Fair warning, this is a long story. It's gonna be quite the emotional and physical investment. No seriously, it's like 17 pages long. I'm sorry to do this to you, but I hope you like it. If you like it, hooray! If you hate it, leave me a long angry comment expounding upon why I suck.
Here's a picture because I feel guilty for making this story so long:
Okay, enjoy.
Chloë Is Typing…
Peter’s face was dimly lit by his computer’s screen as he sat tented under the comforter on his bed. He liked to sit like this when he talked to girls he liked; for some reason it made him feel safe.
Except Peter wasn’t talking to girls that he liked. He was staring at a blank chat window that he had opened eighteen minutes ago. Ever since Chloë had come online, he had been desperately trying to do two things: one, think of something disarming to say to get their conversation off to a good start; and two, try not to talk to her so soon after she logged on that she would think that he had just been sitting like a gargoyle in front of his computer waiting for her to appear for the last two and a half hours. He didn’t want her to think this, even though it was the truth.
Peter was almost fourteen now and had finally learned a thing or two about women. You couldn’t just come out and say you liked a girl. The courting process was a complicated and arduous dance in which both sides wrestled bitterly for power until, out of exhaustion, the girl would finally concede and let the boy date her. Not only was the process lengthy, but any false step along the way would result in spooking the flighty creatures. Talking to a girl, even online where the stakes were a little lower, was like walking a barbed-wire tightrope over a vat of eternal virginity.
“Have you talked to her yet?” a different chat window inquired. “She came online like eighteen minutes ago.”
“I know, Glenn. I have to wait and be smooth. I can’t just ambush her like a gorilla as soon as she comes online,” Peter responded. Glenn was so clueless. He knew even less about girls than Peter. I’ll take him under my wing and teach him someday, Peter thought.
“So, have you been working on your hotkeys?” Glenn asked. “You know the raid is in like three hours and you’re going to be our only healer.”
“I know. Don’t worry about me, I’m the highest level of all of you anyway.”
“Yeah, like 37 is high. You don’t even know Divine Shield yet.” Glenn had once had an even higher level Paladin than Peter, but lost all his progress when the server he liked to play on was damaged by a lightning storm in Japan.
Peter didn’t respond. He was too distracted by the clock in the corner of his monitor that seemed to be frozen. Only a few more minutes and then it would be safe to talk to Chloë. Peter held his breath, hoping that somehow that would accelerate time.
---
Chloë looked great in her track uniform. The shorts that the girls had to wear were far shorter than anything allowable by the school dress code and Peter was thankful for the loophole. He would like to use track practice as an excuse to talk to her, but he didn’t always have the opportunity. It didn’t help that she ran short distance and he ran long distance. He was always a little jealous of the short distance people because the girls and guys got to hang out around the track together. In long distance running, the girls and guys would split up and go on separate hour long runs.
He would return to the track after a nine-mile run to see that the short distance people had long since completed their workout and were chatting in groups or playing Frisbee on the football practice field. Chloë usually liked to hang out near the stairs that led up to the bleachers. Guys would gather there to try to impress her, jockeying for position and clashing antlers in loud displays of dominance.
Worse yet, the short distance team was mainly composed of out-of-season soccer and lacrosse players who wanted to stay in shape for the sport that they actually cared about. These guys, for whatever reason, seemed cooler to Peter than the average track runner and thus were more threatening to his chances with Chloë.
Peter ran by the cluster on his way to the locker room. “Hey Chloë,” he offered. No one heard him. Oh well, it’s not as though she was going to be able to talk to him anyway, not with all of those Neanderthals bickering noisily about which NFL teams were going to make it to the playoffs this year.
---
Seventeen minutes. Peter’s feet were falling asleep. He was still waiting for the perfect moment to start his conversation with Chloë. He had pretty much narrowed the perfect entrance down to “hey, what’s up?” First of all, “hello” and “hi” were unusable because they weren’t nearly as cool as the industry standard of flirtatious conversation: “hey.” And just saying “hey” by itself would be too open ended. He had learned these essential tidbits over the years. Also, he knew to never capitalize letters. Girls hate capitalization.
