“I found out that I have diabetes,” Rachel said.
“Ah yeah,” I said. “That’s a thing. Hospital cafe food tastes terrible, by the way.”
Rachel covered her mouth when she laughed. “I ate too many donuts after like two full sugar blue ox twenty four ounce cans.”
I let that hang there for a bit.
“What? Why didn’t you just... bow out if you were feeling rough?”
She sat up, fully, like a girl who knew her limits and would adhere to them when it suited her. “No one tells me what do to. I mean, not even me.”
“Is that what we’re really doing now? Macho lady bravado?”
“Oh, hell no. They gave me a damn prescription for this damn robot that I have to wear around all day. And I have to keep my drugs in the fridge. Like, what is my life? Now I have to think about all of this and...”
The medical-surgical unit that I was sitting in had a second bed. I had volunteered to collect her in the morning. The doctors wanted to keep her there overnight for observation. She had to oblige, as otherwise Leigh would have thrown a fit. The Physician’s assistant didn’t even work on this floor. She had just popped in on her break to check on her friend.
“Look. It’s just a new cool thing about you. Tell the boys that you’re a cyborg now. Plus, now that you’re back to the new normal, you should be...”
“The boys? I mean I guess.”
“Don’t care for them?” I leaned back. I had suspected something like that.
“Didn’t you tell me you and your mom fought about these things? She was trying to have grandchildren?”
“She doesn’t have grandkids’ money,” I said.
Rachel smiled. Esther was still technically chauffeuring her cousins around until long past Thanksgiving, but it was going to be okay.
“She would be here if you were worse. Plus, you told her yourself that you don’t want her to be here.”
Rachel raised her arm to show the medical port, connecting her to a panel of distracting machines. “Yeah...”
“Still, she’s probably torn up. Don’t you guys usually spend your Fridays together? They mentioned it in the chat a lot.”
She gave me a side dish of side eye. “We are good friends. I know she is my ride or die, but like...”
She waved vaguely at me.
“I live in Ridgewood. She lives in Palisades Park. It’s still a drive for her, even if she wasn’t taking her cousins around. She’s still doing the right thing.”
Her phone buzzed for what had to be the one hundredth time that day. It was the group chat or Esther.
“You can tell her how you feel about her. I promise it will be okay.”
“I read her novel,” Rachel said. “It’s pretty good. I just don’t... I don’t want to get in her way. She’s so put together and maybe my dream of being her best friend is just not...”
A nurse pulled back the privacy sheet.
“Hello! I’m here with your discharge instructions and paperwork.”
Rachel looked like she was ready to cry.
She was still in a hospital gown, though she had put it over her bulldogs jersey by the time we were getting up.
“Are you going to be okay to take her home...?” The nurse looked at me.
“I got this,” I said. “My car is on the parking deck. I’ll take you to your car back in the student lot.”
I stepped outside as Rachel got some last instructions, then she came out. She still had the medical identification bracelet on, but was tugging at it.
---
“So, are you ready for Black Friday?”
“Daughter, I don’t understand why they call it that. Nobody wears black. It’s not about the culture at all. It’s just buy this, buy that.”
Her dialysis machine beeped. The signature smell of being in the unit was one that was quite familiar to me. Too familiar, like it came up in my dreams a bit too often.
In case you’re wondering, my preference is more cabana boys and less kidney treatment smell. It’s a hard line to keep with myself, but somehow, I find it.
“Thanksgiving is coming up, daughter. Have your cousins said anything about showing up?”
I shook my head. I was planning on giving them a call this week.
“I’ll talk to them, mom. If nothing else, we can do what we usually do. Like old times.”
She had a beat there where she grabbed her tablet, shrugged and then returned to her solitaire game. I loved the woman, but she was a bit set in her ways.
She waved me off. I took a beat to walk across the street to a Wawa. They didn’t have a place to sit down and eat, but it was the height of Jersey to eat at one.
Two and a half hours was a long time to wait for someone’s blood to cycle through a machine.
It was enough time to bring myself up to speed on the team. They were buzzing with excitement about heading to the finals. Heck, I was ready. I was almost a month away and pumped. I just had to get through finals. That wouldn’t ever be a problem, right?
