THE DAY AFTER THE INTERVIEW AND CHARLIE’S UNEXPECTED INVITATION, I’ve come up with a solid nine-day plan to tackle my game design. The first thing I need is a firm concept. I stayed up well into the night scouring my archives, looking over game samples and character drawings, even revisiting my list of idea concepts that are not yet developed. Though they were enough to get me to this point in the interview process, none are memorable enough to submit as my final impression. Not for Jack Palmer and Catapult. I’m giving myself twenty-four hours to come up with something new, which will leave me just over a week for design and run quality assurance of a reasonably put together prototype. But ever since Charlie mentioned it, all I can seem to hear in my apartment is the damn yapping goldendoodle from 6F.
So, notepads and laptop in hand, in need of massive inspiration, I head to the deli next door—the place where some of my best gaming ideas have been shaped.
“Sloane!” Marv, the shop owner, waves from behind the counter as soon as I walk in. “A Cubano for my favorite customer?”
“You say that to everyone.” I drop my stuff onto the table closest to him. Marv’s is a long and narrow space reminiscent of an alleyway converted into a deli. With its sourdough scent and mustard-yellow walls adorned with black-and-white framed photos of C-list celebrities biting into hoagies, Marv’s feels like a hug from my favorite uncle.
“Not true, not true. My other favorite customers order ham and Swiss on rye!” He laughs heartily at his own joke.
As I’m setting up my workstation at the front window two-top, seat facing the door, Marv comes over with a Cubano and a stack of chocolate chip cookies.
“Marv, if I ate everything you try to feed me, I’d keel over in a food coma.”
“And I’d find you a pillow and a comfy spot in the back to lie,” he says. “Whatcha workin’ on this time? Zombies or werewolves or aliens?” He points his rag at my sketchbook.
“To be determined.”
“Ah well, if you need some inspiration, let me know.” He crosses his eyes, sticks his tongue out to one side, and wraps his hands around his throat like he’s choking himself.
The bell on the door chimes and a man who looks to be in his late fifties enters. “Angelo! Long time no see! Ham and Swiss on rye for my guy, uh?” Marv is off.
I open my laptop. Concepts. I need a game concept. One unique enough that Jack Palmer and his team will find compelling, but not so out there it doesn’t fit into their post-apocalyptic fantasy brand. Developing the concept alone could typically take months, and now I have a little over a week to figure out the concept and prototype and I’ve already lost almost twenty-four hours charting out options that I inevitably deemed unviable. I take another scroll through the many game ideas I’ve accumulated over the years, all in various stages of conceptualization, just to be sure there isn’t something I overlooked last night.
Nothing with zombies—too overdone.
Same goes for landmark cities in alien-generated ruin.
I could create a post-apocalyptic world where rising temperatures have created resource scarcity. No, too much world-building required for just nine days.
There’s no time for design documents or a formal blueprint of any kind. They likely expect a game that was already at least partially constructed in my previous work, as it’s incredibly unrealistic to assume someone could build a full game in ten days. But everything in my portfolio is insufficient for one reason or another—it either doesn’t fit Catapult’s niche, the graphics are too weak and require complicated fixes, or the premise is not interesting enough. Though it’s a much harder road, I must push myself to create something completely fresh.
The bells chime again and I instinctively look up. When I do, everything inside of me stops. My heart, my breath. I even feel the blood in my veins come up against tiny, invisible dams. I know who it is in my bones before my brain can fully register the sight.
“Zane, Zane, Zane, whatcha doin’ here, my guy?” Marv speaks slowly and he can’t help but glance in my direction. I’m trapped in this corner with nowhere to go. I grip the table’s edges and go statue-still, hoping Zane won’t notice me. No such luck, though, because Marv’s constant skittery looks in my direction cause him to glance over. We make eye contact and it’s like a bullet to the throat when our eyes meet. It’s the first time I’ve seen Zane since the evening six months ago when I left his apartment in tears. He looks exactly the same as I remember, and I feel just the same as the day I met him. Gripped. That feeling used to be akin to the draw of a magnet. Now it’s like a vise.
