//------------------------------//
// Chapter 1: Just Out Here Trying to Play 
// Story: Monophobia 
// by Aquaman 
//------------------------------//

It’s about a quarter to one in the morning, the floor tiles are so cold I can feel them through my shoes, and I’m starting to think for probably the hundredth time tonight that this wasn’t a very good idea. 

It sure seemed like a good one three hours ago. Who doesn’t love old Super Joybox games, right? And who, when they saw someone playing old Super Joybox games alone in a chilly dorm lounge on a freezing-cold Saturday night, wouldn’t think, “Whoa, look at that cool dude I’ve definitely met before but don’t remember at all. I should go over and start a conversation and do all the hard work of making friends in college for him!”

Everyone, it turns out. The answer to both questions is “everyone,” and at this point I’ve got about three hours of evidence to prove it.

I guess I get it, on the one hand. The SJB was vintage before I or anyone in this building was even born, and Battle Bot Z doesn’t really measure up to any game less than two decades old. But on the other hand, encyclopedic knowledge of ancient side-scrollers is the closest thing to a personality I have, and it’s not like I got anywhere close to IRL friendship with anything else I’ve tried lately. Or like I tried at all over the entire first semester.

Now that I’m thinking about it, this was an actively bad idea.

And that’s what I mutter out loud, to myself and to the empty lounge chairs around me: “This was a bad idea.” And then I thumb the START button on my controller and toss it onto the coffee table I set up my console on, and I rub my eyes and sigh and listen to my breath echo around the frigid, deserted room.

Somewhere beyond the discolored pixels flashing in the blackness behind my eyelids, I know there are more pixels displayed on the lounge TV — a menu of sci-fi weapons and upgrade slots, blinking in rhythm with a tinny guitar riff that seem to say, “Quit moping and get back to blasting 16-bit bad guys, you big dork.” Tough shit, game. I’ve been putting this moping session off long enough. You’re gonna have to wait a bit.

I let my hands drop into my lap and wait for my vision to clear, and once it does I realize I’m staring at my phone on the scratchy couch cushion next to me. I pick it up and light the screen just to confirm what I already know: zero new text messages, and zero old ones too save for what my mom sent me earlier in the evening: 

Miss you already! How’s your first weekend back at school been? <3

It’s great moping fuel, first of all, but also a good reminder that this is all kind of my mom’s fault. Not me being a hopeless nerd — that’s 100 percent pure Button Mash. But I was all set to continue being nerdy and hopelessly alone, until I was dumb enough to answer honestly when my mom asked over the holidays if I’d made any friends at school. 

And now here I am, Mom! I did what you said to do: put myself out there. And technically, it’s your fault that you didn’t specify exactly where “there” was, or what sort of putting-out I had to do. You have to be specific with hopeless nerds. We’re not good at not following instructions.

Just as the mope train’s fully leaving the station, I hear the dorm’s front door open behind me. A blast of wintery air prickles at my neck and sneaks down the back of my t-shirt, and for a moment the room feels lively, filled with chattering voices and laughter from people who were out being normal freshmen doing normal Saturday night things at college: drinking, partying, making friends, having fun.

It’s not like I wasn’t having fun tonight, I guess. It’s not like this — old games, older console, warm nostalgia and solitude away from the cold outdoors — isn’t the same thing I’d usually do with my free time. But that chill from outside has still stuck in my gut for a few seconds every time a group’s come back from partying or whatever. Or rather, when they stomp through the foyer and keep going upstairs, passing me by without so much as a glance or a “Hey, isn’t that what’s-his-name over there?”

I don’t even know that I want someone to interrupt me, to drag me out into the cold so I can be awkward and uncomfortable in a crowd rather than by myself. But I guess part of me was kind of hoping they would anyway. I guess I was hoping making friends would be something that just happened to me, rather than something I had to nut up and actually go do.

See what I mean? Bad idea. Horrible, even. 

But sitting here feeling sorry for myself for too much longer would be the worst idea of all. So, after one more big sigh and another shiver as the front door swings open again, I pick my controller back up and unpause my game. Might as well finish this level before going to bed, so I don’t have to look up the password for it the next time I feel like being sober and orderly in public. Now there’s a party plan. I wonder if –

“Is that Battle Bot Z?”

