Pwned (6 page)

It was an understandable question, I thought
.

“He turned around and looked at me! It was too late to make it look like an accident so I panicked! I didn’t know what to do,” I explained in a rush, my cheeks getting hot.

“It doesn’t matter if it looked like an accident. It probably would have been better if it looked like it was on purpose, just to show them what their place is,” she threw back icily, looking at me like I was a complete moron.

“I’m
sorry! I’m not as smart as you; I can’t think on my feet,” I said, thinking that if I threw a compliment in there, she’d forget her rage and be distracted by her own vanity.

“That’s a true statement,” she conceded with a short laugh.

Again, she was being much meaner than usual and it was unsettling. She hardly ever turned her wrath on me, and now I seemed to be the cause of it most days. I was starting to understand how everyone else around us must have felt—just waiting to be selected as the next victim.

“I’ll fix it,” I said desperately, trying to regain my position as someone on Tawny’s level.

“Don’t bother. Kimber, get over here,” she barked as a short blonde hopped up from the table and obediently came to Tawny’s side. “We’re going to have a little party at your house Saturday night,” she informed the girl.

“Okay,”
Kimber said nervously, trying to figure out how to get her parents out of the house even as Tawny continued speaking.

It would never cross her mind to simply refuse Tawny’s command. Finding a way to get rid of your parents was easier than defying Tawny.

“Go tell that nerd boy over there that you’ve noticed him around lately and really want him to come to your party. His nerd friends can’t come, though. We need to isolate him,” she said with a note of finality that was chilling.

Kimber
obediently walked right over to Parker’s table and began talking to him.

“Don’t worry
, Reagan, I’ll fix your mess again,” Tawny said slowly.

“What are you going to do?” I asked nervously, not sure I really wanted to know the answer.

“Put him in his place.”

7.
Like Casting a Stunning Spell

“You’re such a liar,” I heard Kaydinn say in his naturally loud voice the second I put on my headphones after logging in to
Voyager’s Quest
that night. “Eilarae, I need a heal.”

It seemed like the whole guild was in a fit over something. Even Sovay was typing h
er input like a madwoman . . . Or at least, a person who played a female character. I guess none of us were 100 percent sure she was really a girl.

Kaydinn’s
just saying that because he can’t figure out how to get up there,
Sovay typed.
Also, I’m backstabbing that guy over there in a second. Be ready for some aggro.

“It’s so easy. All you have to do is follow the mountain ridge from the zone before
, and once you get there, you can see the cabin up at the top of the mountain,” Rekrap said adamantly. “Raising a golem.”

It was so odd to hear his voice over guild chat now
, after having heard it in real life. Meshing my two lives together was definitely starting to throw me off.

“It can’t be done until they let us use our flying mounts in the main continent in the next expansion,” Kaydinn countered, sounding sure of
himself. “Aggro over here!”

“That’s going to be so awesome! I wish I had one IRL to help me get to work on time,” Eilarae chimed in with a happy little giggle.

“Oh my gosh, just say ‘In Real Life’ not IRL,” Kaydinn grumbled.

“All right no more debating for you. It makes you grumpy,” Eilarae shot back, still as sweet as ever. “Incoming heals!”

“Can I ask you guys exactly what we’re arguing about?” I finally asked, failing miserably at trying to catch up based on the tidbits of conversation I was hearing.

It sounded as if they were arguing about something while doing a dungeon
, since their arguments were mixed with bits of battle instruction.

“
Rekrap thinks you can get to that cabin up by the waterfall in the Allyn Nouveau zone,” Kaydinn informed me, his voice very obviously indicating that he did not agree. “And I reminded him that it can’t be done until we can use flying mounts in that zone. Eilarae, we need more heals over here!”

“And then I told Kaydinn that I had actually gotten up there and sent him a screenshot to prove it, which he said proves nothing because I just manipulated the picture,”
Rekrap said in annoyance. “And I’m dead now.”

“Sorry!” Eilarae said quickly. “Hit the wrong button.
Rezzing you now.”

It was good that our guild was so unusual in that i
t had more girls than guys. It kept the balance of these testosterone-fueled arguments on the side of calmness and reason.