He had also been trying to think of a cute nickname to call Chloë so that they could bond over it. He had come up with “Umlaut” in the shower a couple of weeks ago after he had discovered that her name had one over the “e.” He was pretty sold on the nickname, but he just hadn’t found the right opportunity to warm her up to it yet.
Suddenly he was tired of waiting. It had been nearly eighteen minutes! Surely that was long enough. Eighteen minutes is plenty of time to appear casual and cool like those soccer players with the ankle deep gene pool. He was about to hit enter and send the message he had prepared when his mom called from the kitchen a floor below.
“Peter! Can you please come take out the trash for me?”
“Mom, can I do it in a second? I’m kind of in the middle of something,” he yelled down to her.
“What?” She couldn’t hear him. He sounded muffled.
Peter pulled the comforter off of his head and leaned toward his door. “Can I do it in a second?”
“I’d really prefer if you did it now. I don’t want you to do it after it gets dark.”
Ugh. How old was he going to have to be before his mom stopped treating him like a child? He climbed out of his bed and put on his Tigger slippers. He jogged downstairs and grabbed the trash bag from his mother.
“Don’t get lost up there. Dinner’s going to be ready soon.”
“Okay Mom, I won’t,” he said, not really listening.
He ran outside, trash bag in tow. Technically he wasn’t supposed to wear his slippers outside, so he just ran on his tiptoes as if that would make them less dirty. He put the bag into the metal receptacle and shut the lid with a loud clang. Peter was back inside before the can was done reverberating. He ran directly up to his room, kicked off his slippers, and jumped back under the comforter.
When he opened his laptop again to finally send the message to Chloë, he noticed that her chat window had turned gray and contained a notification in small letters: Chloë has signed off.
“SON OF A-“ he yelled but cut himself off. Peter punched the mattress beneath him. The message he had so thoroughly considered was still waiting dumbly in the bottom of Chloë’s chat box. He removed it with loud bangs on the delete key.
“She just logged off,” Glenn wrote, his message arriving on Peter’s screen with a ping.
“I KNOW. THANK YOU,” Peter responded dryly.
“Well did you talk to her? Is that why she left?”
“No, Glenn. I didn’t get a chance.”
“She was online for almost 20 minutes…”
“I KNOW. JUST FORGET ABOUT IT AND FOCUS ON THE RAID TONIGHT. I know for a fact that you haven’t conjured those mana potions that you promised that you would have ready.”
“Ugh,” Glenn responded. Soon afterward, he changed his status to “busy” and his icon turned red.
---
Chloë always brought the most interesting lunch. Yesterday she had brought pita bread, hummus, and some kind of Indian soup. She had told him what it was, but it had a weird name and he had forgotten. Today, her lunch consisted of grapes, raspberries, and strawberries accompanied by slivers of several different types of cheese that Peter could not readily identify.
Peter and Chloë didn’t sit at the same table, he usually just made his observations from across the cafeteria. He used to sit with her, but he got frustrated by the storm of testosterone that followed her to her table. He would try to talk to her, but who could even hear themselves think over that rabble. The funny thing was, as he watched her (discretely of course, he wasn’t a weirdo) he noticed that she never really seemed to contribute to conversations. She just sat quietly and ate her food. Whenever she did decide to say something, the guys at her table would be suddenly still, listening in rapt attention for her to finish her statement at which point they would burst into raucous laughter as if the one who laughed the loudest was most worthy of her affection.
He kind of hated lunch. Glenn was his best friend but they weren’t scheduled to have lunch at the same time. This charged Peter with the awkward task of deciding which group of periphery friends he wanted to sit with. He was friends with a group of guys that sat at a table in the back corner of the cafeteria, but they played “Magic: The Gathering” at lunch. They would sit and eat and battle each other using cards bearing Goblins and Orcs. Peter thought it was pretty entertaining, but he didn’t want Chloë, or any other girl for that matter, to associate him with nerdy fantasy games. Today he was sitting with the drama geeks. They were probably even louder than Chloë’s table. They were always grotesquely over-emoting some poorly remembered monologue to one another or yell-singing songs and playing loud guitar accompaniment. For some reason it seemed as though these kids thought that being an actor was synonymous with having an insatiable hunger for negative attention.