“Lo, hi,” he says, only a few steps into the small space and standing right across the table from me.
The sound of his pet name for me, mixed with the sound of his deep, familiar voice, sends a pang through me. He might as well whisper something dirty in my ear—it would feel far less intimate.
He’s wearing the black CHRIS STAPLETON tee from the concert I took him to for his birthday last year at the Hollywood Bowl.
My mouth goes desert dry. “What are you doing here?” I ask. It’s a fair question. Marv’s is my place. It’s right next door to my apartment. I introduced Zane to it, to Marv.
We used to split a Cubano and eat it on the way back to my apartment, the walk just long enough to finish the last bites as we rode the elevator up to the sixth floor, finish chewing by the time we got to my apartment door, finish crumpling the paper by the time we got into my apartment and to the waste bin under the kitchen sink. He’d open up the paper wrapping before we stepped outside of Marv’s, hold the two sides up next to each other, then hand me the larger half. There was always a larger half. And when Marv figured out our ritual, he started dividing it more and more unevenly. Toward the end, my “halves” were nearly double the size of Zane’s. Still, Zane gave me the larger half without even so much as a good-natured protest. He was good at that—small measures of selflessness. Only small ones, though.
It should have been an unspoken agreement that he was never to come back here after our breakup. I didn’t realize I had to spell that out for him. The anger starts to rise from so deep in my belly that it feels like my lower back.
“We just moved into the neighborhood. Into that new building on Fairfax.” He points in the general direction of Fairfax, but I’m stuck on we.
Who the fuck is we?
It’s then I notice the woman who’s appeared by Zane’s side. “This is Jenna.”
Of course. Jenna.
She smiles. I take in her perfect white teeth and too-red lips and white silk tank top. Who wears white silk to a deli? I hope she drips mustard all over it.
Jenna bends across the table and reaches out her hand. Do I have to shake this person’s hand? I begrudgingly take it and almost wince at its infirmness.
I look over to Marv and his face betrays him. He already knew this bit of information and chose to keep it from me. I should probably speak. “Jenna, I’m Sloane.”
“Oh right, Sloane! I’ve heard so much about you!”
Yeah, I bet.
Jenna’s raven-colored hair is sheet straight and silky (like her stupid shirt) and it sways luxuriously back and forth when she moves, like the smoke releasing from a cigarette.
As I’m focused on watering the drought in my mouth, Jenna lifts her left hand, tucks a line of hair behind her ear, and I am blinded by the rock on that finger. I have a Mean Girls–esque hallucination of leaping across the table, wrapping my hands around her throat, watching her eyes bulge from under their ambitiously shimmery lids. Zane and I broke up six months ago, and somehow he’s already engaged and he moved in with her . . . into my neighborhood.
She smiles at me and her nostrils flare.
Flaring nostrils. I imagine Zane eyeing her flaring nostrils during an argument, knowing how much he usually despises facial tics like this in others. The vision causes me a fleeting moment of delight.
Because I can’t show Zane or Jenna how upset I am, I turn and glare at Marv. He drops the spatula in his hand and it clangs against a metal cookie sheet before he bolts through the plastic divider to the back of the deli.
Never let your guard down. It’s been my motto for as long as I can remember. It’s the way I survive, apocalypse or not. Being with Zane was only the second time in my life I felt truly out of control, and it certainly didn’t serve me well. I mentally slap my own cheek to remind myself of my impenetrable armor.
“Oh, look at that,” I say with saccharine adoration, pulling Jenna’s hand toward me. I place my palm under hers to admire the ring. Her hand is so delicate and thin that mine feels like a catcher’s mitt in comparison. The ring is stunning—princess cut, gold band, more than I know Zane can afford. I have a brief fantasy of shoving her hand into her face, that rock likely to gouge her eye. I think better of it, of course. It’s not her fault. None of this is. I refuse to be a woman who blames the other woman. I cannot blame bubbly, silky Jenna for everything that happened with Zane.
