by Don Zolidis
I had half a mind to pretend I didn’t know what he meant, but I didn’t.
Glenn kept going. “I was thinking on the way over here…if she’s gonna die, would it be better if she knew, or would it be better if she didn’t know?”
“What do you think she would say?”
He looked back at her and opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.
“So…I don’t know your mom all that well, but…she did tell me that adopting you was one of the happiest moments of her life. And I think, if you have enough space to open your heart to a baby that isn’t yours, if you’re a person who can do that, then you can probably open up your heart to accept whoever that child becomes. And maybe sometimes it’s best to assume the best about someone. That’s what I think.”
He nodded, hands on his knees. “Thanks.”
I heard Amy’s shuffling steps before I saw her. She was halfway down the hall, coming toward us. She probably hadn’t heard me, but that was all right.
Just in case you were wondering, we didn’t get back together.
But she got there and we talked a little more, and Glenn stayed by his mother’s side. Amy put a few fresh flowers in a vase. All three of us walked out together, and Amy and I didn’t hold hands.
And it was okay.
The weather turned warmer. The rain stopped and people started wearing shorts again because they were idiots and it was only fifty degrees, but that’s what you do in Wisconsin. Amy and I said hi to each other in the halls. We didn’t have to pretend we didn’t know each other. It was kinda cool, actually. Being friends.
Nothing had been resolved between me and Kaitlyn regarding the college situation. I was worried she was going to begin a relentless singing campaign against me, but mostly she just glowered when she saw me. My dad redoubled his efforts to find a job, but the job market was still deeply ensconced in the shitter.
Anyway, with two weeks left in the school year, Amy called me up.
“Okay,” she said. “This is going to sound nuts, but I kind of need your help.”
Yes. The day has come. Of course I will give you a back rub. We’ll see where it goes. No worries.
“What is it?”
“Well, um…My mom got out of the hospital the other day and we were talking…about my birth mom and, um…since I’m eighteen I can go to the adoption agency and I can find out who she is. And I think I want to do that.”
That hung in the telephone for a moment. It was kind of like saying I have decided to fly to the moon.
“Oh,” I said.
“I was born in Milwaukee, so that’s where the adoption agency is.”
“Wow.”
“So…do you want to go with me?”
Milwaukee was about ninety minutes away if you had a car, which I did not anymore. Neither did she, actually. Her car had died an unheralded death when the engine broke. There was a complicated explanation involving belts or cartridges or other things, but it basically meant that the car was dead.
I can imagine my dad right now reading the above paragraph and concluding that he has failed as a father.
Borrowing our parents’ cars for a day trip to Milwaukee was out of the question, so that left us with no way to get there except the bus.
And Brian, whose early graduation gift was the keys to the family’s 1984 Dodge Omni, a car designed for elves with a death wish.
“Are you kidding me?” he said, when I asked if he wouldn’t mind ferrying us halfway across the state out of the goodness of his heart.
“It’s like five hours, maybe six or eight, max,” I said.
“EIGHT hours?!”
“Well, if she wants to try to find her birth mom afterward, and if we figure that it’s gonna take some time at the adoption agency.”
“Dude, I am not giving your girlfriend a ride to Milwaukee. That’s crazy.”
“She’s not my girlfriend. Right now. At this moment.”
Brian blinked his eyes in dumbstruck horror. “You have problems. There are probably counselors that can help you.”
“Please?”
“No! What am I gonna do in Milwaukee while you’re hanging out with your not-girlfriend?”
Then it occurred to me. “Gen Con,” I said.
A low noise almost like a grunt emerged from Brian’s mouth. I had found his weakness.
Okay, if you don’t know what Gen Con is, congratulations, you are most likely a socially competent human being. I’m sure that you will enjoy your life in the upcoming years with your well-adjusted family. If, however, you know what Gen Con is, then you may skip the next three paragraphs and continue on in the story as if I had said something like It’s the biggest gathering of nerds ever witnessed on earth.
I’m being ungenerous. Gen Con was short for Geneva Convention, which had nothing to do with human rights and everything to do with Dungeons & Dragons.
Brian began to quiver. So imagine him quivering in a nonsexual yet still disturbing way while I explain this thing.
Gen Con is a yearly event in which enthusiasts of gaming gather together for a week of more gaming, competitive nerdsmanship, and trying to find girls in chain-mail bikinis. There are seminars. I repeat: There are seminars. There are sections devoted to gaming with little monster miniatures or inventing new games or designing new elven races or playing Dungeons & Dragons with a group of really weird strangers. It was like a moving town of ten thousand of the oddest, nerdiest adult men and ten or twelve women. (Okay, there were more women than that—I’m exaggerating for comic effect.) There were shimmering clouds of body odor and vaporized Mountain Dew in the air. It was, in short, awesome.
None of us had ever gone. We had dreamed of it, sure. We had read the brochures. But none of us had ever set foot in the hallowed paradise that was the Milwaukee Convention Center. (Side note: TSR, the company that created Dungeons & Dragons, began the convention in Lake Geneva, which, again, is in Wisconsin, not Switzerland, because people just got tired of coming up with new names by the time they made it to Wisconsin, so they just started repeating shit. Gen Con grew too big for Lake Geneva, so it packed up and moved to Milwaukee, but instead of being called Mil Con, it was still Gen Con.)
