The moment I finished, I buried my face in my hands. Why. Why, why, why. I thought I’d grown out of that. But the minute anyone asked me about games, all my understanding of appropriate social customs went right out the window. I became a one-woman blabbermouth and info dumper. I was a fool.
But my sister went “Huh.” Like she was actually listening. “Okay. I’ve seen that online, so I’m down to give it a shot. Where’s the thingy you play it on?”
“You mean, the console? It’s right there. Give me a sec.”
I unplugged it from my TV and brought it to my sister’s room. Her room was a lot girlier than mine. For starters, she had so many clothes they couldn’t all fit in the closet. There were hanger racks everywhere. The bookshelf on her desk had a bunch of books about badminton, and everywhere you looked, you’d see plushies of this chonky little wolf dude. He was her favorite character.
Huh. I hadn’t been in my sister’s room for some time, come to think of it. Not since summer break, when all her friends were here. My sister barged into my room whenever she needed me, but I basically never went into hers.
After I plugged the console into her PC monitor—I don’t know why she even had a PC; she barely used it—the screen flickered to life. I made a new account and passed my sister the controller.
“How do I play this?” she asked.
“Start with the tutorial, I guess.”
I sat next to her and showed her the controls. My sister had touched a video game or three in her life, so she picked it up pretty quickly. It reminded me of teaching Satsuki-san to play that one game.
“Okay, I get it,” my sister said. “So now I do a 4v4 team game, right?”
“Yup, exactly.”
“Everyone’s gonna have to carry me, though. They’re probably going to get mad at me.”
“Yeah, it’s good mental training,” I told her. “The more you play, the better your fortitude. Pretty soon, nothing will faze you.”
“Said the girl who’s fazed by everything.”
Well. Couldn’t argue that one. Maybe I was better off shutting up.
Just then, I noticed a couple of bandages on my sister’s right hand.
“Did you hurt yourself?” I asked.
“Yeah, kinda,” she said. “It’s just a scrape.”
Huh. Okay. I decided not to press the issue and turned my attention to the game. She charged into casual match after casual match, and every time she did, the expression on her face morphed into a closer approximation of a frown.
“I’m not hitting anything,” she complained.
“You should switch to one of the beginner-friendly weapons.”
“But this one’s cute!”
“Then I fear you have no choice but to obtain the skill to back up your conviction, grasshopper,” I said, stating the blatantly obvious.
My sister gave me a Look. What was that for?
“Like you’re so cool,” she said. “I’d like to see you do better. Can you walk your talk?”
“I’ll walk your talk!”
I yanked the controller out of her hands and pulled up the settings. Once I had my usual setup, it was on. She crossed the line, and it was time to show her what I was made of.
I charged into battle, armed with that stupid gun she insisted on using. Within moments, my sister began oohing and aahing in spellbound admiration of my miraculous feats of video gaming wrought from hours of diligent training. Heh heh heh. How’d she like these apples, huh?
“I’ve never seen you in the zone when you’re playing one of these gun games,” my sister said. “I had no idea…that you could be such a creep.”
“What was that?!”
If I’d sucked at it, she would have been like, “Called it.” But because I kicked major butt, she insulted me! There was no winning with this girl. Seriously, what was I supposed to do?
Before long, the timer beeped, and the match was up. I brandished my pointer finger at the score table and my double-digit kill count. And, since my sister wasn’t giving it the attention it deserved, I grabbed my phone and texted her a bajillion pictures of the screen. So there!
“Okay, okay, I get it already!” she said. “Yes, you’re amazing. Alert the media!”
I flip, flipped my hair a few times, put her wack-ass settings back, and handed her the controller. “If you keep it up, you’ll be playing just like me in no time,” I said. “Maybe. If you’re lucky. Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, you know? Good luck, champ.”
“Can you literally shut up?”
My sister gritted her teeth, vexed at the poignancy of this quotation from one Amaori Edison Renako. Ahh. Now that was what I liked to see.
Satisfied that I’d flaunted my senior sister superiority, I stood up. “Give it your best shot. If you get bored, I’ve got other games you can try.”
“Mmrgh,” she grumbled. “I’ll stick with this one for a little longer. Thanks for playing with me, I guess.”
“Oh, uh, yeah. Any time.”
Just before I crossed the threshold, I looked back at my sister sitting on the floor in a cross-legged slouch. She leaned in toward the screen, a cushion in her arms. Then she noticed me watching her and turned to look at me.
“What’s up?” she said.
She blinked at me a couple of times with those beautiful big eyes. Her long hair was silky smooth and as neat as the day she came home from the hair salon. Her skin was great; her figure was better. She was gorgeous. The definition of a girl who had everything.
I shook my head. “Nothing. See you,” I said.
I closed the door behind me and sighed. Ultimately, that cleared up nothing. I didn’t know how to address the elephant in the room with my sister. All that? That was just me showing off my gamer prowess. But this wasn’t the time for one-upping her. God, I could not have been worse at social interactions.
I felt gross inside. I dragged myself back to my room, feeling like I was fleeing a dungeon without finding so much as a treasure chest.
Remember when I said earlier that my sister just, like, picked things up quickly? That’s true, but if you were to ask me, her biggest asset was her, well, “perfect example of a typical human being” vibe. She must have gotten that from Mom. She always knew what was right and wrong, and whenever I opened my big mouth and blurted out some weird stuff, she had no hesitation in calling me out. I’d been getting stung by truth bullets, courtesy of my judgmental little sis, for years now. It was like living in a beehive.
But at the same time, she also taught me a lot. Especially about social norms. Like there was a time she told me, “Hey, you know what? You need to say thank you when someone does you a favor, no matter how small. Otherwise, even if they like you a lot, there’s gonna be a little voice at the back of their mind going, ‘Damn. What was the point if she doesn’t even care?’” That was one of many special lessons she gave me during my makeover from sucky to social. She always started with “Hey, you know what?” She chastised me a lot. But, admittedly, she also taught me a lot of really valuable things about social interactions. Most of which had sunk in by now.
See, even if my sister had been totally run-of-the-mill and talentless, she would still have that typicality. I would have respected her mightily just for that. But she had a buttload of talent on top of that. And she kept rubbing that in my face, the jerk.
But that’s what convinced me that something was wrong. She was clearly trying to avoid acknowledging some big, unknown issue. And that’s just not how my sister rolled.
✦ ✦ ✦
She would go back to school today, right? She had to. Or maybe tomorrow. That mantra rolled through my mind for a good three days, but my sister continued to show no sign of wanting to go back to school.
Granted, she wasn’t just holing up in her room all day. She still showed up for dinner and did her chores and stuff. My parents kept telling her they were here if she wanted to talk, but that didn’t get a peep out of her. Every time I heard one of those conversations, I felt an ache in the pit of my stomach. I knew how much stress a depressed truant could introduce into a household because, oh yeah, I’d done it first! I knew my sister wasn’t trying to open old wounds, but that didn’t make it any easier on me. My mental health took a nosedive. I felt like I couldn’t catch a break.