by Arthur Aronstein
Until now, my buddy Derek never had the best luck with girls. They were kinetically repulsed by him for as long as I can remember, his very presence a force that repelled them from wherever we found them, first on the playground then as his lab partner and then at every dance or party we attended in high school. We weren’t exactly friends based on common interests or social status; ours was a friendship built on shared circumstance, on history, and witnessing his lack of success in securing a girlfriend—hell, to even get one girl into bed—became more a matter of sentimental interest than genuine concern for a friend. I brought him to all the lacrosse functions I could, finessed blind dates with women most guys would wait in a twenty-block line to catch a whiff of walking home from Pilates, included him in thousands of games of Truth-Or-Dare and Spin-The-Bottle and Have-You-Met-Derek and, still, nothing; his loins are as dusty and cobwebbed as the attic of a haunted house.
In the proceeding decade of adulthood, my friend slipped deeper and deeper into his reclusehood, lubricated by the pacifying safety of a life lived on the internet. At first he was just playing games all day, then he found communities within those games, and then the people he was playing those games with became realer than his own few friends. He knew well how deplorable I found it all—how antithetical it was to the colorful social lifestyle I had forced him to witness and continued to pursue—so he didn’t mention his little online posse or the “quality time” they would spend together over messaging apps, prancing around in their virtual worlds, and watching streams where other people pranced around in those same worlds. My contempt for the implication that these relationships were somehow equivalent to the ones he was refusing to pursue in the real world was not shy. There’d come a time where it would be too late, I told him, meaning that, someday soon, I wasn’t going to be around to be his wingman—the person willing to crowbar him out of that shell he’s been so stuck in since he was a big-headed, thick-lenses child; that my amusement with the life of a high-value bachelor could expire at any day, and I might find myself settling down with any number of people who were both waiting and didn’t-know-they’re-waiting-yet on me to make that call, condemning me to a life of commitment from which I could never free him. He just said that stuff would happen when it did.
I like to visit him monthly, just to check in. He doesn’t reach out to invite me over as much, but the history of our relationship grants me a warrant to come by any time. So once a month I barge into his studio, plop down on his bed, and start bugging him over his shoulder, just like when we were kids. He doesn’t lock his door, I think, for this reason.
“What’s up, fucker?” I say in my signature greeting. Walking toward my place on his bed, I notice he is clasped between his headset, enthralled with something on his 4K dual-monitor. “Hey. Fucker!”
He uncups a single ear. “Oh, hey. Welcome. Didn’t hear you come in.”
“Clearly,” taking my place on his comforter. “If I were a home invader you’d be dead right now. .45, straight to your domepiece. Blaow.”
I mime the weapon and its recoil in Derek’s direction. Still facing the screen, he wiggles a yolk-stained steak knife over his shoulder. “Nuh-uh. I would’ve spun around and launched this into your eye socket last-second—like the Esquites scene from Nacho Libre.”
I let my laughter take me down. Our banter, our inside jokes, the movies we remember seeing in theaters together as kids—being with Derek is one of the refuges I have from the adult world. Here, I can just relax and catch up with an old friend, vent about our trials and tribulations and share in the anxiety we both experienced in getting the same kind of old at the same time. The game-used baseball he keeps on his dresser is just for me; its decades-old bruises from the game we caught it at will never fade; I reach for it and begin rattling off what’s on my mind, tossing it toward the ceiling and catching it as it falls back to me, its motion and rhythm somehow therapeutic in turning my feelings into thoughts into words. This month, it’s different but more of the same: Raya stories, DM disasters, Run Clubs, things that were but are now weren’t and things that might that are now are. It occurs after several minutes of this that he has not replied at all, not even with a morsel of disinterested understanding. That’s all I ask for, really, but when I sit up he’s still fixated on his computer, leaning closer yet.
I tap him on the shoulder. “What are you even watching, anyways?”
He seems startled by my enthusiasm to know. “Just a streamer,” he says, “a girl who really throws down at MOBAs. I’ve never seen a top-lane like her and I think I’m in love.”
I never cared to learn the vocabulary of his video game stuff. About the only thing I recognize him say is that she’s a girl and that he’s in love with her. This piques my curiosity, yet when I take the lay of the screen, I see no such thing as a girl, only a drawing of one. Sequestered in the corner of the video game and superimposed over its recondite depictions is what appears to be a half-woman, half-reptile or -dragon hybrid drawn in anime-style, the physics of both its facial expressions and chest proportions grossly exaggerated as they react to the flourishes of digital magic and murder on screen.
“Her?” I scoff, “That’s a drawing, brother. It’s not even a good one, either. It looks like it was conjured from the bowels of some basement-dweller’s fantasies.”
He finds good humor in this. “Her name’s AshPetal and she’s a V-Tuber. The ‘character’ on screen obviously isn’t a real girl, but the personality that gives it life definitely is. We watch her because she’s funny, she plays well, and she treats her community right. The character doesn’t really matter at a certain point.”
How normal he ‘pitched’ it to me was frustrating. A little push might cause him to look in the mirror. “So, you’re saying this chick basically pretends to be a cartoon all day, and lonely losers pay her rent for it?”
