CHAPTER ONE My name is Natalie I'm thirteen years old By day I'm Natalie Schwartz your average eighth grader at Golden Trails Middle School But by night I'm GNAT112 SUPER AMAZING PLAYER OF ALIENLORD THE BEST VIDEO GAME TO EVER EXIST You know how superheroes have a secret identity Well that's how I think of my gaming I might not have secret powers but I do have a secret and it makes me feel awesome Even my best friends don't know I'm a gamer and they definitely don't know that while I'm daydreaming in math class I'm thinking about creating a successful streaming channel I can see it now GNAT112 WELCOME TO GOATII2'S CHANNEL 1,000,000 SUBSCRIBERS FOLLOW SUBSCRIBE 3 ONLINE
Some gamers want their own big streaming channels for money or because they want cool opportunities like testing video games before they’re available to the public But if I’m being honest what I want more than anything is to have gamer friends The only person I regularly play with is someone named Spyder_0wns and I don’t even like playing with them because they beat me so much Don’t get me wrong I have great IRL friends that means in real life In fact they’re the best But they’re not interested in gaming and they probably have no idea what streaming is let alone that I want to do it Streaming is playing a video game live So when the streamer is gaming they have a network of people to cheer them on in theory anyway I tried to tell my best friends Celia and Jess that I was a gamer once I really did I had it all planned out We were eating pizza at Marino’s a local Italian restaurant near the Hudson River with a bunch of fun old-school arcade games My plan was this casually ask if they wanted to play then let them know that it was well kind of my thing I’d even saved up enough pizza tokens to get four 4 ANDREA TOWERS
games for us each That was a lot of tokens and a lot of babysitting allowance that I’d collected from our across-the-street neighbors But it would be worth it when Celia and Jess learned just how cool gaming is I couldn’t wait We sat down at a big booth our plates dripping with goopy pieces of dough and cheese laughing without a care in the world Everything was going according to plan until PLURP Celia accidentally dropped her slice of pizza She got up to get some napkins and noticed the arcade games in the corner Five tokens to play an arcade game Celia scoffed Wouldn’t people rather spend their pizza tokens on something else Like I dunno on pizza She giggled clearly amused by her own joke Ouch Celia didn’t mean to hurt my feelings how could she have known but my heart sank I concentrated on my pizza the way the cheese was congealing against the red sauce and tried to shrug her words off like they didn’t hurt Maybe they’re fun I said I don’t understand how anyone can have fun if they’re just standing in front of a screen Jess 5 GNAT VS SPYDER
