At the windmill, for sentimentality’s sake, I called Luke. No answer. So I shot a picture of Benji putting towards it. Wish you were here, I typed beneath it. This time, I made sure the text went through.
Because Benji was a novice, I stopped keeping score about hole seven and just let him go at it, rules forgotten. By the time he knocked his ball into the clown’s nose on the eighteenth hole (after ten or so tries, from multiple angles) he was miles away from the surly kid in the porch swing earlier.
“Wanna play again?” he asked me, once the siren and circus music of the game finale died down.
“Nah,” I said. “Let’s go to the arcade or something.”
“Arcade?” His face lit up. “Awesome!”
I opened up my wallet, digging around to see if I had any SafariLand cards. When I was a kid, they’d issued the old-fashioned paper tickets when you scored points, which you could then exchange for your pick among the toys and prizes kept in a dusty case by the snack bar. Sometime during the last few years, though, they’d switched over to a debit card system for both playing the games and keeping track of credits. I always had at least one floating around the bottom of my purse, usually coated in lint and half-melted sticks of gum.
“Aha!” I said, extracting a card featuring a smiling lion. I unwrapped a hair elastic that was tangled around it, wiped it on my shorts, then slid it through the slot of the skeeball machine beside me to check the balance. “Seven seventy-nine,” I told Benji, as the number popped up on the display. I handed it to him. “Should keep you busy for a while.”
“I can spend all of it?”
“Sure,” I said. “Word of advice, though: Don’t bother with the toy grabber thing. It’s totally rigged. I’ve never seen anyone win anything there. Not even Luke, and he aced all these games, like, years ago.”
Benji looked at the machine, which was full of stuffed animals that looked deceptively easy to snag with the metal pinchers that hung above them. “Right. I like the video ones better anyway.”
“Perfect. I’m just going to grab a drink, okay? I’ll come find you.”
He nodded, then was off, moving down the rows of loud, blinking machines, the card in his hand. I walked over to the snack bar, checking my phone on the way. No reply from Luke, at least not yet.
I went to the snack bar and got a drink, then tried Luke once more, hanging up when it again went to voice mail. What was it about suspecting someone was deliberately not answering that made you that much more desperate to reach them? I told myself to calm down and put my phone away.
After a brief search, I spotted Benji at one of the driving games, wrenching the wheel back and forth as the screen flickered in front of him. I was almost to him when my phone buzzed in my pocket. Finally, I thought, grabbing it and hitting the Talk button.
“Hey,” I said, cupping my hand over my other ear to drown out the array of noises around me. “You missed it. Benji’s got a lethal swing. Must run in the family.”
There was a pause. Then, “Emaline?”
It was Theo. Whoops. “Oh, hey. Sorry. I—”
“What?”
“Hang on a sec.” I walked over to the do-it-yourself photo booth and slipped inside. It wasn’t silent, but still an improvement. “Okay. Can you hear me?”
“Yeah. Much better,” he replied. “Where are you?”
I looked at the display of pictures on the wall opposite where I was sitting, all staged snapshots meant to look casual and spontaneous. A girl holding two fingers behind another girl’s head; a family crammed in together, all of them making faces. Meanwhile, in the reflective lens, I just saw myself, looking tired. “I’m hanging out with my . . . with Benji.”
He was my half brother. I knew that. But calling him that, or anything really, felt more than half-weird.
“Oh, right,” Theo said. “So . . . I was just calling to tell you Ivy went crazy over that milk crate. She couldn’t believe it.”
“Really.”
“Oh, yeah. I got some major brownie points. I owe you big.”
I looked at the pictures again, each in strips of four. At the top of one, a boy closed his eyes as a girl kissed his cheek. Next shot, she kissed his lips. Then they both faced the camera for the last two, one smiling, one laughing. “No problem.”
We were both quiet for a moment. Outside I could hear Benji’s computerized car squealing its tires, then crashing into something. Theo said, “So I wondered if you might be up for playing tour guide again sometime. I mean, at your convenience.”
I eased the curtain aside, looking over at Benji. GAME OVER, said his screen. He kept turning the wheel anyway. I sat back again.
“I don’t know,” I said, thinking of the look on Luke’s face the night before when he’d pulled up beside us. “I’m really busy with work right now, and . . .”
Theo waited a second, as if I might finish this thought. When I didn’t, he said, “Oh, right, sure. I understand. I figured you had a lot going on.”
I nodded at my own reflection. “Yeah. I do.”
“Emaline?”
I glanced over to see two skinny ankles clad in socks and Nikes at the bottom of the curtain. I opened it and looked up at Benji. “Hey. I’ll be off in a sec.”
“Cool,” he said. “Can I come in?”
Before I could answer, he was sliding in beside me onto the short bench, leaning forward to look at the camera lens. His arm was warm next to mine, one foot already tapping the floor. “I better go,” I told Theo, as Benji pulled out the SafariLand card I’d given him and swiped it through the slot. A row of lights appeared on the screen behind the camera, blinking.