“Yes, YES! Give it to me baby!”

  “Oh, fuck. Fuck fuck fuck!” I screamed, “Gods, this is tight!”

  “Fucking hell, you do know how to put out!” There was a terrible smirk on Winona’s lips. “I never knew you could be such an amazing slut while we’re gaming together!”

  “Healslut!” I shouted, correcting her. “And of course I would gravitate towards being Mercy! I do come from a medical background, after all!”

  “So you learnt how to work your way around a healing rod while being homeschooled too?”

  “Funny! I thought that was on your trailer park curriculum!”

  “Shut up!” she snapped. She didn’t have enough time to get a snippy retort in. Instead, she tapped frantically on her keyboard, desperately hoping it might charge her D.Va ultimate up faster. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck! Reaper and Sombra are encircling us!”

  “Yeah, I can see that! Just keep shooting at them while I push Mr Robot on a bit more!”

  That’s me. Nathan Connolly. Twenty years old. Video-game fanatic, currently majoring in Computer Science at Boston University, while also holding down a part-time job as one half of a rock duet called Irish Navajo, where I played bass.

  The girl I’m carrying in a game of Overwatch 2 is Winona Bluebird. Nineteen. Native American — a fierce, funny Navajo who’d come to Boston from Arizona with her parents. She was also the other half of Irish Navajo. The singer. A guitarist. And, infuriatingly, much better than me.

  We were roommates in college, and had been best friends since we were young. We were also an incredibly skint pair of heterosexual life partners, and had to make do with each other’s company for entertainment.

  Winona, being part of the cultured group of people known as the PC Master Race, had hooked her premium-sized tower up to the one crummy TV we had on hand, while I tapped furiously on my Nintendo Switch. We were both deep in the confines of the match.

  “You’re supposed to play to your strengths as a tank, not go against it!”

  “To hell with that!” she screamed at the screen. “I want the highest kill count possible!”

  “Then play a damage character next time!”

  “Too long of a waiting time!” she yelled, banging her shoulder into me as D.Va grazed past a teleporting Reaper. “Haha! In your face, Espa?ol edgelord!”

  Sombra, however, hadn’t lost focus. Once Winona’s Boosters had dried up, she was suddenly overwhelmed by Sombra’s hacking ability. She pressed down on E, but her Defence Matrix was disabled. The Mexican hacker unleashed a torrent of gunfire on the hapless Korean streamer, and suddenly Winona was out of her mech, before being taken out by a Reaper as he unleashed his ultimate Death Blossom to hold the centre.

  “Blast! Nathan, get over there and revive me NOW!”

  “Trying to get away from two different damage heroes at the moment,” I replied, switching from the Caduceus Staff to the small blaster that Mercy kept on hand. My ultimate was only at 36%, and there was only half a minute or so until the game was called and we lost. We still had to push the robot another fifty metres. The rest of our team had been killed beforehand and were now rushing down to group up again.

  Tracer. Ana. Widowmaker. Only one of them I could count on to dash-fly to — and that was Tracer. More gunfire came, and I could tell the French and Egyptian snipers were trying to pick the terrible twosome before they got to me.

  Then I heard it — the sharp crack of temporal jolts pulsing through the Hollywood streets. Tracer was on her way. Just another few seconds. She would charge at them, both blasters akimbo, using Recall if she had to buy us time.

  She might take down one of them, but both? I was horribly uncertain. I always became horribly uncertain when I realised something was out of my control, especially in a late-game matchup like this.

  “How much of your ultimate is charged?!?!”

  “Ninety-eight percent!”

  “Right! Once I revive you, rush to Mr Robot and use your ultimate to clear out any remaining enemies. Understood?”

  “Understood, Captain!”

  I gritted my teeth. The clock trailed further down. Time to transform into Rambo.

  I fired a few confusing shots at the Sombra tailing me, who backed off and hid behind a garbage can. She was low health, still reeling from the fight with Winona, and knew her surprise tactics wouldn’t work on me.