His brow lifts but the comment mostly washes over him. “I guess when you put it like that, yeah.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Thinking about it more just makes me shake my head. “I doubt she’s even hot. You know that, right? I bet the girl under the cartoon—if she’s even a girl and not some pervert with a voice mod—she’s probably fat and acne-covered and never got any proper attention from guys in her life. That’s what’d drive a girl to do something like this.”
It became clear this rhetoric started to annoy him. He no longer took it as an argument but as an insult, eyes narrowing. Putting his headset back on, he doesn’t look at me as he says: “Good thing we don’t like her for her looks, then.”
Two months pass. The first is because I’m mad at Derek for blowing me off and the second is because I want him to reflect on the error of his ways—to either realize he was being stupid or to find out the hard way that this 2D Succubus is playing him with an empty bank account. I secretly hope for the latter.
I try for a different, more direct approach, one that by design intends to get Derek out of the ass-indent in his gaming chair and into the real world, at a trendy restaurant where we can catch up properly, which will hopefully lead to the two of us hitting the town together. So I text him for Friday dinner at The Saffron Claw, a hipstery new Sri Lankan fusion restaurant that all the ring-light influencers are flocking toward, telling him to dress the part of the people he’ll be courting. An hour before we’re supposed to meet, I text him a picture of my formal outfit to show him what I mean. He replies with his typical yellow thumbs-up.
The vibe is off: he’s late when he’s usually early and he orders a cocktail when he doesn’t drink. He has a pep in his step—one that might be a measure of confidence in someone else but, for this person who had spent their whole life as the same brand of withdrawn, awkward person, his transformation arouses only suspicion. He talks with a kind of furtive enthusiasm as if he’s waiting for me to ask the one question that will get to the source of it. We’re about halfway through our crab curry when, during the first long silence of the night, he smiles and asks if I want to hear something cool.
“So you remember that Ash girl, right? The V-Tuber? Well, her and I have been chatting in her Discord a lot. She made me a mod a while ago and for the past months we’ve been talking, really getting to know each other. I don’t mean to sound insane, but I think I’m falling for this girl.”
Him stressing the pronouns like that—her, she, girl—served only to piss me off. It was insulting, really, to everyone putting themselves out there in the real world. “You’re falling for ‘her’? Come on, Derek, how much money are you paying her?”
“None!” raising his hands in arrest. “She wouldn’t need my money, anyways. We’ve just spent a lot of time together and ended up hitting it off.”
“Lots of time together?” I lower my voice realizing the ambient lighting and white tablecloths that surround me. “You haven’t spent any time together, Derek. You don’t even know her. Have you seen what she looks like?”
Derek makes a pensive press of his spoon through the reminisce of yellow broth.
“Have you seen what she looks like?”
The consideration brings him back down to earth. “No,” he mouths.
“Exactly,” I say. “I know you, Derek. And I know you’ve been at this long enough to know that you might be feeling desperate, like maybe you’re running out of time to make a choice at all, right or wrong.” I attempt to channel within myself the person he first knew all those years ago, as toddlers in church, while searching for that person in him, too. “These things take time. You can’t force them when they aren’t right.”
There’s a second there where I think he’s going to fight back—where his lip wriggles a bit like some turmeric-dyed caterpillar to hold back a spur of resistance. Ultimately, though, he swallows what little pride he can lay claim over and accepts that I know what’s best for him, like always.
“You’re right,” he says as the napkin reaches his lips. “It was silly of me. Let me grab the check.”
“Drinks after?” raising my eyebrow. “The night is young, man, we got to get after it. Who knows what’s waiting for us out there?”
He didn’t skip a beat to think. “No, thanks. I think I’ll just go home.”
It’s three months before I grace Derek with the opportunity of my presence again—to represent what strike he’s on with me. By now, the earwig I deployed in his brain over crab curry and chardonnay should’ve chewed its way through all the scaly-cartoon-girl-psychosis that’s been muddling up his good sense, and I estimate he’ll fall to his knees at first sight of me walking through the door, fingers enwrapped in rejoice that his prayers have been answered.
The hallway is haunted by a presence. From the elevator I hear it snickering, a whisper, loudening with each step toward Derek’s door. It’s locked. It’s never supposed to be locked. Palm to the paint, I call for him to let me in. His lease expired. He must’ve moved somewhere else.
The door wedges open. By only a sliver I recognize that, indeed, Derek still lives here.
“Ayo, fucker! You locked the door on me, man, what gives?”
He pokes his uncharacteristically turtlenecked head out the door. “Do you think you can come by another time—like, literally any other time?” his voice low. “I’m a little busy right now.”
“Derek?” calls a voice—female, familiar—from his bed. “Who’s that at the door?”
Her concern, so entitled, should be mine. I impose myself through the gap and see her sitting there, in my spot.
“Hi!” I force a smile but it is likely uncanny. “You must be Ash. It’s so good to finally see you’re real. This your first appointment of the day? I’d call them clients but you’d prefer ‘Subscribers,’ right?”
Derek makes a protective maneuver between us. “Whoa,” he warns me.
