"Hey man, you wanna come over? Got the new World of Orcette expansion. It's, like, insane."
The kid on the porch was chubby, glasses, green t-shirt with a pixelated dragon on the front. Erik Loafer. My best friend, apparently. He was bouncing on his heels and holding a bag of chips under one arm and he looked exactly like his game sprite come to life, right down to the part where he was thrilled to see me at nine in the morning on a summer day to talk about a game I'd never played.
"Yeah," I said. "Give me like twenty minutes?"
"Cool cool cool. I'll set up the LAN. Mom made muffins."
He was already heading back across the lawn. I watched him go. Chubby legs, quick walk, more enthusiasm than he had room for. He'd been this kid's best friend since childhood and I didn't have any of the memories. Erik didn't know. Erik would never know. I just had to not be weird about it.
I closed the front door.
"That was Erik," Debbie said from the kitchen. She'd heard the whole thing. "It's good that he's checking on you, honey. You should go."
"I will. Just gotta get ready."
She nodded and turned back to the sink. I stood in the hallway for a second. The entrance was small, wood-paneled, a coat hook on one wall and a hat-rack on the other. Shoes by the door. A framed photo of a man I'd never met in a fishing vest, smiling, holding up a catch. Frank. He looked like a decent guy. The kind you'd trust with your money and your wife and who'd get hanged for both.
The hat-rack had a scarf, a baseball cap, and a small key hanging from a hook on the side. Brass, old-looking. The attic key. I knew it was there because I'd followed a walkthrough that said "pick up the small key from the entrance" and I'd clicked on it without reading what it unlocked. The attic. Frank's keepsake box. A photo, another key, a lockbox code. Evidence that eventually brought down the mayor.
I picked it up. Turned it over in my fingers. Small, cold, the teeth worn smooth on one side. I could go up there right now. Open the attic, find the box, start the evidence chain on Day 1 instead of whenever the game was supposed to trigger it.
I put it back on the hook.
I knew the key existed and I knew the word "lockbox" and that the mayor was involved. The rest was a blur of walkthrough steps I'd followed without understanding. Going up there now would be picking up a puzzle piece without the picture on the box.
Not yet.
I checked the garage. Side door off the kitchen, down one step. It was dim and smelled like motor oil and cut grass. A lawnmower against the wall, a shovel, a drill on the workbench next to a coffee can full of screws. A stool in the corner. That was the other thing I'd need for the attic. The stool to reach the hatch. I left it. I went back inside.
Upstairs. Jenny's door was closed. The bass was still thumping, the same song or a different one with the same beat. I stood outside her door for a second. In the game, her door was the one you couldn't open until you'd progressed far enough in her route. In real life, it was just a closed door with music behind it and a twenty-two-year-old who thought I was a loser and there was no dialogue option I could click to change that faster than just being a different person than the one she expected.
I went to my room. Found my phone on the desk next to the broken PC. Cracked screen, old model, barely functional. I thumbed through it. Contacts: Debbie, Erik, and a group chat labeled "summer crew" with names I'd recognize when I met them. No social media apps. A few blurry photos of a dog I didn't recognize.
Wallet was on the dresser. Inside: a school ID with a face that was mine now and a name I'd need to get used to, a library card, and nothing else. No cash. No debit card.
Zero dollars. Zero stats. In a town where Russian mobsters were going to start showing up at the door demanding money from a grieving woman who was going to take out a mortgage she couldn't afford just to make them go away.
I sat on the edge of the bed. The same bed I'd woken up dead in an hour ago.
Okay. Priorities. The game had four stats: strength, dexterity, charisma, intelligence. Strength came from the gym with a guy named Kevin. Dexterity from Muay Thai with a trainer who charged payment in panties, which was the most video game shit I'd ever heard. Charisma from rap battles in the park at night. Intelligence from upgrading this broken PC and playing some maze game. Money came from pizza delivery once I got a job at Tony's.
I needed all of it. I needed stats to pass the gates that blocked the routes, and I needed the routes because the routes were the whole point and also because several of them involved keeping Debbie's house from being repossessed. The main story and the harem weren't separate tracks. They ran through each other.
