The Game

convention—both virgins—brought their sister along. She was a quiet nineteen-year-old imp with large eyes, gumdrop breasts, and a hip-hop fashion sense. Thanks to her brothers, she knew everything about the game. When guys approached her with cocky funny lines, she told them, “Don’t try that David DeAngelo stuff on me. I’ve read it all.” She introduced herself as Min, and then asked me to pose for a photo with her.
    “I’m a big fan of your posts,” she said.
    “You’ve read them?” I asked, shocked.
    “Yeah.” She bit her lip.
    For my presentation, I brought in five of the girls I was dating. I ran routines on them, and then used them as a panel of experts to critique the clothing and body language of various wanna-be players in the audience. I received a standing ovation.
    Afterward, I sat on our newly purchased blood-red couches surrounded by Papa, Tyler Durden, and a few of their students. They were discussing the video of Mystery and I picking up Caroline and Carly. Somehow, Gunwitch had gotten hold of it and put it on the Internet, shattering what was left of my anonymity.
    “It’s so genius,” Papa was saying. “Tyler Durden has broken down everything Style does to a science. He calls it Stylemogging.”
    “What’s that?” one of the students asked.
    “It’s a type of frame control,” Tyler Durden replied. A frame is an NLP term: It is the perspective through which one sees the world. Whoever’sframe—or subjective reality—is the strongest tends to dominate an interaction. “Style has all these really subtle ways of keeping control of the frame and getting people to qualify themselves to him. He makes sure that the focus is always on him. I’m writing a post about it.”
    “That’s awesome,” I said.
    Suddenly, Papa, Tyler Durden, and the students laughed. “That’s one of the things you do,” Papa said. “Tyler’s writing about that.”
    “What? I just said ‘awesome.’ That’s because I think it’s hilarious. Seriously, I can’t wait to read it.”
    They all laughed again. Evidently I was Stylemogging them.
    “See,” Tyler Durden said. “You’ll use curiosity as a frame to get rapport and make the other person lose social value. When you show approval like that, it makes you the authority and makes other people want to seek your validation. We’re teaching that.”
    “Shit,” I replied. “Now, every time I say something, people are going to think I’m running a Real Social Dynamics routine.”
    They all laughed again. And that’s when I realized that I was fucked: Everything Tyler Durden was writing about wasn’t anything I had learned in the community. That was all part of me and who I really was. And even though he had my intentions wrong—that was his frame, his way of looking at the world—he had my mannerisms down. He was taking the building blocks of my personality, giving them names, and turning them into routines. He was going to take my soul and spread it all over the Sunset Strip.

On the last day of the summit, Mystery had a brainstorm: He was going to raise the price of his workshop from six hundred dollars to fifteen hundred. He wanted Papa to change the website to reflect the increase.
    “That doesn’t make sense,” Papa protested. “The market won’t support that.” Papa rarely went out anymore. Instead, he spent his nights working on the Real Social Dynamics website and Internet affiliate program. Since we’d moved into the house, I’d seen him with a woman exactly once.
    “It’s my method,” Mystery said. “People will pay. I’ve worked it all out.”
    “It’s not practical.” Papa stared straight through Mystery’s chest. He didn’t like confrontation.
    “This is unacceptable!”
    Mystery stomped through the living room, where Extramask was giving a presentation. Extramask had arrived in town a week before the seminar and was sleeping somewhere in the house—I wasn’t sure exactly where, since Papa had run out of closets to stuff people into. I had hardly talked to Extramask since he’d arrived. He was always either in Papa’s room working for Real Social Dynamics, winging a workshop with Tyler Durden, or working out.
    I watched him for a few minutes. He was buff now, wearing a torn T-shirt and a loosely knotted tie. He was telling the students that he hadn’t lost his virginity—or even held a girl’s hand—until he was twenty-six-and-a-half. It was a gimmick now, part of his routine for guys. He had