I felt so stupid. I’d woken euphoric on Monday, knowing this was me now and feeling not only okay but absolutely ecstatic about that, and now one brush with my old life and I didn’t know who “me” even was. The vertigo had been almost physical, like I’d just stepped off a spinning motion ride and the ground was tilting. Steadier now, I didn’t feel much better.

  It wasn’t because of what I’d lost with my transformation, either. It went back further. After my heart attack, surgery, and prognosis, I’d had to cut the center out of my life. The family business had never been my passion, but it had been my responsibility. A couple of dozen employees, the Ross legacy was really theirs, their livelihoods, the support of their families. I hadn’t been a brilliant boss, but I’d taken the reins from Father and carried it all forward for everyone. Then I’d had to put it down and Tabitha had been right; it had been my wish to move on. Not just for her, so that she wouldn’t have her old boss looking over her shoulder and second-guessing her decisions, but for me, so I could find another center for the life that I’d had left.

  And I’d missed it. I hadn’t wanted it, but what you take care of, you care about. I’d “moved on” so my damaged heart wouldn’t linger like a ghost where there was no place for it anymore. In some ways it had made it easier to adapt to my transformation; Boss David had died before David did. Before that night I’d already halfway stepped out of my old life and April had left nothing behind.

  And now that firmly shut door had been kicked wide open and, up in the room that was April’s, not David’s, my old heart was whispering to me. Now that the vertigo was past, it felt weirdly like grief. But at the same time . . .

  “Hey, you.”

  “Hey.” I opened my eyes. I’d felt Mom get back and, after a bit of time with Carl, come upstairs to stand in my doorway.

  “Are you okay?”

  “It’s just drama. I’ll be helping Ms. Clark—Tabitha, I’m not her boss anymore—get out of a pit an asshole dug for her.”

  “I heard, but are you okay?” She came in to sit on the edge of my bed. I’d spent more than an hour sitting back against my headboard hugging Hads and just feeling stuff, and when I patted the blanket, she scooted up to join me. Leaning my head on her shoulder, I sighed when she snaked an arm around me.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  “For what?”

  “You asked if I’d ever forgive you. Remember?”

  “Yes.” Her free hand started playing with my locks that weren’t in the tail.

  “And I knew I would even if I couldn’t then.”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “Well, I did on Monday. After our Sunday . . . fight? I’d have said, but I didn’t really realize it until this morning.”

  Her arm had tightened around me at my words, but she just leaned her cheek against my hair. “Are you sure? I’m not making light of it, it’s a big thing. But I expected it to take much longer.”

  “Mmhmm. You should have asked. Even if it had turned out like you expected, you should have asked. But I forgive you.”

  How to put it into words?

  “I’ve been sitting here thinking about my life,” I said finally. “Before and now. I wouldn’t have stepped down from the business, if it wasn’t for my heart. And if it wasn’t for my heart, you wouldn’t have done what you did. If none of it had happened? Today I’d have spent the morning reading city business news in my kitchen, looking over my work calendar for next week. I’d know who I was and what I was doing, and what I’d be doing tomorrow and Monday and every day after that.”

  I curled into her side. “Instead, I’m going to be meeting up with Pinky and Brain and doing something stupid and fun. And tomorrow I’m going to church with you and Carl and the little goblin, and Monday I’m going to school and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ve decided I wasn’t so bad, as David, and I still don’t know who I am now, but I want to find out. I’m looking forward to it, and I realized Monday that this is what I want. So, thank you. I forgive you.”

  The squeeze got even tighter, but I didn’t mind. “Oh, sweetheart. Thank you. I love you so much.”

  “Love you, too.”

  *****************************************

  The morning had been drama and hugs, but team bonding was important. A shared experience (adrenaline and laughter helped), time to just hang and get to know each other, such were the things that led to fellowship and mutual support when the time came. Proven fact. So even though half of me wanted to call it a day already, when the afternoon rolled around, I took Carl up on his offer of a ride.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The City Mall was the core of a city block next to City Center; three floors of shops, restaurants, arcades, theaters, and public spaces, connected to parking garages and three downtown hotels and a convention center by walkway. It was a popular weekend hangout, apparently, especially because of its management’s decision to always have places like Dangerzone.

  Getting ready this morning, I’d looked Dangerzone up in case they had clothing regulations and been stunned by the technology-creep I hadn’t noticed; someone had combined laser tag with virtual reality-plus. VR+ visor looked a lot like a regular VR headset but were much lighter and incorporated a camera that relayed the view around you directly to your screen, with Dangerzone’s wifi-connected system providing the processing power to give you an additional virtual overlay on top of what was really there.

  The position-tracking sensors in the visor, your “blaster” (a solid, hefty thing with an interior mechanism that provided a vibrating “kick” when fired, all to make it feel like a real weapon), and the chest harness and the cuffs you wore on your wrists and ankles allowed the Dangerzone system to map you and superimpose your team’s armor over your body in the goggle’s screen view. The visor not only painted the superimposed “avatars” over everyone (you even saw your own when you looked down at yourself), but they provided the brilliant “blaster bolts” fired by your weapons, painted hits and “damage” on your armor, and even painted additional background details over the flat black the floor, ceiling, and featureless obstacles were painted with.

