Men, Women & Children by Chad Kultgen Read Free Book Online Page B

was in junior high again, I’d fuck every piece of 7th grade ass I could, even the niggers.”
    Tim had become used to the tone and content of his guild’s chat. He believed that none of these people were actual pedophiles, homophobes, or racists, and he found humor in their explicit chat messages, understanding that most massively multiplayer online games had evolved a similar style and tone of communication within their player bases due to the fact that a large number of the players had spent so much time digesting the Internet’s most base content that they were now desensitized to nearly everything most people would consider offensive. Even though Tim had never known the real names of his guildmates, he considered them his friends based on the frequency of their interaction, which was daily. He had no conversations of substance with these people and their exchanges involved little beyond World of Warcraft , racial humor, and explicitly sexual anecdotes that were rarely true. He had told none of them about his mother moving or about his decision to quit playing football, which were the two most important events of his life thus far. Tim enjoyed the surface-level communication he had with his guildmates. He didn’t want anything more.
    He knew Chucker only as the protection-specced paladin who was the greatest purveyor of fake racial hatred in the guild. He would never know that the person on the other end of the computer was a twenty-eight-year-old loan officer in Annapolis, Maryland, who had to beg his fiancée to let him play World of Warcraft virtually every night and more often than not waited until she fell asleep so he could sneak off to the computer in their office and play the game.
    He knew Baratheon only as the dwarven shadow priest who would respec to holy before every raid and then fail to properly heal the tank on at least one boss per instance, causing a wipe. He would never know that the person playing Baratheon was a six-foot-five, three-hundred-twenty-pound half-Korean, half-French Canadian college student studying engineering and accounting in order to make his parents happy even though he really wanted to play football.
    He knew Selkis only as the night elf rogue who could out-damage most of the mages in their guild. He would never know that the person playing Selkis was a twenty-six-year-old perpetual college student who had no intention of ever graduating, ate a Wendy’s Baconator at least once a day, and lived with his parents and their five cats.
    At a chat command from the guild leader to “Get on Vent,” Tim logged on to the guild’s Ventrillo server, a third-party program that allowed the members of the guild to actually talk to one another using microphones; he put on his headphones; and they all entered the instance. Tim was happy not to think about his mother in California with Greg Cherry or his father sitting silently in the living room wishing he would play football again or the pointlessness of any of it for the next four hours.
    A few blocks away, Carl Benton was uneasy about his daughter spending so much time with her boyfriend, Danny Vance. Carl was aware that his daughter had inherited much of her physical appearance from her mother, which meant that she would likely be the first sexual fantasy of many of the boys she went to school with. And more than a fantasy, she would likely be Danny Vance’s first sexual experience. Carl did not like this. As he ate dinner with his wife, Sarah, and his seven-year-old son, Andrew, he said, “She spends a lot of time over there. Should we be as okay with this as we’re acting like we are?”
    Sarah didn’t mind Brooke spending time at the Vances’ house. She and Carl had known the Vances for several years, and their son, Danny, was among the less threatening boys of his age. Brooke had never cried as a result of anything he had done, which, as a junior high school teacher for many years before she retired, Sarah knew to be rare. She