Unnecessorry

“Oh come on!” I groaned, almost throwing my controller into the floor.  15.2 seconds was close but not close enough, not when I was just a tenth of a second away from beating the game developers’ best time.  Just as I was about to run through the training course another time, the doorbell rang.  I set down my controller, got off my couch, and peered through the peephole.  Out on the porch, a girl with the most familiar gray hoodie patiently waited with her hands in her pockets and her head hung low.  I opened the door.

“Hi,” Bree said.  She switched her gaze from her feet to me and managed to break out a smile.  That I could differentiate her hoodie from any other made little sense.  It must have been the length of the strings, fixed ever since she tied each of them in a tight knot.

“Hey babe,” I said, straightening out my t-shirt.

“Are your parents home?”

“No, they’re still taking my uncle to the airport.  Must be a lot of traffic.”

“Okay.  Can I come in?”

“Yeah, sure.”  Bree took a brief moment to kick her shoes on the doormat and walked in.  Immediately, her eyes were drawn to the bright television screen in the otherwise dimly lit living room.

“Luis actually got you Modern Warfare?”

“Yeah.  I owe him a few bucks, but it’s better than paying for the whole thing.  That’s what you get for being a good friend, you know?”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”  I lightheartedly scoffed and returned to my seat on the left side of the couch.  Bree snickered and fell back on the right, leaving space between us but managing to borrow a portion of the blanket.

As Bree took out her old flip phone, a classic Razr, and began texting her friends back, I glued my eyes to the screen and my hands to the controller.  I blazed through the next run on the training course—15.5.  Again, 15.4.  Again, 15.5.  Beads of sweat formed just above my brow, and my hands began to cramp.  Even so, I was in a half-conscious rhythm of brute force.

“Ahem,” Bree interrupted in the middle of a run.

“Huh?”  I paused the game and turned to see her raising an eyebrow at me.

“Are you alright?  You’re, like, the most focused I’ve ever seen you.”  Wincing her eyes, she gave the television a quick and disdainful glance.  “What’re you even doing?”

“It’s just the training course.”

“Oh please.”  She rolled her eyes.  “I think you should focus on the actual game.”

“I gotta beat Infinity Ward’s record!”

“Do it later.  I’m worried you’re going to burst a blood vessel or something.”  With that remark, she was back to tapping on the keys of her phone.  I could see the boredom in her dreary, inanimate eyes, and the situation was clear.  That’s my girlfriend, I thought, and I’m just ignoring her?  It was then that I realized how tight my own face was—eyebrows crunched from readiness, teeth clenched from frustration.  I set down my controller again, and I stretched my fingers and rolled my shoulders, letting out a heavy sigh and relaxing my face.

“I think I’ve had enough.  Do you want anything to eat, anything to drink?”

“Um, sure.”  She shut her phone and grinned.  Despite this long second of reassurance, I had to say it.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted out mid-breath, as if that little sentence was a reflex.  It was an untold truth between us, I believed, that I was the apologetic one.  I always made two apologies: the first was a gesture, and the second was that short and explicit sentence.  Surely, the first was always enough, but such was a force of habit.

“Ed, it’s fine.  Remember how I was when you got me hooked on Bioshock?  I died so many times you were probably stuck with watching me trace back my steps more than watching me actually play the game.  It’s just like you are right now, except it’s the tutorial of all things!”  She tittered and scooted over to nudge my shoulder.  In fact, I did remember.  I remembered taking the time to just look at her in anticipation for her to say something, waiting for words to come out of her mouth ajar instead of shallow breaths to ease the tension—but only the tension of gameplay.  Most of all, I remembered her apology, heartfelt with a deep sense of guilt and a relentless urge to just say sorry and nothing else.  It was only ever sorry, a two-syllable word that simply and tentatively slipped through the teeth not just for me but for her as well.  We were both apologetic, I realized.  What did we really have to apologize for?  “I want water.”

