"Emmy! You’re back! How are you feeling!?" Lizzy’s high-pitched voice entered my ears through the headset.

The headset wasn’t the exact size I was used to, so I was still adjusting it slightly to be more comfortable. My finger was gliding over the volume slider on the side of the shell, lowering the volume of the different voices that were being transmitted through its speakers. 

Another voice spoke up, a slight nasal sound betraying the fact that it was Jade’s. “Good to have you back, Em."

I adjusted the microphone, so it was in front of my mouth. “Hey, all, I’m feeling a lot better. Just needed to purge my body of any viruses before the tournament I guess.”

“For sure,” Jade said. “Even though I’m pretty sure Rachel would have literally carried you to Battingham herself if you weren’t better by the time of the tournament.”

I chuckled, remembering Rachel’s identical threat a few weeks ago. “No doubt, and that’s something I want to avoid at all costs. I hope she hasn’t worn you guys out too much in my absence?”

Lizzy giggled softly. “What do you think? Mandatory daily solo queue, only playing our 5 top heroes, shared sleep timers, and then I’m not even talking about how she blew off hockey practice for 2 weeks. The girl has gone completely overboard after those terrible boot camp scrims.”

Jade chimed in. “Totally, she was also a bit…weird? About you not being there last week? She didn’t really want to talk about it, but every time we brought you up, she just kind of tuned out?”

I exhaled through my nose. Who knows exactly what the cause was, but it sounded like Rachel was still not quite emotionally stable yet. Knowing her streak of perfectionism, however, I figured it was mostly due to our performance at the boot camp. And hearing this, I was afraid something similar might happen this weekend. Instead of cutting loose a bit and reducing the pressure on herself and the team, it sounded like she had doubled down instead.

“Sounds like it’s been pretty rough for you guys as well.”

“We’re used—” Lizzy started talking, but before she could even complete her sentence, a familiar bleep indicated that a fourth person had joined the channel. Rachel’s avatar was now neatly aligned with the other three avatars.

“Emily? You’re here? Good. Now we can actually get some real practice done for a change,” Rachel’s voice sounded cold.

“I’m sorry for not being online last week, I was just not feeling well an—”

“Spare me the excuses,” she interrupted me. “You’re here now, that’s all I care about.”

I took another breath. “Sure. So…What’s the plan?”

“Kelsey will be here in about ten minutes, as soon as she joins the party, I want to get started with a quick game of party queue to make sure we are all warmed up. We should be able to get that done before 8:30 PM, which is when we will have a scrim up against Team Solid. So, if you need a pea brink, water, or God-forbid snacks, go get it now so that we can start queuing right away when Kelsey joins.”

I bit my lip. Her demeanor was already putting me in a bad mood and if she was going to be like this all week, I’m not sure I would want to be part of this. Deciding to give her the benefit of the doubt for at least one night, however, I answered, “Sounds good, I’m getting that drink real quick.”

Just as I brought my hand up to lift the headset off my head, a final comment from Rachel came through the device’s speakers.

“I’m assuming by drink you mean water, right?”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I let my gaze pan towards the other side of the room, where Riley was sitting cross-legged on her bed. In front of her lay two sets of geometry workbooks, but her focus was on the phone she had gripped firmly between her hands.

“She actually lost it,” I said, trying to get her attention.

“Huh?” she turned her head. “Who?”

While spinning around on the office chair, I held up my hands to sign quotation marks at Riley. “Your ‘future girlfriend,’ Rachel.”

Riley laughed and fell backward onto her bed, her eyes now focused on the phone again. “I’m sure she’s just stressed because of the tournament. She didn’t seem that bad with me last weekend.”

“You didn’t hear how she just talked to me.”

“And you are not hearing all that crazy stuff your ‘boy toy’ is saying,” she said, shaking her head slightly, still tapping away at the screen with her fingers.

I shuddered. “Ugh…Don’t call him that.”

According to Riley, he was coming onto me, something that just sounds a little too far-fetched to me. He’s just a friend, but apparently, I’m giving him false hope or something.

“You’re letting him down easy, right?”

“Hey, you get free rein over my computer for the entire week, and I get free rein over your interactions with Arthur all week. Seems like a fair deal to me.”

“Yeah, sure, but I don’t want you hurting him on my behalf. He’s been nothing but nice to me, I don’t see why you feel like I need to tell this guy off, all of the sudden. Why would he be bad because he was trying to make me feel better when I was sad due to—”

“—Buddy!” Riley sat up straight, now looking at me instead of the phone. “Everything this guy is saying is exactly what every manipulative sleazeball would be saying! The whole thing about you not being like other girls? That’s just such a tell-tale sign that this guy is no good.”

I rolled my eyes at her dramatically. “And of course, you know this because you have soooo much experience with guys.”

She arched her eyebrow. “Touché, but I have more experience being a girl than you do.”

It was like a rock had suddenly embedded itself into my body. For some reason, that comment hit me hard. Of course, I didn’t have any experience, I knew that very well, that’s why I constantly feel like crap. I can’t properly connect with anyone because I don’t have those shared experiences. Experiences that are literally impossible for me to form. I thought about this a lot, how this is one of the reasons why I can never really be who I want to be.

But I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that. I decided to push my thoughts down again and let it rest. Instead, I got up from my chair, wanting to distract myself for a bit by having a little peek at what Riley was typing on my phone.