  Twenty-five seconds.

  I ran again, seeing Reaper shift into Wraith Form. He was invulnerable now, letting Sombra control Mr Robot as he looked to finish me off for good.

  Twenty-four seconds.

  I kept running and running. Where on Earth was that damned British lesbian Sonic the Hedgehog knock-off when you really needed her?

  Twenty-three seconds.

  Like a dark shadow, Reaper closed the distance. His Wraith Form dispersed, and now he too was shotguns akimbo. I was absolutely screwed. The last thing I would ever see would be D.Va’s body strewn over the eyesore of a pink MEKA chassis.

  Twenty-two seconds.

  Then I saw Tracer’s sharp hair come into view and mashed ZR. Mercy’s wings snapped open as Guardian Angel yanked me into the air, pulling me out of Reaper’s grasp as Tracer fired brazenly at him.

  I turned to Winona. “GET READY!” as I used Resurrection to bring her back into the fight. D.Va was back in the game.

  “GO! GO! GO!”

  We ran after Tracer, who’d been gunned down by a sneaky Bastion elsewhere on the map. Sombra, Reaper, and Bastion had clustered high in the centre, but their supports — Kiriko and Moira — still hadn’t arrived. Then more sniper fire rang out, and I saw on the feed that both supports had been picked off by a Widowmaker who was on fire this evening.

  The path ahead was clear. All we had to do was make sure D.Va’s ultimate went off without a hitch.

  “Ready?”

  Winona practically leapt in the air. “As I’ll ever fucking be, Nathan!”

  She Boosted straight into Mr Robot and jammed her finger into Q.

  “NERF THIS!”

  Ten seconds had passed since I’d revived Winona, but it felt like a millennium as the MEKA began to coalesce into a single bright star. Sombra, Reaper, and Bastion scattered, but it was too late. The explosion swallowed the robot whole, bathing the street in red and green as the trio went back into the changing rooms.

  “YEAH-YAH!” Winona roared excitedly.

  There were five seconds to go, but we wouldn’t need them in the end. Along with Ana and Widowmaker, we steadily pushed Mr Robot over the finish line until the match was called.

  “VICTORY!”

  Winona leapt into the air as she celebrated, crashing into me once she’d returned to reality and almost breaking my Nintendo Switch in the process. Her tailbone landed squarely on my knees, and I yelped out in pain.

  “Ow!”

  Still, I would take some sharp pain a over a broken Nintendo Switch any day of the week.

  “I can’t believe you still get that crappy A&W Root Beer to drink,” Winona murmured as she unplugged her tower from the twenty-two-inch TV. “Barq’s is where it’s at. I’ve told you that numerous times.”

  “Barq’s?” I repeated. “More like—”

  I started grunting and coughing as an invisible lump took hold in my throat, clutching it with both hands as though I were intentionally choking myself to death.

  “Barq’s is the absolute bottom of the barrel in root beer, Winona.”

  “Says you!”

  “Nuh-uh, says everybody else. That’s why you drink the one with caffeine — you’re not even in it for the root beer!”

  I rummaged my hands through the seams of the couch, trying to find the cartridge copy of Minecraft. This always happened. Winona would catch the Minecraft bug and suddenly we were scheming to win a Minecraft Hunger Games together while discussing all our latest plans for Irish Navajo to take over the world.

  Sometimes she’d get ecstatic from playing all the Miney-Crafta, reaching across for the songwriter’s notebook she always kept nearby to jot down new lyrics — most of them centred on hungry student life or the commiserations of not becoming a professional musician yet.

  “Okay, maybe I go against the grain when it comes to liquid poison,” she said, bundling the cables around her keyboard, “but I’d rather save the money and buy better snacks with it.”

  “Like Mars Bars?” I said. I kept trying to get her to try the Irish confectionery from back home. I was American, yes — but Irish-American. I’d spent so many months over in Ireland during summer holidays that I considered myself half-Irish as a result.

