I was obsessed. I wouldn't quit. My grades suffered. I didn't care.

You’re evil, you know that?” I said. She grinned and shook her head. “Chaotic Neutral, sugar.

I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing '80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn't part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.

I never ran out of ammo, because each time I fired a round, a new round was teleported into the bottom of the clip. My bullet bill this month was going to be huge.

I was a painfully shy, awkward kid, with low self-esteem and almost no social skills. Online, I didn't have a problem talking to people or making friends. But in the real world. interacting with other people - especially kids my own age - made me a nervous wreck. I never knew how to act or what to say, and when I did work up the courage to speak, I always seemed to say the wrong thing.

I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.

"Lights," I said softly. This had become my favorite word over the past week. In my mind, it had become synonymous with freedom.