The End of FUN (18 page)

On my way to Katie's that night, Homie
™
popped up and was like,

Which, no duh. I was in
FAIL
. I told Homie
™
to go away, and it did, but then it popped back up again.

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.)

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.

“What can I do for FUN
®
?”

“I don't have a Zazz
®
bar.”

“Homie
™
, I'm broke.”

“Go away, please?”

Homie
™
disappeared/popped back up again.

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'll 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.