  “A poor man’s Milky Way,” she replied. “By the way, didn’t you tell me once you dressed up as a Mars Bar for Halloween?”

  I groaned, reluctantly nodding my head. “Yes. I did.”

  “Figures. You always raid them when we go to O’Brien’s together. Couldn’t keep it to yourself though.”

  “Yes, I just had to let everyone know how much of a Mars Bar weirdo I am in person.”

  “It must’ve been cringe-inducing for everyone involved.”

  “Hey! At least I’m better dressed now than whatever it is you’re wearing.”

  I really was better dressed. I was proudly wearing my WWE Jeff Hardy T-shirt, alongside some dark checkered trousers.

  Winona, well, had forgone the whole pants thing. Instead, she was just wearing one of those obnoxious anti–politically correct shirts that aggressive blue-collar workers wore when out and about in their day-to-day lives. The phrases “Make liberals cry again” and “Snowflakes melt under pressure” were printed in big, bold letters on the back.

  She had picked it up at the local Goodwill store. Someone had (hopefully) donated it after regaining some common sense and social awareness, and Winona had picked it out when she realised she needed a new pair of pyjamas but couldn’t afford them. Its size was 4XL, and it hung long and loose on her 5'6" frame, much like her own dark hair, which came down to her tailbone.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  I would kill to have such long, straight hair myself, but every time I tried to grow it out it turned into a horrible, curly mess. So I had to find consolation in buzzcuts instead.

  “The only thing you’re missing is the MAGA hat,” I whispered.

  “Shut up!” she giggled at me. I loved seeing her giggle, especially after this back-and-forth teasing we were doing. “Look, a girl has to cut corners to survive.”

  “You mean until our next concert?” I replied. We still hadn’t been booked since our last disastrous performance during a benefit concert for the Children of Palestine fund. One sharp-tongued concertgoer had said afterwards that if any Palestinian children heard us perform, they would gladly ask Israel to bomb them to oblivion. Ouch.

  Nonetheless, it hadn’t dampened either of our spirits about making a living in music, though I was still worried for Winona’s future. “What corners have you cut besides fishing through Goodwill for second-hand clothes?”

  “I’ll make lots of dreamcatchers and then sell them on eBay.”

  I put the Switch back in its case and set it on the table. “You said that yesterday around the same time too,” I murmured. “And the day before that. And the day before that. Shouldn’t you be studying instead for a degree?”

  “Weaving and music-making are my study methods, Nathan.” Winona was clever enough to major in Native American Studies — her essays consisted of regurgitating the same historical lessons her own parents had taught her long before she’d ever seen the inside of a classroom.

  “There’s enough cheap Native tat on eBay, Winona.” It was true. It would be much like me trying to pass off Guinness beer bottles as antique items to the plethora of Plastic Paddies I shared a heritage with. “Nobody is going to buy another dreamcatcher. Get a proper job, please?”

  “Well, it’s not like I don’t have other commitments in life too,” Winona replied. “Besides, you haven’t touched that guitar of yours since our last concert two weeks ago.”

  “I don’t have to practise. The skills are naturally baked into me. Like making tea.”

  She gave my left arm a slight jab. “Natural, my ass. You’re just so used to making me honey tea when I’m sick. My butler, in other words.”

  “Hush, hush. Time to see what’s on TV.” I reached across for the remote and pressed a few buttons. We didn’t have cable, but really, why did we need it? I was someone much happier with less — and with the freedom to move — rather than doing a thousand different things at once.

  I flicked through the channels, all of them public TV, most airing the same syndicated repeats of Judge Judy and Malcolm in the Middle.

  The less said about Judge Judy Sheindlin the better, but I liked Malcolm in the Middle and was tempted to settle into another bumbling episode about teenage life in the early 2000s when something caught my eye on the local news channel.

  “Oooh, look!” Winona mockingly pointed out. “It’s Ms Felicity Briggins!”

