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“Well, it’s kind of difficult to understand even if you’re watching it being played. The point of the game is to figure out in which hand a person is holding a small object, usually a penny or a small stone. I suppose the closest comparison would be the shell game. You know, when someone hides a ball under one of three shells, and you try to guess which shell it’s under?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“Like that, only you use your hands to hide the penny. Two teams of four or more people kneel on the floor facing each other. They have a blanket or their jackets on the floor in front of them. Drummers play behind them, and a lot of people chant along. At the start, one team hides their hands under the jackets, passing the penny back and forth in their hands and deciding which hand to keep it in. A caller signals them when it’s time to start, and then they all raise their hands up at once, dancing and moving their hands to the beat of the drums. The other team’s captain tries to guess which hands are holding the objects.”
“Everyone has a penny?”
“Everyone on the hiding team, yeah. Then the other team guesses. If they guess right, they get a point, and the person doing the hidin
g is out for that round. If they guess wrong, the other team gets a point, and the person doing the hiding stays in the game. They play over and over until everyone on the hiding team is out. Then they switch which team does the guessing and which does the hiding.”
“Do they guess one person at a time?”
“Not exactly.”
“How do they guess?”
“A series of hand gestures that split the players.” I hold my hand out sideways with my thumb up and all my fingers straight, pointing to Seri’s left. “If I do this, you and the person sitting to the left would show me your inside hands. So that’s your left, and the person next to you would show their right hand. If I’m right on both counts, I get two points, and you’re both out of the round.”
She tilts her head and narrows her eyes at me.
“Sorry,” I say with a sheepish smile. “I don’t think I’m explaining it well. It’s an ancient game—thousands of years old, I believe. The combination of moving to the drums, hiding the object, and catching the facial expressions of the players is a dance as much as it is a game. It’s really cool to watch, but also insanely involved and complicated. I never got the hang of it. Different regions sometimes have different guessing gestures, too, which can cause all kinds of ruckus during the championships. The frenzy of the people involved reminds me of how excited people get during March Madness in the States. They even teach it to the kids in schools. It’s a big deal.”
“Sounds like it.”
“They held the championship in Whatì the first year I was here. People drove in from all over the place, tripling the number of people in town. They filled up the school with cots to give people a place to sleep. It was a huge deal. The championship tournaments last for days, and the pot for the winning team can be thousands of dollars. The drumming and the way people try to psyche out the other team can get very intense. There were so many people packed into one place, and it was so loud for so long, I thought I was losing my mind at the end of it.”
“Yeah, I think I would have to see it to understand.”
“Maybe I’ll take you sometime.” I feel my face heat up, and I grab the poker for the fire to give myself something else to do. I spread the coals around while Seri goes quiet.
I hadn’t considered the implication of what I just said—that Seri would be around long enough to go somewhere to watch the games—before the words were out of my mouth. It is one thing to tell her she can stay, but it’s something else to make future plans with her.
I just redefined our relationship—or whatever the hell this is—and I didn’t really intend to. I’m not exactly sorry that I did so, but I am unsure about how Seri will feel about it. Now I don’t know what to do.
Iris’s voice echoes in my head.
Does Seri know that you’re in love with her?
“You don’t have to do that,” Seri says quietly. She bites her lip and looks away from me.
I look at her and blink a few times, trying to figure out if she’s trying to let me off the hook or get herself off the hook and feeling annoyed with myself for creating my own Margot-style fishing metaphor.
“You don’t want to?” I ask.
“I can’t imagine you want to be around that many people at once.”
“I don’t, really,” I tell her. “The first time I went, it wasn’t easy for me, especially being one of the only white guys around. Coming from the States, it took me a while to get used to being a minority. But the Dene are good people here. The drumming is loud, but you do get used to it. The energy in the room is positively insane but in a good way. You might like it.”
“I think I would,” Seri says, “I mean, if you really want to go sometime. It sounds unique.”
She’s twisting her fingers around themselves and blushing, and I’m not sure what to make of it. Does that mean she really wants to go, or is she embarrassed because we’ve trapped ourselves into a future plan? Do I want to make future plans with her?
Yeah, I do.
“I’ll take you.” I look up and her and try to smile while my heart races.
“No,” Seri says abruptly. She pushes herself off the floor and takes a few steps away. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t…”
