Summerville High looked like every public school in every movie I'd ever seen about a place where nothing important happened. Three stories of brick and glass with a courtyard out front and a flagpole nobody looked at and a sign that said SUMMERVILLE HIGH HOME OF THE DOLPHINS with one of the L's peeling off. Erik was still talking about dragon riders as we walked up the front steps and I was running numbers in my head.
Thirty-something.
That was roughly how many romanceable characters the game had. I'd scrolled through a wiki page once, during a boring afternoon between the Montreal girl and the accountant's wife. Thirty-something women in a town this size. Teachers, students, neighbors, business owners, a literal mermaid. The developers had crammed an impossible density of fuckable women into a sleepy coastal suburb and I'd played every single one of their routes and now I was walking into the building where half of them worked or went to school and every one of them was a real person who could see me and hear me and would notice if I stared.
I was going to stare. I already knew I was going to stare. The question was whether I could make it look accidental.
"Summer orientation" was what Erik called it. A check-in, get your schedule, meet your teachers, walk the halls. Enough to get me through the building and close enough to the game's first school visit that I knew the rough shape of what was coming.
The front hall was wide and smelled like floor wax and old lockers. A banner over the main entrance said WELCOME BACK DOLPHINS and someone had drawn a dick on the O in Dolphins with a Sharpie that the janitor had smudged but not removed.
"Name?"
The voice came from a folding table near the entrance. A girl sat behind it with a clipboard and a yellow sash across her chest like she'd been appointed by God to check boxes. Annie Livingstone. Titian braids, brown eyes behind glasses, a face that managed to look disapproving and fourteen at the same time. She was smaller than I'd expected. In the game she'd felt bigger because she blocked your path every five minutes.
"Uh-"
"Your name." She tapped the clipboard with her pen. "For the roster."
I gave it. She checked a box without looking up. "Orientation packet's in the cafeteria. Second floor. Don't run in the halls."
I hadn't been running. I hadn't even been walking fast. Erik gave her a wave she didn't return and we went past.
The hallway opened up. Lockers on both sides, classroom doors at regular intervals, the hum of a building with people in it but not enough of them to fill it. Summer session was sparse. Most doors were closed.
One was open.
French. Through the doorway, actual French, spoken by someone who'd grown up in it, the consonants soft and the vowels round and warm and doing things to the air that English doesn't do.
Ms. Bissette was standing at the front of her classroom with a piece of chalk in one hand and a pencil between her lips and she was writing on the board with her back to the door. Cinnamon-brown hair to her shoulders, a pink cardigan over a white blouse, a skirt that hit her knees. She pulled the pencil from her mouth and muttered a verb conjugation to the empty room, talking to herself while she prepped.
I stopped walking.
Erik's hand landed on my shoulder. "Dude. Cafeteria's upstairs."
"Right."
I kept walking. The French faded behind me.
Upstairs. The cafeteria was half-full, which for summer orientation meant maybe forty kids scattered across tables meant for two hundred. The lighting was bad fluorescent and it smelled like reheated pizza from a box and Pine-Sol.
The cheerleaders were impossible to miss. Center table, loudest group in the room, and the girl at the head of it was Roxxy Belle and she was exactly what the game had promised. Platinum blonde, blue eyes, sucking on a lollipop, bust straining against a cheer top that had been designed by someone who believed in the power of hope over fabric. She was laughing at something, her head thrown back, and the sound of it carried across the whole cafeteria.
Next to her: copper hair, green eyes, arms crossed, looking at her phone. Becca. I knew her mother owned a bank and her father had been killed by the mob and she was going to call me a loser at least four times before the end of the month. And next to Becca: Missy, brown waves, smallest of the three, looking at Roxxy with the expression of a golden retriever at a dog park. The cheer trio. I'd seen them all naked. I'd been inside two of them. On a screen, in a game that was over.
Mia Potter was three tables away, alone, reading a book she'd positioned to block the rest of the room. Dark-brown hair in a low ponytail with a pink scrunchie, a mauve polo shirt buttoned all the way up. She'd made the book into a wall. I'd played her route. I knew about her mother and the butterfly tattoo she got in secret. I knew she whispered when she came.
I looked down. I didn't have a tray. I was standing in a cafeteria doorway cataloging women I'd jerked off to and they were real people eating lunch.
"Yo, seats over here." Erik was already weaving between tables. I followed.
I sat down and the first thing I saw from my chair was blue. Blue hair, blue eyebrows, black eyeshadow caked on like armor. Eve Rogers was in the far corner of the cafeteria with her back against the wall and headphones covering her ears and her combat boots up on the empty chair next to her. Slim. Band t-shirt. Choker. She was drawing in a sketchbook and she was the only person in the room who looked like she'd rather be somewhere else, which in this school probably meant the rooftop or the tattoo parlor where her sister worked.
She didn't look up.
I was reaching for the orientation packet on the table when someone hit me from the left.
Books went everywhere. A textbook hit the floor spine-first and bounced. Loose papers fanned out across the linoleum. A calculator skidded under a chair.
