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: : : SHE HARDLY EVER SEES PAUL anymore. He does telephone support for an IT company now, and since he's new he got stuck with the shift nobody wants, 5 in the evening to 2 in the morning. When she gets home from Delphi he's already left; she's gone to bed by the time he gets back. They communicate mainly through notes that they leave to one another on the kitchen counter. Sometimes, late at night, deep in her cave of dreams, she will hear a sound, far away, a door opening and closing softly, a floorboard creaking in the hallway. She will understand his presence from this and a comfort will pass through her. She will roll over and fall deeper into sleep.
That's if she doesn't go to Austin's place. She finds herself wanting to spend the night there more and more often. She can usually manage two or three nights during the course of an average week—any more than that, though, and Austin starts to get antsy, as though he's worried that she's going to lose her mind and demand his hand in marriage. Typical guy behavior. They all think they're such catches. She'd love to tell him that she's spending the night over there not because he's so great but because the alternative—going home and having to spend the evening with Marvin—is so lousy.
Marvin's acted kind of testy with her ever since she quit the Dungeons and Dragons campaign, eight fucking months ago. Things have settled into a kind of uneasy truce, but she still detects a certain edge in almost everything he says: he seems to select his words based solely on their potential to irritate. Are you finished in here? And when Paul's not around to mitigate things between them it only gets worse.
Tonight she's closed herself into her room and is instant messaging Maria, an old friend of hers from Detroit. In the other room Marvin and his friends are laughing raucously.
God, Lydia types, I wish they would shut up.
These new friends—don't get her started. Over the summer, Marvin joined up with a group of University of Chicago students involved in a live-action role-playing game with a gothic horror theme, and ever since then, her apartment has been a central hangout for a group of college kids who dress up like vampires. Dorks in velvet shirts; skanky bitches wearing black gowns and too much eye makeup. Lydia can't abide any of them: when she comes home, after working all day, and finds all of them sitting around in the living room, waving around their stupid cigarette holders, she has to choke back the urge to scream get out! All of you, out!
He doesn't even ask, she types. Send. He just assumes it'll be OK. Send. To have like eight people over. Send. Without asking.
Oh God, Maria writes back. That sounds horrible.
Marvin rattles the doorknob. —Are you using the phone? he says.
—Go away, she says.
—Victoria needs to make a call, he says.
—I'm busy, she says.
Austin will need a new roommate in February, when Craig moves out. That's four months away. She plans to be ready.
: : :
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Further Reading:
Recent input in the Narrative Technologies weblog:
:: Choice and Narrative In Massively Multiplayer Online Games by Cindy Poremba
[fresh as of 11/07/02]
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