Scary Out There Read Free Page A

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    â€œReport him,” Margaret said at lunch, peeling back the top of her sandwich and picking through its guts with a plastic fork.
    Nim flopped forward in her chair and put her head on her arms. “They’d just say how it isn’t a terms violation and if it happens again maybe I should change my screen name to something more neutral and use a different avatar so I don’t look so obviously . . .”
    â€œLike you have girl parts?” Margaret said, rolling a lump of white bread into a ball and shoving it in her mouth.
    The observation was built on a foundation of experience. Nim’s first avatar had been a hyperfeminine model called Sugar, with a tiny waist and a cloud of red hair so voluminous and bright it nearly matched Nim’s real-life color. She had liked the Sugar. It was curvy and pretty. It had looked like her, but better.
    She’d regretted it almost immediately.
    In Vertigo, the biological condition of being a girl meant a lot of attention, and not the good kind—in Nim’s case, an impressive and never ending flood of messages about the carpet and drapes.
    She stuck it out for a month, then traded in the orange haired Sugar for a model called Lola. It meant losing all her progress on Dreadnought Island, but she sucked it up and played the board again. She caught up to herself in a weekend.
    The Lola was a hipless pixie with slender arms and basically no chest. She was about as asexual as you could get, with tiny hands and feet and hair so blond it was almost white. It was nothing like Nim’s real-life hair, and that was kind of the point. Now, when she signed into Vertigo, she looked fragile, like she’d been through something mysterious and traumatic and had survived it. Her only act of rebellion had been to download a mod to put her Lola in pants.
    It annoyed her that she was the only person who seemedto care about this. When she’d broached it at the ill-fated games club meeting, the rest of them had looked at her like she was out of her mind.
    Even Margaret didn’t bother with mods—especially cosmetic ones. The homegrown stuff tended to be janky, and there were rumors that black-hat hackers built in all kinds of spyware and sketchy back doors to monitor your activity or highjack your machine. As far as Nim could tell, it was paranoid gossip. Most of the time the worst that happened was the homemade mods didn’t work, or they sort of worked, and you wound up with your torso square with your headset and your hips somewhere off to the left, getting stuck against the wall when you tried to go through a door.
    Anyway, it was a small price to pay to address the little issue that anytime the Lola climbed a staircase or a ladder, anyone behind her could look up her dress.
    â€œMaybe it’s someone on your launch list,” Margaret said, trying to sound helpful.
    But that was worse, somehow. Nim would have to wipe her whole list and add them all back one by one, and even that wouldn’t help, since if Margaret was right, Mr. No One would still be some mysterious jerk who had her launch code.
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    In physics, Mr. Howard was drawing vectors on the board, explaining their project for the quarter, which was a complicated telescope involving angles and mirrors and refracted light.
    Nim sat at her desk, thinking about Vertigo and the Doomsday Glass, how she’d figured out its point. It was a tiny vacuum from which nothing could escape. A black hole. An event horizon full of monsters. Her favorite thing in the world was just knowing how something worked.
    Mr. Howard eyed the class, gesturing with his dry-erase marker. “Can anybody give us a real-life example of a parabolic lens?”
    Nim stared at her work sheet. When she closed her eyes, all she saw was the difference between lush, vibrant Vertigo-world and sad, flat ordinary-world.
    Mr. Howard stood with his