She Dims the Stars (26 page)

Tell me about Audrey. Leave nothing out.

Cline’s memories of Audrey are what shaped the game I developed for her. Starring her. It’s nothing spectacular as far as graphics go. After talking with him and finding out that the two of them used to play games on his dad’s old Atari (“The only thing he left behind before he took off with that bitch, Kendra”) I decided to keep it basic. They're the only kind of games she knows how to play, so it’s a bit of a throwback to 8-bit. Much like Minecraft or a few other games that are going back to their roots, Audrey’s game is simple.

When she puts it into her computer, it will load, and on her screen will appear the name
She Dims the Stars
with some music that Cline put together which sounds like some music box she used to have in her room when she was younger. I have no idea how he remembers this tune, but he says that it’s one of those things that gets stuck in your head and never really leaves … just hangs out there and suddenly pops up out of nowhere.

Game Audrey is a princess born into a land where everyone loves her. Tragedy strikes upon her birth and her mother dies, but she is so adored that the town helps to raise her. She is a wild little thing with a chubby best friend who wreaks havoc everywhere they go. They spend most of their time down by the water’s edge, playing in the woods and camping under the stars. It’s there that young Audrey discovers that she has wings and is far different from everyone else around her, so she tries to keep the wings a secret.

A wicked step-mother enters the picture, and with her comes clouds of darkness over the land that Audrey once played around and where she found so much happiness. This woman finds out about the wings and steals them, leaving Audrey helpless and grounded. Desperate and confused. Her best friend has disappeared as well.

This is the beginning of her journey.

In Level 1, she’ll be made to search for her way out of the town. Of course, I’ve provided her with exactly what she’s asked for: a unicorn. Though, to be fair, it’s an alicorn because it has wings to fly like a Pegasus, but it’s a unicorn, too. Cline and I agreed that if a unicorn was going to shit cookies as a defense, then it should be from great heights so that the most damage could be caused—hence the addition of the wings.

I don’t know how much time it will take her to find her alicorn, but once she does, she has to earn its trust, and only after they bond can she move on to the next level.

Level 2 is finding her best friend. As promised, I made Cline completely mute. He has no mouth, which I think she’ll appreciate on
so
many levels. He, of course, has been banished to another land by the wicked step-mother and is being held prisoner by “that bitch, Kelsey” who Audrey has to defeat in order to save him. I have included the option for her to give him back his ability to speak or not, though I assume she’ll opt to keep him silent. Wouldn’t we all?

Once Kelsey is defeated, in whichever manner Audrey so chooses to take her down, and Cline is freed, he will lead her to a cave where his weapon is hidden: a fedora wearing dragon. Now, it’s not my fault that this dragon exists. It’s also not my fault that the dragon can talk instead of Cline. What
is
my fault is that the dragon mostly talks in innuendo and bad pick-up lines. So when they first meet, he definitely asks her,
“Do you like dragons?”

She can choose to slay him or let Cline have something to ride. I, once again, assume she will let him keep his dragon, even if he’s a major douche. The two of them, at this point, can continue on to the next level.

Level 3 involves the two of them working together to overcome the wicked step-mother. This part of the game is a little harder than the others because Audrey will be faced with a Miranda-like character who has an army of bat-shit crazy followers, doing her bidding. They follow her around and do her every command, attacking Audrey from all sides. The whole town seems to turn against her, but it’s merely a mirage set up by Miranda, and if Audrey can figure that out, she can defeat her. In doing so, she can free the town, unlock her father from the spell he’s been placed under, and she’ll retrieve her wings.

Finally, Level 4 will appear on her screen, and Audrey will be alone in a dark room, standing in front of a mirror.

All games have one final battle, one final monster to defeat in order to win the entire game. The Big Boss is the biggest, toughest villain to beat and is the one that usually takes a few tries to overcome before you can call yourself a winner.

It’s possible that Audrey will be confused when she sees herself step through the other side of the mirror and she is looking at a screen with two of the same character facing one another, identical in every single way.

I developed a scene for the doppelgänger to speak to Audrey, telling her that it doesn’t matter that she’s come this far. Nothing matters. It never will. She can’t win this battle.

When I was coding it, Cline sat by my side, sweating and talking to September on FaceTime. “What if you trigger her and she relapses? What if you do something seriously wrong and cause her to go off the deep end?”

“September, do you think Audrey is strong enough to know reality from bullshit when she sees it?” I asked, looking up and into the pretty brunette’s eyes through the screen.

She ran her fingers through her hair and exhaled slowly. “I hope so.”

In any other game, this exchange would go on for a long time. The Big Boss would grow stronger with the main player’s weakness. They would fly overhead and show their vulnerable spot on their belly or something to that extent. But this scene is silent with only the two of them staring at one another. After the fake Audrey stops speaking, a prompt pops up on the screen. Simple. One click.

