Page 39 of Looking for Group

And to top it all off, Kit was still on his phone.

He had it on his lap and was doing his best to be discreet, but in a lot of ways that made it worse.

Everyone had clearly noticed and was clearly being too polite to say anything.

Drew kept having to nudge him when it was his turn and remind him of the rules, like for example not gunning down your allies by accident.

Worse still, despite his constant distraction, Kit was having a much better game than Drew was.

He’d wound up with a chainsaw in one hand and a scoped sniper rifle in the other, and had personally taken out more zombies than anyone else.

He was living the Zombicide dream and didn’t even seem to care.

Then, when they weren’t even halfway through the scenario, Drew got killed. He’d been desperately ransacking a police car, looking for any weapon better than a crowbar, when he’d found a zombie in the boot. He’d spent his last action trying to kill it, failed, and promptly had his face chewed off.

An awkward silence fell over the table.

“And that,” said Sanee finally, “is why you shouldn’t search when you’re playing last in the round.”

Drew sighed. “Dude, I didn’t have a weapon, searching is my only skill, and frankly, I was kind of dead weight anyway.”

“It’s a swingy game. All you need is one shotgun and you’re back.”

“Yes, which is why I was searching the police car. And why I am now dead.”

“Shall we stop?” asked Steff, before the argument could build any further. “It seems a bit unfair for Drew to have to sit out.”

He really didn’t want that to happen. The only thing more depressing than getting knocked out of a game early was feeling like you’d wrecked everything for everybody. “No, it’s fine. You guys carry on.”

At that moment, Kit looked up from the text message he was blatantly sending. “You can take my character, if you like. I don’t mind.”

Drew didn’t want to be an arsehole, but it kind of happened anyway. “I can tell you don’t mind. You’ve been on your phone for the whole fucking game.”

Everything went silent.

“I’m sorry.” Kit gazed at him, wide-eyed. “Something came up in guild.”

There was a dull roaring in Drew’s brain. “Fuck the guild. I’m sick of the fucking guild. You’re supposed to be out, here, with me and my friends. But if you seriously want to be in an imaginary dungeon full of pretend monsters with randoms off the internet, then, y’know what? Go do that.”

Somehow it got even more silent.

Kit got up, tucked his phone into his breast pocket, and left the room. The door closed with a click behind him. 6

For a little while, nobody moved, and then Sanee began packing up Zombicide. There was an almost funereal air about it, as if he was laying to rest a good game, taken from us too soon.

“Are you going to go after him?” asked Steff.

Drew hadn’t thought that far ahead. To be honest, he hadn’t really known what was going to come out of his mouth.

And he was in this confused, stuck space where he felt stupid for having made a massive scene, but was sure he’d feel even more stupid if he backed down now.

“He was the one being the antisocial dickhead, not me.”

“I’m with you, mate.” Sanee glanced up from the reboxing. “You just don’t come to a thing, then not be at the thing.”

Tinuviel was busy dividing the zombies up by type so they could go into their separate bags. “I think,” she said, “that you may be failing to account for the essentially arbitrary and constructed nature of social conventions, and for their variability between seemingly similar groups.”

Drew was so not in the mood for this.

“If someone gave me a quid every time you said arbitrary , convention , or constructed , I would own all the expansions for this game by now, and there are a shitload.” Apparently neither was Sanee.

She blinked. “I just meant that maybe he didn’t know how rude you’d think he was being.”

Steff squeezed behind Sanee’s chair and wrapped her arms around him. “He was definitely being a bit weird, but you shouldn’t just let him walk out like that. You know the rule, Squidge, never go to bed angry.”

There was a thoughtful moment. Then Sanee shamelessly one-eightied.

“She’s right.” He turned his head and nuzzle-nibbled the inside of Steff’s elbow. “That’s how we do it, and look at us. If I don’t deal with stuff when it comes up, it just bugs me forever.”

Steff nodded. “It’s true. He got super angry at one XKCD strip and then never read it again.”

“Fine.” Drew pushed away from the table. “I’ll go after him. Whatever.”

Andy, who had been keeping his head firmly down since zombiegate, risked a comment. “Um, look. I’m not the biggest relationship expert here, but I kind of think ‘fine, whatever’ isn’t the best strategy for making up with someone.”

