Free Come and Find Me by Hallie Ephron

me. Except when there’s a man in the picture or when she’s convinced that she’s deathly ill.”
    GROB laughed. “Hypochondriac?”
    “And then some. We couldn’t be more different. Her favorite color was pink; mine was red.” Diana told him about the pictures in their family photo album from a typical Halloween—her blond sister posing in a leotard, pink tutu, and feather boa; dark-haired Diana, two years older and all knees and elbows, wearing a red cape she’d made out of one of their mother’s old cocktail dresses, red tights, a leotard, construction-paper horns on her head, and a garden pitchfork clasped in her hand.
    “Believe it or not, when I was little I was fearless,” she said. “I jumped off our garage roof one time on a dare. Sprained my ankle. A month later I did it again, this time without a scratch. Then I started charging kids in the neighborhood to watch. Earned enough to buy myself a Game Boy. Ash . . . uh, Susannah stood sentry and whistled if my mother was on her way out to investigate.”
    “Sounds like you two were quite a pair.”
    “Oil and water.”
    “Siblings,” he said. “Definition: two people who run in opposite directions and end up crashing into each other.”
    Diana laughed. GROB sat on the beach. Nadia sat beside him. She unlinked Nadia’s hand from GROB’s, and the two avatars just sat there in a long silence that neither of them rushed to fill.
    Finally, Diana said, “Thanks for telling me about yourself. And for sharing this special place.”
    “Special,” he said, “and sad.”
    “Sad?”
    “Yes . . . no.”
    “I’m sorry. Do you want to talk about it?”
    “Maybe one day. But not here. If we ever meet . . . in the real world. I hope we do.”
    Diana stared out at the virtual ocean, wondering if she’d ever sit on the sand on a real beach and gaze out at the horizon separating sea from sky. In the real world, waves were irregular and unpredictable, not like these waves that unfurled as regularly as wallpaper patterns. Predictability. That was this virtual world’s greatest strength and greatest weakness.
    Suddenly little eddies seemed to be forming in the sand in front of them. The swirling patterns grew, and grew, until the entire beach heaved and boiled.
    “Oh, shit,” said GROB.
    Instinctively Diana grabbed her chair arms and pushed back. A downward whirling vortex grew in the sand, and up from its depths shot an avatar clad head to toe in gleaming battle armor.
    “This is what you wanted to show me?” Diana managed to say.
    “Hell, no!” In an instant, GROB was standing over Nadia, planted between her and the armored avatar that hovered over them. It raised its arm and an avalanche of blue phalluses fell from the sky and seemed to bounce off a barrier, like an invisible bubble surrounding her and GROB.
    Flying phalluses. Soon there’d be tumbling toasters. It was completely ridiculous—Diana realized that. But still she felt assaulted, and when she tried to move Nadia and found she couldn’t, she started to panic. She smashed down on the mouse, clicking over and over as she grew short of breath. She should never have come here.
    “Take it easy,” GROB said. “They can’t hurt you,”
    It took three tries before Diana typed /home correctly into the transporter, but Nadia simply disappeared and reappeared right where she was. She typed in random coordinates. Once again, Nadia faded and came back. Diana clicked all over the screen, trying in vain to get a menu to come up so she could get out of there.
    Two more armored avatars circled overhead
    “Assholes!” GROB said. “I hate this. Jesus, don’t these people have anything better to do?”
    More blue phalluses rained down around them, bouncing off the invisible barrier that she assumed GROB had created. Diana reared back each time one of the freakish objects splashed into the water or crashed into the sand and exploded.
    Her hand shaking, Diana reached for her computer’s power