Games Boys Play: A Dark High School Romance (Troubled Playthings 2)

I had a feeling about what had happened when I had a note from my homeroom teacher to go see Ms. Miller.

As expected, when I sat down in her office she just looked at me for about a minute, as if she was hoping for me to cry or otherwise understand just how disappointed she was, and then she started with, “I’ve had someone come to me to talk about you, Steven.”

I rolled my eyes. “Tamika, right?”

“Tamara,” she corrected, and then quickly added, “I can’t tell you the details of other students’ visits with me, of course.” Pathetic.

“That girl was bothering me, Ms. Miller,” I spoke up before she could get going. “I—”

“And I can’t get involved in your interpersonal issues,” she interrupted. That wording did stop me. Had she already decided that Tamara was trouble before I got there? “I want to be clear here, there’s been no complaint made against you, but I wanted to pull you in here because obviously you are treading on very thin ice just having conflict with a female student.”

“My position’s the same with every woman, Ms. Miller. If she leaves me the fuck alone, I’ll leave her the fuck alone.”

She shook her head. “You know you can’t get away with being like that, Steven. If she—if someone had decided they wanted to make an official complaint about you, that would be the end. You’re eighteen years old; this is not some playground joke any more. What happens from here will follow you for the rest of your life.”

I didn’t say anything to that, because how could I? They’d all already decided what they thought of me and I’d wasted too much of my time already trying to turn around those opinions. People took one look at a situation and drew their conclusions about what was really going on, and they never looked back to see if they’d missed anything.

But even worse than the people who condemned quickly and moved on were the people who acted like they were doing you a favour for only partially condemning you to start with.

“I hope you appreciate I’ve stuck my neck out for you once, Steven, and I can’t do it again.” There it was. What I had been expecting the whole time.

“Never asked you to do that,” I said, “but fine.”

“Will you at least promise me you’ll try not to go looking for trouble?” she continued, as if she’d gotten the grovelling response she’d been aiming for. “Let your friends work out their own personal issues. The stakes are higher for you than for all of them.”

“Whatever.” She was right, but why should that mean I grovelled? It had never been my fault.

Probably she did take Tamara’s side in all of this. That was what women did: they supported other women to the bitter fucking end. Even when it made no sense.

Women are the fucking worst, the most stealthy malignant little bitches. I had no idea why Lucas was so keen to get in a relationship with one, he’d been more rational about it before. I could tell Callie was hiding a lot of things, too. Just the way her eyes were always shifting when she was around us. She didn’t like us to start with, and there was probably a lot more than that fact I couldn’t even guess at. If there was one thing I could find common ground with that Tamara on, it was thinking Callie was full of shit.

It was a pity I couldn’t trust her even a little. Maybe between the two of us we’d be able to get Callie back where she belonged: the hell away from me.

After she’d gone and pulled this stunt with Ms. Miller though, Tamara had better hope she had the sense to stay out of my way.

Dad was watching some racing replay on TV when I got home after my run, and Mum was nowhere to be seen because she was out with friends for dinner. That was great in my books. She’d never looked at me the same way after all the bullshit with Julia. She would never admit it, but she was just holding out for me to get the hell out of the house so she could stop thinking about me.

She never did get into being a mother and we both knew it. She just had me because my dad was keen on the idea of having a son, but once I was no longer a cute little toddler and started running and jumping and climbing everywhere she was fed up and wanted to be free to smoke and fuck around with her friends again. And all of that was before I became the sort of monster her friends were quietly sad for her even pushing out of her pussy.

At least on a day like this, we could avoid having to pretend we even tolerated one another and I could get straight onto what I was interested in: Wild Duty.

I’d been through a lot of games since I’d managed to save up enough money to get my really good rig, and I went back and forth on a few of them depending on what was new or had been updated recently, but Wild Duty was the game I’d play if I could only play one game for the rest of my life. It was half survival sim and half intricate war sim, and the two sides were complementary—a word I’d only ever found a use for in the context of Wild Duty—so time you spent on your own gathering resources and assembling structures had an effect in the battling half of the game.

I pulled on my headset. I was a top player at Wild Duty because unlike a lot of casuals, I understood the need to put in the mostly solitary hours base-building as well as running around hacking or shooting at enemies and gathering public glory. I liked doing my ‘solo time’, as we more enlightened players called it. (The fucking casuals preferred the term ‘solitary confinement’.)

But tonight, I wanted to talk to people. I wanted to yell at people. I wanted to be at the head of some dumb crusade to take out some other arsehole’s dumb video game base, celebrated by everyone else who was a part of my team… a fucking legend basically.

It helped that my friends list in Wild Duty were all people I didn’t know. Danger69 and I_Throw_Potatoes didn’t even live in the same country. ParasiteA did, same state even as we’d discovered during a private chat early on. She didn’t live around Hobart though, and she went to a very elite private school, which was a big fucking relief because I never wanted one of my friends I used to get away from school bullshit to turn out to be… that fucking Tamara, or something.

Oh yeah, ParasiteA is a chick. I’ve had my dad walk into my bedroom once or twice while I was talking to her and raise his eyebrow at me like he thought she was a phone sex girl or something, and t

he guys at school get really fucking weird if I say ‘my friend’ and it’s ‘she’ because I’m talking about Para. Because obviously I must hate women, right? Luc and Axel and Mic don’t know about Julia, I managed to keep that from everyone at school but fucking Ms. Miller, but they’ve all noticed I keep girls a bit more at a distance now compared to how things used to be.

It’s different with Para. We’ve never been in the same room and we probably never will unless she finally invites me to come take her away from her shitty family, so there’s no way for it to ever matter about her having tits or anything. We can just give a shit about one another as people, same as with anyone else in the game. And it’s a hell of a lot easier to give a shit about people when they’re in a game and not in your school or your daily life.

Para was the only one of my group online at that point, like me just filling in time until she got called down to dinner. I was on edge right away when she said hello though, because she sounded like she was hiding that she’d been crying. I was pretty familiar with that sound.

“Your dad again?”