Senpai bites into a pixelated strawberry shortcake. Strawberry juice runs down his chin, and a dollop of whipped-cream dots the tip of his nose. He hums in delight, wiggling in the cafe's plush chair.
His pink dialogue box appears on the television. How is your meal, darling? It must taste as heavenly as you are beautiful.
Sitting on a stained carpet floor, Girlfriend forces a chunk of casu marzu down her throat. "It's wonderful." A spicy burp puffs out her cheeks.
Claws dig into the inner lining of her stomach, but the glee on Senpai's handsome countenance is worth the discomfort. He asked her to eat it a month ago ( I've always wondered how it tasted, but alas, it doesn't exist in this game. Try it for me, love. ). She had to threaten more people than she could count in order to find someone who would confect it, and then smuggle it back into the States. If she hadn't recorded and saved Senpai's words of encouragement onto her phone, she would've dropped dead the instant she stepped out of her apartment complex.
She washes the cheese's maggoty taste down with a plastic cup of milk and sets the drink beside a grimy game controller and a heap of crusty napkins. She begins to wipe off her milk-mustache but stops when Senpai instructs her to keep it. His synthy laugh overspreads the little apartment like jasmine perfume. Girlfriend joins in, and during that moment, her stomachache dissipates.
The buzz of a motorcycle intrudes into their intimacy. Girlfriend cranks up the speakers' volume until she is engulfed inside a chiptune ballad.
She sighs. "I could listen to this song forever."
And I could gaze upon you until my final breath.
Red burns on Girlfriend's pallid cheeks. He has ladled her with more compliments than the number of spiders teeming on the windowsills, yet each one unleashes a heady rush that seizes her entire being.
"I could just kiss you!" She smacks her lips against the television's gelid glass screen. Her joy freezes over.
As she draws her head back, pressure amasses behind her eyes. "I don't know how much longer I can take this."
Since the moment she first booted up the game, she wondered how Senpai's strawberry-blonde hair would feel as it slipped between her fingers, what scent would envelop her inside his embrace, how quickly his heart would beat as her ear rested against his chest. It's the television's fault that she can't experience these thoughts. She wants to punch and kick it until it's shrapnel, but without it, she'd no longer have Senpai to enliven her lousy life.
Her shoulders droop, she sniffles. "I just want to hold your hand. Even if it's for one second."
A grin spreads across Senpai's fair face. I may have discovered a way to make that a reality.
Everything blacks out except his message. "Really?"
Have I ever deceived you?
She scrambles closer to the television, mowing down empty chip bags, stained styrofoam cups, and mutilated wrappers. Her question rushes out: "What do I need to do?"
Across the room, atop the kitchen counter, Girlfriend's phone rings. She jounces. Nobody should be calling her. She blocked everyone months ago.
"Can I turn that off?" she says.
Ignore it.
She obeys. Seconds pass before the game's music reclaims the room.
Senpai points at the game controller. Enter what I tell you.
Girlfriend pounces for it. Although some of the ink has been smudged off, she can still discern the letter on each colorful button. Her pulse thumps a bit faster with each press. The controller jitters in her clutch.
Two knocks against the front door snap her out of focus. She doesn't recall ordering anything, and if she did, the delivery man would have known better than to disrupt her and Senpai's date.
Concentrate , says Senpai. The sooner you finish, the sooner we'll be together.
His smile sends a dizzying wave against Girlfriend. She imagines cuddling with him underneath a sakura bower, feeling the rumble of his voice inside her chest as he serenades her. The doorknob rattles. The knocks louden to bangs. A woman's voice shrills at Girlfriend to answer the door.
Girlfriend's mood sours. She tries to ignore her mother, humming along to the videogame's music, sneaking peeks at Senpai's loose pink tie (which she cannot wait to fix), but her mother's incessant whining and repining detonates a bomb within her.
She interrupts Senpai. "Please forgive me."
His face twists into confusion as she shuts off the console. She heaves herself onto her feet, her legs prickling, and stomps around her messy mattress and towards the front door, grousing and swearing with a ferocious breath. Old paper plates scrunch underfoot, plastic bags crinkle and rustle, dust motes and blowflies burl about her. She crushes an ant on her doorknob and throws the door open.
"You're not welcome here!" she shouts.
Mommy Mearest pinches her nose and fans the air, jingling her golden bracelets. "Did you eat a bowl of vomit before you came here?"
"Did you just finish your shift at the strip club? Get out!" She swings the door, but Mommy Mearest slams her purple palm against it before it can shut.
"You're not going to give me the opportunity to say hi ?"
"There, you said it. Now leave. And fall down the stairs while you're at it." She tries to close the door, but her mother overpowers her.
"Your jokes never cease to amuse me. Let me in before you make me break this door."
A few seconds of struggling transpire before Girlfriend groans and gives in. "Step past the doorframe and I'm calling the cops."
"Believe me, I won't. I'll probably catch lice from standing here alone." Mommy Mearest rubs her temples. "Your dress is giving me a migraine."
Senpai hand-selected it for Girlfriend, rhapsodizing about how dazzling she'd look in it. She hesitated at first—with its garish neon green, its long tassels that bristled it like hay, and the perturbed looks it wrested out the whole store—but after she squeezed into it and witnessed her reflection on the changeroom mirror, she saw the beauty that Senpai had divined.
"I hope it turns into a stroke," Girlfriend says to Mommy Mearest. She crosses her arms over her chest and taps her unshod foot against a bed of bills. "Are we through? I have better things to do than bicker."