Then
, of course, there was the cheerleader part of me that couldn’t believe they were actually wasting their time talking about this at all when it was such a nerdy thing to care about.

But I guess that was me; a closet nerd.

“I hate to break it to you, Kaydinn, but I’ve been up there with Rekrap. You can get there; you just have to manipulate some faults in the game’s walls,” I said a little guiltily.

Technically you weren’t all
owed to go anywhere in game if you had to utilize the game’s weaknesses to do it, but everyone did it anyway. The worst they could do to you was suspend your account for a few days . . . Although, if they chose the right days—like a raiding day—that could be the end of the world for some people.

Ohhhh
, you and Rekrap went up there together, huh?
Sovay typed.

I was guessing she was trying to hint at something
, but through text you never could tell.

“Yeah
, Xandris and I are pretty much engaged by this point,” Parker said sarcastically, to which I rolled my eyes and gave an “Mhm,” as my reply.

“Okay
, this dungeon is a total bust since our whole group died. I’m heading into a battleground. Nobody bother me,” Kaydinn said suddenly.

It dropped
the guild into silence, not so much because he was intimidating and actually needed silence, but mostly because everyone was off selling their loot from the dungeon and had exhausted the topic of how to get into the mysterious cabin.

Today I was taking my character Xandris out questing. I had reached the level cap right after the last expansion came out
, but I still loved all of the funny little storylines that went along with picking up quests. I did them anyway, even though I didn’t really gain experience from them anymore.

So
, something really weird happened today that I have to tell you about
, Parker typed to me in a private message.

I stared at his words for
a moment, almost positive his “weird thing” had to do with my momentary lapse in coolness. I didn’t reply, hoping that he would think I was away from my keyboard or just missed his message. Unfortunately, he didn’t bother to wait for a response before continuing on with his story.

Remember those cheerleaders I told you about? The ones who knocked my food tray out of my hands?
he asked, clearly not actually expecting me to respond, since he went right ahead with the rest of his story.

Well
, the blonde one came over to my table today at school. I thought she was going to give me a citation for breathing or something, but instead she just sat there and looked at me. Then she gave me a half empty soda can. It was bizarre.

I read his words over and over
again, knowing full well that my behavior was pretty dorky and saying it was “bizarre” was a really nice way to put it. I couldn’t quite think of a response to this, so I simply typed back,
Yeah that is weird
and hoped that he’d leave it at that.

He didn’t
, of course.

Why do you think she did that?

As if I would know.

I guess technically I did know, but if I didn’t happen to be that weirdo cheerleader
, how would he expect me to know?

Maybe she had a different
reason for going over there and changed her mind,
I answered, trying to sound like a completely objective third party observer.

I have to admit though—
there was a small part of me that wanted to tell Parker who I was. It would be kind of nice to have someone at school who I could talk to about things I was actually interested in. Of course, even if he did know who I was, I wouldn’t ever be caught dead hanging out with him. Not after all the soul-crushing work I’d gone through to solidify my safety in high school.

Okay
, so that made me sound completely shallow. I could admit that. Sometimes I wasn’t a very nice person and sometimes I did things I wasn’t proud of, but like I’ve said, it’s so much better to be part of the mean girl crowd than on the receiving end of their wrath.

I was thinking that maybe she’s different from those other girls,
Parker typed after a long textual silence.

I stared at his words for a long time until they disappeared from my screen, pushed up and out of the chat window by the hundreds of people in the main city talking about trading items, who had better equipment, and why the latest annoying spammer shouldn’t be alive.

I tried to think of a good response—for some reason why I was better than Tawny, or Kimber, or any of the other rude girls on The Squad. In the end, I gave Parker the simplest answer I could think of.

She’s not
.

+++

“Reagan, where are you going?” Cannon asked as I was applying lip gloss in the bathroom that same night. I had decided that I needed to unplug from the game for a while so that my thoughts would stop getting confused.

No
, I didn’t really want to be a soul-sucking sociopath, (even if that phrase was kind of catchy) but I didn’t really see the rest of The Squad becoming nice all of a sudden, so I needed to focus on getting back to my normal life.