Brian put his hand on his forehead and stopped quivering. “I don’t know, dude.”
“What?!”
“It’s a long drive, and we wouldn’t be there for very long—”
“We’ll get a hotel room. We’ll stay one night and then we’ll spend a whole day at the convention,” I said, fabricating this plan faster than speed of thought.
His eyes went wider. “What am I gonna tell my parents?”
“Lie to them. Look, I’ve watched my sister do it for her whole life, and it’s mostly worked out for her. Come on—you’ve wanted to go to Gen Con forever. We all have. Groash can come. Elizabeth can come. We’ll make a thing out of it.”
He wavered. “I don’t know…”
“Brian,” I said, looking him in the eyes. “This is your chance to do something stupid. After you get out of high school, you’re gonna say, ‘Why didn’t I do anything dumb? Why didn’t I try anything?’”
“You’ve been doing dumb stuff all year long,” he said. “And look what’s happened to you.”
I put my hands on his shoulders. “You know what? That’s probably a fair point. But I gotta tell you—and I mean this—this has been the best year of my life. Period. Because I went after something. So you can sit at home safe and not get arrested—”
“We’re gonna get arrested?!”
“Probably not. Unless Groash does something. But you can be safe, or you can take a chance. And it’s better to take a chance.”
He took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said, gathering steam. “Okay. Yes.”
“Yes!”
“Fuck yes! Take the chance! I’ll just tell my parents I’m in jail.”
“Not sure about that part of it.”
“But how are we gonna afford it?”
“Don’t
worry about it.”
“Dude,” said Groash, later that night. “I’m in. Gen Con.” He made some kind of invented gang-hand-signal gesture.
“But you can’t get arrested or anything,” I said.
“Brian’s so sensitive about that shit,” said Groash.
We were on our own for the night. Brian was a having a solo adventure with Elizabeth—we were facing the prospect of ending our campaign at the end of the summer, which was bumming everyone out. Playing together had been one long story; we had started sometime during our freshman year and now it was coming to a close in three months. It’s like our show had been canceled. So, anyway, Brian was trying to get everyone caught up in the narrative before the final boss battle.
And then…who knows?
“By the way,” Groash said. “I’m gonna need money for an entry ticket.”
“Okay.”
“And the hotel room.”
“All right.”
“And probably some food.”
THE PLAN
STEP 1: Convince parents to let us spend Saturday night in Milwaukee. How to do this? Lie our asses off. Brian said that he was going to an incoming Michigan student social. Groash didn’t say anything to his mom because she didn’t give a shit and wouldn’t notice. Amy told her dad she was going to a sleepover. Elizabeth, because she had a very strange relationship with her mom, was able to tell the truth. That left me.
“So…” I said. “I’m going to a sleepover at Groash’s house tonight.”
Mom was incredulous. “Is his mom going to be there?”
“Sure. Absolutely. You can call her. Her name is…Esmerelda.”
I smiled.
“Okay,” she said.
Thanks, Kaitlyn.
STEP 2: Rent a hotel room in Milwaukee.
This proved more complicated than it sounds. My money from selling the comic books was already slated to buy entry passes and food for everyone. None of us had credit cards, and the rest of my friends managed to scrape together forty dollars between them (well, actually them minus Groash, since he could contribute nothing except unhelpful suggestions like “We should get an awesome room”). For that price, we could get one room at the Motel 6, as long as we didn’t tell them there were going to be five people staying in it. I called up and reserved a room, which shocked them, since the Motel 6 was pretty used to people showing up with a wad of cash and the cops hot on their tail.
STEP 3: Drive there without killing each other.
Also harder than it sounded.
The nightmare was already well under way by the time I folded myself into the Omni the next morning.
If I had been a cat or Spider-Man, my danger sense would have immediately activated. Something was terribly wrong. The air in the car, which you might expect to be breathable, was thick with terror. Groash looked at me from the shotgun seat and mouthed the words Get out now as I ducked in. Elizabeth sat in the middle of the backseat, and Amy was scrunched up against the driver’s side rear window. There was room for an additional five or six molecules of oxygen if we squeezed.
“All right, then,” said Brian, trying to keep it together. “And we are on our way.”
I tried to make eye contact with Amy, but she was looking out the window. What was going on?
No one said anything. When we got to the highway, Brian floored it. The Omni’s engine, composed largely of Tinkertoys, whined and surged to life.
“Don’t you think you’re going a little fast?” asked Elizabeth.
“Nope.”
The car started to vibrate. Even Groash looked uncomfortable.
“Brian,” Elizabeth said.
“Just a red-blooded American male driving fast in my fucking car,” he said.
“Okay, then,” mumbled Groash, holding on to his seat belt.
“You don’t have to prove anything, you know,” said Elizabeth.
“I guess not,” Brian said, gritting his teeth.
“If you want to say something, say it,” she said. Brian shook his head and kept flooring it. “This is always your problem, dude. You try this whole circuitous route to get what you want, but you can’t ever actually say what you want.”
