✅ A Dose of Humiliation

43. Big Decision

"Light sleepers, huh?" Nikki muttered sarcastically as soon as Marcie's mum was out of the lounge.

"I take it they're not that easy to wake in reality?" Clint guessed. He had been hanging around with us for a while, but Marcie didn't talk about her family much and her brothers weren't a particularly interesting topic for conversation. He probably didn't understand why the rest of us found Mrs Miller's comments so amusing.

"Oh, they sleep fine," Marcie was the one to explain. "They're tired in the morning because they're often up until three in the morning, screaming racial slurs into their microphones. Mum just can't hear them from her room, and the patch panel for the alarm system is in their room so they know when she's coming down to check on them."

"They play competitive leagues for Shadow Covenant 7," Jodie added, sensing that the explanation still lacked a little something. "The most wretched hive of scum and villainy in online gaming."

"And she's so strict with you..."

"Marcie and Cecilia tried their best to comply with Mum's crazy rules. The boys realised years ago that it's easier learning to get away with it."

"Anyway," Elspeth cut in. "This is a party, right? We're here to have fun, not focus on family drama. What do you want to do?"

"The food will be here soon," Nikki said. "Something quick until then?"

"We could play 'truth or dare'," Marcie suggested with a giggle. "I mean, that's what you're supposed to do at a sleepover, right? They always do it in stories and on TV."

"Yeah." I could share some of that laughter. "I've never actually done it before. It's like something that you read about, but it's probably not so dramatic in the real world. What kind of things would you ask, anyway?" There were a couple of mumbled answers, but nobody seemed to have any clear ideas. We'd all heard of the game, but it wasn't something we'd tried, and it seemed that everything we knew about it seemed to be from fantasy.

"I know what it normally turns into at some parties with the rich kids," Serena offered. "But I don't think anybody here would want it to go like that. It just ends up trying to prove you're edgier and more daring than everybody else, or using a game as an excuse to pressure people into things they're not comfortable with. I suspect if you're already close to your friends and share everything, the game would be very different. Maybe we can think of something, but it wouldn't be the same as any of the parties I've been to before."

That embarrassing conversation quickly came to an end when the doorbell rang; our pizzas and booze had arrived. A few minutes finding plates, finding forks for the people whose dinner was too greasy to eat with your fingers, and trying to arraŋe the room so that everything was within reach of the people who had ordered it, and by the time all that was over, we'd mostly forgotten what the previous conversation had been about. While everybody else was deciding what they wanted to drink, Elspeth picked up the TV remote and called up a playlist of silly viral videos. Something entertaining, but not needing a whole lot of attention while we attacked our dinner. Half an hour passed, and nobody was getting bored yet with the cavalcade of people doing dumb things, cats being cute, cats doing dumb things, and repetitions of whatever happened to be popular that week.

"Damn, that's rough," Marcie commented on one particular video a little later, and looked away from the screen. The clip on screen now was showing a young man who had apparently been subjected to the Punishment Pill and kept falling asleep in the middle of conversations with his friends, who took the opportunity to take pictures and draw on his face with a marker.

"I guess that's how it's supposed to make you feel," Jodie said. "Want to stop these now?"

"It's fine. Just hit too close to home. I mean, I can't imagine going through something like that, feeling so helpless, if I didn't have friends who'd actually help me."