With that impasse out of the way, we agreed to carry on as before and discuss again at a later time. I thought that even if the store was successful, The Barrister would eventually just want to free up his investment and do something else with it. Since he wasn’t working in the store at all and Dollar Bill moved out of state to some palatial mansion in North Carolina, I had to hire on a few new people to help run the store since I couldn’t be there 12 or more hours every day. The Kid was first on my list since I had been paying him with Pokemon cards to help out around the store anyway, but I also brought my good friend Billy Motion on board and he is still to this day one of my best gaming partners.

I also knew that if I hired him I would always have a wargaming partner close at hand. But still, even with new employees I was there at AGF almost all of the time- I couldn’t bear to be away from it. I wanted to be in the middle of the action at all times, I wanted to know what was going on, who was buying what, and what was being played. I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner there almost every day. Fortunately, the best pasta joint in town was right around the corner so dinner often meant gnocchi in Pomodoro with a good piece of bread.

My employees and closest friends became like family. I watched out for them, listened to their personal problems, offered advice, and made sure everybody was happy. When The Kid would walk out of the store crying after fighting with his parents I’d go out and hug him and try to get him back in the store where everybody would pat him on the back and try to get him into a game to take his mind off things. Girlfriend trouble, car trouble, financial trouble…I saw it all from these people and when I could help, I did. I really cared about my customers, my workers, and my friends. It was a motley bunch to say the least, but these rag-tag irregulars were really what AGF was all about and it was their place as much as it was mine.

And then, into this crucible, stepped The Girl.

The Girl was 17, 18, or 21 depending on who you asked but I’m pretty sure she was 15…or 15. She had blue hair. She claimed to be in Atlanta for the summer to attend some kind of academic program at Georgia Tech- which in retrospect was likely some kind of high school thing, another piece of evidence regarding her alleged age. Despite the temporal discrepancy every college-aged male in the store (apart from The Kid) completely lost their minds over her. She never bought a meal, wanted for transportation, and I’m really surprised her feet were allowed to touch the ground. She played games too—anything.

She loved board games in particular so I wound up with her at my table almost all the time and I’ll be damned if she wasn’t actually a pretty good gamer. Or it could be that the others at the table were so dumbstruck by the attention of a girl that they somehow lost their will to fight and compete. At least two semi-relationships and one love triangle seemed to start amongst the regulars with her at the center but I tried to completely ignore the high school drama that seemed to be unfolding…they would talk about The Girl and I would just roll my eyes, thankful that I was almost twice her age and married. I knew what she was doing though. She was a total operator, a master manipulator of male competition and attention. One time I pulled into the parking lot and I saw her duck behind one of the brick columns of the shopping center to put on makeup before she went into the store.

It’s really interesting to see how certain people, events, and occurrences get woven into the history and mythology of a place like AGF—like how The Girl became an avatar of Eris, casting her golden apple smack into the middle of my store or how The Kid became legendary for his ugly duckling transformation. The summer was when the store became something more than a store, something with a living, breathing culture and a thriving community. You could feel it when you walked in the door, something alive and thriving, pulsing with the blood flow of passion and possessed with a real sense of community and belonging. When customers are wearing your shirt to come to your store, either you’ve got some really nerdy customers or some very loyal ones. Or both.

It didn’t matter if you came into the store once a week to buy a game or if you were there every night to play MAGIC. It didn’t matter what game you played or how deep your interest was, you had friends there with whom you might never even actually play a game. We were united, solidified, and the summer was ours, together as gamers and friends.

You hear about “endless summer” as a concept but never in my life have I felt it as something real like I did at AGF. I didn’t really know what day it was unless it was Sunday and I was at home, or if it was Friday night because BATTLESTAR GALACTICA was on to mark that day of the week. If you asked me in June or July where AGF was going to be in a year, I couldn’t possibly have imagined anything other than what we were doing then but magnified. But I knew that fall would come, classes would resume at Georgia Tech and the other schools around the city, and we would cycle down to a lower level of energy- at least temporarily. I started to plan for the inevitable, even though it felt distant and impossibly remote.

My plans were to increase the frequency and organization of planned events such as a popular “Heavy Metal Saturday” miniatures tournament complete with painting workshops, demos, and giveaways. I started planning on a “Back to School” Barbeque that would have put us out in the parking lot with a rented grill, playing simple games and probably dressing up the Noble Giant as a gorilla to wave passersby into the parking lot. I wanted to renew marketing efforts around the school, employing students as a sort of street team to make sure that incoming freshmen would know where the local game store was. I started thinking about redoing our entire e-commerce effort since it was an almost complete failure, barring frequent online orders for hard-to-find FLAMES OF WAR miniatures. The goal was to cushion the drop in sales that I knew was coming in the months between August and December. Despite all of our successes, The Barrister still called me once a week to let me know that he thought the store wasn’t doing as well as he anticipated. And once week he would drop by before the store opened to pick up the bank deposit.