---
Finals were the absolute worst thing I could imagine and I hate them and I hate having to answer questions and emails well after a semester’s over from students that didn’t attend my classes or thought that they're one class. That they attended was enough to get them an A+.
But I had gotten to Atlantic City. We had a single elimination game to get there. And more importantly, after this? Mom and I were heading on our medical vacation to the Caribbean.
Esther was up to full speed. Rachel was on fire. I swear she was literally vibrating with excitement.
There’s a feeling you get at the end of a semester when everything’s done and you can finally sit down all of that. It’s amazing. Now all we add between us and the championship was us playing several good games. Essex was going to be against us in the second game if both of us won.
Our first competitors were from UCNJ.
Stacey stepped up on the event floor wearing a shirt that said ‘Central Jersey isn’t real.’ Behind her, Mr. Johnston joined her with a matching shirt.
“Is that a couple’s costume?” I said.
“You know it. We are cosplaying responsible adults,” he said, sipping on a margarita at ten in the morning.
“Did you at least bring your brother?” I groaned.
“The one you were having about being so hot that you had to eat a piece of right now?” Stacey said. Her eyes were wide with anticipation.
“Yeah, that one. He is right behind me, isn’t he?” I said.
“I thought she had a better plan than this, but hi my name is Gus,” the man said. “And I’ve got a shirt for you, too.”
He held out a hoodie for a big girl that had the words ‘Central Jersey is real!’.
“Oh, hello,” I said melting. “Thank you, Gus. As you can probably guess, I’m Kelly Thomas.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you and your kids,” he said. “And I’m not just saying that. Stacey won’t shut up about how outstanding you are.”
“For good reason,” I said. “Do you play DOTA?”
He smiled, and I felt giddy. “She told me you were going to ask. I’m actually here as a vendor. Gotta raise these kids up to understand the media landscape, especially with everything that’s going on in the world.”
He purred out of his chest. The man had definitely not skipped the gym in a while. “Influencer Academy. We teach you to be a thought leader.”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
“Oh, we definitely need to talk business,” I said. “You need to help me with my social media. I’ve got a few games and they’re about to start but...”
“I’ve got a booth,” he said. The large, open conference hall was full of booths and esports for adjacent vendors.
“Who are your students facing first?” he asked. “Bulldogs, right?”
“Union county, and yes.”
It took him a second. He paused in front of the row of esports related vendors. “You’ve faced them before?”
“We’ve beaten them before. It’s only a matter of time and making sure that we leave nothing. It’s full court press time.”
“Then you’ll get the prize? What is it about custom PCs for each of the students on the winning team?”
I sighed, underneath an enormous sign showing some prizes for the various competitions that were going on that day. We weren’t even the main thing going on that day. There were the four-year college championships as well, which for New Jersey with its many colleges were looking to have way too many games in one day.
On one hand, professors want to be at a four-year college, or doing research, but I enjoyed working one on one with my students getting them through it and then that moment where they get it.
“A prize is a prize. I can probably buy a better computer easily,” I said. “But the bragging rights will be forever.”
My phone buzzed with the group chat.
Esther: We’re being called up!
“Did you want to see the ban round? Maybe the first ten minutes?” I gave him the look. It wasn’t suggestive, but it was trying to gauge his interest.
“Honestly, I would like nothing more than to talk shop with you,” he said. “But I’ve got to, uh… work the crowd. Just because my brother and his girlfriend introduce me to a fine woman doesn’t mean that I can disengage with what is going on.”
“That is completely understandable and oh woe is me,” I said. “I shall have to console myself by absolutely dominating my opponent and leaving you with my phone number.”
I accepted his phone from his outstretched hand and went through and programmed my number in.
“Oh, what a terrible fate has befallen you,” he said. “I shall give you the space needed to crush your enemies and hear the lamentations of their men as they cry out for justice.”
His status blinked in my vision. It had taken a while to even get to this point.
Gus Johnston
AC 1 AP 100
I blinked several times. This exchange had fixed in my mind that not only was he nice, but he might be an excellent player.
My phone buzzed with a text from him.
“Thanks. Good to meet you but I… I’ll see you after I manage my team?”