  In short, with the headphones that also mixed the sizzle and explosion of blaster bolt hits with the actual environmental sounds, it was advertised as equivalent to being physically in the middle of a first-person shooter science-fiction game with up to a couple of dozen other players.

  Reading all about it, I’d come away skeptical of Dangerzone’s ability to live up to its hype. Arriving outside its doors, I forgot about all that when I saw who waited for me; Pinky and Brain had beat me there, and with them stood Brad, Bret, and Papa.

  “April!” Pinky waved when she saw me. “What kept you?” Beside her, Brain had been talking animatedly with the guys and looked just happy to be here.

  “ . . . Traffic? Why do I see three guys who aren’t sisters?”

  Brad laughed. “Pinky called and said she’d rather shoot me than a bunch of kids she doesn’t know and I should bring my best.”

  “Which is Papa,” Pinky clarified. “I don’t know about art-boy, there.”

  “Hey, now.” Papa threw his arm around his cohort-mate’s shoulder. “Picasso here’s good at this stuff.”

  So, the quarterback, the running back, and . . . emo “art-boy.” I narrowed my eyes at Pinky, but Brain was practically vibrating in place and I was beginning to reconsider those three computer screens she had on her desk at home. Maybe science-stuff wasn’t all that big rig we’d seen was made for?

  “Okay, how are we going to do this?” If I could focus on the game, I could keep it together around Papa.

  “We’re signed up for three games,” Brain said, all business. “Standard capture the flag first, we’re with whatever Blue Team forms, those three are with Red Team. Then we’re all together on a convoy game. We’re the “convoy team” that has to get from the entry gate to the exit gate with the other two six-man teams defending the entry and exit zones. And then all three teams are together in a bug-hunt game where we try for group survival and highest individual kill scores. All of them are set in the terrain of a half-destroyed space station, and each game lasts fifteen minutes, with fifteen minutes between each for recovery and shit-talking each other while other teams play.”

  “You’re going down,” Pinky sneered at Brad, and then hearing herself, flushed beet red. Brad opened his mouth, looked at Brain our fourteen-year-old first year, and closed it on the filthy double-entendre.

  “Oh, it’s on.”

  Standing behind them both Papa rolled his eyes, and I was deciding that the mysterious boy Pinky had a crush on was . . . Brad?

  Which would explain a lot.

  Moving the party into the Dangerzone foyer, we identified ourselves to the staff to be ushered into Mission Prep where we met the other players on our teams (mostly middle-schoolers) and got outfitted with guns, chest harness, cuffs, and finally our VR headsets, the first system-check being Dangerzone’s VR overlay bringing up our armor and “activating” our gun’s “powerpacks” with a rising whine in our earphones.

  I lifted and rotated an arm, staring at the hundred-percent believable VR armor covering it. “Whoa.”

  “I know, right?” Brain was still vibrating. “I’ve done all the games, it’s the best!”

  “She really has,” Pinky said, grinning evilly under her visor. “And she knows all the best spots for defending our base and sniping the enemy. We’re going to waste them.” I couldn’t see her eyes beneath her visor screen, but they had to be twinkling and I laughed.

  “Well, if Brain’s going to lead us to victory . . .” I turned to the rest of our team. “Anyone who hasn’t played this before, get over here and General Brain is going to tell us how to win.”

  *******************************

  We won, of course, especially after it became apparent that Brian, quarterback that he was, had decided to call the shots and make him and Papa a roving scout team; a team I could follow with my mind since I couldn’t stop pinging Papa. In the convoy game, I realized Papa was doing something himself when, as we cut through the center of the zones on our way to safety, he seemed to have eyes at the back of his head for pop-ups. His advantage disappeared in the third game, though, when our six space-trooper squad got swarmed by alien insect-creatures on our way to our mission-zone, the station’s secondary shuttle bay.

  Getting “killed” by a flying insectoid the size of a Great Dane spitting armor-eating acid is scary, and yes I screamed like a girl. Brad and Papa theatrically dragged my dead butt to the shuttle bay. Leave no trooper behind!

  By the time the lights and horn sounded the end of The Battle of Orpheus Station, I knew three things; one, boys were a lot better than girls at this on endurance alone (even skinny anemic Bret was breathing less hard than the three of us), two, the VR-tech had gotten amazing, and three, I was so heterosexual and gone for Papa; in all the action and screaming laughter, just his voice made my bones vibrate and a Great job, Hemingway! made me melt. Melt! As wiped out as we all were after it all, I could swear the smell of his sweat did something to me and when, harness off, he pulled his shirt up to wipe his face with it, cruelly exposing his abs, my brain bluescreened.

  “So, burgers?” he asked calmly as if he hadn’t just destroyed my mind. “Brian and I need all the protein we can get.”

  “Um, what? Sure?” And damn him, he knew.

  I was really going to need to do something about this.