 
Do you agree? Yes. No.

That’s it. It’s all she has to do. In order to slay her monster, she simply has to say she doesn’t believe the bad things in her own head. The stuff she hears with her own voice.

If she chooses no, which I hope she will, her wings grow, and she rises into the night sky, shining so brightly that every star around her grows dim. And with one swipe of her hand, the other Audrey is completely erased, obliterated into nothing but ash.

She’s victorious.

I am nowhere in this game. There’s a reason I did not place myself there to help her or to be a sidekick or the main character to save her. She doesn’t need saving. She never did.

I gave her the hero she deserved: herself.

It is three o’clock in the morning, and I can’t stop shaking.

The music playing on my laptop is making my pulse race and memories of my childhood flood back long after I have beaten the game that Elliot made for me. This song was put into a music box for me by my dad when I was three. It was a song a friend had written for my mom years before I was born. I’d only recently retrieved the box from my room and asked Patrick about it.

He’d explained that Wendy was going through a rough time not being able to have children, and she’d had a best friend, Delilah, who played the guitar and wrote songs. She showed up one day and played it for my mom, telling her that no matter what, she was there for her through any and everything. He gave me the lyrics just last week, and I pinned them to my wall because they spoke so deeply to my soul. “It’s okay to not be okay,” she sang to my mother as she mourned the idea of never having a baby.

My eyes search out the paper with the lyrics on them, and I read them over once again, letting my heart stretch and pull while I picture Elliot putting all this effort into the gift he left at my doorstep. Without even knowing he’d done it, he’d woven a song of hope into his game.

Fear looks back

Doubt looks down

Hope looks up

So, darling, hold your head up now

It’s okay to feel like the dawn’ll never break

It’s okay to not feel okay

Just remember me, friend, when you’re down on yourself

I’ll be here with an outstretched hand

Don’t worry, my friend, if you darken my door

‘Cuz I’ll be here to turn on the light

And I’ll carry the weight of your dear, heavy heart

And dry the tears from your eyes

My lids are heavy, and I am drained from finishing the levels he created for me. The last one, choosing to not believe the terrible things being said about me, by the reflection of myself … that was the toughest one of all. Psychologically, I wanted to agree, but in the moment, taking a step back and grounding myself in reality, listening to words of wisdom I’d gleaned from Dr. Stark, my father, Cline, and Elliot, I know better. It will be one minute at a time, and maybe I’ll have to remove myself from the situation to get clarity, but I’ll move forward every day. I swear I will.

Right now, I’m going to get my shoes on and go to an apartment where I have a sneaking suspicion the light will be on outside.

He opens the door on the second knock, hair standing up in multiple directions like he’s been asleep, but he’s fully clothed. The TV is on in the living room, and my first thought is that he’s been waiting for me. He knew I would come.

Elliot steps aside as I walk into his apartment and I look around, comforted that everything is exactly the same as the last time I was there. Nothing drastic has occurred since the summer.

I turn to look at him, noting his glasses as he shoves them back into place and blinks a few times like he’s trying to make sure I’m real and not some weird dream he’s having.

“Count your fingers,” I say. “If you have five, it’s real life. If you have six, it’s a dream. I promise, you have five right now.”

He does as I say, and a smile appears on his face in place of the confused frown that was there before. “You got the game, then.”

“Of course, I did. You left it with Tessa. There’s no way it wouldn’t make it to me. Good job on the fedora threat, by the way. I was thoroughly intrigued and scared. Put the game in immediately for fear that Cline would show up within the hour.”

“He’s asleep,” Elliot says, leaning on the bar, his eyes still looking me over for signs of … something. Distress? I’m not quite sure.

Without asking, I move into the living room and plop down onto the couch, kick off my shoes, and turn sideways to look at him from across the room. “When did you have time to make it?”

“After I got the internship. With you gone, I had time on my hands.” He’s not nervous at all when he comes to sit by my legs. I scoot over to give him room, and the comfort of his closeness settles over me immediately.

I am levelheaded and focused when I speak again. “Do you think you love me, Elliot?”

His hand rests on my calf and he gazes down at his fingers while he thinks it over. “Do I think I love you? Or do I know I love you? I guess those are two very distinct questions, aren’t they? Thinking you love someone means you’re not really sure, and you want to test the waters. Knowing you do means you’d spend time with them, going through a bunch of states so they could find out about their mom. You’d stand in a dead tree covered in bugs and walk through cemeteries. Jump off a cliff. Risk being arrested for sleeping on the beach. You’d hold them until paramedics show up so they don’t die.” He looks at me then, his mouth set in a tight line and face deadly serious. “Do I think I love you? No. No, I don’t think I do. It’s pretty obvious to just about everybody that I know it.”