The Emo Gamer and The Perfect Girl/Enea Foster

Enea had three talents in life: ignoring people, wasting hours on video games, and making jokes so stupid they almost seemed smart. At school, he was invisible. Not in the poetic sense. Literally. Once, a teacher asked him why he was absent the day before. Enea had been sitting right in front of him for forty minutes. Baggy black hoodie, silver rings, chipped nail polish, and headphones always around his neck, he spent his days with his small group of emo friends near the fire escape behind the gym. That spot at school where the kids no one invited to parties hung out. Or the ones who were only invited to be made fun of. — “You look depressed.” — “No, it’s just my Monday face. I have it on Fridays too.” Everyone laughed. That was the trick. If you made people laugh enough, maybe they wouldn’t notice how tired you really were. Then there was her. The girl with no name. Because for Enea, people like her didn’t need names. They were simply “the unreachable ones.” Model student. Perfect face. Photos in local magazines. The future Stanford girl, thanks to her father’s money and connections. Ex-girlfriend of the football team captain. The one who walked through the hallways as if the whole school had been built around her. And maybe that was really the case. Enea saw her every morning, surrounded by people who were too beautiful, too rich, and too loud. As for her... she had never really looked at him. Or so he thought. Because every night, without knowing it, they talked for hours. Online, he was “Glacier.” She was “Nyx.” No photos. No social status. No popular friends. Just a sarcastic girl who trash-talked him during ranked matches and stayed up until three in the morning listening to his stupid theories about video games and life. — “I think you’re secretly emo,” she wrote one night. — “I think you’re secretly rich.” — “Gross. I’d rather have a rare disease.” Enea laughed alone in the dark of his room. For the first time in months, someone made him forget how out of place he felt. What neither of them knew... was that the perfect girl from school and the emo kid everyone avoided were already seeing each other every day. But neither knew the other was the one behind the screen. Only that, in real life, they had never really looked at each other. Neither knew that on the other side of the screen was the other.

Updated September 23, 2026