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There, gathered around the front desk, was everyone I worked with—pointing at me and laughing. Hysterically. The idea, a bespectacled senior editor informed me, had all been his. When he heard me talking about the “fan mail” I’d received, he thought about how “hilarious” it would be to send me letters from fictional insane people. He regaled me, proudly, of the elaborate lengths he’d gone to—having the magazine’s art director design the prison stamp, sending the missive to Georgia so that it would have an Atlanta postmark—apparently expecting me to join in the laughter and admire both his creativity and gumption.

But I was incensed. No one likes to walk out and see all her colleagues pointing at her and laughing, but I was horrified beyond reason. Not only was I not special, not worthy of being watched as I discovered what happened when people stopped being polite and started getting real, but I was pathetic—a girl who was desperate enough for attention that she believed she could accumulate fans for not making it on a reality show. This was what my self-obsession and vanity had brought me: humiliation.

My coworkers may well have unconsciously been trying to teach me a lesson about accepting my life the way it was and not pretending it was how I thought it should be—or at least of not blindly believing that all the empty spaces in me could be filled by 24/7 cameras in my face and a possible future appearance on a Real World/Road Rules challenge. But I wasn’t remotely interested in receiving this information. Years later, when opportunities to appear on reality shows began presenting themselves, I vehemently ran from every single one—as if the more ardently I passed, the further I could distance myself from the twentysomething who thought a stint of televised fighting with strangers would be her only shot at glory.

At the time, I dealt with my mortification the best way I knew how—by doling out a series of dirty looks and promising myself I’d never forgive my co-workers—while wondering what I lacked that Cory, a weepy blonde who was by then being featured on the San Francisco Real World, had.

Of course, it turned out for the best. After all, I never had to live with Puck.

11

GAMEBOY

Austin Bunn

THE SUMMER YOU TURN THIRTEEN, an invitation comes to attend “gifted and talented” summer classes at the community college. You paw over the catalog as if this is it—the sign that you’re destined for greatness. Your twin brother can’t understand why you want to spend a month in a classroom because all he wants to do is play tennis, and he’s better than you, so fuck him. You sign up for two classes, How to Win a Nuclear War and Game Theory, and count the days until you go.

See: You are a gamer, but it’s not so much a noun as a verb. You game. Not well but often, and with a love and focus that will astound in your life to come. In your bedroom, the Dungeons & Dragons die-bags tuck against the shelf of original-series Choose Your Own Adventures. You have blasted through the entire series, drawn maps of the story outcomes, even written a winsome letter to Bantam on graph paper pitching your own (“BOMB SQUAD!”). Bantam never writes back. Like most Chess Club members, you think winning—and when you say “winning,” you mean “pure unadulterated happiness”—is a series of moves executed with a smirk. On the computer in the basement, your masterwork emerges: ’NAM!, a video game about the war with mama-sans and babies on fire that you saw in a Chuck Norris flashback. The hard fact that you are an unexceptional player at everything but War and Old Maid doesn’t matter. You smirk all the same. The game itself is the point—the most awesome hours of vanishing into play.

Summer classes start and your mother drops you off every morning with a three-ring binder and calculator. In How to Win a Nuclear War, you learn that, with the right outlay of ICBMs, Guam can rule the world. Also, that 55378008 on the calculator spells BOOBLESS upside down. When you ask your mother