  “Brigham,” I corrected her. “Ms Felicity Brigham.” Like Winona, Felicity was someone I’d grown up with too. We all went to the same schools, but we’d never gotten past the friendly-acquaintance stage, even as we ran in the same circles.

  Nonetheless, I’d always been smitten with her. Unlike my Irish-American background or Winona’s Native roots, Felicity was from a deeply cloistered New England WASP family. She was rich, beautiful, deeply intelligent and — as the reason for the interview — quite sporty.

  She was the top-seeded female fencer in New England, and it looked likely she was set to become one of the three women on the U.S. épée team at the next Olympics. She chatted in good spirits with the interviewer, and my eyes suddenly drifted into a matching pair of ruby-coloured hearts.

  The crush I had on her should’ve fizzled out at the end of high school, but she had enrolled at Boston University, taken a Computer Science elective, and become a classmate of mine once again. I was in a haze for days whenever she came and left the classroom.

  “Whatever,” Winona said, rolling her eyes. “I’m not sure why you’d get so defensive about her honour.”

  “I’m not getting defensive,” I replied, reaching into the mini-fridge plugged in beside the couch. Our kitchen was so small we could barely fit a table, let alone a normal-sized fridge. “I’m just making sure everything is accounted for, as Felicity would say.”

  I sat back down and motioned for Winona to move over and huddle with the pillow on the other end. Felicity was all smiles while being interviewed at the Boston University Fencing Club when the interviewer asked what made her so successful.

  “Being in Daddy’s pocket and not having to juggle ten part-time jobs while balancing a college degree like the rest of us,” Winona muttered, clearly in the mood for backbiting.

  “No, no — it’s nothing to do with my generational wealth,” Felicity said. “I just keep myself busy every day. I have to make sure everything is accounted for.”

  Winona stuck her tongue out at me. “See?”

  I cracked open the can. “What?”

  “Repeating all her pitch-perfect sound bites like that,” Winona smiled slyly. “It’s almost like you have a crush on her or something.”

  “That’s not true!” I stammered.

  “It obviously is,” Winona smirked. “You follow after her like some deranged K-pop stan!”

  I had only listened to one K-pop song in my life. It was LE SSERAFIM’s Perfect Night during their first collaboration with Overwatch. I’d left the main menu on numerous times and listened to it play, contorting my body in all these strange ballet moves that caused Winona to giggle from the kitchen table.

  Again, I liked it when she giggled. I liked making a fool of myself and tearing my dignity to shreds if it meant Winona was smiling. I had tried to do much the same with Felicity whenever I was in her company, but the only response I got back were furrowed brows and a side-eye glance.

  No matter. One day Felicity Brigham would soon see the joy of Nathan Connolly and be enraptured by him. It was only a matter of time until I’d finished the development of my indie game Gerry Adams: Stick ’Em Up! — a side-scrolling beat-’em-up where Gerry Adams dons a Batman-esque persona to take out the last remaining vestiges of the Orange Order in Northern Ireland.

  The idea was good, but it would only take me so far. I realised I needed to add more characters from Irish history to ensure there was more replay value. Once I made my fortune, I could even escape this crumbling apartment and smile triumphantly as Felicity clamoured to be with me and my wealthy ways.

  “I am not a K-pop stan!” I grunted. “Only a K-pop stan would know what a stan means, anyhow.”

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” Winona pressed the cushion closer to her chest. “You have it bad for Felicity. I know it!”

  My voice went low. I grumbled and mumbled out scattered words here and there. This always happened when I felt pressed into a corner, caught in the web of my own lies. I rustled my hands through my hair.

  “Well, I…”

  “And that’s it for all of us from the Boston University Fencing Club!” the interviewer chirped in that strangely optimistic tone that would be considered off-putting anywhere else in polite society.

  Felicity gave another hearty smile, her glistening white teeth emanating brightly through the small TV screen. My heart melted into a puddle.

  Winona sighed in obvious displeasure.

  “Typical.”

  The news broadcast moved on to another story, this one centred around an arts-and-crafts fair organised by the Boston University Artist Society.

