WoW can be a social game, you meet up with other players, group temporarily and work on a quest or instance together. Sometimes you even meet up and play together again. Wil is better at that than I. He’s always making friends. But we grouped up with a female night elf rogue a couple of months ago, not long after we first started playing, and sort of clicked with her. We called her Z, as she seemed to name all her characters names starting with Z. They call me “T” because all my character names start with … wait for it… T. We call Wil “Wil” because he lacks such consistency and his main character’s name starts with “i” and it could be awkward referring to someone as “I”

Soon we were playing with Z all the time. I’m going to be honest with you here, I’d come home from work and Z and Wil would have been playing for some time, they’d be laughing about the horde they ganked, or quests they had completed without me, both of them leveling up rapidly, and I was jealous. They had their little jokes, and they played well together. It was petty, but I was a tad jealous that Wil was playing the WoW with some other girl. But we did have fun when the three of us played, as well.

So, one day I was about to play with Z, and Wil asked me if Z was a boy or a girl.

“What do you mean? I assumed she was a girl, she plays a girl character.”

“….”

“Ok, point taken, you play a girl character and you are all man.”

“Actually, I assumed so too, but once we met up with some of his/her friends and I swear they referred to him/her as Kyle.”

So, I decided to be impertinent and ask her. And, as it so happens, Z is a boy. And suddenly I LOVED Z. Z was my favorite person in the whole World of Warcraft. I had a whole new appreciation for him. I mean, I liked him before, don’t get me wrong, but now… well, I don’t know why I even thought he was a girl. He and Wil have the same love for the fart emotes, the same sick teabagging the dead horde joke… Z actually taught that move to Wil. It’s obvious when they play together, they become 14 again. 14 year old BOYS.

I just hope he never finds out I’m old enough to be his mother. Fourteen wasn’t all that long ago for Z.