Peter’s house was a glass-and-concrete monstrosity, the kind of thing someone newly rich would pour money into, in the part of town where professional athletes and internet zillionaires built tributes to themselves. It was nowhere near the staid mansions of Mary Clark and Tim Fletcher. But to Charlie, all of it was wealth beyond belief, and he couldn’t see the difference.
Peter was on his couch, legs up on the twisting chrome coffee table, totally visible through the front windows as big as a wall. His laptop was on his lap. His dad was nowhere to be seen. He could’ve been in trial in Atlanta or Akron, or cavorting with any number of young blond women in the Bahamas or Cozumel. Charlie could count on one hand the number of times over the last few years he’d seen Peter’s father. Peter didn’t seem to care one way or another. It was just his life.
He let Charlie in. “You look worse than the last time I saw you.”
“We need to talk. You’re coming tonight, right?”
“I am. You haven’t quit yet, have you?”
“Not yet.” Charlie didn’t want to admit that he hadn’t yet found a way out—that once again he needed Peter’s help to figure it out.
“Good. Because I have a present for you. I think you’re gonna like it.” Peter turned the laptop around.
“I don’t want to see it.”
“Trust me, you do. Two treats. One for me, one for you.”
Charlie couldn’t help himself and glanced at Peter’s screen.
“That’s not the Game.”
“No, that’s the comments section of an article.”
Peter’s cursor was flashing under the name BarryH.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trolling. I needed it a break. Watch.”
Peter started typing: Its PATHETIC that the MSM is trying to force OBOZO’s Agenda down our throats! What happened to LIBERTY!!!!! Ban mUZLIMS and BURN THE MOSQUES BEFORE ITS TOO LATE.
“That’s awful.”
“Yeah. The snowflakes will be calling me a fascist Neanderthal for hours.” Seeing Charlie’s frown, Peter said, “Don’t worry, I fuck with the red-meaters, too. I’m a chaotic neutral, after all.” He scrolled down. “That’s me, too, under ILoveSoros.”
Charlie read, “‘Go fuck yourself, it’s the only way you could get more inbred.’ Jesus. Why? You’re just making people hate each other.”
“Saint Charlie, come to earth to make us whole.”
Peter closed the window, and the God Game was open behind it. “I needed to blow off steam.” Peter pulled up Caitlyn’s texts with Mary. “Look what she said about me.”
Peter?
Yes
Whatver
Thought you liked him
He’s fun on the side but K is popular
“We’re just trash to them,” Peter said.
“Mary didn’t say that,” Charlie said too quickly.
“That you know about. You think I’m above it all, but I’m not. I can’t get Caitlyn out of my head. It’s not love, but it’s … I’m out of my mind for her. And now this. But the Game, Charlie, it can help.…”
“You’re gonna send her poetry.”
“I did. She didn’t write back.”
“So what then?”
Peter caught Charlie’s eyes and held them. “So we turn it up a notch.”
Peter turned the screen toward Charlie. Peter was in first-person view, in his own house within the Game. They went up the staircase that was across the room from them, but instead of Peter’s dad’s horrid modern art at the top of the stairs, there was a painting that Charlie recognized from the internet. It was The Eye of God, a portrait of the mythical Bitcoin founder, Satoshi Nakamoto—who might or might not be real—by Xania Dorfman.
With a double tap, the painting swung open on a hinge, revealing a peephole in the wall behind it.
“Let’s take a look, shall we?”
Peter dialed in a date, time, and location on a set of radio knobs beneath the peephole, then tapped them. The peephole zoomed to fill their screen, with an image beyond.
When the screen came into focus, they were looking at Kurt Ellers, from the view of the little round video camera over his laptop monitor. That ever-present little eye built right into the frame.
Charlie heard breathing, slow at first.
Then faster.
Kurt was locked in an embrace with someone, but it wasn’t Caitlyn. The other man was entwined with Kurt, their hands moving over each other’s bare skin hungrily, urgently.
“Turn this off.” Charlie was stunned from what he was seeing, trying to reconcile it with the homophobic beast who’d been calling people fags as he shoved them into lockers since middle school. Charlie’s fascination was overcome only slightly by his profound unease at seeing this private moment. He remembered someone saying once that you should tape over the camera on your laptop, but who ever remembered to do it?
“Erase that. Right now.”
Peter shook his head. “Why? Because he’s such a great guy? Because he’s really nice?”
“No, because it’s fucked-up you have this. It’s private.”
Charlie grabbed for the laptop.
“No, no, no. I don’t think so.” Peter poked Charlie in the chest. “This is a public service. How many kids has he tortured over the years for being gay?”
