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gave him a slightly feeble smile.
“So anyway—” Sanee made an awkward gesture “—now we’ve established which of us is best, and that it’s definitely me, what are you going to do about, y’know, Kit and stuff?”
“I dunno. I thought I might just sit here for a bit. And then go sit at home. And then maybe never speak to another human being ever again.”
“You could do that. Or we could try to fix it.”
“I tried. I said I was sorry, I said I’d do better. And he got on a bus anyway.”
Sanee sat forward excitedly in his chair. “No, no, no, dude, you have to understand. Sometimes chicks . . . and, uh, also probably dudes—”
“You know, you could just say people.”
“Dispensing wisdom here. Sometimes when you’ve really upset a person, you have to wait a bit so when you say sorry, they’ll believe you. Otherwise it’s like you’re just saying it to get them to calm down and do what you want.”
“So let me get this straight. Your plan is do nothing. Then do the same thing again and hope it goes better. Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”
Sanee shrugged. “Well, you could go stand outside his window with a boom box if you like, but I’m pretty sure romance has moved on since the eighties.”
“So I should stand outside his window streaming Spotify on my phone?”
“Honestly, mate, I think that’d just annoy him.”
“No offence, but you are really bad at this.”
“Look, all I’m saying is that you need to find a way to apologise to him that will show him you’re actually serious. Basically, you should do something that shows him you don’t think what he thinks you think. Whatever that is.”
To Drew’s surprise, for what felt like the first time that evening, something made sense. He didn’t quite know exactly what he was going to do, but he knew how to start. “Thanks.”
“No problem. Should I make up the futon?”
And Drew nodded, not quite wanting to be alone in his room with his thoughts and his laptop.
The next day he woke up with a slightly bad back from the futon, and a plan he’d thrashed out in the small hours of the morning. He’d been thinking a lot about what Sanee had said and what Kit had said, and his time with Anni and his time with SCDD, and he’d come to the conclusion that he’d spent far too long worrying about stuff that was basically meaningless. He’d thought he left Anni because he didn’t want to be the sort of person who got angry about a virtual axe in a video game, but actually he’d left Anni because he’d finally realised that nobody there cared about anybody else.
And he thought he’d been worried that Kit spent so much time in HoL because he wasn’t happy, when really he’d been worrying about—what exactly? What his mates would say? What his old guildies would have thought? The judgement of an anonymous cloud of strangers he vaguely thought of as “everyone.” And wasn’t that the stupidest thing of all? He’d been so down on Kit for caring about people he rarely met in person, but Drew’d spent all this time obsessing about the opinions of people he hadn’t met at all and who probably didn’t even exist.
When you got right down to it, killing imaginary pigs with a bloke who lived on a different continent was no worse or sillier a way to spend your evenings than throwing a piece of plastic around with a bloke who lived down the corridor. The really silly thing was that he’d ever believed there was a difference. As long as you cared about what you were doing and who you were doing it with, then it didn’t matter if you were in a pub or your living room or on a virtual rock in an imaginary kingdom in a video game.
And now he just had to show Kit he’d finally got it. But he couldn’t do that without help. Unfortunately, the people best placed to do that probably had good reason to believe he was an irredeemable prick right now. Nevertheless, he used Sanee’s wi-fi to log on to the guild forums and send a PM to Jacob. He would have asked Tiff as well, but given what Kit had told him last night, he really didn’t think she needed to be bothered with his problems right now.
Then he folded up the futon, gathered his belongings, and hurried back