In Summertime Saga

Bissette was talking about cheese when I walked into French class.

"The essay will require research," she was saying, her back to the door, writing on the whiteboard in a cursive so neat it looked printed. "Three pages on a traditional French dish of your choosing. Coq au vin, bouillabaisse, ratatouille, cassoulet. Due Friday." She turned and saw me in the doorway and her eyebrows went up. "Ah. Arthur. How nice of you to join us."

"Sorry. Hallway was crowded."

It wasn't. I'd been standing outside the door for thirty seconds listening to her voice. Bissette had a light French accent that made homework sound like a dinner invitation and I'd been enjoying it from the hallway. She was in a white blouse today with a pink cardigan over it, sleeves pushed up to her forearms. Reading glasses on top of her head. A skirt that ended just above the knee.

"Take your seat. You will need to check out reference books from the library for your essay. I have a list." She held up a printed sheet. "Three titles. Cuisine Française Classique, Larousse Gastronomique, and Les Secrets de la Cuisine du Terroir."

I took the sheet and sat down. Erik was two seats over doodling something on his notebook that looked like an Orcette character. Eve was in the back row with her blue hair and her combat boots up on the desk next to hers. Mia was near the windows with her hands folded and her ponytail over one shoulder and she was already taking notes on a fresh page.

I looked at the book list. I already knew where the copies were.

This was Step 2 of Bissette's route. The library book fetch quest. Three overdue copies held by three different students who weren't going to give them up easily. In the game I'd followed a walkthrough: Erik's was under his bed, Martinez had one stuffed in her backpack, and Dexter's was shoved in his locker which required the master key from Smith's office. The whole thing had taken me four in-game days of clicking through dialogue trees. I could have it done by lunch.

Class ended. I caught Erik at his desk while he was packing up.

"Hey. You have a French cookbook checked out from the library?"

Erik's face went through a fast sequence: confusion, realization, guilt. "How did you- yeah. It's, uh. Under my bed. I checked it out for a recipe thing and then I forgot and now it's like three weeks overdue and I keep meaning to-"

"Can you bring it tomorrow?"

"I'll bring it tonight. I mean tomorrow morning. Before school. I'll put it in my bag right when I get home." He adjusted his glasses. "The fine is going to be bad, isn't it."

"Probably."

"Don't tell the librarian I had it."

"I won't tell the librarian you had it."

"She scares me. Jane. She's got this look."

"I know the look."

He left. One down.

Martinez was harder because Martinez was never alone. She moved through the school in a unit with Lopez, the two of them walking shoulder to shoulder like a convoy. They were at their lockers when I passed on the way to the stairwell. Martinez had a side-cut that made her look like she was always turning toward you even when she wasn't. Lopez was shorter, darker hair pulled back, scrolling through her phone while Martinez stuffed a notebook into her backpack.

The backpack. The spine of a book poking out of the front pocket. Not quite zipped. Red cover with gold lettering. Larousse Gastronomique.

The game had the book in the boys' locker room, in Martinez's backpack that she'd left on a bench. I didn't know why it ended up there in canon. Some quest logic that made sense inside the game's event triggers and nowhere else. In the real version of Summerville, Martinez's backpack was right here at her locker and she was about to walk away from it because Lopez had grabbed her arm and was dragging her toward the screen.

"Oh my god, look at this," Lopez said. "Scroll down. No, the comments."

They both turned their backs. Martinez's backpack was half-open on the floor.

I walked past. Hooked the book out of the front pocket without stopping. Kept walking. It was smooth enough that I surprised myself. Two down.

Dexter's was the problem.

His locker was on the first floor near the gym entrance. I knew the book was in there. I also knew his locker needed the master key from Smith's office, which meant getting into the principal's desk on the third floor, which I didn't have the access or the charisma for yet. In the game, there was a master key and a specific sequence. In real life, Dexter was six foot two and built like a vending machine from a gym that wasn't Planet Thiccness and he hated me because I existed near his girlfriend.

I'd handle Dexter later. Two out of three was enough for today.

The hallway was doing the between-classes thing where everyone came out of their rooms at once and the noise tripled and the corridor became a slow current of backpacks and elbows. I was headed for the stairwell when someone hit my shoulder.

Hard. A bump that rotated me forty-five degrees.

"Watch it, loser."

Roxxy Belle walked past me with Becca on her left and Missy on her right, a triangle formation that took up the entire width of the hallway. She was in the red-and-white cheer uniform even though practice wasn't until after school. Platinum-blonde hair down her back. A lollipop stick poking out of her mouth. She smelled like candy and hairspray and she didn't slow down.