“Just water?”  She hummed.  I stood up and hurriedly got to the refrigerator, where there were five glasses of chilled water to choose from; my mother always believed in pleasing our guests, even if it meant sparing some refrigerator space.  Tapping my foot, I looked up at the ceiling and thought about what I wanted.  I took a leftover bag of Ritz crackers from the cupboard, knowing it would discourage me from continuing the game.  I came back to see Bree lying down smug-faced and taking all the space on the couch.  “Really?”  She laughed and bolted back up.

Bree held her cup of water with both hands and slowly sipped.  After popping a couple Ritz crackers into my mouth, I lost my appetite and gave her the stack as well.  I exited the game and turned off my console.  Switching back to satellite TV, we were met with the nightly news.  The adults across the table were chattering about concepts of which we only had hints of understanding and never bothered to explore: housing, mortgages, the economy in general.

“Do you wanna watch something?” I asked.  Bree put her finger against her lips and took a moment to chew.

“I don’t really care,” she replied, covering her mouth.  I figured the news was not so bad, at least not as ambiance.  In any case, I wanted to talk to Bree, so I stayed on the channel and lowered the volume.

“So, uh…why aren’t you at the party?”

“I didn’t want to leave my boyfriend behind, duh.”

“Yeah, but you know I want you to spend some time doing what you want to do, you know?  We can head over there right now if you want to.”

“I’d rather not.”  She leaned on me with her head on my shoulder.  “The party’s full of people I don’t like.  You know Luis’ brother Raul, right?”

“He’s alright.”

“I don’t like him, though.  He’s too loud, not that being loud is bad.  He’s just not loud in any good way.  Then there’s, um…oh yeah, Dean.”

“Oh.”

“He’s the life of the party there, like, right now.  But he’s such an ass.  I don’t understand how nobody else sees that.  He’s really selfish on the inside, and his ego, and—.”

“I didn’t want to go to the party for the same reason, Bree.”

“What do you mean?  You knew who was going?”

“Yeah, Luis knew all about it.  All the popular kids who don’t really deserve it, all the regular kids who are still pieces of shit anyway.  I knew there’d be people like Dean, that stuck-up Kylie, her boyfriend Lawrence.  I could go on forever.  I shouldn’t, though, huh?”  She giggled and pecked me on the cheek.

“If we can complain to each other about who we don’t like, you can tell me why you don’t want to go to a party.  Long story short…”

“…I think we should talk to each other more.”

"Mhm.”  We both let out a chuckle.  “So let’s not go.  Screw the party.”

“Yeah.”  She kissed me on the cheek again, and I kissed her back.

“Now, do you want to actually start the campaign for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, a first person shooter video game developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision, or do you want to keep watching the news?”

“Let’s play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, a first person shooter game by…”

“You can’t remember?”

“No.”  We laughed.  “Hey, I know you’re saving up money to buy the game for yourself next week, but do you wanna maybe take turns?  Maybe we can swap every mission or if we can’t figure our way through something.”

“Sure!”

---

Bree yawned as I began the next cutscene.  It had been well over two hours since we entered the first real mission.

“I think we’ve gone pretty far,” she muttered.  Admittedly, we were playing on normal difficulty mode, and luck was on our side.  “I’m gonna take a nap.  Can you tell me when your parents come home?”

“Uh, sure,” I said, pausing the game.  “I think I’ll keep going.  We can head back to this mission next time if you want.”  She got off my shoulder and lied down, using the right armrest as a pillow.  Truth be told, I would have preferred that she fell asleep on my shoulder, but if she did, it would have only brought us physical discomfort in the form of limited reaction time and an awkward sleeping position.  The emotional comfort, on the other hand, was all the same.  Even as she lay awake only just preparing to go to sleep, the warmth of her love seemed to radiate from her, and because of that, nothing was different.

We said our sweet-dream’s and our I-love-you’s.  “All Ghillied Up” was a mission less intense than the others, at least in the first half.  They were no bouts of rapid click-clacks on the controller that could have awoken Bree.  Once I reached the second half, I exited the game and turned off my console.  My parents came home to find their TV broadcasting more economic talk, their son fluttering his eyes in an attempt to stay awake, and his girlfriend asleep on her own side of the couch.