Peter sat in silence, eating his lunch and watching how everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves. He liked to look down on these cliquey ecosystems as inferior but sometimes he just wished he could be as comfortable with himself as they seemed to be.
BBBBBRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNNnnnnnnnn! The school’s bell sounded like a repurposed Cold War missile defense warning system. Its ring heralded the end of Peter’s lunch period. He put his Tupperware sandwich container back into his lunchbox and crumpled all of his foil and plastic trash into a ball. All of the drama kids who bought their lunch simply stood up with their trays and walked toward the door. This moment of clean-up hesitation made Peter look like he had been eating lunch alone at the table, but he never remembered to gather his trash beforehand so he could get up with the rest of them.
When he finally stood to head out with the massive lunch exodus, he glanced back toward Chloë’s deserted table. Under it, he noticed something that looked like a duffel bag. Forgetting his ball of trash, he picked up his lunch box and walked over. He crouched down and tried to pull the bag out, but one of its straps had become entangled in the legs of a chair. After taking way too long to wrestle it free, he pulled it the whole way out from under the table. A tag on the handle of the bag read, “Chloë.”
This was Chloë’s track bag! He looked up sharply, scanning the cafeteria to see if she had already left. He didn’t see her. He grabbed the bag and his lunch box and jogged for the door to the cafeteria. He wasn’t sure which class she had next, so he had to see if he could catch her before she got too far away. He was about to climb the stairs to the cafeteria exit when Chloë appeared at the top of them.
“Oh, hey. You, um. You forgot your-“ Peter lifted her track bag up in front of him.
“I know! I was coming back to get it. Thank you for keeping it safe for me!” Chloë smiled at him, still standing at the top of the stairs.
Peter stood below her, holding out her bag.
“So, are you-“ she started.
“Oh yeah, right. Of course,” he said, finally understanding that she was waiting for him to come up the stairs. He climbed up and handed her the bag. There was a short pause where they were both silent before a group of about eight guys appeared on the other side of the door with puzzled looks on their faces. They beckoned for Chloë. As she walked through the door, she looked back at Peter and smiled. This tiny moment made Peter’s whole week.
---
An alert went off in Peter’s Gchat. It made the “Ka-Ching!” sound like a cash register opening. Peter had set up this alert to go off every time Chloë signed in. The sound itself was a little crass, but Peter liked to know when she got on so that he could begin waiting to talk to her. Waiting, though, had not paid off like he had hoped this last time, and he was worried that he might miss his opportunity again. He retyped the message that earlier he had so carefully crafted and sent it to her: “hey, what’s up?” Now it was just a waiting game. He hoped that she had come back online with the intent to stay for a while and would be able to talk. Pretty soon the message “Chloë is typing…” appeared at the bottom of the chat window. Peter’s adrenaline spiked.
“hey,” she wrote. “nothing much, just watching tv. what have you been up to?”
“oh, you know, watching the game,” he lied. He wasn’t sure if there even was a game on right now. After a minute or so, she replied.
“so I’ve spent the past two hours watching the food network.”
“naturally.” He hoped she would think he was funny.
Suddenly another chat window popped up. It was Glenn again. “Alright, mana pots are good to go. Also, I remembered that I forgot to equip that Blackvenom Blade that we found last week in the Redridge Mountains. I’m gonna try that baby out tonight.”
Ignoring Glenn for the moment, Peter followed up with Chloë, worried that she would misinterpret what he had typed. He didn’t really have anything good to talk about or know what she was interested in, so he just pursued the last thing she had said.
