A 10th Birthday Memory with Vicki Xu

Vicki Xu’s flash “Quail” gives us a bittersweet moment in a market in which a girl glimpsed seems to “speak home” to the main character, but upon a closer look transforms into just another stranger. As part of celebrating Split Lip’s 10th Anniversary, Vicki shares a memory from turning 10:

“My tenth birthday coincided with one of my first days at my new elementary school. Since third grade I had deeply looked forward to fifth grade: ten seemed the perfect age, not too young and not too old (“old” meaning twelve, junior high). Unfortunately being the new kid ruined the experience. 

In those first days what I looked forward to most was going home and playing SuperPoke! Pets. This was the one holdover from my old life. The game was simple: you adopt a virtual animal, and you take care of it by completing quests that award virtual money. You spend this money on outfits for your pet, different backgrounds, and props and furniture.

Certain goods can only be bought with “gold”, which is purchased with real money. They were generally animated and had more aesthetically-pleasing designs than normal goods. I deeply coveted these “gold” goods, to the point that I tried a couple times to purchase gold using the code on a credit card I’d found on Google Images. Still, through some shrewd trades with other users, I’d managed to accumulate my own “gold” collection. 

One day someone messaged me — “I love your profile picture,” they said, referring to the hyper-realistic digital painting of some random Asian girl I had found online. “Thanks!” I said, flattered. They told me that since the site was shutting down, they were gifting everyone their “gold” goods, and would I like to have some?  “Of course,” I said. They said they needed my email and password to do the transfer. I paused. My parents had told me not to do something like this. But, well, if my parents had warned me of scams, then it would be too much of a cosmic cliché for one to actually happen to me. I’d lived long enough to know that life was not a parade of clichés. I gave them my login information. 

As I watched them root through my inventory in real time, putting all my gold possessions on my display, I realized maybe I made a terrible mistake. I tried to log back in and found out that I couldn’t. I made another account and messaged them, what are you doing with my account? What are you doing? Give it back. Give it back, please. This isn’t what you said you’d do. I messaged my old account too, because they were on that one now. 

I got blocked on both. I ran into my parents’ room.

“My SuperPoke! Lets account is gone,” I sobbed to my dad. “Can you help me get it back?” 

“What did you expect,” he said, and was unhelpful. 

The next day at school everything appeared to me in high-definition, crystal-clear detail. I sat under the huge pine trees and pulled the baby pinecones and rubbed their nubby green bodies against the cement planters, until their red juice, pine blood, leaked out and dried. They’re going to be shut down anyway, I told myself, because at this point we all knew Google was going to shut down the parent company which it had bought just a couple months prior. I kept telling myself this. 

A couple days later, some girls invited me to play tetherball. I tried to hold on to my SuperPoke! Pets hurt — they’ll never take this grief from me, I thought — but with a week of watching tetherball rope swing around the pole, SuperPoke! Pets inevitably faded into the background.”

Erica Frederick at 10 years old