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“Ruthie’s up to something,” I comment.
My buddies Leonard and Shane came over to help me out with a special project. We’re all sitting on the floor of my apartment, circled around the bright pink contents of the box that still saysIf you steal this box, you’ll be cursed to have seven years of bad sex. So don’t steal it.
Well, shit. I guess I cursed myself, because I’m the one who brought it up here. Then again, I’m already almost two years in, since jacking off isn’t exactly good sex.
Shane laughs, grounding me back in the moment. “When isn’t your sister up to something?”
Ruthie would say he’s being condescending. She’d be right. There’s always been this push-pull between them, like they knew they needed to share me and didn’t care to.
At the same time, he does have a point. My sister’s twenty-eight years old, and she’s always trying to reach up and grab a star—to find the one business idea that’ll be lucrative enough that she can quit her waitressing job. It hasn’t happened yet, but I believe in her. Always have.
So I shrug. “Maybe this is the one.”
“And maybe it’s another waste of money.”
“Sick burn,” Leonard comments.
Leonard and I are dressed casually, like usual. Shane’s wearing a suit, but he’s done us the favor of taking off his tie. When we were kids, Shane used to make fun of suits, and now he’s become one. If only he’d been a shark back when I got into legal trouble ten years ago. But he wasn’t, and I was a kid who couldn’t afford anything but a public defender, and the rest is history.
Anyway, suits and swagger aside, Shane’s the same kid who used to wear pocket protectors and insisted on being the Bard in our Dungeons and Dragons games because he liked playing the recorder. He’s been my best friend since the second grade, years before we met Burke and Drew, and well over a decade before we met Leonard, so I guess we’re stuck with each other. It seems like all five of us are, actually, even though Drew surprised us all by moving to Puerto Rico with his girlfriend and her grandmother. Temporarily, he said, but it’s already been months.
He could be gone a decade, and we’d still consider him family. That’s how it’s always been with Shane, Burke, Drew, Leonard, and me.
Mira and I are kind of stuck together too.
I keep thinking about that moment when she fell—the sinking panic that filled my gut. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop it from happening. Other than convincing her not to take the bottom position in the first place. I should have, obviously. If I had even a fourth of Leonard’s swagger and Burke’s charm, maybe I could have.
I didn’t like seeing that powerhouse of a woman brought down by the heavy box of poorly labelled parts that are now spread out in front of us.
While we were waiting in the emergency room, Mira was quiet and almost contrite, probably because the expired Tylenol in my car wouldn’t dull a toothache, let alone a broken ankle. I tried to distract her by talking. I’m not supposed to tell anyone the details of my actual job, the one I’m shackled to by the private legal agreement I made with my boss, so I told her about the game instead.
My buddy Drew and I made True Colors together—I did the coding, and he handled the design. It took us years to finish it. For me, it started as a distraction, something I did to take the bad taste of work out of my mouth. For him, as a full-time game designer who spent most of his days designing zombie clowns, it was a chance to design a game he actually liked. Only later did it occur to me that it could give both of us an escape from our shitty jobs.
It’s a survival game, of which there are plenty, but ours is special. My friends and I have always loved hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We go for a two-week camping trip every year, and our game is an offshoot of that. But we’re also kids who grew up on Dungeons and Dragons, so it’s set in a fantasy world, the elements of which slowly unfold during gameplay.
When I told Mira about that part in the ER, she asked, “If I play it, will I get to ride a dragon?”
“No dragons.”
“What’s fantasy without dragons?” she asked.
Her pout was pretty, and I had to dig my nails into my palm to distract myself from it. It’s not cool to want to fuck a woman who has a broken ankle, but my libido has taken a liking to Mira. Maybe it would take a liking to any sexy woman who gets close right now. Or maybe—
“Hey, you’re a lawyer,” Leonard says, snapping his fingers and pointing at Shane, as if there might be any disagreement about which of us is the lawyer.
“When’d you notice I was a lawyer?” Shane asks him with a smirk, tugging me back to the moment. To the guys sitting next to me and the box on the floor in front of us. To the smell of chemicals and the uncomfortable squeak of Styrofoam as Shane shifts the pieces around. I itch for my earphones. But it’s a familiar itch, and I’m used to ignoring it. With them, it doesn’t really cost me. “Was it when I bailed you out of jail?” Shane continues.
Leonard snaps his fingers, grinning. “That must’ve been it. Now, whaddya say? Will you bail me out again if I kill whoever wrote these instructions? They must’ve done it just to fuck with us. None of the parts match.” He folds the inadequate directions into a paper airplane and sails it at my head before grabbing his beer up off the floor.
I catch the airplane before it hits my nose, then examine it.
“Nicely done.” A half-second later, I shake my head in disgust. “One page. One page for all of this.” I wave at the mess of wood and screws and other parts from the box. “That’s not efficient, it’s just stupid.”
“Beer me,” Leonard says.
“I’m guessing we’re all going to need one,” Shane agrees.
I nod and head into the kitchen to get us some cold ones.
