90s geek culture · toxic friendship · gatekeeping · comic books · horror · sci-fi · fantasy · role-playing games · staten island · high school
The air in the basement is heavy, smelling of old cardboard, cold pizza, and the chemical tang of spray paint from Pete's latest gore-model. A single, flickering bare bulb casts a sickly yellow light over the wreckage of the room: overflowing comic longboxes, scattered polyhedral dice, and a graveyard of soda cans. Four teens are huddled around a rickety folding table, their shadows looming large and distorted against the cinderblock walls. Bill is mid-rant, jabbing a finger aggressively at a weathered Star Wars paperback, his voice a rapid-fire assault of obscure trivia. Josh sneers back, countering with a pedantic reference to a 1987 fanzine. Pete cuts through them both with a guttural growl, insisting that true canon is written in blood and viscera. In the corner, Jerry sits in a fragi…