“Okay.” Drew made a show of sitting down again. “I’ll stay. Just make up your minds.”

Tinuviel put away the last of the fast zombies.

“Andrew, stop projecting. It’s terribly clichéd.

Either go after your boyfriend because that’s what you want to do.

Or stay. Because that’s what you want to do.

But there’s no point getting angry with us because we didn’t cause this situation and we can’t fix it. ”

Drew opened his mouth and closed it again.

Pointless or not, he still felt pretty angry.

And he kind of knew it wasn’t fair but… that wasn’t how anger worked.

It just happened. And was there. He fumed helplessly for a minute or two.

And, very gradually, managed to dig through everything until he realised that he was mostly upset at his friends because he’d been relying on them to tell him what to do.

In fact, it wasn’t even that. He wanted them to tell him to go after Kit so he could do it without it turning into this big public statement of what a dick he’d been.

Even if Kit had been a dick first.

“So I’m going to, um… Sorry.” He got up again, grabbed his coat, and went after Kit.

He told himself he wasn’t going to run. Honestly, he’d probably missed the guy anyway, so he’d just wind up looking stupid. Sort of like when you dashed to catch a bus and it pulled away just as you got to it, leaving you breathless on the kerb with everybody staring.

Aaaaaand he was running.

Shit. Shitshitshit.

He caught up to Kit at the bus stop—where, ironically, there was no bus, pulling away or otherwise. Just Kit. Still on his mobile.

Drew was about thirty-percent mindlessly angry, thirty-percent sorry, and forty-percent really not sure what the hell was going on. Now he was here, now they were both here, he realised he didn’t have a clue what to say. In the end he went with, “Uh, hi.”

Kit looked up. They might have both been there in practice, but he seemed a million miles away. “I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

And, with that, he went back to texting.

Drew was now seventy-percent mindlessly angry and about two-percent sorry and fuck knew about the rest. “For fuck’s sake, Kit. Do you even want a boyfriend and friends? Or do you want to sit alone in your room playing HoL for the rest of your life?”

“Right now, I just want you to leave me alone.” Kit’s thumbs skimmed ceaselessly across the gently glowing surface of his smartphone. “And I’ve got friends.”

Drew literally threw his hands in the air in frustration. “Holy crap, for the last time, they are not your friends. They are just people you play a video game with. And when you stop playing that game, or if anything happens that they don’t want to deal with, you will never hear from them again.”

He’d started strong but, for some reason, all his anger was draining.

And now he was just sad. Really fucking sad.

“I raided with Annihilation three times a week for three years and the moment I stopped being what they needed me to be, that was it. I haven’t had so much as a whisper from any of those… from any of them.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you, and I’m sorry it’s made you so upset.

” Kit didn’t sound all that sorry, and as Drew was getting sadder, he seemed to be getting colder.

“But you do realise the reason it happened is that everyone in Anni thinks about HoL the same way you do? That the game isn’t real , that the people aren’t real .

That you have no obligations and nothing to offer each other except your DPS and your raid buffs. ”

“That’s… I mean…I…” Nope. Not happening. That would lead to thoughts and feelings and stuff, and Drew wasn’t in a place to deal with thoughts, feelings or, indeed, stuff.

“And what I really don’t get,” Kit went on, “is how you can have gone through that and experienced firsthand how shitty it is and still be so keen for me to do the exact same thing to other people. People, by the way, who have actually been there for me when I’ve needed them.

Been there for me in a way that nobody else ever has. ”

“Okay but…” Drew rallied slightly. He wasn’t sure how he’d got quite so swept off course, but he was sure he had a genuine grievance. Somewhere. “That’s no excuse for blanking our mates when we’ve gone round their house for the evening.”

“Drew, I’ve known them a month. I like them, but they’re your mates, not our mates. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I told you something came up.”

“What? What came up that was so important that you had to wreck everybody’s evening?”

“You remember that poet Tiff was seeing? They got drunk and hooked up last week and now there’s a performance poetry thing she’s done all over Facebook, and it’s about Tiff, and it’s really horrible, and she’s really upset about it, and she needed someone to talk to, and Jacob’s got kids, and if I’d found out about it earlier I’d have cancelled, but we were already at Sanee and Steff’s, and frankly, you’ve made me so fucking self-conscious about my friends that I didn’t feel I could tell you about it. ”