Life is Not a Game

CHARLOTTE (CHARLIE)

I stepped into the arena, a seven-foot orc clad in full battle armor, ready to blast away my opponents with the help of my three trusted compatriots.

We’d fought together for years now, clawing our way to the top together. I would trust any of them with my life. I did trust them with my life. They’d saved me more times than I could count, just as I’d saved them.

Well, I would have been ready to cut down my opponents if the other three would log on.

“I am so sorry, Mars. I’m logging on now. Coach ran practice long,” my best friend, Jupiter, or Jup for short, told me over our voice chat.

“Nice of you to finally join—What are you wearing?”

In the place of my best friend, who normally played as a dark elven character, was a four-foot-tall, bright-blue bunny, and not even a muscular, scary bunny—a straight-up fluffy Easter bunny.

“Ah, shoot. My sister must have been screwing with my settings. Be right back.”

He quickly logged off before logging back on in his standard elf attire.

“Don’t mention this to the other guys,” Jup pleaded, but I was too busy cracking up to even give him an answer.

It took another few minutes before Pluto, our third teammate, logged in. He usually played a female character, a voluptuous human with long red hair who, today, was wearing a glittery red dress. I normally didn’t think anything was odd about his character, but the dress and hair combination had me cracking up even harder.

“Hey, Jessica, you just missed Roger,” I barely managed to get out between laughing fits.

“What?” Plut asked, confused.

“Don’t even go there,” Jupiter replied with a scowl, and I just continued to laugh.

“Hey, what’s so funny, guys?” Neptune, the final member of the team, asked. I didn’t even notice him logging on.

I turned to wave him off, knowing my best friend might actually murder me if I ratted him out, but was stopped in my tracks by his character. Like Plut, he played a well-endowed female, but his was blonde—and currently not wearing clothes.

“Um, how did you manage to strip your character down to very skimpy lingerie?” I asked.

“Where there is a will, there is a way, good sir,” he replied with a smirk.

“Anyway, now that we are all here, are you guys ready to start the battle?” Jup asked.

The game we were currently hooked on, Strike from Above, was a first-person shooter, or FPS, with an added RPG, or role-playing game, aspect. It was a four-player team game, so the four of us teamed up to form The Romans, a nod to our Roman-god-inspired names.

We’d started out by playing the RPG side, but quickly maxed out our characters and weapons. With nothing left to complete on the RPG side, we’d switched to the PVP, or player versus player, mode. We now competed in PVP e-sports tournaments.

We did pretty well. Currently, we were ranked fifth in the country, but that was mainly because we’d only competed in the online side of the game. We hadn’t been able to participate in the in-person tournaments, mainly because my parents were busy and didn’t want me traveling alone.

Our sponsor was trying to arrange for us to attend an upcoming one, since they really wanted us in it. I thought there was one next year near where Pluto lived. I was hoping Mom would let me go, since his parents had offered to host me.

The biggest issue was we would have to compete in a regional tournament first to qualify, and none of us were in the same area geographically.

Mom knew the parents of all three of my teammates, since she was a lawyer and reviewed our contracts before we signed with our current sponsor and agent. I made sure to tell Mom not to reveal my secret when talking to them.

The guys didn’t actually know that I was a girl.

It was a bit strange, considering Jupiter and I had been best friends for seven years, but gender never really came up in our conversations. They all just assumed I was a guy, and I didn’t contradict them. I really didn’t want them to treat me differently.

These days, I used a voice modulator when we chatted, so my voice sounded deeper. That wasn’t necessary when we were ten, but I definitely sounded more like a seventeen-year-old girl than a boy now.

So, in our team, Jupiter—or Tony—was the leader. I was the strategist and best sniper. The guys all called me Charlie, if they used my real name. In real life, I’d stopped going by Charlie a few years ago. These days, I was known as Charlotte, but of course I never told them about the change.

Neptune, a.k.a. Cory, and Pluto, a.k.a. Frank, were the other two members of the team. They were better at mid-range and close combat, which was good since we couldn’t all be snipers.

Despite knowing the guys’ real names, while playing the game we only used our gamer tags. We rarely used real names, except when talking with our parents.

I didn’t talk to Neptune or Pluto much outside the game, other than to coordinate practice. Jupiter, however—I talked to him almost all the time. He was probably the sweetest guy I knew, but he seemed to be the opposite of me. From his texts, I gathered that he was super popular and played football.

Me, I still couldn’t talk to people in real life. And by this, I mean I literally couldn’t open my mouth and make sound when I was with strangers. So I spent most of my time studying.

“Charlotte, dinner’s ready,” I heard Margot call from downstairs. She’d been my nanny for as long as I could remember. I kept asking Mom why I still had a nanny, given I was seventeen, but she seemed to feel that Margot was family now and didn’t want to let her go.

“I’ll be right there!” I called back.

“Dude! Mute your mic before you yell in our ears!” Nep scolded me.

“Sorry, guys. I forgot. But I gotta go eat,” I said.

“See, that’s why I always keep my mic muted. I’d hate for you to accidentally hear the moaning coming from my room as we play,” Nep replied.

“That’s gross and not something I wanted to imagine,” I retorted.

“Lots of late nights with your hand?” Jup teased.

“Very funny. For your information, my hand’s feeling a little neglected, with all the hot girls throwing themselves at me,” Nep bragged.

So, Neptune was a bit of a—well, a massive player. Like Jup, he played sports, but he let the popularity thing go to his head. He claimed he kept himself muted, but he seemed to “accidentally unmute” a lot. I thought he wanted us to hear what he was doing. Gross.

“So, what’s for dinner, rich kid?” Jup teased.

Yeah, he was my best friend, but he loved to tease people whenever he got the chance.

“I’m not sure, but it smells like some sort of pasta,” I replied.

“I am so jealous. My mom’s been so busy lately that she hasn’t cooked in ages. What I wouldn’t do for some Italian,” Pluto lamented.

“Sorry, Plut. Anyway, bye, guys. I’ll be back on in an hour and a half or so,” I told them before signing off the chat and going AFK, or away from keyboard.

When I got downstairs, I noticed that Margot had left a plate of lasagna for me but had put the rest into the fridge and already cleaned up. I grabbed the plate and went to the kitchen table to sit and eat—alone, like always.

The fridge started to hum quietly. “Hey, Fridge, how was your day? Same old same old?”

On cue, the ice maker rattled, and I said, “Oh, that’s too bad. Yeah, my day at school kind of sucked too.”

My voice sounded weird in the quiet kitchen, so I stopped talking.

Besides, I was a little ashamed to admit, even to the fridge, how bad it felt sometimes to see other kids whispering and pointing at me when they thought I wasn’t looking. It happened once or twice almost every single day. I told myself I was used to it, but I didn’t see how you ever got used to something like that.

Maybe I was so socially awkward because I’d never had any real social interaction—but practicing on the appliances wasn’t going to help.

Having Margot around didn’t help much, either. Margot acted more like a servant. She didn’t actually communicate with me person to person. Mom and Dad thought we sat down together and played board games and cards. That was part of Margot’s job description originally, after all. But Margot had given up on all that years ago.

I’d never told Mom and Dad how Margot went straight into her room and closed the door the minute she was done with her chores. I didn’t want to make them feel bad—or get Margot in trouble.

I barely saw my parents. I loved them, and I loved how successful they were, but I would rather them be home more than be the best in their fields.

Really, the only social interaction I had at all was over video game chat or text messaging with Jup.

Thank goodness I had him, or I’d be completely alone.