by Sean McGinty
Oso got back in the truck. The wheels spun and the engine whined. The body rocked back and forth. I knelt in the back, in the cold, trying to imagine myself as a black hole, just sucking everything all around me, the very light itself. And it was strange, because the longer I was out there, the more I actually began to feel lighter, like I was actually losing weight, like I’d been enrolled in the WeightWatchers® Infinity Loss™ weight loss program (YAY!) or whatever, which isn’t a diet exactly but rather a healthy way to live.
The wheels stopped and Oso’s face appeared out the window. “Got good news and bad news, bro. We’re gonna have to dig.”
“What’s the good news?”
“That is the good news: I know how to get us unstuck. The bad news is I don’t have any shovels.”
So instead of digging for treasure, we dug out Oso’s truck with our hands. In the freezing cold. For an hour. I didn’t really mind. It was just good to be doing something, if that makes sense. I kept looking off into the distance. Way out there, out in the blackness somewhere, was my grandpa’s house. My house. Huh. With money or treasure or—who knows? Just sitting out there. Just out of reach. Just waiting.
We gave up on the truck idea, and I got home late and slept in late the next day, successfully avoiding my dad, and then in the afternoon I worked up the nerve to go ask Katie about her truck. The sun was out, the snow melting, everything glittery and full of promise.
But when I got to Katie’s apartment no one was there. Well, duh: it was two o’clock in the afternoon. She was still at work. There was only one elementary school in town—good old Antello Primary—and it was only a couple blocks from her apartment, so that’s where I went next.
It was weird to be in my old elementary school again, although not much had changed. It still looked the same and sounded the same, and the smell took me right back to being a kid again: glue, disinfectant, and the faint lingering odor of puke. I checked in at the front office and got a visitor’s badge and a complimentary ChocoLoot™ chocolate coin (YAY!), but I forgot to ask where Katie’s room was.
There were these three boys loitering in the hallway, so I stopped to ask them.
“You guys know where Katie—where Miss Ezkiaga’s room is?”
The boys were dressed up in animal costumes. Two of them were birds, with paper beaks on their faces and felt feathers around their necks and under their arms, and the third kid had on these fake elf ears.
“Miss Ezkiaga?” I said again. “Youngish blondish woman with real pretty eyes? Whoever can tell me where her room is gets this chocolate coin.”
“Chocolate coins are gross,” said the first bird.
“They make you barf,” said the second bird.
“I ate one once,” said the elf, “and it made me barf gold.”
“So ‘no’ on the coin, then. Do you know where her room is?”
The first bird raised his beak. “Are you Miss E.’s boyfriend?”
“Not really…not yet…I’m working on it.”
“Did you kiss her?” said the second bird.
“Did you touch her boobies?” said the elf.
“Boobies? Look, I’m not really comfortable having this conversation with you. I just need to know where her room is.”
“Miss E. doesn’t have a room,” said the first bird.
“Miss E. has a portable,” said the second bird.
“Her class is out back where the portables are,” said the elf.
“Great. Thank you. Anyone want this coin?”
But none of them did, so I slipped it back in my pocket and headed out to the portable classrooms. There were four of them where the tetherball courts used to be. I found the one that said MISS DERADO & MISS EZKIAGA and stood by the door and listened in.
“Take a little time,” Katie was saying, “and think about Dress As Your Favorite Animal Day, and everything you learned about animals and each other, and how important it is to respect everyone’s personal space bubble and—”
A bell began to ring and I couldn’t make out the rest. After the ringing stopped there was a brief moment of silence like someone drawing in a breath, and then all around me kids began to pour out of the portables. They swarmed the scene, a waist-high tide of children dressed in animal costumes, and when there was a break in the swell, I ducked into the trailer.
I must not have made much noise, because when she turned and saw me she jumped a little.
“Jesus! You scared me.”
Once again, not quite the reaction I was going for.
She tugged the hem of her T-shirt down around her hips. It was pink, with a picture of an otter on the front.
“Hi! I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by….Here. I brought you something.”
I handed her the chocolate coin. She looked at it for a second, then dropped it in a bowl of identical chocolate coins on her desk. Then she aimed her blue eyes at me like, What are you doing here? I started telling her how I felt weird about how we’d left things.
“Look, I know you said things were complicated, and that’s cool. But I wanted to ask you something.”
“Arnold.” She sighed. “You’re nice and all, but…it’s the Space Amazon, OK? The rule is: no new planets until the old planets are out of sight.”
“Is that your rule or the Space Amazon’s rule?”
“Both.”
“But rules are meant to be bent, aren’t they? Like, take Dress As Your Favorite Animal Day. I saw a kid back there dressed like an elf. Or take you, for example. Technically you’re not dressed as a favorite animal—you’re just wearing a shirt with a picture of an otter on it.”
“Sea lion,” she said. “And there’s a big difference between Dress As Your Favorite Animal Day and my personal life.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But what if it wasn’t personal?”
“What?”
“What if it was purely business?”
