Your Princess is in Another Castle (33 page)

“Well, you should like me
then, because I’m very naïve.  I’d trust you completely and never even consider that you might have any ulterior motives or secret agendas ala Ada Wong.” 

Sabrina laughs.  “That’s good, because really I ju
st date Marvel fanboys so I can kill them and thus lower Marvel’s circulation.  But now that we’ve successfully ordered and shared some basic likes and dislikes, how about we delve a bit deeper into your psyche?  I have a fun little exercise to try in lieu of me merely asking you questions about yourself.  What do you say?”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Just answer me one simple question and then I can give you a complete psychological profile of yourself.”

“
Oh, really?”

“Absolut
ely!  A guaranteed, one-hundred percent accurate psychological profile.  I’ll instantly know you better than you know yourself.”

“
Alright, I’m game.  What’s the question?”

“Who is
your favorite and least favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“
Why Sabrina, you think you can dissect me with that blunt little tool?” I ask doing my best impression of a Brit doing an impression of a Southern accent.

“Oh, scared
, are we?  Maybe you’re afraid of what you’ll find out.”  Sabrina leans across the table and looks into my eyes intently, mostly succeeding in repressing her smile. 

“Fine, then.” 
I lean in so we’re almost nose to nose.  “My favorite is Raphael.  My least favorite is Michelangelo.”

“
I had my suspicions those might be your answers.  And that’s very rare, for someone’s least favorite to be Michelangelo.”

“I know.  He’s like Curly from T
he Three Stooges. But it had an upside, I always got to be who I wanted when I played the Turtles arcade games, unlike with X-Men.  But I suppose everyone whose favorite is Raphael would dislike Michelangelo.”

“Not necessarily.  But as for your picks, the R
aphael/Michelangelo dynamic is certainly the most extreme of them all when it comes to socializing.  Raphael was the loner, while Michelangelo was the party dude.  And yet they rarely clashed with each other, because Raphael instead butted heads with Leonardo, the most disciplined turtle and de facto leader. 

“
So, I would say that you tend to clash with authority.  Combined with your loner ways, I would imagine that you likely did poorly in high school, largely due to your rejection of the system.  You would have had no interest in homecomings, student councils, or honor rolls.  You would have believed that you were better off studying independently, and acted out a lot as a response to attempts to force you into assimilation into the prom king and star quarterback-driven high school culture you had nothing but contempt for. 

“
Now, while Raphael was solitary by nature, he was still sociable.  He may have spent more time alone than any of his brothers, but he also takes the kidnapping of Master Splinter in the first film the hardest.  So, you and Raph would fight for the people you love the hardest of all.  You also both believe that actions speak louder than words, which is why you can have difficulty expressing your true feelings. 

“
And as with Raph, you have a small but close circle of friends, although you’re still something of an outsider to them as well.  But that is as you wish it to be.  You’re someone hate parties.  You never go to them, even if they’re being thrown by your friends and they’ve expressly invited you.  If you drink, you drink alone, and mostly hard liquors, but since I know about your beer pong anecdote, I bet you never touch the stuff. 

“
And you value your solitude, because often it is being alone that gives you your greatest moments of peace.  But you’re also the type to suffer in silence, for just whenever you need your friends the most, you deliberately don’t call on them as a means of self-punishment.

“
You also internalize failure to a high degree and have trouble forgiving yourself.  And you don’t take enough pride in your accomplishments.  You brush off all compliments because you instead judge yourself on your own scale of likely unreachable ideals of perfection.  Oh, and you hate comic relief characters in movies.  You have absolutely no tolerance at all for Jar Jar Binks and his kind.  So, am I right?”

I look at Sabrina for a long time before I answer.  “Yo
u’re right,” I finally say.  “I hated Jar Jar Binks.”

“Okay
,” says Sabrina.  “But I was actually referring to my more complete diagnosis.”

“Oh, that?  Well, I’d say you were somewhere
in the middle about my description.  Neither hot nor cold, I guess.”

“
Uh-huh.  See, I know I’m right, because if I were, you’d certainly never admit to it.”

“
So what about you, then?  Who are your favorite and least favorite turtles?”

“Sorry.  I don’t turn the looking glass inward.  At least
I won’t just yet.  But I will tell you that we do not share the same favorite or least favorite turtle.  And my picks are also not the opposite of yours, either.  But to be fair, I’ll let you ask me some personal questions now and I’ll give you honest answers.  It’s the least I can do since I just blew your mind by psychoanalyzing you so thoroughly.”

“Okay, I got one.  Why
’d your dad suddenly bring up MMOs before?  And why’d you so quickly intervene when he did?”

Sabrina leans back and lets out a sigh like a suspect s
ettling in for what will surely be a lengthy police interrogation.  “I knew you were going to ask me that.  So, this is what I call my death of a clown story in that it’s tragically funny.  See, I haven’t really been out much since things ended with my last boyfriend, Danny.  He’s MIA, via an MMO.  WOW, to be precise.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, you know, World of Warcraft?  People aroused by acronyms like to call it WOW.”

“
Oh, I know what it is.  I was just saying
wow
because I can’t believe a guy would pick WOW over a girl.  Usually guys just take MMOs by default.  When you actually have a choice, you should always choose the girl.”

“Well, that’s not what Danny did.
  And it’s hard to compete with WOW.  It’s never not in the mood, it’s always on, and you never run out of new and exciting things to do together when you’re with WOW.  But unfortunately, just like in real relationships infatuation with WOW can turn into dangerous obsession.  That’s what happened with Danny.  And it all started out innocently enough.  Danny had always been into first-person shooters, but then a couple of his buddies got into WOW.  And eventually, Danny joined them. 

