“Bear, I haven’t played this in years.”
“Doesn’t matter. Mom is on my team. Tyr is on yours.”
He tosses me a Joy-Con. I catch it. The Joy-Con is the blue one. It is sticky in a way that says Bear has been eating something while playing. Gross.
“Rabbids.”
“Rabbids,” Bear confirms. “I’m going to whoop all you.”
“Bear.”
“I amtransparent,Lucy.”
He picks up the second Joy-Con and hands the third to my mother. She holds it the way you hold something you are not sure of the shape of.
“Diane, you’re horizontal.”
“What?”
“Horizontal. The Joy-Con. The shoulder button is on the side.”
Tyr sits down on the rug in front of the couch with his Joy-Con in his lap. He looks back at me over his shoulder and winks.
“We’ve got this, Lucy.”
We don’t.
My mom is, somehow, very good at Rabbids. She wins the cow-tipping minigame. She wins the carrot-juggling one. She wins the spinning-plate one. Bear is winning the ones she is not winning. By the third round, they are up four to one over Tyr and me. Tyr keeps looking at me over his shoulder.
“Lucy, we’re getting blown out.”
“I know.”
“By your thirteen-year-old brother and your mother.” He looks at her and smiles. “You aredestroying us.”
Bear is laughing evilly. Now I know why he wanted Mom on his team. I lose another minigame. Bear shouts at the ceiling in triumph.
Two more rounds and Bear declares his team the winner. My mom does the celebration he wants — both arms up, a smallwhoofrom her chest, a high five with Bear that she does not quite line up but that he meets her halfway on. Tyr fallsbackward onto the rug with a groan. Bear takes the Switch off the dock and announces he is going to play Mario Kart in his room. He disappears upstairs.
My mom sets her Joy-Con on the coffee table. Tyr sits up from the rug with his hand at his lower back as if he has been working a job site and not playing Rabbids on the floor.
“You are aRabbids prodigy,” Tyr says to her. His hand lands on her lower back.
She laughs once. Then she turns to me on the couch. “You can stay here as long as you want.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Bear comes back down at nine-fifteen with the Switch on the TV again because he decided he’s going to playone more gameof something I don’t recognize before bed. He pulls me off the couch and hands me a Joy-Con.
I am, this time, half-asleep. I play badly. I lose three rounds in a row. Bear grins at me with his Joy-Con in his lap.
“I’m going to sleep. Love you, honey.”
“Good night, Mom.”
I am drifting with the TV playing something Bear has put on and Bear curled up on the other end of the couch, when my phone buzzes against the wood of the coffee table.
I don’t move. It buzzes again — longer this time. It’s a phone call. I reach forward without sitting up and flip it over. The screen saysGianna.