"Is it wrong for a mother to check on her own daughter after not hearing from her in forever? And by the looks of the hoarder's wet dream behind you, I should've done it sooner." She peers over Girlfriend's shoulder, squinting. "Is that mold growing on your curtain? Clean up after yourself before you become evicted from this place as well. Don't tell me you're still grieving over that 8-bit shuck."
"Don't disrespect him," snaps Girlfriend. "And why would that matter? I'm free to do whatever I want."
"I understand that, but the last time you used your free will, you were kowtowing to a lump of pixels and code. You're still shaving your hair as if you have that game."
She brushes the gray stubble on her pate. "I like how it looks."
"And flies like shit. Do you enjoy living in this cesspit as well?"
Girlfriend casts her eyes over her knobby shoulder. Her sights jaunt through mounds of takeout boxes and soda cans shared with Senpai's company, and she relives the guffaws that ached her sides and the happy tears that streaked her cheeks as they regaled and confided with each other all day and all night. Two dog bowls flank a bag of kibble slouching beside a pale yellow wall. For a few weeks, she was Senpai's adorable, little pet after he lamented never owning one, and she relished every second of it. Unwashed clothes spew out her closet—all of which were handpicked by Senpai—and dirty dishes clutter the kitchen sink. She pays no mind to the cobwebs lacing her ceiling, the moths blotting the jaundice lights, and the overwhelming stench of rot and B.O. With Senpai, every place is a luxurious palace.
Her blissful smile answers her mother's question.
"You're worse than when you had that game," says Mommy Mearest. Her voice drops to a serious tone. "You're not playing that game, are you?"
"Are you forgetting you and daddy incinerated it? And then incinerated the ashes?"
"That was after you gave us the wrong one. We had to flip your room upside down before we discovered you hid the cartridge inside your mattress." She pinches the bridge of her nose. "That imp brought nothing but evil into this family."
Girlfriend tightens her grip around the doorknob. "I've experienced more kindness from him in a week than I have from you and daddy my entire life."
"How so when you were coerced into locking yourself inside your room and severing all ties with your friends and family?"
"Because he loved me and I loved him."
Mommy Mearest buckawks! with laughter. "You call that love? You were treated no better than an abused mut. We had to send you to the hospital after you ate raw meat for that rat."
"I told you not to disrespect him!"
Mommy Mearest rolls her eyes with her entire head. "If you want to know what real love is, go find a man that actually exists. That thing never loved you."
The crackle of skin against skin cracks the air. Girlfriend's handprint sears her mother's cheek.
"Get. Out," says Girlfriend.
Mommy Mearest blinks, dumbstruck
"I SAID GET OUT!" Girlfriend shoves her forward and slams the door shut. She twists and swipes both locks before storming back to Senpai. After she boots up the console, a synth blares out the speakers. Her mother buffets the door.
"I knew you still had that abominable game!" she shouts. "Unlock this door this instant!"
The doorknob jostles and rattles as the videogame's floral loading screen illumines the room. Girlfriend assuages her nerves and focuses on the increasing percentage below the pink bar.
69.
75.
84.
90.
The door bucks several times before Mommy Mearest fumes out a sigh. "Fine. Be stubborn. You'll get what you deserve."
By the time Senpai shimmers onto the screen, Girlfriend is already groveling with her face smooshed against a brown stain.
Iturnedyouoffbecausemymomcame," she blurts. She snaps her head up and quails at Senpai's vexed visage.
Tell me everything.
The details gush out, pilling higher than the towers of cardboard boxes around her. Her gut twists while she recounts the moments her mother disgraced him. The blasphemies taste like bile.
Senpai rubs his blocky chin, studying her. Do you believe a word she said?
A piece of Girlfriend's heart chips off. "Of course I don't! Why would you think I'd betray you like that? There's nothing anyone could say that would make me stop loving you."
Senpai curls his lip. Shall we finish what we started?
Girlfriend jams the buttons at lightning speed. She and Senpai haven't even met, and yet her stomach is already abuzz with hummingbirds. She imagines the few, precious seconds of disbelief where they gawk at each other, frozen in place. They'll take one step forward together. Then another. And another. Then their legs will explode into a desperate race before ramming into each other and rolling onto the ground as a heated tangle of kisses and laughter and tears and I love you 's.
When she hits the final button, a spark of electricity nips her thumb. Senpai grins before darkness engulfs the television. Loud sparks splutter out the console. Girlfriend shrieks and scampers to the kitchen sink, snatching a smudged glass off the counter. Cold water jets out the faucet and fills the cup until it overflows. As she scurries back to the living room, water sloshes out the glass. She dumps it all over the console, tears and smoke stinging the corners of her eyes
When the last droplet of water drips out, she chucks the glass behind her and falls to her knees. It shatters onto a crack slithering up the wall. Girlfriend gingerly taps the power button, afraid that any more force might dismantle the machine. Five seconds stretch to 30. She clicks the button again and again, each press weaker than the last, until she's sobbing and snuffling with her forehead against the TV stand.
She can't live without him.
The screen brightens, lighting her scalp with a warm pink. A mellow song thrums inside her eardrums. She jolts upright and devours the lambent command on the floral backdrop.
COME TO ME.
She reaches her hand out. The screen ripples like water as her fingertips submerge. Her breath catches. She retracts her arm and examines her fingers. Warmth hums at the chewed tips, but besides that, she's unharmed. She funnels her attention onto the command. She can hear Senpai's sultry voice through those words. He wants her as deeply as she yearns for his touch. She gets up, fills her lungs with the apartment's dusty, lonely air for the last time.
"I'm coming, Senpai," she whispers.
She dives in.