I’d love to say I didn’t jump, or drop my controller, or let out a noise like a Girl Scout realizing she just sold her last box of Thin Mints. I’d also love to be four inches taller and have a Space Wars sequel trilogy that didn’t suck. In any event, I turn around once my heart rate drops below “hummingbird with ADHD,” and what I see behind me is…

… a hallucination, I guess, because what it sure looks like I’m looking up at is a girl with curly pink-and-purple hair that frames her snowy-white face in swirling whorls, and a sparkly strapless top that seems designed to make people forget her eyes are up there. But I can’t forget her eyes — her big, green, hypnotically long-lashed eyes — because they’re staring past me at the TV screen and filled with what really looks like genuine, giddy glee. 

Her cheeks are glowing pink. She must be freezing. And video games must have finally did what the local news always said they would and fully melted my brain, because that’s the only way in hell that now, of all times, is when Sweetie Belle finally wants to talk to me again.

“Shit, did I scare you?” She’s looking at me now, lips bent into an apologetic grimace. “My bad, I… got excited. Was I right, though?”

“Um…” is the sound my mouth makes while my mind finishes its hard reboot, and once ButtonOS is back online: “Y-Yeah! It is.”

“Nnnnnnailed it” Sweetie Belle shouts, pumping her fist hard enough to almost stumble over completely. She catches herself on the back of the couch, lets out an off-kilter giggle, and then sidesteps around the couch’s arm so she can flop down heavily next to me. 

I catch a whiff of faded flowery perfume, stale sweat, and something grainy and thick like chemical-treated wood — and suddenly, reality starts making a little more sense. She’s a normal freshman, after all. And by the look and sound and scent of things, she’s been out doing a lot of normal freshman things tonight.

“‘M Sweetie Belle, by the way,” she says, swaying a bit as she lolls her head over to look more or less in my direction. “‘M in your dorm, I think. This is my dorm, right?”

“Yep,” I answer, trying to stare at the floor instead of any particular part of the girl leaned in really close to me. “And… I know.”

“Know what?”

“I… know your name’s Sweetie Belle. We went to, like… every school together.”

Sweetie Belle blinks, squints at me, then jolts in recognition. “Oh fuck, Button! Hi! I’m so sorry, m-my brain’s… bleh.” She flaps her hands around her face to emphasize the bleh-ness. “God, I’m an idiot, how… how’re doing? What’ve you been up to?”

I glance down at the controller on the ground, then gesture limply at the plastic box it’s connected to and the TV connected to that. Sweetie purses her lips and gives me a tight nod. “Yep,” she says. “Because you were… doing that before. I’m just…” She takes a steadying breath that doesn’t seem to steady her at all. “Y’know what, just… keep playing. I’ll just watch. Ignore me.”

And with that, she settles forcefully back into the couch, kicking off her platform shoes and tucking her bare feet under her butt — which I only stare at for half a second before I realize what I’m doing and force myself to stare at the TV screen instead, until all the pixels on it melt into a technicolor blob. 

Just ignore her. Right. Just pretend one of the only people I know at this college — who I’ve known since elementary school, for God’s sake — isn’t there at all. Even though her knee’s touching my thigh, and her fingers are drumming on the couch cushion by my shoulder, and I’ve been thinking and dreaming and fantasizing about most other parts of her since I first figured out what proverbial team I was batting for — and now she wants to watch me play a video game.

Sure. Easy. No problem. Fuck.

“C’mooooon,” Sweetie complains, nudging me with her knee. “Do the thing.”

You asked for this, an obnoxious little voice in my head reminds me. You literally asked for this exact thing to happen. Now you get to deal with it.

I take a steadying breath myself, and it works exactly as well for me as just did for Sweetie Belle. Then I pick up the controller, focus on the screen, and start playing.

“Ooh, I know this level,” she exclaims as I navigate my Battle Bot sprite towards a ladder leading to the next section of the level. “The one with the, uh…” She snaps her fingers aimlessly, staring up at the wall above the TV. “He was like… invisible? And you had to jump to hit ‘im…”

“Dagger Squid, yeah,” I say. Full credit to her and/or more evidence of unreality: she got it right on the first try. “And you don’t actually have to jump. If you do Boom Kangaroo’s level first and get the boomerang, you can…”

You can what? Oh, by all means, Button, keep explaining how an old video game works to a girl who’s clearly played it before and probably already regrets coming over here. Dipshit.