  “Huh. Slow news day,” I said. “You know what they say about an arts degree?”

  “I’m studying an arts degree, Nathan.” Winona plugged her ears, hoping I didn’t go into another tirade about how an arts degree wasn’t only worth the bathroom rolls you wiped yourself with — but I didn’t.

  Something far more interesting to tease Winona with had caught my eye.

  “Huh, isn’t that Benjamin Renzetti?”

  Winona immediately let go of her tight grip around her ears. “Where?!?”

  Like Felicity, he too was on TV, being interviewed by another smiley reporter who seemed strangely enthusiastic about being among hungry art students and their stands in a makeshift gymnasium.

  Benjamin didn’t quite fit the mould of a hungry art student, however. He was also from a wealthy WASP background, but whereas Felicity excelled in every aspect of her life, Benjamin was a maestro in one: cartoons.

  I’d first come across him not in school, but on sites like Newgrounds.com or DeviantArt, where he shamelessly posted his early fan art among piles of fetish material and unhinged political rants that made up ninety percent of the submissions on those sites.

  Like Winona, he too had moved to Boston with his parents from elsewhere — Alaska, originally — and had never quite gotten used to the heatwaves we suffered through on the East Coast.

  It left him indoors most of the time, turning him pale, his dark hair grown out to shoulder length, his eyes sunk deep from endless hours spent drawing and scribbling in the dead of the night.

  People who didn’t like him — myself included, I must admit — thought he was a vampire who had brought himself to life with the skill of his own draughtsmanship, but Winona had always been smitten with him and his cartoonist ways.

  I didn’t blame her. Whatever I might’ve felt for him, he was still a good cartoonist. He’d enrolled in the university’s Fine Arts degree just for fun, but he wouldn’t even need the so-called toilet-paper degree, since major studios were already scouting him and that creative brain of his. He’d been commissioned to do book covers and the like, and already had a very successful webcomic to his name.

  I knew deep in my heart that my dislike of him came from deep-seated envy. I had always wanted to be good at art, but it had never come to be. No matter how hard tried, I couldn’t even sketch a straight line from memory. Seeing Benjamin blaze past me didn’t help me feel any less self-conscious. So I’d stuck with game development instead of pursuing my dreams of becoming a cartoonist and working for Cartoon Network.

  Benjamin was prattling on about some nonsense — how it was supposedly more difficult to get cartoon anatomy right than human anatomy — and Winona hung onto every word. I elbowed her to get her attention, but it didn’t work. So I waved a hand in front of her face, but that turned out to be a bust as well.

  Then I simply decided to pinch her on the thigh, and that worked horribly well.

  “Ow.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t get what?” Winona said, soothing her now-reddening thigh.

  “Him. I don’t get his appeal.”

  “Well, he’s great at drawing, for one.”

  “Is that enough of a reason for you to drool over him, though?”

  Winona sputtered out the loathsome Barq’s gruel she was in the midst of drinking.

  “I’m not drooling over him!”

  “You are now,” I pointed out.

  She wiped away the caffeine froth that had bubbled out of her brown nostrils with a handkerchief. She always had one on hand for some reason. I tried to rationalise it — maybe it had something to do with women of the West always carrying handkerchiefs back when the frontier was being civilised. Winona, for her part, had always said it was something Navajo women did.

  “He’s very…” she chose her words carefully, “handsome.”

  “He has big black eye bags, Winona,” I replied.

  She waved her hand dismissively at me. “And he’s soft-spoken. And kind. And he knows the right buttons to push when talking to women as well.”

  “You mean you don’t like my unhinged rants about how horrible the syntax of C++ is and how the tech community would be much better off without it?”

  “No, no. I do. It’s just… a woman would rather hear someone like Benjamin gush on about art instead.”

  I slumped down in the seat. Benjamin really was gushing over his favourite cartoonists right now in his interview: Chris Reccardi. Lynne Naylor. Danny Antonucci. Mr Warburton. And the man who shared his own namesake, Rob Renzetti.

