It was all-nighter kind of fun because he had learned of a way he could earn a place with his thumbs. Simple as turn on his console. They are always at in-game chat. They are always saying his aggros are sick. Clap clap clap. He is the most fed Tank in their universe. Like him so much, they invite him to internet relay chat. Keep it down low.
It is a place to learn the cheats.
But also, there were other things, bigger things. Other secret winning. There is something they get, and it is math.
Stash soda went down easy. Suck gentle at the bottom with the straw. His mother could hear a slurp down the hallway with the TV on.
She’d been weighing him.
But the bigger he got, the smaller the treatment, baby stuff. It had gotten to the point of no snack money and packing apples. The green ones made his mouth all funny. She didn’t know the dire hole in his stomach.
He looked at the can. Thirty-eight grams of sugar. One hundred fifty calories. Not his kind of math.
But in chat there is no scale, no rules like salad first.
Started simple. A cheat here and there. You want, you got to migrate the conversation from in-game chat to relay chat. They noticed other things about him: he was good with numbers, for example, and moms’s bitches.
He thought of listening in on the conversation with the STARK lady. He typed some. He typed not my mom. So but, the thing about cheats: they are minor coding. You can be major too. He wanted to be major. And in the way-late, with his stolen soda, Mom down the hall eating corn chips in her front-and-center TV seat, him 180 pounds, they say, you like math; we can show you some sickass other type-a equations if you want to get serious.