Zane is engaged. To Jenna, of all people. And they are here at Marv’s. My Marv’s.
Before I can ask why they chose this neighborhood, he answers the question barreling around in my brain. “I’m interviewing for a job two blocks from here, so it’ll be perfect if it works out.”
“When it works out,” Jenna says, placing her hand, the one with the ring, on his chest and looking up at him. She’s blinking too much.
“Where?” I ask, though I’m afraid I know the answer.
“Over at Catapult,” he says. “They’re hiring a new—”
“Game designer.”
“Yeah . . . wait, are you interviewing for it too?” He’s smiling, but his expression isn’t friendly. His right eyebrow twitches in its tell that he’s amused. He doesn’t view me as a threat. In fact, he finds it comical that I believe I could get the job.
I think back on my time with Zane. When we met, it felt like kismet, serendipity, whatever the hell you call it when the universe puts someone in front of you and it feels meant to be because of some odd connection. What were the chances that two video game designers would meet randomly as we had? One of the main reasons I thought he was my perfect match. It was clearly a more misguided idea than white silk in a deli.
I get a flash of Zane and me sitting on a bench at the West Hollywood Dog Park, watching Finn, tennis ball in his mouth, play keep-away with a black Corgi. I feel Zane’s arm wrapped around the back of the bench, his fingers aimlessly twirling a lock of my hair.
“I’m so incredibly proud of you,” I told him, my hand clutching his knee.
“Thank you, babe. It’s really exciting.”
“Triton. It’s a dream come true. I can’t believe you’ll be working as a game designer at Triton Media.”
He cupped his chin and rubbed at the stubble. “It’s pretty insane.”
“Maybe I’ll be there someday too. That’d be pretty cool, wouldn’t it? Both of us designing at one of the biggest game development firms in the world?”
He squeezed my shoulder then and jumped up. “Finn! C’mere, boy. Time to go!”
“Yes, I am interviewing for it.” I force my eyes to stay tracked on his instead of flicking down to the ground as they demand.
“Isn’t that something!” Jenna says in what I’ve quickly identified as her standardly upbeat way.
“It is. Good luck, Sloane. May the best man, or woman, win.” He holds out his hand. I look down at it. I don’t want to touch it. I don’t want to touch him. I’m afraid of what it will do to me.
It’s just a handshake, I tell myself. My hand moves in slow motion toward his. And when we make contact, it’s worse than I imagined. I was afraid I’d feel attraction, longing, loss. Instead, there’s nothing but blind pain, like his fingers are knives carving their way under my skin as he grips. I pull away quickly.
He’s already a designer at Triton. Why does he need to butt his way into my dream job?
“Well, I better go. Lots to do. I’m so busy . . . in demand . . . all the things.” I gather my items scattered across the table as they look on, then I rush out the door. I need to get a million miles away from them. Away from Marv’s, which used to be my sanctuary. Away from Zane and Jenna. I can’t think of anything I need more than to be on the flip side of the earth from Zane and Jenna. Away from the crushing walls of what is now our neighborhood.
My heart is throbbing and my breath is short by the time I make my way to Charlie’s door and bang my fist upon it.
Then, against my better judgment, despite my true crime-built logic, and in contempt of every survivalist instinct within me, when he opens the door, I blurt, “Fine, I’ll do it. I’ll go on the trip.” I turn toward my door and then pivot on my heels to face him again. “But if you try anything, I’ll murder you. I’m quite knowledgeable about how to hide a body.”
He leans against the doorframe, a sly smirk across his full lips. “History tells me I’m not the one to worry about when it comes to keeping my hands, or lips, to myself,” he says, the smirk of his mouth growing to a full-blown grin.