The Bad Boy Rating

The ring light has been on since seven and the left side of my face knows it.

“Redemption potential,” I say, and chat was moving before I got to the second word. “Okay. Okay, hear me out. He has one facial expression, and the expression is something happened to my brother, and I need everybody to sit with the fact that in forty hours of game nobody asks him what.”

The rail on the right monitor goes solid with nariBadBoy, the fanning one. BunnyHops_ types the thing about letting him ruin her life, which she types every Monday, and I hold two fingers up at the lens without looking away from the rail, and the rail goes off, because the two fingers are a bit and chat knows the bit.

I like this part.

The sheet is up on the left monitor, four rows and an empty box under them, this week’s man in the corner in his coat. The coat has more buckles than a coat needs. Aesthetic darkness went nines across before the top of the hour, because he owns that coat and stands in the rain in it on purpose, and there was never going to be a debate.

“Sixes,” I say. “Sixes on redemption, and I’m being nice, and you know I’m being nice, because he burned down that village, and BunnyHops, I saw that, I saw it, the village was already on fire, that is not the defense you think it is.”

Somebody says he’s my type. Somebody else says they’re all my type, and that one I let stand.

Past the monitors, past where the light gives up, there is a man standing between me and my door.

“Tragic backstory,” I say. The sheet scrolls to row three. My voice does the climbing thing it does at row three, where the sad part lives, because chat likes the climb.

He is in the half of the room the ring light doesn’t want. Dark clothes, the forgettable kind. He isn’t leaning on anything, and everyone who comes into this room leans on something, the dresser or the back of my chair. He is just standing, with his weight in the middle of him, and last Monday that was a wall and some polaroids.

The polaroids are the wall the camera never gets, Jess with paint on her nose, a lanyard from a con, Danny holding a fish he did not catch, the six of us on the porch in winter coats, and from the chair he covers most of them.

Everybody who comes in here needs something. The charger, the good chair, me to look up, and I can usually tell which from the door. I can’t tell what he needs. I don’t look again. The edge of my eye keeps him where it keeps the door.

“So the brother,” I say, “and the dog, and the, sorry, the village, chat. Chat, that’s three. Three is greedy. Nobody gets three. Sevens. Sevens, and the seven is for the dog.”

The headset is the sponsor’s. The logo faces the lens. I say the dog’s name and chat says the dog’s name back at me forty times, in capitals, with hearts. A Hydration Check comes through on the points bar and the glass goes up, at the lens, down, and the mods put a line in the rail about it in proper capitals, and chat repeats it back in lowercase.

The camera has one angle and the angle is my face, and my eyes go where my face goes: the rail, the sheet, the lens, the rail. There is no fifth place for them to go that the lens wouldn’t watch them go. He hasn’t moved.

(It’s fine. Guy in my room. That’s basically content.)

“Would Nari survive,” I read, in the voice with the drumroll in it, and the rail stops being words and becomes nariBadBoy wall to wall, and under it the vote is already going. My eyes do their four places. The four places have not been work before tonight.

“Yes,” I say. “Obviously yes. I would survive him. I would make him soup. He would eat the soup and be normal about it for the first time in his life, and the writers would have to just deal with it.”

The rail says no. The rail says no in three languages and one emote, and I put my hand flat on my chest like a woman wronged, and chat loves a woman wronged, chat would follow a woman wronged into the Sound.

“Fine. Fine! Chat says ten. Chat says I am dead in the first cutscene. Ten, on the record, under protest, and I want it noted that the soup would have worked.”

Past where the light gives up, nothing has moved.

“Final score.” I do the averaging out loud, slowly, wrong once so chat can catch it, and chat catches it, and I fix it. “Personal bias adjustment. Plus point four. For the coat. I’m not sorry.” The box fills in. “Eight point four.”

The alerts go before I’ve finished saying four.

ding — ding — ding ding ding ding ding

Somebody is gifting. Somebody is gifting enough that I stand for it, which is the rule, and the petals come down across the overlay, and I’m on my feet with both arms up doing the thing my hands do for petals, and the rail is nariBadBoy top to bottom, and BunnyHops has already put him at S, BunnyHops puts everyone at S, that is why BunnyHops does not keep the list, and chat wants him above Vergil, on an eight point four, and the tier list is chat’s and not mine, and I am telling the lens I will not do that to Vergil, I’m telling it with my arms in the air, and

the preview goes gray.