“learn any good recipes?” Ugh, this was horrible. He wished he knew of anything that they might have in common to talk about. He opened a new tab in his browser and navigated to her Facebook page, hoping to find something usable in her “Interests” section. Chloë must have recently changed her privacy settings, because Peter wasn’t able to see her Wall, her Info, or any of her pictures. He’d never sent her a friend request up until this point primarily because he was too nervous but also because previously he was already able to see all of her information anyway without having to reveal himself. Now, he wasn’t sure what to do. He had begun this dead-end conversation with a girl he liked and wanted to impress and he had no leads.
“Dinner!” shouted Peter’s mother from downstairs. Now not only was this conversation dead in the water, but now he wasn’t even going to have an opportunity to try to fix it. This was a disaster.
“So, what do you think? Should I go DPS tonight and try to work on my berserker build with the new sword? Or should I go back to the mage build that I’ve been using?” Glenn asked.
“Just equip the Blackvenom Blade on that level 14 Dark Elf that you started and we’ll get him a couple quick levels.”
Peter sighed. He wasn’t even hungry but “dinner time is family time!” as his mother liked to say.
“What?” was the response. But it came from Chloë.
Why was Chloë reacting to the message he had sent to Glenn? How could she…Oh no, he thought. He hadn’t switched windows before responding. He had sent that last message to Chloë by accident! His brain was scrambling desperately to create a believable excuse when Chloë signed off.
Well that was it. That was the end of any chance Peter was ever going to have of a relationship with Chloë. Now she knew he was a nerd because he had literally sent her the proof. Then Peter noticed that Glenn as well as everyone else in his chat list had signed off. He tried to go to Google in his browser, but the page wouldn’t load. The internet must have gone out! Chloë might still be online! He might have a chance to explain away that errant message. Maybe he could tell her that he had a computer virus.
---
Mrs. Carlisle dropped Peter’s graded homework on his desk during her trip around the room. There was a large, red “100” emblazoned across the top of his stapled stack of papers, but Peter wasn’t particularly excited. Lots of people got one hundreds on their homework in Mrs. Carlisle’s class. She graded purely on completion and when the class learned that this was the criteria upon which their work would be assessed, all effort to generate correct answers vanished and was replaced by putting down anything that might be vaguely construed as Chemistry. This was the sixth or seventh homework assignment on which Peter had earned a one-hundred for complete gibberish and he was becoming more bold with each passing assignment. For this most recent homework, he had simply answered “Argon” for every single question. Obviously this was not helping him learn the material, but he hoped in vain that perhaps the final would be graded on completion as well.
Peter looked over at Chloë. She was wearing earmuffs even though they were indoors and it was a relatively warm day for mid February. Sure Chloë was quirky, but that’s what Peter liked about her. She was so unique that deep down he worried that he might someday discover that they, in fact, had nothing in common. Mrs. Carlisle handed Chloë her homework. A small smile crept across her face. Peter wondered if anyone in the class had gotten less than a perfect score. Her stack of papers gone, Mrs. Carlisle marched to the front of the class.
“Alright everyone, we’re going to start group projects today. I’m going to tell you all who you’re going to be paired with in just a second. I have the list right...here.” Mrs. Carlisle shuffled around some papers on her desk. “I would let you pick your own groups, but I fear the worst when Dylan and Curtis are allowed to be together.” Dylan and Curtis simulated a high five from across the room and shouted “Air-Five, Bro!” They had been separated in the first week of class and sequestered to opposite corners of the room because they were distracting when they were together. But, even separated by twenty-five feet, they still found a way to talk to each other.
“Alright so the pairs are as follows…” Mrs. Carlisle began reading off the list. Peter realized there was a chance that he might be paired with Chloë and almost swallowed his gum. “Daniel and Mark, Martha and Cal, Brandon and Tanya, Bernice and Thomas, Chloë and Peter, Bryan and…” Wait. Wait, did she just say “Chloë and Peter?” Where they actually paired up for the group project? The Gods had smiled on him! He was going to get to do the project with Chloë and she was going to see what a great guy he was and they were going to fall in love and raise a family and grow old together and buy wicker furniture! His wish had come true!
“Oh, I’m sorry. Peter, you’re with Curtis. I thought something sounded funny. Is that okay? You don’t mind if I split up you and Chloë, do you?”
