The Game

reality. They had no problem whispering in students’ ears while they were talking to women, dropping pickup terminology in front of strangers, and even interrupting a student during a set and explaining, in front of his group, what he was doing wrong. They were so confident and their talk was so full of incomprehensible jargon that the women rarely even raised an eyebrow, let alone suspected they were being used to train wanna-be ladies’ men.
    I bid my new friend good-bye as Sin had taught me, pointing to mycheek and saying, “Kiss good-bye.” She actually pecked me. I felt very alpha.
    On the way out, as I stopped to use the bathroom, I found Extramask standing there, twirling an unwashed lock of hair in his fingers. “Are you waiting for the toilet?” I asked.
    “Sort of,” he replied nervously. “Go ahead.”
    I gave him a quizzical look. “Can I tell you something?” he asked.
    “Sure.”
    “I have a lot of trouble peeing beside guys in urinals. When there’s another guy standing there, I can’t fucking pee. Even if I’m peeing already and a guy walks up, I stop. And then I just stand there all nervous and shit.”
    “No one’s judging you.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “I remember about a year ago, a guy and I were trying to piss in these urinals that were right next to each other, but we both just ended up standing there. We stood there for around two minutes, recognizing each other’s pee-shyness, until I zipped up and went to another bathroom.”
    He paused. “The guy never thanked me for changing bathrooms that day.”
    I nodded, walked to the urinal, and discharged my duties with a distinct lack of self-consciousness. Compared to Extramask, I was going to be an easy student.
    As I left the bathroom, he was still standing there. “I always liked urinal dividers,” he said. “But you only seem to find them at the classy places.”

I was in high spirits in the limo to the next bar. “Do you think I could have kissed her?” I asked Mystery.
    “If you think you could have, then you could have,” he said. “As soon as you ask yourself whether you should or shouldn’t, that means you should. And what you do is, you phase-shift. Imagine a giant gear thudding down in your head, and then go for it. Start hitting on her. Tell her you just noticed she has beautiful skin, and start massaging her shoulders.”
    “But how do you know it’s okay?”
    “What I do is, I look for IOIs. An IOI is an indicator of interest. If she asks you what your name is, that’s an IOI. If she asks you if you’re single, that’s an IOI. If you take her hands and squeeze them, and she squeezes back, that’s an IOI. And as soon as I get three IOIs, I phase-shift. I don’t even think about it. It’s like a computer program.”
    “But how do you kiss her?” Sweater asked.
    “I just say, ‘Would you like to kiss me?’”
    “And then what happens?”
    “One of three things,” Mystery said. “If she says, ‘Yes,’ which is very rare, you kiss her. If she says, ‘Maybe,’ or hesitates, then you say, ‘Let’s find out,’ and kiss her. And if she says, ‘No,’ you say, ‘I didn’t say you could. It just looked like you had something on your mind.’”
    “You see,” he grinned triumphantly. “You have nothing to lose. Every contingency is planned for. It’s foolproof. That is the Mystery kiss-close.”
    I furiously scribbled every word of the kiss-close in my notebook. No one had ever told me how to kiss a girl before. It was just one of those things men were supposed to know on their own, like shaving and car repair.
    Sitting in the limo with a notebook on my lap, listening to Mystery talk, I asked myself why I was really there. Taking a course in picking up women wasn’t the kind of thing normal people did. Even more disturbing, I wondered why it was so important to me, why I’d become so quickly obsessed with the online community and its leading pseudonyms.
    Perhaps it was because attracting the opposite sex was the only area of my life in which I felt like a complete failure. Every time I walked down the street or into a bar, I saw my own failure staring me back in the face with red lipstick and black mascara. The combination of desire and paralysis was deadly.
    After the workshop that night, I opened my file cabinet and dug through my papers. There was something I wanted to find, something I hadn’t looked at in years. After a half hour, I found it: a folder labeled “High School