18 There's Too Much Love
With his thoroughbred good looks and shocking reputation, Adam was every gossip's natural favorite, so there was no shortage of pictures of him sneering and strutting around with an air of menace.
Nobody's boyfriend Adam Harlow, 22, makes a typically impressive entrance wearing a look that could melt chrome and a good-looking woman on his arm: Pokémon League golden girl Delilah Peerenboom, 19. According to eyewitness reports, Beauty and the Beast canoodled and close-danced but left separately; supposedly Adam, ever the gossip columnist's darling, threw a tempestuous tantrum in the men's room and smashed a bottle of Guerlain Habit Rouge against a mirror so the attendants had a chance to earn their wage—considerate really!
Overlapping the picture of her and Adam was a picture taken of her the next day in Covent Garden. The wind blew her hair around and there was a blue circle around a hickey revealed on the side of her neck with all caps proclaiming it "THE SMOKING GUN!"
Her hand went immediately to her neck. The bruise was no longer visible by that point, but it felt like he had bitten his initials into her skin.
She sat in the Fuchsia Gym gift shop/café and a girl named Alice, who had had a badge match that day, asked, "What did you think of my battling?"
One of the problems with people knowing that Delilah was Pokémon League World Champion was that they would frequently ask right away what she thought of their battling. This was a bit of a social puzzle. Not really a jigsaw, or a sudoku, but perhaps a crossword, the British kind where there was less confidence in the answers. If it were wrong, the whole thing might have to be erased, so Delilah never put an answer down unless she was very sure of it (yet the surer she was, somehow the likelier she was to be wrong).
But the real life crossword was always in pen. She didn't want to lie but she didn't want to be bluntly honest because people always seemed to interpret this as her acting superior. She found that people often became defensive of their decisions when she talked to them, even when she didn't disagree with them, and this was something she didn't really understand. Did she really come off that judgmental? How could she think a decision was wrong, if it had really happened? The truth was just what it was.
Alice was a genuinely good trainer, the kind who could logically expect to win badges on the first try, but her battling rarely deviated from standard practice and Delilah thought she would struggle at a more competitive level, and that the sudden difficulty would take her by surprise.
"Your pokémon are so responsive to you commands!" said Delilah.
Alice smiled, satisfied with this deceptively casual evaluation. Delilah, hesitant to lie ("That was wonderful!") and equally hesitant to be truthful ("I really don't understand why, when it was quite obvious the opponent could only withstand one more hit, you decided to use a status move—what could you possibly have been thinking?"), usually resolved to say something objective like this but sort of obscure so it sounded insightful. (It worked every time.)
She felt suddenly nostalgic for those days of badge collecting...well, she was still collecting badges—she had three from Kanto now, but it was different somehow. Her number of badges no longer defined her as a trainer. It seemed to serve a less immediate purpose now. She didn't have to win badges to qualify as a League Tournament participant anymore. It seemed funny that she had been so unexcited about badges and tournaments...if not for others' prompting, she might never have entered.
There had then been a sense of exploration about pokémon training, a freedom that it didn't really matter. Now people cared about her, people she didn't even know and would never know. People had expectations or desires about her performance in matches, and even out of matches—since being seen with Adam Harlow, her scandal magazine stock had risen by several percents.
For some reason lots of tabloids often had little featurettes with titles like "CELEBS—JUST LIKE US" with pictures of famous people grocery shopping and holding their children's hands. In one such spread was a photo of Delilah with a scraped knee from when she tripped over her cousin at Christmastime on the way to the movies, the caption saying that "they" get bumps and bruises the same way normal people do.
It came as a bit of a shock to realize that she was no longer included in "us". She was a "they" now. It was interesting to see how she was portrayed in tabloids, which published more stories than articles, meaning that most of the writers treated her as a character, choosing which parts of her personality were appropriate to mention in order to attract readers. Descriptions of her in interview articles were usually more admiring and respectful (though one puzzled her by saying she had "an aura of hide-and-seek"—what was that supposed to mean?), and tabloid articles usually used more alliteration and sometimes rhyme.