Not the stream. The camera. The little window where my face is supposed to be has a face-shaped nothing in it and a wheel going around, and the audio bar is still jumping, so they can hear me, and what they hear is, “Oh. Oh, no. Hang on. Hang on, no, don’t, everybody stay—”

I’m in the chair. I’m under the desk. I have the fat plug in my hand and I pull it and push it back in, because that is what you do, that is the whole of what I know how to do, and the wheel keeps going around. The thin plug next to it. The one next to that, which is not a camera plug at all, which I find out when the mouse dies.

DK is in the mod tab in lowercase saying it’s dead on their end too, try the other port. I don’t know which port is the other port. Every port is the other port, and I say “aish” into a microphone that is very much still on.

Under the desk it smells like dust and the warm plastic the tower gives off, and there is a gummy bear down here from some other Monday.

“Okay. Okay, everyone. Technical difficulties. We are having a moment, the moment is happening, nobody panic, DK is panicking for all of us, I can see him panicking.”

DK is not panicking. DK is asking the rail what if the camera is fine and I am the one that got unplugged, and the rail is enjoying that more than it should. I keep talking. The audio bar is jumping, and the audio bar is the only part of me that is still on.

I come up from under the desk with the plug in my hand. My face is already doing the sorry face at the lens. The eyes, the little wince. Halfway into the wince there is nobody on the other side of the lens. It stops. Halfway.

My face is a face in a room. The ring light is on. It is pointed at a woman holding a cable. A ring light with no camera behind it is a lamp. I can hear the tower fan. I have not heard the tower fan before.

And past the monitors, past where the light gives up, there is the wall, and the polaroids, and nobody.

The space between me and the door is a space. I have been looking at the edge of that half of the room for an hour, the way you look at a thing you aren’t looking at. At some point in the last however-many minutes he walked out of it. I was under a desk. The door is shut. It was shut when I sat down at seven, and it is shut now, and in between it was open and I didn’t hear it either way.

There is nothing to do with that. Sarah’s text came in the afternoon: a detail would be in place before I went live; she’d come by after the stream with the paper. The firm came and walked the house with Danny while I had the podcast on and the second serum going, and I did not look up. So what I have is a text, and a man who was there, and a man who isn’t, and a paper I haven’t read a word of.

There was supposed to be more after this. There is a game queued, and a face-shaped nothing where the face goes.

“Okay, garden. Okay. We’re calling it. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, this was a good one, this was a really good one, the clip is going to be so ugly. I love you. Go to bed.”

I put the plug down and hit end. The overlay goes to the offline card, the lily and the little sleeping face, and the rail stops, and the whole tab is quiet in a way it hasn’t been since seven.

It’s ten. Past the street window the sky has gone. Not dark yet. Gone. There is rain on the glass, and I don’t know when that started; three hours ago I looked at that window and it was blue. Under the rain the street is loud, the bar on the corner, somebody’s laugh going past without an umbrella in it.

I turn the ring light off and the corner is a desk. Two monitors, a lamp on an arm, the panels on the wall that make the room sound smaller than it is, the pothos with one new leaf that has been in frame all night and that I will move tomorrow. The glass of water by the keyboard is full.

The phone does notifications, dashboard, DMs, in that order, always. The dashboard is bigger on the monitor and I look at it there too, because I always look at it.

The graph has a cliff in it at the place the camera died. Before the cliff it is the shape it is every Monday, the good shape, the one that climbs at row four. After the cliff it is a slope, and then nothing, and the nothing is me hitting end. I screenshot the cliff. I don’t know for who.

The headset comes off and my ears are hot where it sat. The top comes off over my head and the hoodie goes on, the merch one, the one Jess drew the sleeve for, and the hoodie smells like the drawer and not like the room.

At the vanity the wipes take the camera off my face in three passes, and the old acne scars along the jaw are there under it, where the lens has never met them. The mole under the left eye stays. That one the lens knows.

The bottom drawer of the nightstand has the gummy bears in it and I eat four standing up, the vitamin kind, so it counts, and Danny would say it does not count.

I sit on the bed. I’m tired. My jaw hurts, the Monday-at-ten amount. I don’t hum. The seventeen pillows are where they were, and the weighted blanket is folded at the foot where it lives, and I don’t get under it yet.

Nobody is in the room to need anything, and my hands fold the stream top anyway, neatly, in thirds, and put it on the chair. Half an hour ago I was standing in this room with my arms up.

Sarah’s text is where I left it, under a chain of Jess sending me a pigeon. The detail will be in place before you go live. I’ll come by after with the paperwork. That is the whole text, finished the way she finishes things. I read it again. There is nothing in it the second time either.

Downstairs the front door goes, and Sarah’s voice, and Danny’s, and under them a third one that isn’t either of theirs.