“And it also just happens to clear the way to Caitlyn for you. How convenient.”
Peter shook his head tauntingly. “You haven’t even seen my gift for you yet, what I have on Tim.”
“I don’t want it.”
Peter glared at Charlie. “So high-and-mighty. Let’s see how you feel after I show you what Mary said about you.”
“I don’t want to see it.”
“Sure you don’t.”
Peter scrolled up. Charlie wanted to look away, but he couldn’t.
I really like him.
So do it
But T is T. Hard to give that up for … you know
Loserville?
Stop it
You thought it
Charlie felt the sting. “How do you know that’s even real? Any of it? Kurt? This?”
“It’s Game-certified. Lie to yourself if you want.” Peter scowled.
For the first time, Charlie saw the full haughtiness of the private-school Peter. “Did you even look back at that Confederate-flag pic we posted? You know what happened? People liked it. They wrote things like ‘Represent!’ and ‘Southern Man!’ Were Tim and Kurt suspended today? Did you hear anything? No, because they’re fucking royalty, because football is more important than decency here. The whole thing is so rigged against us, Charlie. You think these people got where they got by playing fair?”
“I have no idea. But I won’t do it this way.”
“Then you don’t really love her.”
They stared at each other.
Finally, Peter blinked first. “God damn it, Charlie, you make me feel like a shit sometimes.”
“I’m going to ask the Vindicators to quit with me tonight. I hope you will.”
Peter smiled wearily. “Why?”
“Because it’s making us worse.”
Peter leaned back on the couch. He rubbed his eyes, tired all of a sudden. “It’s a democracy. Whatever the group decides, I’ll live with.”
Charlie nodded, feeling like that had been way too easy.
In her darkened room, Vanhi tried desperately to re-create the magic essay. She’d refused to hit SUBMIT, and the Game had taken it from her. Try as she might, she couldn’t reconstruct it. How was that possible? The essay was everything she’d ever felt inside. Could the Game be better at being Vanhi than she was?
She tried to summon the first line:
Vanhi means “fire,” a Hindi word that means creation or destruction.
But it was off, like knocking a single note sharp or flat and suddenly the song wasn’t Mozart anymore, it was Taylor Swift on a bad day. Mozart could erase a D (the grade, not the note), but Taylor Swift couldn’t. Maybe at Yale, she thought, before cursing herself. I haven’t even gotten in and I’ve adopted the rivalry—what bullshit I am!
Fuck!
She remembered only one part perfectly, because it cut so close to the bone about her friends, even though the essay didn’t say so explicitly:
Fire, earth, water, air, space—the five fundamental elements of the Vedas—we all bring different forms of matter to bear. We are all made from different stuff.
Wasn’t that God’s own truth? Five elements. Five Vindicators. Charlie was earth: the ground under them, but crumbling in a drought. Kenny was water: deep and pure, but drowning in anxiety. Peter, space: unknowable, more vacuum than light. Alex? Air: invisible. And of course she was fire—it was written in her name. Was all of this a coincidence? Or an elegant symmetry, an essay below the essay? She doubted the God Game believed in coincidences.
It is the choices that we make, the ways we use and combine our elements, that define our worth.
Someone knocked at her door. Assuming it was her mom, she snapped, “Leave me alone!”
But then she heard Vikram’s soft voice from outside the door, asking, “Are you mad at me?”
She immediately felt bad and opened the door. “No, sweetie, no, of course not.”
She knelt down in front of her little brother and wrapped her arms around him. Seven years old now, he had been a late-in-life surprise for her parents. Like many Down’s kids, Vik was so gentle and loving that any mean thing she did as a sister felt twice as bad.
“What are you doing?” His question was so innocent that it stung all the more.
Well, Vik, I’m re-creating an essay I failed to plagiarize the first time. “Just homework.”
He looked up with those beautiful eyes. “Do you want to play?”
“Not right now, Vik. I have to finish this.”
“Okay,” he said in a way that broke her heart. “Who’s that?”
“Who is who?”
“The man in the window.”
Vanhi froze. She instinctively put a hand on Vik and kept him behind her as she turned around. It was nearly dark out now, but her window was empty. Just the trees swaying in the woods beyond.
“Go to Mommy,” she told him, trying to sound calm and normal.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes, of course, sweetheart.” An idea came to her. “Vik, did you know the man? Was it Charlie? Or Peter?”
“No.”
“Kenny? Alex?”
“No, Sissy.”
“Okay. Go to Mom.”
When he was gone, she grabbed the scissors on her desk like a knife and walked toward the window.