all this?” I asked.
“I was…consoling him.”
“Shit,” I said, wonderingly. “You must have been a good consolation prize to make a gay guy…uh, sorry. That was rude.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “It…oh, nevermind. It happened.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll have to tell my parents.”
She looked at me. Not a dead-look, but close. “I was going to have an abortion.”
My stomach clenched, and I about threw up in her lap. “You can’t!” But I whispered it, so it only came out as a mid-level squawk. “That’s Charlie’s baby!”
She rubbed her face. “I’m not ready to be a mother.”
I couldn’t deal with it anymore, so I changed the subject. “Look…who was he seeing? Behind Gary’s back?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” I couldn’t believe it. I scooted away from her so I could see her whole face, showing up really pale against the dark-gray walls of my can’t-paint-it-black bedroom. A silhouette of terror, no mistake.
“Didn’t I just say that? It was Charlie. He didn’t name names, you know that.”
“Then how did you know he was seeing Gary?”
“I guessed.”
I shook my head, trying to make the memory of what I’d just learned leave my brain by centrifugal force.
“You’re the one who gave me the hint, actually,” she said. “You used to flirt with Gary mercilessly. It was embarrassing. And then you suddenly stopped. And you were just friends, really just friends. One thing led to another, after that.”
I groaned. “Figures. All right. No matter what happens, thank you for telling me. I’ve been going crazy, trying to figure out what happened to Charlie, really.”
“He was worried,” Kylie said, brushing long hair away from where it had stuck to the tears on her face. “He was worried that you would feel betrayed.”
“Me?” I asked. “What about Gary?”
But she didn’t answer.
***
After Kylie left and Mom gave me a weird look for who knows what, I logged back on. First I checked my email, automatically rather than out of any real sense of priorities.
The admins had sent me (that is, Charlie) an email:
Further research has proven that your account has, over the last several weeks, participated in several violations of the terms of service, including the period after your account was recently unlocked. Please call customer service at 1-800-226-9758 to discuss this issue with a customer service representative.
Well, that was that. I couldn’t call. I mean, they might have believed me, but I knew I’d wig out and start bawling. But…broken the terms of service? With Butler’s Candelabra, no doubt. I had to get rid of that thing before they caught me at it, too. But I needed it for the funeral. I’d create a dummy account through a fake email address, plunk down the money for a subscription and everything, hand over the candelabra, switch over to Hiromage, and have his corpse lay there until after the funeral was over.
It hit me, suddenly: No wonder Gary hadn’t gone to the funeral.
But the question remained: Why had my brother killed himself?
I put my head on the doorframe between the kitchen and the front hallway and cried. Mom was in the kitchen, reading a magazine at the dining room table, and Dad was in the living room, watching some show on TV where they broke the locks off storage units for some reason.
“Are you all right?” Mom said. I cried harder. “Is it something about Kylie?”
I came into the kitchen and sat next to her at the table. She put her arms around me, and I cried and I cried and I cried.
Whatever had happened, I now believed, right down to my soul, that Charlie had killed himself. He’d gone on that raid with me and pretended like everything was okay…or everything had been okay, but something had come up after that, and…then he’d killed himself. I don’t know why or when I’d changed my mind, but I had.
I’m really good at keeping secrets. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t. I didn’t tell mom a thing.
***
I didn’t want to go up to my room.
***
I read the screenshots, and there it was: the story of my brother discovering that a month ago Butler, using Butler’s Candelabra, had knocked him out and stolen something off him, a pet that he’d worked his tail off to get during last year’s pseudo-Halloween in-game events, a short, fat kid that would say TRICK OR TREAT when you clicked on him about a hundred times, and then would puke up his own skeleton and dance around for you after that.
Most sane people would have gone after Butler with a vengeance, especially when they had the power of a whole guild behind them.
Charlie? He fell in love. Head over heels love. It was stupid and cute, and I hoped it never happened to me. And then Gary found out.
At that point, Charlie didn’t know who Butler was, in real life; at least, that’s what I picked up on in the letters. So he hadn’t, you know, done anything with this Butler guy, who was probably off in China someplace anyway. But Gary didn’t care. Charlie couldn’t deny that he was in love with some hacker from China, and that was that, as far as Gary was concerned. He wasn’t going to live a lie for someone who didn’t love him and him alone. Caput.
I hated Charlie for breaking Gary’s heart. Then forgave him.
But why did Charlie kill himself?
It wasn’t like…any of this…was important. It wasn’t important enough to make him wig out, anyway.
I read the letters again. Butler had probably deleted the thing that had tipped Charlie over the edge, whatever it was.
It probably wasn’t that big of a deal. I left the monitor on and lay in bed until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. The most important thing was convincing Kylie to have the baby. Get her to give it to my mom and dad and me. Something.
***
I was walking down the hallway with Kylie the next day, not talking about her baby but making arguments nonetheless.
“My parents are younger than your parents,” I said.
“My parents brought me up to think about my future.”
“My parents brought me up to be loyal.”
“Don’t go there.”
I shrugged. “How am I supposed to convince you if you won’t let me use my best arguments? What about giving it the guild name as the last name?”
“What, call it Bobby Dinosaur Boogie?”
“There are worse names.”
One of the popular girls happened to hear us and sneered, “Coming up with new character names again, geeks?”
We both turned beet red, if Kylie’s face and my body temperature were any indications.
“Jealous?” I asked.
She snorted. “Hardly.”
Crisis averted.
The fact was, if I had the power of Butler’s Candelabra in real life, I would have smacked Kylie on the back of the head with it, taken her baby, and put it in my stash tab. But that’s not how things work.
“I like taking things to Goodwill,” I said. “You know, if someone gives me a gift that I don’t really want, I like to donate it rather than throw it away.” Well, kind of true, if you count giving it to Mom to take care of.
Kylie sighed.
Bullsworth walked down the hall and stopped next to us, causing a couple of freshman to crash into him from behind. He growled at them, then stared at us.
I don’t know what made it click, but the penny dropped. I gaped at him.
“What are you staring at?” he asked.
I sucked a breath back in and said, “In a murder mystery.” Then stopped. This guy. This bully. This…this. This guy with big hands that he used to hurt people. I remembered. Gary remembered. We knew him. You don’t forgive and forget swirlies. You just don’t.
It was like someone kicked me in the gut. Everything my brother was had been a lie. Broke up with my best friend. Knocked a guildie up and left her hanging. Fell in love with a hacker because his lame game-killer item was cool. Got kicked off his entire social life because of said item. Probably.
It wasn’t the bullying that had killed Charlie, but the thought of me finding out that he wasn’t the hero that I thought he was. That’s what made him wig out. Well, me and everybody else.
“What?” Kylie asked. She didn’t know, was looking back and forth between the two of us. Bullsworth was the shit-covered finger poking the first domino of the chain of events that was crashing down on her, and she didn’t know.
“It’s the butler who did it,” I said.
Bullsworth went pale.
“Yeah,” I said loudly. “Actually, I think your bullying did kill my brother. Just not as directly as everyone thinks.”
I wiped my eyes, grabbed Kylie’s arm, and dragged her off down the hall. I didn’t care what my brother had done. He was my brother. I would have forgiven him. He just shouldn’t have wigged out.
When I got online, I destroyed Butler’s Candelabra, which I probably could have sold, in real life, for a couple of thousand bucks. Then I reported his character for creating it. Later, Bullsworth sent me a copy of the email from Gary, threatening to tell me. I didn’t care. Gary, he’s my rock. He should have told me.
I could forgive Charlie. But Bullsworth? I told everyone what he’d done, online and off.
Fuck him.
***