The game was a good
distraction from everything that went on at school and the horrible things Tawny did that I pretended to ignore, but at the end of the day, I couldn’t live in the game like Parker did. I had to live in the real world. And in order to survive in the real world, I had to be a part of the strong pack, not one of the weak ones.

“I’m going out,” I replied elusively to my little brother
, who didn’t need to know that I was going over to Zane’s house at 11 o’clock on a school night.

“I’m going to tell mom,” he said matter-of-factly and without a hint of whining in his voice, as if I should have known this response was coming.

“Go ahead. Tell her that you saw me sneaking out at almost midnight because you were out of bed wandering the house,” I answered, knowing I had him beat.

“Maybe you woke me up because you were making too much noise in the bathroom,” he said devilishly.

He was such a punk.

“Maybe I’ll play that stupid pattern science-y game with you for an hour on Saturday if you were just sleepwalking right now,” I offered.

I knew I probably shouldn’t bribe my little brother, but in my defense, he wasn’t a normal little brother. He was a genius little brother and that was just unfair.

“Reagan
, is that you? Snorkels. Renoir,” he mumbled sleepily as he half closed his eyes and walked back to his bedroom.

“Good boy,” I whispered to his retreating form.

It didn’t take long for me to stuff some pillows under my blankets and climb out of my second story window. I was fortunate enough to have a large tree branch leading right up there. It was almost like the house was asking me to sneak out. I couldn’t very well ignore its pleas, now could I? Besides, if Mom and Dad didn’t want me sneaking out, they shouldn’t have planted the tree there in the first place.

Zane’s house was dark when I got there and my heart rate instantly sped up at the thought that I was out when I shouldn’t be. It felt so sneaky. I tried to ignore the feeling that this was just like sneaking up on a particularly tricky mob in the game
, because I was here to escape my nerdiness—not embrace it.

Zane’s bedroom was in the basement of his parent’s house, which meant that the t
op of his bedroom window came to my knees, making it easy to peek in before I made my big entrance.

He was asleep on his very messy bed. Despite the freezing air outside
, he slept on top of his comforter in a T-shirt and his soccer shorts, sprawled out with his arm dangling over the edge of his mattress.

I walked down the concrete stairs at the back of his house to the door that led right into the finished basement. Luckily for m
e the door was always unlocked, though I suspected that had more to do with Zane constantly unlocking it, rather than his parents agreeing it was a good idea.

Once in his room
, I plopped myself down in his desk chair and tossed a crumpled up shirt at him to wake Zane up. I took a deep breath, trying to decide why I was actually there, and couldn’t help but notice that it smelled faintly of cotton candy.

The room would have been dark if his computer screen hadn’t been illuminating it faintly, casting a green glow over everything.

Zane didn’t stir after my little shirt throwing experiment, so I picked up a shoe and threw it at his leg. This time he snorted and turned over, looking up at me in confusion. He propped himself up in bed and continued to stare in my direction, obviously confused by my presence.

“Rae?” he asked, finally cluing me in to the fact that he couldn’t see my face because I was backlit by his computer.

“Who else would it be?” I asked jokingly, rolling the chair closer to his bed so that he could get a better look at me.

“What are you doing here?”

That was an excellent question. I wasn’t sure what I was doing at my boyfriend’s house so late at night. It had seemed like a good idea when I needed to get away from my computer.

Having Parker move to my school had been an adjustment. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if Tawny hadn’t decided to inexplicably hate him
, but since she did, everything had gotten really awkward really fast.

“I don’t know. I just wanted to talk
, I guess?” I asked, though it wasn’t actually a question.

I saw slight disappointment pass over his face, which made me wonder what he
thought I had come over for.

Boys.

“Would you still like me if I wasn’t a cheerleader?” I asked.

I hadn’t really expected to ask that question, and apparently it was just as unexpected to him as well.

“Um. I don’t understand the question,” he said slowly.

I could tell he was worried about giving me the wrong answer. He must have suspected that this was some sort of relationship test.

“Would you still like me if I wasn’t popular?” I asked again, trying to rephrase the question.

I wasn’t sure why I was even asking him this. Zane was shallow
—I could readily admit that. He probably wouldn’t have looked twice at me if I hadn’t been on The Squad, prancing around school in my short skirts and winking at everyone I saw.