My old body could have handled this in its sleep. Gym was gym. Confidence was confidence. Money was hustle. But this body was eighteen and soft and my voice cracked when I swore and the last time these arms lifted anything heavy it was probably a textbook.
Foundation was there, though. I'd kept fit in my old life. The muscle memory wouldn't translate but the discipline would. I'd just be starting from zero instead of from wherever the kid had been, which was also zero, so at least we were even.
I stood up. Put the wallet back. Pocketed the phone.
Downstairs, Debbie was wiping the counter. She looked up when I came down.
"Going to Erik's?"
"Yeah."
"Take a jacket, honey. It gets cool in the evenings."
It was summer. In a coastal town. I grabbed a hoodie from the coat hook because she needed me to and she smiled and the smile was less wrong than the last one.
The walk to Erik's house was nothing. Next door, literally. Same style suburban house, different color, a garden gnome by the front steps that was missing one ear. I rang the bell.
The door opened and Tammy Johnson was standing there.
Purple tank top and black leggings, chestnut hair pulled up with a purple band. Late thirties, maybe forty, slim but with curves that the leggings were doing nothing to hide, and she had freckles across her cheekbones and green eyes and she smelled like coconut. Coconut lotion, warm, post-shower. It hit me when she leaned in to open the door wider and the air carried it across the porch and I stood there. Just stood there.
I'd played her route twice. The yoga scenes were good. I'd seen her in every position the developers had animated. I'd thought she was hot on a screen and I was wrong because a screen doesn't smell like coconut and a screen doesn't look at you with those green eyes and a screen doesn't squeeze your shoulder with a warm hand through a hoodie.
"Hi, sweetie," she said. "How are you doing? We've been thinking about you."
The line of her collarbone above the tank top. A freckle just below her throat that the game hadn't rendered. Her hand on my shoulder. I needed to say words.
"I'm good, Mrs. Johnson. Thanks." Small crack. "Nice house."
I complimented the house. The house. I was looking at a woman who smelled like a tropical vacation and I complimented her house. The house that looked exactly like my house except a different color.
"Oh, thank you, hon! Come in, come in. Erik's upstairs. I made banana nut muffins if you're hungry." She stepped aside and I walked past her and the coconut was stronger in the close space of the doorway and her hip was right there as I turned sideways to fit past and I kept my eyes forward and my hands in the hoodie pockets and Erik's voice came from upstairs:
"Dude! Get up here! I already loaded the save!"
I went upstairs. The hallway was short. Erik's door was open. Tammy's door was closed, a damp towel draped over the doorknob, and the whole hallway smelled like coconut and the shower had been running recently and I kept walking.
Erik's room was exactly what I expected. Gaming PC taking up half the desk, the other half covered in trading card binders and empty energy drink cans. Posters on the wall: World of Orcette, some anime girl with improbable proportions, a movie I didn't recognize. There was a hentai collection poorly hidden behind a stack of textbooks on the bookshelf. A bag of chips was already open on the desk.
"Sit sit sit." Erik shoved a beanbag chair toward me with his foot. He was already at the PC, clicking through menus. "Okay so they added this whole new continent and there's these dragon riders and you can tame them if you-"
He kept talking. I sat in the beanbag and it was comfortable and Erik's voice washed over me, excited and detailed and going faster than his mouth could keep up, and I let him talk. I didn't know anything about World of Orcette. I didn't care about World of Orcette. But Erik cared, and Erik was my best friend in this world, and he was a good kid who'd come to check on me the morning after my dad's funeral, and that was worth sitting in a beanbag chair and hearing about dragon riders.
Through the floor, Tammy was moving in the kitchen below us. Cabinets opening. Water running. Coconut drifting up through the heating vents.
I'd been in this world for about an hour and I'd already identified my first three priorities: get to the gym, get to the pizzeria, and figure out how to be in the same room as Tammy Johnson without my face doing whatever it had just done on the porch.
Erik was showing me a character creation screen. A muffin appeared next to my elbow on a napkin. Tammy's footsteps retreated back down the stairs.
I took a bite. Banana nut. It was good.
Everything in this town was good.