No. Surely the Gods weren’t this capricious. They couldn’t toy with him like this. Peter was crying on the inside, but what could he do? Say that it, in fact, wasn’t okay and that she was totally sabotaging any chance that he and Chloë might have at mutual happiness? “Sure, that’d be fine.” Peter responded, completely deflated. He looked over at Curtis. Curtis mouthed “High Five, Bro!” and held up his hand.
---
Peter leapt out from under his comforter and ran out of his room, past his slippers. He clomped down the first flight of stairs to the kitchen, but he would have one floor to go after this; the modem for the internet was in the basement. He scrambled past his family members who were seated at the kitchen table, waiting to start the meal. “Where are you going?” his father asked. Peter mumbled something incoherent and hurried down the basement stairs.
When Peter reached the modem, he found it blinking confusedly with the internet light unlit at he suspected. He unplugged the modem, hoping that the usual fix of unplug and replug would do the trick.
“Peter, what are you doing? We’re waiting for you!” Peter’s mom yelled down to him.
“I’m fixing something! I’ll be up in just a second!” He knew you were supposed to wait thirty seconds before plugging the modem back in to let it have enough time to fully reset, but Peter didn’t have that kind of time. He mashed the power cord back into the modem and shook it impatiently as the lights on the front slowly became lit again. Soon, the modem seemed to indicate that all systems were go and that the internet, theoretically, should be restored. He jumped back to his feet and ran back toward the door of the basement, kicking his left big toe hard against the leg of the couch as he took the turn too closely.
Pain shot up from his toe through his whole body and resonated in his teeth. Sweet mother of God, the internet better be working now, he thought to himself as he limped up the stairs. His family was still seated around the kitchen table as he had left them. They looked up at him blankly. He continued his limp-run up to his room. His mother and father called angrily after him but he yelled back, “start without me!”
---
The ice bath was freezing. Peter was sitting waist deep in a briskly circulating tub of 45 degree water in the corner of the trainer’s room and was naked except for his running shorts. His knuckles were white as he gripped the side of the tub. He hated this, but his coach had been making him do it once a week ever since Peter had started complaining about his hip. He should have just kept quiet and waited until it either went away or his leg fell off. His teeth were chattering loudly when he looked up to see Chloë enter the trainer’s room. Peter tried to slowly relax and appear comfortable in the ice tub so that she wouldn’t think he was a wimp. Every tiny movement sent ice daggers into his bones.
The only way Peter could get his teeth to stop chattering was to hum to himself. Over his own humming, Peter could barely make out that Chloë was suffering from a cramp in her hamstring and needed the trainer to stretch it out. Chloë climbed onto the trainer’s bench and lied on her back. The trainer leaned over her and pushed Chloë’s leg toward her face. Peter realized he was staring and turned his focus to his knees, which were blue.
Peter checked the timer. There were only twenty-five seconds left in the fifteen minutes that he was required to do, but maybe if he stuck around a little bit longer, he would be able to leave with Chloë. Everyone else would be gone by now and he could be suave and walk her to her car. He would have to time it perfectly.
Peter sat in the tub, edging silently closer to the brink of hypothermia while watching Chloë out of the corner of his eye. It was hard to tell how much stretching the trainer was going to do, but he’d better hurry up because Peter was pretty sure that he was dying.
Suddenly the trainer released Chloë and said that she was free to go. Peter jolted in the tub, sending a small wave crashing over the side. They stopped and shot him a confused glance. He was unaware that they had been this close to finishing. He shakily pulled himself out of the tub while Chloë and the trainer talked about stretches she could do at home and how to apply heat and cold correctly. Peter’s knees screamed out in agony as he shuffled toward his towel and clothes. He looked like a baby foal taking its first few balance-less steps.
Chloë walked out of the door just as Peter finished putting on his shoes. They were still untied, but he had no time. He thanked the trainer as he gimped out of the door after Chloë. She was already on her way to the parking lot. Peter had to jog to catch up with her. This made every joint in his lower body hurt so much that a whimpered laugh was the only thing keeping him from crying. He reached Chloë out of breath and very unsteady.
