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“Where's he going?” Carmen asked, though it was no business of hers.
Lydia and Krista exchanged a glance. Lydia opened her mouth, then closed it again. “He's going to . . . see . . . a friend,” she finally said.
“Oh.” Carmen wasn't sure why this was such a difficult question.
“So guess what?” Lydia changed the subject chattily. “We've come up with a backup plan for the reception.”
She was talking to Carmen. Carmen realized that was because she was the only one who didn't know about it already.
“Oh,” Carmen said again. She knew she was supposed to ask what it was.
“It's going to be in our own backyard. We've rented a giant tent! Doesn't that sound like fun?”
“Yes, fun.” Carmen took the last sip of her orange juice.
“I was so upset yesterday, you know,” Lydia went on, “but I wanted to be brave. And Albert had this fantastic idea about having it here at home. I'm just thrilled with our solution.”
“Sounds . . . thrilling,” Carmen said. She would have felt guilty for being sarcastic, except no one else seemed to hear it.
“Listen, kid,” her dad said, sliding his chair back from the table. “We'd better get going to the club.”
Carmen shot to her feet. “Let's go.” At last, their promised tennis game. She followed him out of the house and hopped into his new beige family car.
“Bun,” he began once they'd pulled away from the house. “What I told you about Lydia's former husband. It's something I'd like you to keep to yourself. Lydia is very sensitive about it.”
Carmen nodded.
“The reason I bring it up is because Paul is driving down to visit his father today. His dad's at a treatment center in Atlanta. Paul drives down once a month and usually stays over,” her dad explained.
For some reason, that made Carmen feel like she might cry.
“What about Krista?” she asked.
“Krista prefers not to stay in contact with her dad. It upsets her too much.”
She's ashamed of him, Carmen thought. Just like Lydia was obviously ashamed of him. Get a newer, better model and forget about the old one.
“You can't just abandon your family,” Carmen murmured. Then she turned her face to the window, and for the first time in days she really did cry.
“I set up the first interview for our movie,” Bailey claimed excitedly.
Tibby huffed loudly into the phone. “Our movie?”
“Sorry. Your movie. That I'm helping with.”
“Who said you're helping?” Tibby asked.
“Please? Please?” Bailey begged.
“Come on, Bailey. Don't you have anything better to do?” In the silence that followed, Tibby's words seemed to echo across the phone line. Maybe that was not a question you asked a girl with a serious illness.
“I scheduled the interview for four-thirty, after you get off work,” Bailey persisted. “I can drop by your house and pick up the stuff if you want.”
“Who are we supposedly interviewing?” Tibby asked warily.
“That kid who plays arcade games in the Seven-Eleven across from Wallman's? He has the ten high scores on the hardest machine.”
Tibby snorted. “He sounds appropriately lame.”
“So I'll see you later?” Bailey asked.
“I'm not sure what my plans are,” Tibby said coolly, not convincing either of them that she had any other life right now.
Of course Bailey showed up the minute Tibby's shift ended.
“How ya doin'?” Bailey asked, like they were best friends.
Tibby felt the hours under the fluorescent lights searing her brain. “Dying slowly,” she said. Instantly she regretted her words.
“So come on,” Bailey said, holding up the camera. “There's no time to lose.”
Upon her first introduction to Brian McBrian, Tibby knew they'd come to the right place for a scorn fest. He was a caricature of a caricature of a loser. He was both skinny and doughy at the same time, his skin as white-blue as skim milk. He had unibrow syndrome, greasy hair the color of dog doo, mossy braces, and a spitty way of talking. Tibby had to hand it to Bailey.
He cranked on Dragon Master while they set up. Tibby watched Bailey with grudging admiration as she attached the external microphone to a makeshift boom. With all the ambient noise inside and outside the store, there was no way to get a reasonable interview without a directed microphone. Had Bailey really never done this before?
Tibby started by setting the scene. She moved from an extreme close-up of an unnaturally pink Hostess Snowball, to a tabloid rack trumpeting Vanna White's alien baby, to a counter display of Slim Jims. She finished her continuous shot on the guy working behind the counter. He immediately slapped his hands over his face, as though Tibby were an investigative journalist from 60 Minutes. “No camera! No camera!” he barked.