He gave me a warm, friendly smile. I could only hope that he wasn’t trying to sell me on some multiple level marketing plan.
There was really nothing going on that demanded my attention except because they wanted the school official, who wasn’t a student, to be there to represent the team. Honestly, besides me managing the team in the background, for some ones with the lopsided matchups, I would rather they do it themselves, even though I knew I wanted those points.
The system had joyfully announced to me that morning that I was being given a special present just for saving up all of my points. I could buy something brand new.
And I was going to spend my time trying to figure out if it was worth me getting it or not. I would have used these points for more in-depth analyses of the league and players, information I couldn’t normally access without extensive online research—work better left to other players.
Like I would gladly do a deep search on one student, but then I needed to see if the team worked as a whole and if the team wasn’t streaming their stuff, then I wasn’t going to get a good picture of that.
What I needed was open source information that would lead me to make better decisions about my team composition inside the game and meta play is on the outside of the game. In regularly playing. You could look at someone’s profile and see what they were actually doing. You could see their win loss ratio. You can see who they played as best. You could see their ELO.
Or really? You couldn’t see it, but you could kind of guess what it would be in comparison with somebody else’s.
After a quick huddle, we got straight into the ban round.
UCNJ once again surprised me by playing into our meta.
You see, what Esther had done was make little patches for everyone’s jerseys for their shoulder. Marking what role they played.
On one shoulder it would show if they were a top laner, mid laner bottom, etc. On the other side, they were a patch that was their favorite character.
So, of course, those five characters were all banned immediately.
But of course all is fair In Love and War, so none of those five characters were really their top picks. Picks. Really, though. Though they were meta pics like Esther wanted to play Freya. In instance, they at all chosen a red herring character that they couldn't care less to play.
It gave us a free band round and since they each had three patches for each of the avatars that they wanted to pretend that they liked, the enemy would have terrible intelligence
Has Sun Tzu says, never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake. Our enemy made the mistake of thinking that we were doing anything at face value. Because we definitely weren’t.
All we were doing that day was showing them they should really pay attention to our social media more than what we were actually wearing.
The match began, and I said our strategy immediately to the farm. They weren’t going to get one over on us. They had given us a strong game before and I would say that we had been an equal footing, but now our match rating was a six versus their five, giving us a slight edge.
Or at least that was the average that we had. Murph, Raquel and Esther all had a six and Rachel had a seven.
It was a box standard start to a box standard game where all we did for the first 10 minutes was stall, farm, and keep them out. By this time, they had spent so much time in practice together that I was going to have a problem replacing Raquel when she graduated after the next semester. It was like I would have to start all over fresh and new and I didn’t know how I felt about that.
There were no rules for esports covering how much they could play and giving them a period which they had to be eligible. Regular sports for years had rules about how many years someone could play professionally inside of a college team. The NCEA had no such rules.
Maybe it was exploitative, but I thought it was time for us to talk to Raquel after this about if she wanted to take an elective course in what would be your junior year. I already knew she wanted to switch colleges to a 4-year school. The only question I had was if she wanted to take some continuing education that would give her the minimum touch point to be a part of the DOTA team.
Because it was something that I was going to have to start again from scratch next year without her.
Now that I figured out how to uncap my Team, I could use Rachel to generate a training plan to get New player is back up to the cap and I would just have to figure out a way to insert them into the team as it was. Maybe we need to have tryouts or something as things were going to get really weird with all the high level and skill that my guys now had.
They were definitely top tier players in a top-tier game playing as other top tier players and I was just baffled how we get somebody else to replace them when the first kill happened.
UCNJ took down Murph as I watched at in horror.
They had gone straight for our support, mainly the heart and soul of the team, the future president of the youth sports club, and Raquel was having none of it.
I had to do a quick rewind of the scene and Merv had taken them under the Tower where they had taken him out. Now Raquel was chasing them back to their tower, and they were trying to bait her into doing a dive on theirs.
I held my breath. Rachel was close enough to intervene and I could see her moving towards it. As our jungle for this game, Rachel had been roving around, complimenting Esther in the mid lane and just being a nuisance. With the first blood taken, she immediately responded.