I told her about the will, the treasure, and the snowy road. How I needed a ride. How she had a truck.
Katie bent to scrub a glue smear from the table. It was like she was working through that same old question. “And when do you need this ride?”
“The sooner the better. I was thinking tonight.”
“I’ve got P.T.A. tonight.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
“I have to get my journal grading done on Wednesdays.”
“Thursday.”
“You’re very persistent.”
“Or Friday?”
“Friday is Pilates.”
“All night?”
“No, not all night.”
“Look—it’s not a date or anything. I swear. I just need a ride. Send me on another quest. Tell me to get you something. A knife that needs no sharpening. A drink that has no calories.”
“You mean like water.”
“Sure. I’ll do anything.”
Katie scrubbed at the table, and I could see her working through that question, whatever it was.
“Fine,” she said at last. “I should be done with P.T.A. by seven. Meet me at my place at seven thirty and I’ll give you a ride.”
On my way to Katie’s that night, Homie™ popped up and was like,
> warning!
u r not having FUN®!
Which, no duh. I was in FAIL. I told Homie™ to go away, and it did, but then it popped back up again.
> warning!
u r not having FUN®!
warning!
And I couldn’t get it to shut up, so I took a five-minute Irish Heritage™ Dairy Quiz, which actually took twenty minutes on account of how I kept missing the number of nutritional benefits a heritage cow gets while grazing on pure ancestral Irish pastureland. (It’s more than you’d think.)
> warning!
u r not now having FUN®!
I tried to YAY! some stuff, but Homie™ said I’d already used up all my YAY!s. I couldn’t YAY! again for another eight hours. I tried to take a quiz, but I was out of quizzes, too.
> warning!
u are not now having FUN®!
“What can I do for FUN®?”
> eat a zazz® bar!
“I don’t have a Zazz® bar.”
> buy a zazz® bar!
“Homie™, I’m broke.”
> u have enough for a zazz® bar!
“Go away, please?”
> ok
:)
Homie™ disappeared/popped back up again.
> warning!
u r not having FUN®!
So I looked up the nearest place I could buy a Zazz® bar…and that’s how Katie and I ended up at the GameCage® Gaming Center in the old strip mall on the edge of town.
The Zazz® bars were behind a little glass case with other candies and plastic trinkets—glow-in-the-dark dinosaurs and parachute men and mood rings—and they weren’t for sale. The dude behind the counter said you had to win them with tickets from playing the games, and to play the games I had to purchase tokens.
“I can’t just buy one?”
“Sorry. It wouldn’t be fair.”
I turned to Katie. “You mind if we win some tickets real fast?”
She looked at me. “You planned this, didn’t you?”
“What?”
“You planned to come here and play these games. Is this like a date?”
“No, no—I didn’t—I swear—”
But then from the expression in her eyes…It’s kind of hard to explain, but I wondered if she was actually kind of maybe hoping it was a date. Like maybe she was warming up to me.
So I bought some tokens and we headed into the game room.
The guy had said Skee-Ball was our best bet, but on our way to the Skee-Ball games I got distracted. The low ceiling and tile floor created an echo chamber, reiterating and amplifying the jangly electronic soundscape. There was this one video game, BattleBorn II (YAY!), the very same one I used to play after school at Oso’s house when we were in grade school.
“Wow! I haven’t played this one in forever. Want to give it a shot?”
“I don’t know,” said Katie. “You can’t earn tickets from it. And I’m not really into fighting games. I can never figure out the moves.”
“Well, then you haven’t played BattleBorn II! Come on. Just one game. It’s not complicated at all. I’ll show you what to do.” I dropped a couple tokens into the slot. “Here, hit that button. Now choose your character.”
Katie scrolled slowly through the faces as if scrutinizing them not for fighting ability but moral character, and when the timer ran out she was resting on Xoti the Deer Sorceress—actually not a bad choice. I’d selected Long Mop, mainly for his grappling technique, which is always fun to try out on a beginner. The arena was a Shinto temple set on a precipitous mountain ledge, and as our characters stood there glaring at each other across the mist, I explained the basic controls—high kick, low kick, jab, uppercut, jump, duck—and gave her a moment to practice.
“Ready? Watch out! Here I come!”
I double-punched Xoti in the face, snapping her head back and sending a spray of blood over the mountain ledge. Then, while the stars circled above her head, I kicked her in the shin, grabbed her horns, and threw her to the ground.
“You need to block. I forgot to mention that. Here, hold back on the joystick. Right, like that. But if I crouch I can still hit you—see? So if I do that, then you have to crouch and block. But when you’re in a defensive crouch, I can then stand up and bop you on top of the head…like this. To avoid that, option one is jump over me…but if you do jump, then I can snatch you out of the air for a body slam, see…”
“You said this wasn’t complicated!”
“It’s not! Hold back on the stick. Back.”
PUNCH!
“See, you have to block that.”
It’s not polite to just beat the crap out of a total noob, but the adrenaline was flowing in my veins, and even with Homie™ popping up in my face to warn me I wasn’t having any FUN®, I was actually kicking straight-up ass, all the moves coming back to me like I was 10 again: Thunder stomp! Fire flash! Century fist!