Groash let out a low whistle.
“I tried to say what I wanted last night,” said Brian. “I’ve been trying to say that for months and you don’t want to hear it.”
Oh shit.
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to hear it!” cried Elizabeth.
“You laughed!”
“Because it was weird! I reacted to the weirdness!”
“It was original and romantic!” He fished in his jacket pocket and produced a piece of coral. “Did you even see the coral? Did you even realize the coral was in the room?”
I looked for an eject button somewhere in the Omni. There weren’t any.
“Just be clear,” said Elizabeth. “That’s all I’m asking from you.”
“I tried to put a little mystery in it. I tried to actually think about your experience.”
Elizabeth groaned and looked at the ceiling. “You can’t be the Dungeon Master of our relationship. You gave me a box to check! What the hell? Are we in middle school?”
“There was a box?” asked Groash incredulously.
“It was a RIDDLE from a SPHINX!” growled Brian, as the Omni zoomed around a curve in the road. “The answer to the riddle was whether or not you wanted to embrace someone who liked you.”
“Which is DUMB!”
“I put a lot of time into that! Okay? I put effort into that!”
“You planned a whole solo adventure just so you could manipulate me into going out with you at the end!”
“Oh, come on!”
“You said I’d get a vorpal sword if I chose correctly!”
Groash erupted in indignation. “You can’t give her a vorpal sword for going out with you! That’s ridiculous! I don’t get a vorpal sword! I would totally make out with you for one!”
“It wasn’t in exchange for making out!” protested Brian. “It was in exchange for—”
“You said,” interrupted Elizabeth, “that if I chose the right answer to the riddle then I’d get a vorpal sword, and there would be more riches than I could possibly imagine—”
“It was a fucking METAPHOR!”
“That’s not a metaphor, dude,” I said.
“Why not just ask me out? If you want to go out with me, ask me out! Don’t put it in a stupid game!”
“Fine! I’m asking you out, then!”
“Why?”
“Because I like you!”
“Why?!”
“You can’t ask why!”
“I can ask whatever the hell I want, I’m the one being asked out.”
“Because I think you’re awesome. You’re hot as hell and you’re smart and you’re funny, and you’re the only one of these dumbasses that role-plays worth a damn.”
“What?!” said Groash.
“You’re mostly just into it for the dice-rolling,” said Brian. “Elizabeth actually plays her character. I respect that.”
Elizabeth smirked. “Go on.”
Brian gripped the steering wheel. “And I mean I feel better when you’re in the room. I think about you all the time. I think about what you’re doing. I think about us, together. My whole day gets better every time I see you—I want to spend as much goddamn time with you as I possibly can because my life is better when you’re around.”
“All right,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“That means all right.” Elizabeth unhooked her seat belt and leaned forward in the Omni to kiss him. She found that rather difficult, as the car was still speeding, so she ended up putting one hand on Groash’s head and managed to kiss the side of Brian’s face.
It was still pretty awesome.
There was silence for a moment.
“So do I still get a vorpal sword?” said Groash.
“Everybody gets vorpal swords.”
�
��Is it a two-handed sword or a long sword, ’cause I’m not proficient in—”
“It’s whatever you want, okay?”
After a brief and awkward pause at a rest stop ten miles down the road, we made it to Milwaukee that evening. When we arrived at the Motel 6 we came to the realization, just like everyone who has stayed at a Motel 6, that we had made a terrible mistake. There were two twin beds that looked like they had been the site of several bloody crimes going back decades. It was perfectly romantic if you enjoyed horror films.
Brian and Elizabeth attached to each other at the shoulder and went on a “walk” as soon as we got checked into the motel. They giggled incessantly and made little chirping noises at each other, which I gather was some kind of reference to the previous night’s solo adventure, but I really had no idea what they were doing. “This is bullshit,” complained Groash after they left. “She’s getting all the magic items now. We’re fucked, Craig. I think it was better when they were fighting with each other.”
Amy stayed in the state she had been in all day: silent contemplation. She had spent most of the ride looking out the window, lost in thought (or simply trying to avoid the flailing nerdstorm raging around her), and when we got to the motel she continued to keep to herself. She had brought along her journal and sat on the ratty couch, tucking her knees up to her chest. What was the protocol here? Should we be talking about this? Did she need space? Did she need me next to her? I decided maybe the best thing was for me to leave her alone.
When Brian and Elizabeth came back, there was some serious negotiation for bed space. They spent a few minutes trying to discover whether or not their fresh relationship could survive sleeping in the same bed. After much discussion and some unhelpful noises from Groash, it was decided that Brian would sleep on his own and Elizabeth and Groash would sleep in the other bed together. But, for propriety’s sake, Groash would sleep upside down, with his feet on the pillows and his head at the foot of the bed. Somehow, this seemed to make sense to them. (“This is how I sleep normally,” said Groash.)
If you’ve been paying attention, you probably have a good idea what Groash’s feet smelled like. He hadn’t been back to his house for at least two weeks, and the showers he took at my house might not have been the most thorough. So Elizabeth was in her own special kind of hell.