“... anyway,” I mumble. “I guess you’ve played it before?”

“Yeah…” Sweetie says after a moment. She seems a bit tired all of a sudden — like she ran out of booze-fueled adrenaline the moment she went from standing to sitting. Or like she’s realized she’s doing and who she’s doing it around. I swallow hard and focus on the game again.

“Uh, yeah, sorry,” she eventually continues. “My dad had a Joybox from when he was in college. Used to sit me in his lap and play it with me when I was little. I mean, he played, I just sorta… mashed buttons.” She giggles drunkenly again as she glances over at me. “Heheh, Button Mash… hey, if you weren’t good at video games, would you hafta change your name?”

“Heh, I uh… I guess!” is all I can think to say back. It’s not like I have any stories like that to reply with. The closest my dad’s ever gotten to being a gamer is fumbling through the first level of Aureole 5 after I begged him to try it once in middle school. He said he wasn’t sure he really got it. He was glad I was having fun.

In the corner of my eye, I can see her still staring at me as the level scrolls again. Suddenly, she shifts in her seat and leans towards me, her breath brushing hotly and heart-stoppingly against my neck.

“Am I bugging you?” she asks. “‘M sorry, I didn’t mean –”

“No!” I interrupt as I pause the game. “No, you’re fine. I just… wasn’t expecting anyone to come over, y’know? To… care, I guess.”

I look her way, and have to fight a primal urge to recoil away from her. She’s staring dead into my eyes, her gaze piercing straight to the back of my skull and shooting down my spine into the pit of my stomach. She sounds earnest when she speaks again — almost sad. 

“You sure? ‘Cause I don’t… we don’t hang out anymore. Why don’t we hang out anymore, Button?”

Because you once had three guys ask you to a dance on one day in high school, and I’m in three Eris servers dedicated to three separate Ogres & Oubliettes campaigns? Because you’re an extrovert and a party person and so far out of my league we’re hardly playing the same sport, and I’m just a nerdy little kid you used to get milkshakes and do math homework with after school?

“I… I don’t know,” I mumble. “Guess we just kinda… grew apart.”

“Are we still friends?”

“Yeah. I mean, we’re… friendly. I think.”

“We should be friends,” she declares with a nod. “We’re gonna be friends again. We’ll…”

She’s staring at the wall above the TV again, crinkling her nose and pressing her lips together.

“You, uh… you okay?” I ask her. She blinks a few times at the question, then flashes me a pained-looking smile.

“Mm-hmm,” she hums. “Fine. Keep… keep playing.”

The dorm’s front door opens again. A gaggle of other girls streams inside, rustling in their thick winter coats and absorbed in some inaudible conversation as they vanish upstairs. The biting draft they bring in with them sinks into my shoulders and settles in my gut, right where the look in Sweetie’s eyes landed a few seconds ago. Did she really mean all that? Is she that drunk? Should I stop gawking at her and just play the fucking video game?

I go with the last option, and quickly blast past the last few basic enemies in the level. As the Dagger Squid spawns and its boss music begins, I realize I haven’t even asked Sweetie Belle how her night was.

“So, how’s your night been?” I ask her. A silent second stretches into two, then three, then more. I look over at Sweetie Belle, who’s staring at nothing at all — shoulders tense, lips and chin quivering. “Okay, are you sure you’re –”

There’s a tiny bathroom attached to the lounge just past the TV, with a sink and a single toilet stall inside. Sweetie Belle leaps to her feet and makes a beeline for it, catching the Joybox’s power cord with her foot as she passes, stumbling over it and yanking it out of the wall as she slams through the bathroom door and into the stall. The picture on the TV winks out, and I barely even notice. It’s kind of hard to when I can hear — and after a moment, smell — Sweetie Belle puking her guts out barely a dozen feet away.

Guess that answers that question. Probably a few other ones too.

I leave the Joybox where it’s fallen on the ground and, breathing through my mouth as best I can, gingerly pick my way around the furniture and towards the bathroom. I hear another retch from inside the stall, then splashing liquid, then the dull clunk of a hand impacting metal. Once the gurgle of the toilet flushing fades away, I figure it’s safe to step inside and check on her.