Tibby caught a shot of Bailey's laughing face in the camera as she moved to the front of the store. She got a shot of Brian from behind, his jumping angel bones as he wrestled the dragons; then she cut the camera to set up the interview. “Ready?” she asked.
He turned around. Bailey positioned the microphone. “Rolling,” she warned him.
He didn't primp or stiffen or put his head at a weird angle the way many people did before a camera. He just looked at her dead-on.
“So, Brian, we hear you're quite a regular here at Seven-Eleven.” Tibby assumed that truly dorky people were deaf to sarcasm.
He nodded.
“What kind of hours do you keep?”
“Uh, just pretty much one till eleven.”
“Does the store actually close at eleven?” Tibby asked, her mouth crinkling up into a grin.
“No, that's my curfew,” he explained.
“And during the school year?”
“During the school year I get here by three oh five.”
“I see. No after-school activities or anything?”
Brian seemed to gather the implication of her question. He gestured out the front glass of the store to the parking lot. “Most people live out there,” he said. He pointed to the game. “I live in here.” He tapped the glass of the screen.
Tibby was slightly unnerved by his honesty and the levelness of his stare. She had imagined she would be intimidating to a person like Brian.
“So tell us about Dragon Master,” she asked, beginning to feel she was backing down.
“I'll show you,” he said, slipping two quarters into the money slot. This was obviously why he'd agreed to this.
“Round one is the forest. The year is A.D. 436. The first great expedition in the search for the Holy Grail.”
Tibby trained the camera on the screen, looking over his shoulder. The image wasn't as clear as she'd have liked, but it wasn't too bad.
“There are a total of twenty-eight rounds, spanning from the fifth century to the twenty-fifth century A.D. Only one person on this machine has ever gotten to round twenty-eight.”
“You?” Tibby asked, a little breathlessly.
“Yeah, me,” he said. “On February thirteenth.”
Tibby the scornful documentarian knew this was excellent stuff. But for some reason, she felt mildly impressed in spite of herself. “Maybe you'll get there again today,” she said.
“It's possible,” Brian agreed. “Even if I don't, there's the whole world here.”
Both Tibby and Bailey peered over his shoulder as Brian, a hugely muscular warrior, gathered troops of loyal men and a curvaceous woman to fight by his side.
“You don't even confront a dragon until level seven,” he expl
ained.
At level four, there was a sea battle. At level six, the vandals set fire to Brian's village, and he saved all the women and children. Tibby watched his hands, fast and sure on the various knobs and buttons. He never looked down at them.
Sometime after the second dragon appeared, Tibby heard the battery die and the camera flick off, but she kept watching.
After a long siege of a medieval castle, Brian paused the game and turned around.
“I think your battery ran out,” he said.
“Oh, yeah. You're right,” Tibby said nonchalantly. “That was my third one. I don't have another one charged. Maybe we could finish this later.”
“Sure,” Brian agreed.
“You can keep playing if you want,” Tibby offered.
“I will,” he said.
Bailey bought them each a Hostess fruit pie, and they watched the heroic version of Brian fight through twenty-four levels before being incinerated by dragon breath.
Eric was leading another run at five. Bridget wasn't sure he looked happy to see her.
“Today we're cutting our time to six-minute-fifty-second miles,” Eric announced to the group. “Once again, you know your bodies. You know when you are overdoing it. It's hot out here. So take it easy. Slow down when you need to. This is conditioning, not competition.” He looked right at Bridget.
“Ready?” he asked them after he'd given them a few minutes to stretch.
He seemed to resign himself quickly to the idea that Bridget was going to run alongside him no matter how fast or slow he ran. “You are quite a player, Bee,” he said to her in a measured voice. “You put on a real show today.” He thought she'd overdone it. That was obvious.
Bridget chewed the inside of her lip, ashamed. “I got too intense. I do that sometimes.”
He made a face like that wasn't coming as a big surprise.
“I was showing off for you,” she confessed.
He seemed to hold his thoughts for a second as he looked her right in the eyes. Then he looked back to see how close the next runner was. “Bee, don't,” he said under his breath.
“Don't what?”
“Don't . . . don't . . . push this.” He couldn't seem to find words he was happy with.
“Why not? Why am I not allowed to want you?”