But was it true? Were "they" really just like "us"? If Delilah were just like everybody else, she wouldn't be famous. Nobody would care if she weren't different. Delilah had always sort of taken for granted the rate at which she won badges; during the year following her high school graduation, her first real exposure to the world of pokémon training, she had won badges on almost a monthly basis without really being aware of how abnormal it was. She had won eight badges just in time to qualify for the Silver Conference. She had to think it must be quite boring to do it any slower.
She bought a pair of turquoise Manolo Blahnik sandals at an invitation-only 90%-off sale at the Celadon Department Store and wore them to a League dinner. Their beauty was helpful in distracting people from asking her about the 1994 Polish National Champion's BubbleBeam technique, or the body image problems of the modern teenage girl. However as she was about to leave with Lance, who had driven her there, somebody said, "Um, Delilah?"
She turned. A girl stood there smiling.
"Hi, I was wondering if you could give me some advice?"
"What kind of advice?"
"About training pokémon."
"Well, of course I could," she said. Her feet were blocked from the girl's view by Lance. "But just so you know, I'm going to be lecturing at a training seminar in Pewter in a few weeks. Brock Harrison will be there, and Jeanette Fisher, and I think Pete Pebbleman."
"Oh—thank you," she said. "But it's just a quick question..."
"Yeah, of course, go ahead." Lance left to quickly go to the bathroom, but the girl didn't look down.
"Um well...well, I've watched all your battles I can find on the internet," she said, blushing, "and I notice that your pokémon always attack when you tell them to, every time, they always obey the command. How do you do that?"
Delilah was a little confused. "What do you mean?" she asked, shifting slightly to a sort of Botticelli pose so that her right shoe was more prominent, but she still didn't notice.
"I mean—my pokémon stops listening to me when we battle," she said. "When we're training, she attacks every time I tell her to. But as soon as we start a match, she'll do it a couple of times, but then she stops. Do you think she gets nervous, or...?"
"Nervous? Huh," said Delilah, her chin in her hand. "I don't know if I've ever heard of something like that. How do you reinforce her?"
"Sorry?"
"What's your reward schedule like? How often do you reward her for performing in training? Do you use a clicker, or...?"
"That's where I don't understand it!" she said. "I reward her every time!"
"Oh," said Delilah, realizing the mundane inexpertise of the problem. "Well you don't want to reinforce it every time she performs. Because when you stop, your pokémon'll stop too."
"Why?"
Delilah stopped for a minute, not having anticipated that she would have to explain it. "Well, because, let's say you're training your pokémon to use, like, Tackle, for example. Every time she does it, you give her a treat. So that's what she learns: she uses Tackle, and she gets a treat. She uses Tackle again, gets another treat. Once more, one more treat. Every time she does it, she gets a treat. Okay?"
"Okay."
"So then let's say you're in a match, and you call Tackle. Your pokémon does it—but she doesn't get a treat. 'Cuz you're in a match. Well, she wasn't expecting that—every other time she's done Tackle, she's gotten a treat, right? So she's going to decide to stop doing it, if she's not going to get a treat anymore."
"But you can't give a pokémon a treat in a match," she said. "So how do you get it to do it anyway, even if it's not going to get a treat?"
"Well, you give it a treat sometimes—just not every time," said Delilah. She assumed that this girl must be the daughter of some kind of League insider, in order to be at the party, so she wasn't sure why she had to explain all this. "Because if you do that, if you reward it unpredictably, it won't know when it's going to get a treat. So every time you call Tackle, there's a chance that it'll get a treat..."
As she and Lance walked to his car he asked her, "What was her question?"
"Oh, nothing exciting," said Delilah. "She was reinforcing her pokémon every time it performed..." Lance turned a corner into an alley, and she followed him. "Didn't you park the other way?" she asked. "Is this a shortcut or—?"
He suddenly grabbed her, getting a sharp intake of her breath as he pulled her to him. "Don't turn around," he whispered gruffly, holding her head firmly against his chest with his hand so she wouldn't be tempted to look behind them. "Just follow me for a minute, okay?"
"Okay," she squeaked.
He lowered his arm to a tight grip around her shoulders and began walking more quickly. Her hair was messy from where his hand had loosened a bobby pin. They turned a corner and he stopped, so she did too.
He released her and stood there for several moments, listening. At first there was just silence; then, the steady tattoo of footsteps, coming closer.