“Check this out. If I remember right, there’s this move where I grab you by the horns and just start wailing…”
Xoti crumpled to the bamboo floor, energy meter depleted, and I walked up and kicked her over the ledge. She fell screaming into the river below and was skeletonized by a passing school of piranhas.
“That’s a secret that you can do that. It only works in the Shinto temple.”
“Yay. What a blast. Getting murdered by proxy.”
So her turn was over, and the next opponent was Psychonaut, and because it was the first computer opponent, the AI was turned down low and it was no big task to bring him down—and yet I don’t need to explain the joy in beating an opponent before an admiring audience—and as I rammed his head into the floor of the murky dungeon, I wondered if this was how the Knights of Yore felt as they fought in their tournaments: crowds cheering their violence, whipped into a frenzy. And on a raised dais a maiden stands waving her kerchief….But as I finished him off with a final eye gouge and turned from the console in triumph, I saw that Katie was no longer standing beside me.
I found her at the Skee-Ball machines, munching on some popcorn.
“You missed some real action back there.”
“I got hungry.” She aimed the bag in my direction. “Popcorn? By the way, I’m going to kick your ass at Skee-Ball.”
She wasn’t kidding. Truth is I’d never played Skee-Ball before—just never had the desire. It’s a pretty simple concept, the objective being to send a ball up a wooden ramp and jump it into one of several holes labeled with different point values. You take one object and hurl it toward another object and hope for the best. No special combos, no zooming camera angles, no instant replays—you don’t even get to kill or maim anyone.
Which maybe explains why I sucked at it so bad. It’s difficult to say what I was doing wrong, exactly—or maybe it was just that I was doing everything wrong—but anyway, every approach seemed worse than the last. First I rolled the balls too hard, bouncing them off the backstop and sending them cascading down the tiers into the gutter, then too soft, dropping them off the lip of the ramp and out of sight. Katie was no expert, either, but going off of point totals, she was easily twice as good as me.
And whereas during Battleborn II I had been careful of her feelings, she had no problem giving me her honest assessment of my performance.
“You’re terrible at this.”
Another ball bounced into the gutter.
“Aim. You have to aim, Arnold.”
By the time we were done we had enough tickets to purchase two Zazz® bars with a little left over, and I told Katie she should get something for herself, and without hesitating she picked out a little silver mood ring.
“Thanks! I always wanted one of these. Now I can always tell how I’m feeling.”
I ate my Zazz® bar and Homie™ shut up, and we got back into Katie’s truck. The evening was actually turning out pretty nice. Almost like a date or something.
“Look at that,” she said.
“What?”
Katie held up her hand. “The ring. It was green—but now it’s yellow.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It didn’t come with a chart.”
It was snowing again—not hard, just lazy: these big, fat feathery flakes touching down on the windshield of Katie’s truck. We were near the edge of town, almost to the road to my grandpa’s, when I remembered something. My toothbrush—I’d forgotten to grab it out of the bathroom.
“Can we go back and get it?”
“Back to your uncle’s?” The truck slowed to a stop. “Arnold…”
“Look. I’ll be so fast. It’ll just be a second.”
Katie started to say something and then she stopped herself. She turned the truck around and drove us back to my dad’s house.
“I’l
l just wait here if you don’t mind.”
And now I’d like to mention a problem I have with FUN®, which is this: night vision. In that there isn’t any. I don’t know what it is about the lenses, but you can hardly see in the dark. So often you find yourself standing there in a blurry haze wishing you had a pair of DarkSight® Night Vision Goggles with duel-spectrum infrared illumination and adjustable comfort straps (YAY!). I’ll also admit that, yeah, my dad had a point about shoveling the driveway. Here’s what happened: as I was heading up the driveway, I slipped on a patch of ice.
It happened fast: one second I was walking, the next—WHAM!—I was on my back looking up at the sky. I lay there watching the snow falling from the darkness above. I sat up and dusted off my arms, but as I was going to get up, something stopped me. My left ankle. The weak one. The same one I broke when I jumped off the garage roof. It kind of hurt.
“Are you OK?”
Katie was standing over me. She knelt and felt my ankle. I could put a little pressure on it, but not much. And it was too much. Not the pain, but Katie. The way she was touching my ankle. The way she was looking at me. My hands were beginning to twitch, and then my whole body was, and I could feel it coming: a full-on TSD glitch-out.
My vision blacked out, then flickered back on.
A car was pulling into the drive.
Katie’s face was right in front of mine. Her lips were open.
Black again.
Then back on again.
She was right there. Illuminated in the headlights of the car.
“Arnold?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Arnold, there’s something I need to tell you.”
And then everything went black again.
I came out of the glitch-out to the sound of a strange, high-pitched voice.
> hello stud
would u like to hop with me?
only 99 per min
Then Katie’s voice:
“Arnold? Are you OK? You had a seizure or something.”
