To avoid myself from going berserk, I went online as soon as I got home. Trying hard to find the right prey, I sharked about for a long while to detect any easy targets. Then, some guy by the nick “4 Lone-Ice” came over and asked me to partner him. Not into gays, I rejected him. I was more of a loner kind. A partner would spoil my hunt.

“Here, I’ll give you a lollipop if you help me level up.”

“I’m not a kid, and I’m not a girl. Puh-lease~”

Lollipop?

What had she called me just now? Lolly? What the? I sat up straight and stared at the screen. No one called me that! The nice girls would call me by my actual name, Lopez. And the guys called me Langer, like all the teachers did.

That spoilt my mood for the whole day. Even the spoils from winning girls’ heart could not inspire its usual uplift in me.

The next day, she was still indifferent about the whole incident yesterday although it had affected my entire being for a whole yesterday. I was going to get heated up again… but a little voice in me asked if I just wanted her hands on my again. Pissed off at that little voice, I was more than determined to not let anything get to me again.

Right.

“Lopez, you play Maple?”

“Why is it of your concern?”

“Oh, so it was you!”

“What?”

“Hard heart.”

I was too stunned to look blur. How could she had known? That was my nick in Maple, and no way my avatar could betray my real identity. I had always believed I had split personality, the one on and the one off.

“Come again?”

“Why didn’t you take the lollipop you were offered?”

“That was you?”

“Yeah. Surprised?”

“How did you know it’s me?”

“Hard_heart. I was feeling kinda queasy when I saw that nick. So it was a random guess. Who knew you totally admitted at the random shooting technique. Mm, the investigating book had been quite accurate after all.”

She didn’t know and I admitted to her. How smart.

“Anyway, Mr HH, my name is Puffy.”

“I thought you’re called Patronus?”

“Oh my God, you knew! Mm, very accurate indeed. Just so you know, that was the ‘wrong info to allow them to correct you’ sorta technique to ask something people usually are too shy to answer. Quite nice to have a cooperative guinea pig. Oh, my dear lab rat, Puffy is my nick… for close friends only.”

Another day she messed up my mind. The only trust worthy body part I had, and she just had to f it up.

I stopped trying to figure her out, it drove me mad. Things settled down a little. The only difference in life was at school, I had a new ‘close friend’ and online I had to tutor an idiot who seemed to have no coordinates to play any sort of games. No matter what I taught her, be it Dota, Gunbound, RO, O2Jam, Dominion or even Neopets, she just sucked at it. Of course, she beat me in her sort of games. Like minesweeper, Bookworm, checkers and some other childish games that were a total bore. What often amuse me was that she loved “smart” games, but she hated chess.

So she stole into my life so quietly, so gradually that I did not noticed how significant she was to me until that one day some crazy fool proposed to her. In public! In front of the whole class. She just smiled and laughed it off. She neither accepted nor rejected him. Only called him cute, adorable and sweet in three different sentences. Fine, she did utter the word darling, but she also emphasized on the word friends!

That night RO-ing, she popped a question suddenly.

“Lolly, is there any reason at all for him to like me?”

She called me again! She only called that name that once! Ever since then, even when I got another fit, she had stuck to Lopez, making me wonder if I’d hallucinated the whole name-calling. I was too happy to pay attention to her question properly. I just came up with the first appropriate reply.

“Why?”

“What is there in me to like?”

“A lot, I should think.”

“Really? Then why do you always seem to hate me? No matter what I say or do, you just won’t smile at all. And you always treated me like I’m stupid.”

“Sorry if I gave you that impression. I don’t hate you, nor do I think you’re unwise.”

It was the golden opportunity to make a proposal. But I dared not.

We left things that way. She never spoke of me of such things anymore. It was again, as if nothing out of the norm had occurred. She just seemed so tired most of the time, her smile strained and her radiance seemed to glow dimly.