"Oh my god, I'm so sorry, I wasn't- I didn't see- oh god, I'm sorry-"
Judith Dinkle. Red hair, glasses, purple headband, cheeks going from pink to red at a speed that suggested her face did this a lot. She was already on her knees grabbing papers and her hands were shaking and she kept apologizing.
"Hey. It's fine." I crouched and picked up the textbook. Biology. Heavy. "No damage."
"I'm so sorry, I'm so clumsy, I always- god, sorry-"
"Seriously. It's fine." I handed her the biology book and our fingers touched on the spine and she went from red to a color I didn't have a word for. She grabbed the book, stood up, said sorry one more time, and practically ran for the nearest hallway.
Erik was watching. "That's Judith. She's like that."
"Yeah, I got that."
After the cafeteria, Erik gave me the tour. He was a good guide in the sense that he knew where everything was and a bad guide in the sense that he kept stopping to tell me about World of Orcette lore connected to each room. The science lab reminded him of an alchemy system. The courtyard reminded him of a PvP arena. I let him talk.
The hallway on the first floor was where they appeared together. Mrs. Smith came around a corner and students pressed against the walls without being told. Short grey hair, grey suit, glasses on a chain, mouth set in a line so thin it might not have been a mouth at all. She was walking with a clipboard and the posture of someone who thought corridors were invented for her to march through. A kid with a skateboard under his arm turned and went the other direction.
Behind her, Coach Bridget. And behind was the wrong word because Bridget was taller than Smith by a full head and wider by the span of her shoulders, which were the shoulders of a woman who bench-pressed things that complained about being bench-pressed. Dark hair tied back, athletic shorts, whistle around her neck, arms that made my new teenage arms look decorative. She caught me looking and gave a short nod. Professional. Evaluating. She was clocking my body mass and finding it insufficient.
Fair.
They passed. The quiet came back.
A whirring sound came from the science room. Small wheels on linoleum. Through the open door, Ms. Okita was walking beside a robot, a squat machine on wheels with a screen for a face and little jointed arms, and she was talking to it like a coworker who wasn't pulling their weight.
"The calibration is still point-three off. I told you yesterday. You need to compensate for the-" She noticed me in the doorway. Straight black hair, lab coat over a tight black dress, glasses, flat expression. "Can I help you?"
"Just looking," I said. "That's a cool-"
I almost said Konterina. The robot's name. The name I knew because I'd played her route and the robot was a central part of it and I'd clicked through scenes where she built sex-tech with the same deadpan she was giving me right now.
"-robot," I finished.
"It's not a robot. It's an autonomous kinetic assistant." She turned back to the machine. "And it's miscalibrated."
The machine's screen flickered what might have been a frown.
I moved on. Quickly.
Down the hall: the art room, door open, and a woman with auburn hair and paint on her smock waving at passing students with a brush in her hand. Ms. Ross. She smiled at me when I walked past and the smile was slow and warm and she had paint on her chin and didn't know or didn't care. "Welcome back, sweetie. There's always room in art."
And above it all, from somewhere on the second floor, music. Piano, then bass, then a voice humming a melody that floated down the stairwell and settled in the halls. Ms. Dewitt. I couldn't see her but the music was in the floor tiles, low and warm.
I stood in the hallway while Erik was in the bathroom and I counted. The girls in this building. The women. Teachers, students, staff. The ones I'd played, the ones I'd seen in passing, the ones whose routes I'd finished and whose bodies I'd memorized in a resolution that didn't capture freckles or how voices carried in real hallways.
Roxxy and her cheer table. Mia and her book. Eve and her sketchpad. Judith and her red face. Bissette's chalk. Smith's power suit. Bridget's shoulders. Okita's robot that I wasn't supposed to know the name of. Ross's painted chin. Dewitt's music through the ceiling.
And that was just this building. There were still the women in town. Debbie and Jenny at home. Tammy next door. Diane at the farm. The bank manager. The tattoo artist. The maid at the mansion. The nun. The cop. The mermaid.
Thirty-something women, and I'd seen most of them naked on a screen, and they were all real, and they were all here, and I was standing in a high school hallway in a body that couldn't do a pull-up.
Erik came out of the bathroom. "You okay? You look weird."
"I'm fine," I said. "Just a lot of new faces."
"Yeah, Summerville's like that. Small town, everybody knows everybody." He clapped me on the shoulder. "You'll get used to it."
I wouldn't. Every woman in this town was a person I'd treated as a series of clicks and dialogue skips and stat checks, and now every one of them had a voice and a smell and a face that did things no game engine could render, and I was going to have to learn every single one of them from scratch while pretending I didn't already know what they looked like undressed.
We walked out the front doors into the afternoon sun. The flagpole. The peeling L. A girl I didn't recognize was sitting on the front steps eating an apple and texting.
"So," Erik said. "World of Orcette tonight? I unlocked the dragon breeding pen."
"Yeah," I said. "Sure."
I had a lot of work to do.