“Derek, what’s going on?” asks Ash. She has a figure that matches the soft, high tenor of her voice and hair like wide strokes of milky chestnut paint. Her eyes are a lush fern color framed and amplified by her horn-rimmed glasses, prettier than the exaggerations of her animated counterpart.
“This is—maybe was—my closest childhood friend. You might have a hard time believing that, because any friend of mine would never be talking about my girlfriend that way, but it’s true.” His expression flips between a scowl and smile as he shifts between us. “You got to get out of here, dude.”
“Girlfriend?” stepping around him. “What do you think you’re getting out of him? His money? He doesn’t exactly got a lot of that, sister. It’s not like he’s going to age like wine, either. If this was the ‘big lick’ you were planning to come up on by pretending to be a cartoon salamander, then, I’m sorry, you’re even more pathetic than I realized.”
It dawns on me that his entire apartment has changed. From the walls to the floors and the surfaces, nothing is as I had come to know it: the crooked posters of female heroines clad in objectifying leather armors replaced with tasteful abstract portraiture, a rug that brings the room together splayed across a floor free of inside-out skidmarked underwear, the nightstand empty of all trinkets save for a pair of silver hoop earrings.
I turn around to ask Derek, “Where’s the baseball?” I see he is on the verge of tears but I don’t care. “Where is it?”
“I don’t know,” he pouts. “Check the nightstand. Jesus.”
Filled with miscellaneous objects, I stroke away old action figures and homeless cords until I see it through a triangle of light in the junk. My hand plunges in the plastic to retrieve it, shoving it in his face so he can get a last good look at it.
“Rockies-Diamondbacks,” I remind him. “September, 20th, 2002. That’s how long I’ve been trying to help you. I shouldn’t have reached over you to grab it. I should’ve left you there panicking like the scared little boy you were, waiting for it to hit you. Well, now you can wait all you want. No one’s stopping her.”
My friendship with Derek is over. Before I storm out, I accept this will be the last time I see him, that the door that was always open is now closed for good. I slam it shut hard, hoping the enthusiasm of my gesture will help me believe it. In the elevator I roll the ball and its familiar scuffs of clay in my hand, taking inventory if they match the ones I’ve memorized.
They remain as fresh as the day we brought it home.
Derek and Ash’s relationship both started and ended behind a veil. It was late May in the Adirondacks, a place that Ash spent the summers with her family as a child, this small church next to a glassy lake at the hour of evening where the bullfrog song emanates as a belched hum at the crease between the water and the reeds.
The attendees are a cherished selection of the few most important people in each of their lives, no plus-ones, just their closest family and friends to pack the rows of pews, three on each side. They were each given a Best Man and a Maid of Honor, a position that Derek had struggled to fill, eventually moving to the semi-desperate, mostly embarrassing gesture of asking his closest co-worker, a guy from accounting named Phil, whom he had known for five years and ate countless lunches with yet spent very little time with outside of work. He couldn’t hide his surprise at the request but, understanding the implication of its obscurity, obliged to step up to the opportunity. Still, Derek could not help but feel that a piece of his life was missing beneath the steeple ceiling.
It came first as a sound, the old double doors swinging open, the silhouette of a woman enveloped in the final flourish of sunset on the lake. In her hand she held a baseball.
“Mel?”
She stepped forward into the church wearing a light blue dress—one he knew was meant to remind him of when, out of pity, she took him to prom all those years ago. It did. “I missed out, Derek. I didn’t think anyone could see you like I did, what’s underneath, but of course I was wrong.” Tears streaked down her face but still she found the smile that completed her. “So here I am. Barging in before the door locks forever.”
The room was stunned—whatever protest brewing from Ash’s side of the church withheld for Derek’s response. They were waiting to see who they needed to pounce on: Derek and his estranged mystery-floosie or just the latter. As the collective gaze of those who had gathered fell on Derek, he felt more pressure than ever before. Curse his indecisiveness. Curse his dreams. Curse his lack of clear communication with Melissa, the trait that defined their complicated, uncertain dynamic above all else. For so long, before he had ever known what a V-Tuber even was, much less that there would ever be another woman for him. He wanted nothing more than to be her last resort. Now she was here, dropping in in her unexpected way, finally bearing the realization he had wished on stars and eyelashes and kitten’s whiskers she would come to. At this crossroads he stood silent, trying to imagine what awaited him down each of the forked paths, unable to parse feeling from reason or instinct from intelligence. Melissa laughed, again, at herself.
“Thought so. Yikes! Sorry, people. Please continue celebrating the happy couple.” She held up the ball. “Never faded. Just take this off my hands. It’s yours.”
She swung her arm in an underhand arc and lofted the ball down the aisle. It seemed to travel through the air in slow motion, as if Destiny had slowed the turn of the Earth for him to choose what was right: to watch it fall to the floor, or to listen to his heart and hold out his hands.
****
Arthur Aronstein is a writer from Wyoming. He has beaten Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice without dying (not even once). More of his work can be found in Citywide Lunch, Burial Magazine, Blood + Honey Lit, and Hobart. He thinks you should check out The Year of the Horse by Zachary Swezy on MCRB.