Raquel harassed them. Just as she was about to get within range of their tower, Rachel joined them.
Rachel, have it unlocked her ultimate ability, fired a skill shot Ice arrow to freeze their support.
An eye for an eye leaves the entire world blind, but revenge is a dish best served in good company.
Rachel didn’t get the kill. Raquel did, locking down the enemy for 3 seconds. Was all that she needed to unleash a barrage of magical attacks and exhaust every single spell she had and all of her mana pool?
I nearly cried about how beautiful Lee executed the scene was.
And then, Murph respond, bought stuff at base and lumbered back onto the fields. We are just about where we had started except having traded one support kill for another support kill.
I could see us shifting into the second round of play, and I adjusted a strategy to defense. Again, I wasn’t doing anything revolutionary. I just knew that they were going to be doing the attack strategy, so I wanted to actively repel them or keep up my towers for as long as I could.
Those towers lasted until the first one went down at the 15 minute mark.
First, they went to our maid lane tower with three people pushing Esther back until Rachel got to back her up.
At the same time, Bob came in from the top lane to support them and with three of them there versus three, the team fights began in Earnest.
I was on the edge of the seat as the avatars bumblebees were around, trying to get one up on the other. Without either side, tower in the center lane up and ready to kill, it was on the players to actually deliver the final blow. Minions piled up in the center, attacking each other and the opposing avatars as the three out of three circled around the center lane. The bottom layers, by contrast, looked like they weren’t paying attention at all and would just farming and defending. The bottom lane still had the first tower on both sides of regardless of how much my guys were farming and getting ahead of them in Gold count.
In the end, it took the mid laners leaving and chasing each other back towards the bottom lane to join the fight. I got a hand to UC and J.
Their players are strong, and they knew what was going to get us going. In the middle of that fight, they engaged with the dragon mob. Trying to kill it and then tried to drag it out. Unsuccessfully.
That mop was not going anywhere. Avatars saturated the river that ran between the middle of the mid lane and the middle of the bottom lane. As Raquel and Murph sprinted, the team fight. The opposing team’s bottom laners followed them, making it for about 5 seconds. A three on five. That was when Raquel stunned the weakest of them, unloading her glass Cannon attacks and getting us our second gank of the game.
Then, they were on the opposing foot trying to get Raquel. As she was a glass cannon, she had little a defense. All she had was her limited speed trying to get away from them.
She had picked a building that used a boot that was special for running away, making her faster at getting out of conflict. It proved its worth as they kept chasing her, trying to get something out of it. She hadn’t even died before, but she was just so vulnerable after using all of her skills at once that they will try anything.
And try they did as they chased her from the river back to the mid lane, being harassed by our guys. I really wish that this single-minded focus would have eventually led to a team Wipeout. Mikel’s stun going on cooldown caused them to lose one player. You’re the two decided that discretion was the better part of valor and departed.
With that, our game was a lock. We were up enough to snowball and the team went to take Dragon.
At about the 24-minute mark, Gus came by to watch us playing. He arrived just in time to see us taking down the first layer of defenses to their base.
“Do you guys really know how to throw a party,. I feel like I should visit more often.”
My heart sunk into my chest. I was really hoping that he didn’t live some place too far away in case he was available for some sort of friends with benefits scenario. It would be just my luck that he would live in Brooklyn or something like that. Maybe he lived in Atlantic City and I should head down here more often.
I couldn’t remember what Stacy had said about him before. She’d surprised me with him.
“Your brother and Stacy are playing in some of the amateur matches?
“They tried to drag me in. But yeah, I’m here for business. Just trying to bring more young men into understanding what it actually takes.”
I gave him a look as if I was waiting for him to explain his position.
Well, surely you wouldn’t mind telling me what it actually takes. I would love to hear your you. Tell me how it is and what I should actually know. So go ahead, tell me exactly how it is and what I should know about it.
I swear it was like a switch flipped inside of him and I’m not going to go over exactly what he said. But let’s just say he got very animated for about two minutes with his elevator pitch and I was not averse to hearing a well-dressed man explained to me the ins and outs of his personal business and how he empowered young men to become leaders.