The next sequence of events happened quite quickly. Lance grabbed at a figure coming around the corner, Delilah gasped decoratively, and there was a struggle for a few minutes that in the dim light just looked like a shadowy mass. The man managed to strike him; Lance cried out, his hand flying to his face, and the man took the opportunity to run away. There was a clattering sound and a burst of light as Lance's altaria emerged from its poké ball, which had fallen to the ground.
The altaria looked at him and made a croaking call before preening its feathers a little. In the brief flash afforded by the opening poké ball, Delilah saw that the clattering had been caused by another object—a camera, falling out of its case. She stooped to pick it up, along with Lance's poké ball. "Are you okay?" she asked him.
"He poked me in the eye," he said, holding a hand over part of his face.
She handed him his poké ball, and he recalled the altaria after giving it a little pat. "This is what he dropped," Delilah reported, giving him the camera.
"So he was a journalist," said Lance. "I thought he might have been a Rocket."
"I think 'journalist' is a strong word," she said.
He laughed, clicking through pictures, the light from the camera screen illuminating his face dramatically.
"Anything interesting?" she asked.
"Not really," he said. "Mostly us."
"I'm very interesting, actually."
At an interview she was asked, "So, Lance Siegfried...are you dating?"
"I think my publicist would like me to say yes," she said, and he laughed. "But no, we're not...he's a little bit older..."
"He's a young man," he insisted. "How old is he, twenty-seven? Or is he twenty-eight now. And you're nineteen? That's not so bad."
"Yeah, but...that's closer to ten years than it is to five..."
"That's true."
"I mean, he's great, I like him a lot, and respect him a lot. But..." She trailed off, shrugging.
"So how about Adam Harlow?"
She laughed. "You are asking way too many pertinent questions," she said, and he laughed again.
Delilah had said more than once that she was not looking for a boyfriend; she disliked repeating herself, because it made her feel like she was getting defensive, but nobody seemed to believe her because they still kept asking the same question as if she hadn't even responded. She had to wonder if they would still have ignored this answer if she were a boy. She also had to wonder if they would have ignored her answer if she didn't wear eyeliner. It had been five months since she had become Champion and she hoped they would soon figure out that she wasn't about to change her mind. Yes, there were pictures of her with Adam Harlow—but why would anybody ever think that Adam Harlow wanted a girlfriend, or that any girl would even have him for that matter.
She still didn't know what to think of the situation and it didn't seem that the magazines did either. There was a collage of photos of Adam with various different girls, and she was one of them. She was in two photographs, bigger than the others because of her title, taken on the same day: there was Adam kissing her, and Adam laughing with his arm around her. The other pictures showed him in similar positions with girls of all shapes and colors; she felt no jealousy, but a horrible, guilty satisfaction in the fact that she was certainly the prettiest of them.
The accompanying text read, "In this edition of Harlow's Harem, there is a notable new notch in the battered bedpost of loathsome lothario Adam Harlow (22): Pokémon League bombshell Delilah Peerenboom (19), apparently unable to Protect herself from the cranky coxcomb's Pursuit. His Lovely Kiss may Charm her, but such a celebrated trainer should have more in her arsenal than Struggle and Submission—hopefully the next time our Mohicaned meanie attempts Close Combat, this thick slice of Yankee cheesecake is ready with a Low Kick!"
The use of battle moves as a literary effect among other things felt tacky and a little embarrassing, and she thought maybe she should be offended. After all, she couldn't technically be called a notch in Adam's bedpost, yet.
Sex. It was Adam's forte, it was what he was known for, he gave off sex in waves, in oceans. Just standing downwind of him was enough to leave someone needing to bathe in cracked ice to cool off from all the hot, dirty sex stinging their eyes.
Perhaps it was a holdover from early American Puritanism that young people (and especially girls) were told, in Delilah's experience, that sex was a scary, scary thing, entailing excruciating pain, hidden dangers, deadly risk, and emotional stress, hinting broadly that it was ultimately not worth it. Adding an intimidating being like Adam resulted in some unholy cocktail of terror that made her want to hide in bed for the rest of her life, or at least until the next opportunity to encounter it.
Some nights in bed she lay with a pokémon sleeping on her heartbeat and wondered if people would care about her at all if she were a boy.
Most of the time she doubted it.