And I’m wrong. I peek into the stall just in time to see Sweetie Belle — on her hands and knees, shuddering and groaning — spew out more of her apparently great night. Sympathetic nausea, or whatever it’s called when watching someone else blow chunks gets you really close to doing it too, smacks into me like a tidal wave, and I have to backpedal into the lounge before the sickly-sweet stench of stomach acid turns her solo act into a duet.

Finally, there’s a second flush, and silence that drags on long enough to convince me the worst is over. When I enter the bathroom again and look in the stall, I see Sweetie Belle slumped against the wall with her eyes closed, sweat and mascara dripping down her face. 

Several seconds too late, I remember you’re supposed to hold a girl’s hair back in situations like this. I glance at one of the stringy curls hanging over her face, and quickly glance anywhere else instead. Maybe she won’t notice. God, I hope for her sake she doesn’t.

As Sweetie takes slow gulps of air and slowly slides down the grimy tiles, I try desperately to remember what my mom used to do when I got sick as a kid. Is drunk sick the same as sick sick? It probably is. So… soak a towel in cold water and put it on her head? But it’s already cold outside. Does that make a difference? For a brief and awful moment, I think about calling my mom at one in the morning and asking.

Then Sweetie Belle coughs — a raspy, painful sound. Water. I can do that, at least. I go over to the sink, tug a paper cup out of the dispenser on the wall and fill it, then take it into the stall with me. Sweetie cracks her eyes open as I kneel down next to her, and mutters something like “thank you” as she takes the cup in her quivering hands.

“Sorry,” she says in a tiny voice, after a few more deep breaths and a long pull from the cup. “Sorry…”

“It’s fine,” I say, because what the hell else am I supposed to say? “It… happens?”

Sweetie just groans and shuts her eyes again. When she eventually responds, it’s in the same tiny voice — thin, trembling, mortified. “Did I break your game?”

“No, you… I don’t think so. Those things are durable,” I tell her. In total honesty, she actually might have broken it, but I figure I shouldn’t bring that up now. She probably feels rotten enough already.

Sweetie lifts the cup to her lips again and empties it, then sighs as she runs her free hand through her hair, wincing as her fingers come away wet. So much for not noticing. I reach for her shoulder — to help her up? Offer a friendly squeeze? — then pull it back. I don’t want to make this any worse for her. I don’t have a clue what to do right now.

“So you should, uh… probably get to bed,” I finally say. “You want some help upstairs?”

“‘M fine,” Sweetie moans.

“You sure? ‘Cause I can… I don’t wanna just leave you here.”

She mumbles something in response, but I can’t tell what it is. Her head droops away from the wall, as if she’s about to fall asleep sitting that. Scratch what I just said: I’m not going to just leave her here.

“Okay, c’mon,” I say, wrapping my arm around her shoulder and tugging until she… slumps forward over her knees and almost smacks her head on the floor before I catch her with my other arm. So far, so bad. I reposition and get my hands under her arms, steering her upright and — with some effort — getting her feet underneath her and her arm around my neck.

We slowly stand up together, and she leans into me hard, limp like a hundred-pound bag of Jell-O that I can already tell I’m barely strong enough to hold onto. Her head ends up under my chin — warm, damp, soaking something into my shirt. I try really hard not to think about it. Instead, I just put one foot in front in the other, half-helping and half-carrying my middle-through-high-school crush — of all fucking people — along with me.

With a lot of effort, I get her out of the bathroom and through the lounge, then step by off-balance step up to the second floor. I’m pretty sure this is her floor — I know I knew it once, from the awkward orientation mixers between boys’ and girls’ halls in our building — but all the cute little nametags the Resident Advisors put up last semester are gone now, replaced by glittery paper snowflakes and multi-colored warnings about drunk driving.

“Hey, which room’s yours?” I ask between puffs of air. Sweetie flops her arm out in front of her, one finger half-extended towards nothing in particular.

“Tha’ one,” is her slurred reply.

“Which one? What room number?”

“... ‘even…”

“Was that a ‘seven’? ‘Eleven’?”

Too late. All I get back is a groan, and more dead weight hanging off of me. I grit my teeth and run through my options. I could just knock on doors until I find someone who knows Sweetie Belle, but… would they know her? I barely know any of my hallmates. And even if they do know her, what would they think of me, carrying around a wasted girl I clearly don’t know well enough to even know where her damn dorm room is?