“
At first it was only an hour or two a day for Danny, the same amount of time he had been spending climbing the leader boards in his shooters.  But it gradually got worse.  First, he started showing up late for our dates.  Then, he started redirecting where our dates would be held, from public venues to solely within his bedroom.  And not so we could enjoy any intimate moments together.  Oh, no. 

“
The only thing we’d ever do is watch some Red vs. Blue machinima, with me on his bed and Danny in his gaming chair.  I even tried sitting in his lap once, but he just shoved me off, saying he was concerned about the structural integrity of the chair with my added weight and that it wouldn’t be cheap to replace if it broke. And then after two or three Red vs. Blue episodes, Danny would just kiss me on the forehead and send me home so he could play more WOW.

“Th
en, he started ignoring me completely.  He’d cancel dates altogether and he quit even returning my calls and would only send me half-sentence texts.  And after awhile, even those stopped.  Finally, I talked to Danny’s mother, and she told me that I wasn’t the only one he’d been ignoring.  He had stopped going in to work, so Best Buy fired him.  He had quit going to class, too.  Danny’s mom said the last straw came when his birthday was coming up and all he asked for was this little plastic tube that was designed for the sole purpose of being able to urinate into it without having to get up from your computer to go to the bathroom.

“Danny’s
family and I agreed on staging an intervention for him, but he was in total denial that he was addicted.  In a last ditch attempt to save him, his parents cancelled his WOW account.  And I created a diversion by getting Danny to come to my house under the pretense that I wanted him to help me setup my own PC so I could join him in WOW.  This allowed his older brother to upload a virus into Danny’s computer that crashed his hard drive.  But his younger brother wasn’t satisfied with that, so he took a baseball bat and smashed Danny’s computer to pieces like he was destroying the copy machine from Office Space.

“I went back to Danny’s
house with him and he flipped out when we confronted him about what we’d done.  He said we weren’t going to stop him from playing and he took off in his car.  Later that night, the police called his parents and said Danny had been arrested for trying to steal a PC from Best Buy.  His parents reluctantly paid his bail and convinced the Best Buy management not to press charges after the situation was explained to them.  And they knew Danny had been a good worker once.  But Best Buy had a condition: that Danny be sent to a rehabilitation clinic specializing in internet addiction.  That was the last time I’ve heard from him, when he’d written a snail mail letter to me from inside rehab.   

“
In the letter, Danny asked me to buy him a copy of The Burning Crusade WOW expansion the day it comes out since he won’t be able to buy it himself.  So he hadn’t been cured yet when he wrote me.  To Danny, I’m still just the other woman he sees on the side.  But Danny never fell for another player.  There was never an elven seductress who came and stole Danny away from me.  There were no online mistresses.  At times, I wish there were.  It would be easier for me to understand it all that way.  But it was always about World of Warcraft itself for him.

“
I didn’t write Danny back and I’m not waiting for him.  I hope when he leaves rehab he’ll be cured, but I’m not holding my breath.  The whole ordeal is a sad situation but it makes for a good breakup story and I think the fact that I can laugh at it now means I’m over it and Danny.  I’m ready to date again now.  And my dad knows the whole story, so you can understand why he wouldn’t want me to have my heart broken all over again by another MMO addict.”

“I understand.  And you don’t have to worry ab
out me.  I’ve got far too much Raphael in me to ever want to join any massive multiplayer online communities.” 

“Actually, it’s
massively
if you want to say it properly.  Sorry, but I’m a gal who likes her suffixes.”

“
Well, there you go.  That’s how little I know about MMOs.  And I’m a guy who likes his prefixes.”

“See what I mean about you being like Raphael?  Leo
nardo would say he likes one thing and Raph would vouch for the opposite just for the sake of being difficult.” 

Our server returns and sets
down our pizza.  Sabrina smiles.  “Pizza time,” she says.  “It wouldn’t be a true turtle-related conversation if it weren’t over some pizza.”

As she prophesized, Sabrina did indeed eat very little during the meal.  I’ve been lucky so far in avoiding any awkward pauses during the post-dining conversation phase of our date, as Sabrina and I have kept the dialogue alive through our rapid-fire questioning of each other regarding nothing in particular.  But now Sabrina is looking at me with quiet curiosity.

“I just realized something,” she says at last.

“Uh-oh, you’re not about to give me an excuse so you can bail on me, are you?”

Sabrina
laughs.  “No.  I just realized that you’ve been holding everything with your left hand.  You’re a lefty.”

“Yep,” I say.
  “Most right-handers tend not to notice, though.  They just assume everyone else is like they are.  That winds up making us lefties a pretty underrepresented bunch.  From the videogame world we have Link, but I don’t think there are any southpaw superheroes.  And Sinestro is the only left-handed supervillain I know of.”       

“Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern, he
wears his ring on his left hand, same as Sinestro.  And since you’re a Link fan, you should cosplay as him sometime.  I think you’d make a very cute Link, plus being a lefty makes you well suited for him.”

“Maybe if we ever go to a con together and you go as
Princess Zelda.”

“Sure, that’d be fun.
  I love going to cons.” 

“Cool. 
I just thought of another question for you, though.”

“Shoot.”

“If you were writing a dating profile, what would your headline be?”

“Fangirl
seeks fanboy.  Yours?”

“Lost cause seeks deus ex machina.”

Sabrina laughs.  “A bit desperate perhaps, but the Latin adds a touch of sophistication.  So, what made you finally ask me out, though?  I’d about given up on you since I was sending out hints with all the subtly of dropping an ACME anvil on top of your head, but you still weren’t asking me out.”