I sigh and trace my fingers along the visible line of my scar.
“Stop it, Aimee,” Mara says. “You make too big a deal out of it.”
I stare at the mirror. And this strange feeling makes my stomach slip uneasily. It’s like nothing about the girl looking back at me makes any sense.
Mara’s probably right and I do make too big a deal out of it. Dramatic is what our mother calls it. That’s what she said to me when I told her that I couldn’t go back to my high school for my senior year and that I wanted to go live with my grandparents in Portland.
Don’t be so dramatic, Aimee.
My best friend had just died and I had the stitches in my skin to prove that I was there to watch it happen, and she thought I was being dramatic.
I reach for the hem of the dress and pull.
“What are you doing?” Mara asks. She pushes herself forward.
“Changing,” I say, bending down to search through the pile of clothes at my feet.
“But…”
I know that she’s disappointed. I can tell that she’s going to try to get me to keep the dress on but it’s too late. I’m already zipping up the baggy jeans I wore to class today.
Cole
“You can’t play worth a shit.” I stand to the side and watch her throw.
Aimee laughs. “You’re right,” she shoots back. “I wish I had a real excuse, like, ‘I’ve got a cramp in my arm,’ or ‘I’m out of practice,’ but the truth is that I just suck.”
“Yep. You suck.” I smile wickedly. “Aimee Spencer, you have a lot to look forward to in this lifetime, but I don’t think that a Skee-Ball championship is anywhere in your future.”
She laughs again. It’s a good sound. A great one actually.
I throw the last of the balls from the side channel and reach down to break off the stream of paper tickets that the machine spews out. I turn to her and ask, “You tapped out yet?”
She casts her head thoughtfully. “Actually, I’m kind of hungry.”
“Well, then you’re in luck because I’ve heard that this arcade offers a wide array of culinary masterpieces. There’s your standard cheddar and caramel popcorn, a variety of artificially flavored tootsie pops, an exquisite selection of braised corndogs, and the cotton candy…” I pinch my thumb and fingers to my lips and kiss them. “Let’s just say that it’s supposed to be divine.”
“Cotton candy? You pull out all the stops, don’t you?”
I like the look on Aimee’s face too much for my own good—the easy way that she’s watching me and how the arcade lights scatter across her long hair. Without thinking, I reach out and run my fingers over her forearm. “For you—anything goes.”
She sucks in a shaky breath and bows her head quickly, but not before I see the ghost of something move across her features.
“Umm…” A flush creeps up her neck. She pulls on her hair and nods at the arcade tickets we’ve both won over the last hour. “What should we do with those?”
I step back and look around. “Follow me,” I say, sliding in between the machines and dodging a couple of waist-high kids.
I know that it’s probably strange that I dragged Aimee to an arcade, but I wanted to do something with her, and dinner and a movie is played out and reeks of a dating cliché. I was about to break down and ask Daniel, of all people, for advice when it hit me.
My mom left when I was seventeen. I was young, but I was still old enough have my own life—one that was busy and kept me distracted. I was able to lose myself in winning races and getting laid and being pissed off most of the time.
Things were different for my little sister, Sophie. I don’t think anyone should have to wake up one day with a mom and go to bed that night without one. Especially not a ten-year-old girl.
She started to do badly in school. She stopped bringing friends home. One night in a bout of frustration because no one was around to help her with her hair, Sophie chopped it off to her ears with a pair of kitchen scissors.
I was a goddamn teenager. I didn’t have the first clue how to talk to a messed-up little kid, and it didn’t help that our dad was completely checked out. Things were bad—really bad. And then one afternoon, four months after our mother left, I picked Sophie up from school and we got a flat tire on the way home. That’s how we wound up at an arcade. It started as a way to waste time while my tire was being patched, but it turned into something more.
For the first time in four months, I saw Sophie laughing. She was lost in the spinning yellow and red lights from the machines and acting like a kid. And it was one good afternoon in the middle of the pile of shit that had become our lives. I started taking Sophie every week. It was a way for her to get out of her own head and have a slice of normalcy—even for just that single hour.