Becca gave me a look that was ninety percent boredom and ten percent contempt. "Don't block the hall, scrub."

Missy glanced back at me with an expression that was trying to be mean but looked more like she wasn't sure why they were being mean. She opened her mouth, closed it, and turned back around.

Roxxy was still walking. But I'd seen it. A flick of her eyes, down and sideways, at my upper arms. My biceps specifically. Three weeks of Kevin's gym sessions were starting to show and the t-shirt was tighter than it used to be and she'd looked. Half a second, then forward again, then she was gone around the corner with her squad and her lollipop and her cheerleader legs.

I'd played her route twice. Once for the walkthrough, once because the cheerleader shower scene was worth replaying. On my screen she'd been a blonde sprite with a mean dialogue tree who called you "loser" until you hit the right triggers. In person she was five foot eight and loud and her voice carried and she walked like she owned every floor she stepped on and her eyes were very blue.

Thirty-eight.

The number hit me in the stairwell. I was going down toward the courtyard and the thought arrived without an invitation. Thirty-eight girls. I'd counted them on a list in my head during a delivery shift, pedaling my bike and running the names. Debbie. Jenny. Diane. Tammy. Roxxy. Bissette. Eve. Mia. Becca. Missy. Judith. Lopez. Martinez. Okita. Ross. Dewitt. Smith. Consuela. Grace. Helen. Odette. Tina. Abby. Angelica. Ivy. Jane. Zoey. Iwanka. Josephine. Liu. Maria. Melonia. Nadya. Svetlana. Aqua. Daisy. Rhonda. Bridget.

Thirty-eight. Some of them I'd barely met. Some I hadn't met at all. Some of them didn't know I existed yet and some of them actively hated me and one of them was a fish woman living underwater and one of them was technically a cow and I was going to sleep with all of them.

Charisma, intelligence, dexterity: zero across the board. Strength was three and the only reason it was three was because Kevin treated the gym like church and dragged me in like a convert. I had a bicycle and a part-time pizza job and I was eighteen and I was standing in a high school stairwell doing math on how many women I needed to seduce before senior year ended.

This was insane. This was absolutely insane and I was grinning about it.

Someone was sitting on the landing below me.

Mia Potter. Cross-legged on the landing between the first and second floors with a book open in her lap and her back against the wall. She was wearing a mauve polo shirt tucked into blue jeans and white sneakers and her dark hair was in a low ponytail with a pink scrunchie. She looked like someone's idea of a good daughter. Which she was. Harold's daughter. Helen's daughter. The cop and the church lady.

She looked up when she heard my footsteps. Brown eyes, warm, careful. She held my gaze for maybe a second, then looked back down at her book. Her cheeks went slightly pink.

I'd been looking forward to her route. Shy girl, strict mom, the whole forbidden thing. Sitting here on the landing she was just a kid reading a book on a staircase because the library was too crowded and the cafeteria was too loud and this was where the quiet was. She was smaller than her sprite. Her fingers on the page were thin.

I kept walking. She didn't look up again.

The courtyard was bright after the stairwell. Afternoon sun on concrete and the basketball court in the distance where Dexter was probably chest-bumping someone. I squinted against the light.

Eve Rogers. On the roof.

Three stories up, sitting on the edge with her legs dangling over. Black jeans, ripped. A band shirt I couldn't read from down here. Her blue hair was the only color against the grey of the building's roof edge and she was holding something to her mouth. A cigarette or a joint, hard to tell from the courtyard, but the smoke drifted up and away from her and she was looking at the sky and she hadn't noticed me or didn't care.

She looked like she'd been put up there by accident and decided to stay.

There was a guy walking across the courtyard with a sandwich and a backpack and he didn't look up. A teacher came out the side door and went to her car and didn't look up. Nobody looked up. Eve was sitting on the edge of the roof of a school building with her legs hanging off and nobody in the courtyard saw her except me.

I went back inside. The book from Martinez's backpack was in my bag and it smelled like old paper and the spine was cracked. I'd give it and Erik's to Bissette tomorrow. Two out of three. The third was behind a locked door I didn't have the key to yet.

I had a list in my head that was thirty-eight names long and I had two out of three books and my arms were bigger than they were three weeks ago and Roxxy Belle had noticed and Debbie was probably cleaning another room right now and Jenny was going to yell at me tonight for missing a photo shoot and Diane's tomato was growing in a garden I'd weeded and somewhere underwater there was a fish woman I was eventually going to have to figure out and my dexterity was zero and my charisma was zero and I had a bicycle.

I went to class.