As soon as I stood next to the bed, however, she swiftly pulled the phone to her chest. “Hey, just let me do my work. I’m not done grading him yet.”

I growled, “I’m getting more and more doubtful about this deal we made.”

Bending down, I retrieved a can of diet soda from my backpack. I sat back down at the desk. When my hands grabbed onto the headset, the muffled sounds of various voices entered my ears.

Jade and Lizzy were passionately discussing where one should place the newly introduced ‘Roshan Banner’, and it was weirdly comforting. It didn’t matter what kind of complicated web of social intricacies I had gotten myself stuck into; I could always rely on the even more obtuse intricacies of Dota 2’s design to clear my head of unwanted anxiety.

I opened my can of soda; the sound of the can opening and its escaping carbon dioxide interrupted my teammates' discussion. While I took a big sip of the delicious liquid, Rachel spoke up.

“That’s not water.”

I swallowed. “Carbonated water?”

Lizzy chuckled softly. 

Kelsey joined the call, and it only took a few short minutes for us to find a game. As soon as I clicked the purple portrait of Dark Seer’s pointy head, it all felt like coming home. No more awkward dads or shouting mothers, no more snitching teachers, or complicated friendships, not even the constant pressure of gender dysphoria. Just me, my team, and a beautiful game.

***

“Just why?” Rachel sounded like she was playing the bad cop during a cliché police investigation show. “Why do you need to teleport to the bottom lane when I made the call to invade their jungle?”

Kelsey carefully said, “There is a giant wave coming into the tower, I can just clear this, take the portal, and join the team on top.”

Our warm-up game had already been tense, but since our opponents were completely uncoordinated, we had won that game handily. Playing up against Team Solid, however, proved to be a whole different ball game. Their skill level should be about the same as our competition at the tournament this weekend, but today, it proved difficult for us to match their level.

Rachel raised her voice. “So that’s what we are doing now? Ignoring calls and just making our own decisions? Who cares that our smoke is 10 seconds late and completely telegraphed! I’m sure that 200 extra gold is going to make all the difference in this make-or-break fight.” The sarcasm dripped from that last statement like the grease off a piece of KFC.

Jade tried to cool down the situation. “It’s fine, we don’t want to lose the bottom tower either. It’s a hard game, just focus on this gank for now.”

The familiar sound of a ‘smoke of deceit’ being activated rang through my ears, causing the game’s music to be slightly lower in volume. There were ten seconds of silence in the discord channel as our characters moved past the barren trees on the Dire side of the map.

Suddenly, the previously translucent skin of my anchor-dragging character turned back to its regular turquoise color. Within less than a second, my brain registered that the enemy team must be nearby. Not knowing exactly where, however, I used my blink dagger to instinctively blink onto the hill northwards, hoping to find my target in the fog.

My character appeared on the hill. I spotted a blue spirit. I pressed R. My character lifted their arms. “Silence!” A low voice barked. I pressed R, twice. “Meep, Meep” I yelled. “Lotus me!”. The blue spirit turned into a ball of lightning. “Shit,” Rachel said. The sound of another blink, an orange pentagram appeared under my character. “Shit,” I said. 

The red bar on the bottom of my screen swiftly depleted until it was completely empty and my screen turned grayscale. The grunts and sighs belonging to my teammates indicated that they had all befallen a similar fate.

I clenched my fists, my mind full of unhelpful words to my teammates. Rachel spoke up. “Damn it, Emily, I know you’ve not been playing for a week but how hard is it to get a ravage off?”

What? She was the one who didn’t purge my silence with her lotus orb. She was the one who didn’t ward when the smoke broke. And now she was blaming me that we lost the fight? This is nonsense!

I sighed heavily. I knew I shouldn't start a whole argument while we are still playing the game. That’s not going to get us anywhere. “Sorry, shit happens I guess,” I said while closing my eyes for a second.

Rachel didn’t receive the message, choosing to keep ranting instead. “All I ask for you is to ravage the Silencer and Storm Spirit together. Just this one thing! Why is everybody playing like a sack of potatoes all the t–?”

“-Ray! Shut up!” Kelsey’s voice boomed. “All you have been doing since boot camp is constantly flaming everything anybody does. You yelled at Lizzy for losing her lane against Viper, you’re constantly criticizing Jade’s warding, my farming patterns are somehow a constant topic of discussion. And now you get mad at Emily because the instant global made her unable to use ravage? You have never owned up to any of your own mistakes. Not even once, not a single time have you admitted to your own mistakes about anything.”

“I just want us to w—”

“—to win, yes. But this is not the flipping way to do it. We are playing the hardest game on the planet, we are going to make mistakes, deal with it. We started this team so we could have fun. To hang out and fuel our competitive spirit when you started playing in the varsity team. But if this is how it’s going to be. If this is who you're going to become every time we sign up for a tournament, I’m done!”

The silence following Kelsey’s outburst was deafening. I just sat there, watching my screen. The radiant towers crumbling in front of my eyes. Removing my mind from the game, I felt the back of my neck aching and my heart pounding in my chest. Should I say something? Wouldn’t that just make it worse?

“Okay,” Rachel said. “If that’s really what you think. Maybe we should just call it quits.”

A bleep. She had left the channel. “GG,” she typed in all chat, starting the forfeit timer. Only a second later, red text popped up in the same chat window. “RayRay has disconnected.”