  They were all my favourite cartoonists as well.

  I turned back to Winona, still lost in a dreamy daze, her right hand wandering slowly down her legs. She was growing lustful. Do women have no shame?

  “You’re definitely drooling over him.” Then I lowered my voice to a whisper. “And you’re getting wet too.”

  It snapped her out of her trance. “Okay. I have a thing for him. Happy?”

  “You have it bad!”

  “Of course I have it bad. But I’m not going to pretend that I don’t — unlike you and your weird fixation on Ms Briggins!”

  “Ms Brigham.”

  “See? It’s unhealthy to be obsessed with a girl who doesn’t even think about you.”

  She put the can of Barq’s aside on the table. Benjamin’s interview finished up with him admitting that the benefits of the fair were going to the children of Palestine — and also, as a gesture of goodwill, mentioning the terrible performance he’d heard one night by some band called Irish Navajo in a coffee shop. Winona pretended not to hear that part.

  “You need to cut that obsession of yours out. It’s not like she’ll fall into your lap anytime soon.”

  “Oh? You don’t think so?”

  “Not as you are now, no,” she answered, peering at me with a sceptical eye. I was dressed in a faded Linkin Park shirt and dark denim jeans — my fashionable go-to.

  “Ms Fancy Fencer won’t give you the time of day if you continue to do all your shopping at Hot Topic.”

  A lightbulb went off in my head. “So… you’ll help me then?”

  Winona raised an eyebrow. “Help you with what?”

  “Win Felicity’s heart!” I pressed my hands to my lips — way too girly and feminine and suddenly over the top for a man of my stature and riveting successes as a game developer in life.

  Winona’s eyes widened. For a moment, I even thought I saw a look of deep distress within those cobalt-blue eyes of hers. But then she shook her head, and suddenly she was smiling again.

  “Sure. Sure!” She was ecstatic. “If it means I don’t have to see any more of your slobbering on the couch, then I’m all for it.”

  She reached across for my hands and dragged me up, moving us away from the couch and into the space between the living room and the en-suite kitchen. Silently, she held out both arms in a horizontal line, and I did the same. Then she stepped around behind me, mimed pulling out an imaginary measuring tape, and took in all my very average measurements.

  “Look at the state you’re in,” she tsked. “No girl is going to give you the time of day dressed like this. Especially Ms Fancy Fencer.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I countered. “I’m sure Picasso would just love to turn you into his muse once he sees you walking the campus hallways in that thing.”

  She held a hand to her heart in mock surprise. “I never thought you were capable of such demeaning comments, Nathan.”

  “Puh-lease,” I said. “At least I’ve developed a smart niche with band T-shirts. What man is going to take notice of a girl dressed in trucker shirts and tweed vests?”

  “So you know what drives men crazy?”

  “Obviously. I’m a man.” I let my arms flap back down to my waist again. “…And I’m pretty sure I can get Picasso to fall for you first.”

  “Really?”

  There was a pause. For some reason, I wanted to take what I’d said back. It wasn’t because it wasn’t true — I just wished I hadn’t said it. That’s what happens when I suddenly grow confident and comfortable in my own skin: I end up saying things I’ll deeply regret minutes, not hours, later.

  But I couldn’t back down now. I had to save face. Especially with Winona sizing me up like a mongrel she was on the fence about adopting or not.

  “I’m certain of it. Maybe we should bet to see who gets there first.”

  “Sounds fun.” She grinned. “The loser gets their long-term crush. And the winner gets…”

  “Doesn’t sound much like a loss,” I pointed out.

  “…The winner gets…” Winona trailed off, lost for words. She glanced around our apartment. It wasn’t spotless, of course, but it was hardly the nightmare of living with a hoarder. Who would want to ask for a week’s worth of cleaning services as their prize?

  I held out my hand. “We’ll figure the prize out when we get there. Deal?”

  Winona took it with the firmest handshake a petite Native woman could give.

  “Deal!”