The Nix

by Nathan Hill

They put on their headsets and log on and materialize in the game world and they are together again, just as they have been every Wednesday and Friday and Saturday night for the past few years.

This was happening a lot lately: He was feeling smaller than his body, as if his spirit had shrunk, always giving up his armrests on airplanes, always the one to move out of the way on sidewalks.

and somewhere in there that black leather journal that contained the first several pages of a novel he promised himself he’d get around to writing very soon—and so he had to go through those boxes

He told his mother he was going to his room to read, which was not unusual. He spent most of his time alone in his room, reading the Choose Your Own Adventure books he bought from the bookmobile at school.

She often had that disassociated quality, like she was focusing on you with maybe one-third of herself, the rest devoted to whatever things she kept locked inside her head.

“You have to be careful,” Pwnage said, “with people who are puzzles and people who are traps. A puzzle can be solved but a trap cannot. Usually what happens is you think someone’s a puzzle until you realize they’re a trap. But by then it’s too late. That’s the trap.”

He stared at her with these horrible hollow eyes and gave her this face like Don’t make me say it out loud.

Every life has a moment like this, a trauma that breaks you into brand-new pieces. This was hers.

panic attacks—which didn’t seem accurate to Faye. It didn’t feel like she was panicking; it felt more like she was being forcibly and methodically deactivated all over.

“in real life,” a place they talked about as if it were another country, far away.

“Since men have their potency and masculinity vicariously confirmed through rape, they will never do anything to stop it. Unless we force them to.

Sometimes Faye wished she lived another life parallel to this one, a life exactly the same but for the choices she made. In this other life, she wouldn’t have to worry so much.

How was she supposed to act if she didn’t know how she was being measured?

How easily a simple façade can become your life, can become the truth of your life.

Understanding is always harder than plain hatred. But it expands your life. You will feel less alone.

If you’re not afraid of it, then it’s not real change.