I feel queasy again just thinking about it — thinking about any of this. I don’t go to parties. I don’t know what people who go to parties do after other people get sick from them. And I can’t just leave her in the hallway. For another even more awful moment, I want to call my mom again.

Fuck it. I don’t know where Sweetie’s room is, but I know where my own is. My roommate’s probably asleep, and I can put her in my bed, and I just need to get her… up another flight of stairs, and then all the way to the end of the third-floor hallway. Got it. Simple. Not an issue at all. Fuuuuuuck.

I sigh, hoist Sweetie Belle up a bit, and get moving again.

By the time we reach my door, I’m breathless and dripping sweat, and especially gross along my neck where stuff-I’m-not-thinking-about from Sweetie’s face has dried into a sticky film. With fumbling fingers, I manage to extract my key from my pocket and unlock the door, nudging the light on with my shoulder as I lead — or really drag, at this point — Sweetie Belle inside. 

My roommate — Bit Crusher, a greasy pre-STEM kid I’ve exchanged about six words in total and about seven words more than I’d prefer with since the year began — rolls over in bed and squints at me. “Don’t ask,” I mutter over to him. “She’s just a friend,” I add pointedly once I realize what this all looks like. Make that twelve and thirteen words. He blinks, shrugs, and rolls back over.

With a bit of maneuvering, I get Sweetie Belle down onto my bed and most of her limbs onto it with her, and I use the last dregs of my stamina to fall into my desk chair and wipe my face with the last dry spot on my t-shirt. I didn’t make a New Year’s Resolution over winter break, but I sure have one now: start going to the goddamn gym. And in the meantime…

For the first time tonight, I sit next to Sweetie Belle and really look at her. I was too awkward to do it in front of the Joybox earlier, too stressed to think about it while I was trying to deal with her post-blackout, but now I have nothing else to think about and no energy left to be awkward with. So I just look at her, past her messed-up hair and ruined makeup to the creases smoothing out of her face as she slips from conscious incoherence into peaceful dreamless sleep, and a familiar hole starts opening in my chest — just like it has a million times before.

She was right earlier: we were friends, a long time ago. Not just classmates, but actual friends, doing projects together at school and hanging out in ice cream parlors afterwards. We were mutual birthday party attendees and field trip buddies and, once, cofounders of a Minecraft server that half our elementary school had played inside. 

And then we were in different middle school classes, and the ice cream parlor closed, and the server grew more and more desolate until an update in high school shut it down for good. We grew up. Time moved on. And I know — have always known — I should too.

But I don’t want to. I didn’t drift away from her by choice, intentionally choose hobbies and interests that would get me snickered at between classes and ignored at homecoming dances. I just became someone she wasn’t interested in anymore — or really, someone not interesting enough to be worth the hassle. And now here we both are, together again, and still miles and miles apart in every way that matters.

It sucks, and it’s not fair, and it’s not going to change so I really should just get over it already and move on with my life like she has. But that’s something adults do — people who go to parties and get drunk and have lives to move on with in the first place. Sweetie Belle’s like that. Practically everyone else on campus is like that.

And I’m not. I’m just a scared little kid in an adult-sized body, who doesn’t know how to do anything and wants his mom to come save him every time he has to figure something out by himself. And no matter how old I get or what happens to me or doesn’t, I can’t shake the deep-down feeling that’ll never change either. 

And in the meantime…

“Well, that was very chivalrous of you, Button,” I mutter to myself. “Now you don’t have a bed.”

And I left the Joybox downstairs. And Sweetie Belle’s shoes. And probably a really good chance of being someone interesting for once, instead of just me.

Fuck it again. I’m too tired to fix any of my problems right now, big or small ones. So instead, I force myself to stand up and tug my comforter out from under Sweetie’s sleeping form so I can throw it overtop of her, then get a dry shirt and a spare blanket — the one Mom insisted I take back to school with me for this semester, just in case — from my wardrobe before flipping off the light.

The floor is hard and cold, and my school backpack makes for a pretty uncomfortable pillow, but just like with just about everything else, it’s the best I’m going to get. Sooner than I expect, I feel my eyelids drooping, and I fall asleep to the sound of my former, or current, or who-the-fuck-knows friend’s soft and steady breaths.