“Hey.”
“Hey! Are you okay?” she asked, concerned about how Peter’s knees were pointed so violently inward.
“Me? Oh yeah, I’m fine. The ice bath’s a little rough, though.”
“Yeah it looks like it.” There was a pause after she said this. He thought that she must be expecting him to say something since he had started the conversation. Surely there must be some reason for him to get her attention. Nope. He hadn’t thought it this far through yet. He had to think of something quick. What did guys always talk about with Chloë? They were always going on about sports, but he didn’t know anything about sports. He needed something though, anything.
“So how about those Knicks?” Peter mumbled.
“The Knicks?”
“Yeah, basketball. The Knicks are a basketball team…in the NBA.” Peter tried to say this like it wasn’t a question, but he wasn’t totally sure that he was stating facts.
“Right, no I know who the Knicks are.” She said. “What about them? Did they play recently?”
“Yeah...sure did.”
She looked at him like he was trying to sell her steamboat insurance. “Okay…so how’d they do?”
“Pretty good. They- they won. The game they were playing, they won it. By a lot of…uh…baskets. Or points, I guess points they won by. A lot of them.” She stared at him blankly. “It was a good game.” He felt like such an idiot.
“I wish I had seen it.” She said not looking at him. “Well, I’m gonna head over this way. I see my dad’s car, he’s parked in the upper lot. Talk to you later!”
“Okay, bye! Don’t miss the next game! I’ll quiz you!” He called after her.
I’LL QUIZ YOU? He was immediately furious with himself. He shoved his hands into his pockets and clenched them until they hurt. WHY DON’T YOU KNOW ANYTHING SPORTS OR AT LEAST COME UP WITH A TOPIC YOU KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT BEFOREHAND? YOUR HEAD WASN’T UNDER COLD WATER TOO, WAS IT? When he reached his mom’s idling car, he jumped up and down, punishing himself with the icy tendrils of pain that shot up from his knees as he landed.
---
When Peter finally made it back up to his room, he didn’t fling himself under the comforter like he normally would, there wasn’t enough time for that. He sat on his bed, toe still throbbing, and refreshed Gchat. Mercifully, it loaded and Chloë’s name appeared; she was still online! Peter was composing a wildly false message for Chloë about a malicious virus that had commandeered his computer with the intent to defame him in front of females when she sent him a message before he could finish.
“what was that?” she asked.
The cursor in the chat window blinked at Peter, waiting for him to type something. Before Peter could come up with a convincing enough lie, Chloë sent the second half of her thought.
“a dark elf can’t wield a blackvenom blade. especially one that’s only level 17.”
Peter sat slack jawed, staring at his computer screen.
“the blackvenom blade is an alliance weapon and you need to be at least level 20 or something to use it”
“how do you…” Peter typed, dumbstruck.
“how do I what?”
“how do you know that?! do you play World of Warcraft?”
“yeah, I’ve played since last Christmas. my brother got me into it.”
“I had no idea you played…”
“I had no idea YOU played. why didn’t you say something?”
“I don’t know.” Peter suddenly became aware that his mouth was still hanging open. He closed it and blinked to try to clear his mind. He didn’t know what to say. He finally had something in common with the girl of his dreams and that commonality was somehow making her seem even more attractive. There were so many competing things he wanted to tell her simultaneously that he was crippled by all of the options. After a pause, she continued.
“Well, I have to go eat dinner.”
“yeah, I do too,” Peter said, remembering that his food was, at this moment, growing cold next to his gradually angering parents.
“well, will you be online later?”
“Gchat?”
“no, World of Warcraft”
“oh, yeah. I will.”
“cool, me too. my name is Umlaut96. see you then?”
“see you then,” Peter typed.
“can’t wait :)”
Peter closed his laptop, but it didn’t feel like he was controlling his own actions. He felt like he was watching himself in the third person from above the same way he would later watch his character in World of Warcraft as he and Chloë slayed swamp trolls together until the wee hours of the morning.
