Page 55 of Aftertaste

She took her hands off the controls and turned back to Konstantin. He watched as the last ghost—the one she hadn’t yet eaten—stalked closer and closer.

“Watch out!” he warned, but it was too late.

The red ghost overtook Ms. Pac-Man, sending her spinning. Dead. The maze went blank, all the little pellets vanishing at once. Some Japanese characters flashed across the center of the screen. Game over, he figured.

“Ouch. Didn’t think I’d get to see you lose.”

“You didn’t.” Maura tapped the bottom left of the screen with her finger, pointing out the two life icons still displayed. “Watch and learn.”

The maze reappeared, in ghostly blue this time, the pellets punctuated by countless miniature foods—not only fruits but pixelated pizza slices, tiny sushi rolls, petite hamburgers. Ms. Pac-Man faded onto the screen, not in the bottom half, where she usually started, but in the central box, where the ghosts usually did. Instead of her trademark yellow, she appeared blinking, in blue.

“She’s—she’s one of the ghosts?”

Maura took up the controls again. Kostya watched her move through the maze, eating everything in sight.

“It’s a secret level,” Maura told him. “Only available in the 1983 rerelease of the Japanese cabinet. It’s called the Hungry Ghost Maze.”

“So it’s a bonus round? The point’s just to… get more points?”

“The points don’t matter in the ghost realm. To clear this level, you have to find the Happy Meal. Hidden in one of these fruits is a portal that gets you back to the real world.”

“But there’s no opponent!” Kostya balked. “No timer. This seems too easy.”

“It would be, without the second player. Get ready.” She nodded at him. “You’re almost up.”

“Wait, what?”

“On the floor, to the right. There’s another controller.”

A handheld joystick was jerry-rigged to the back of the cabinet, a thick black cord tethering it in place.

“But I don’t know—”

A moment later, the screen divided, Maura continuing to eat in the ghost realm on the left and a new maze appearing on the right, the original Pac-Man in his first level, caged ghosts breaking free one by one to chase him. Kostya fumbled with the joystick, running Pac-Man straight into an oncoming ghost and losing one of his lives.

“Careful! Ms. Pac-Man only gets to stay on this side as long as Pac-Man survives on his. True love, right? If I don’t find the portal before you die,” Maura warned him, “I vanish. Literally. We’ll have to reset the game to get her to show up again.”

“Happy Meal, huh? To bring a ghost back from the Dead?” Kostya maneuvered Pac-Man around a corner. “That’s kind of on the nose.”

“Well, Hungry Ghosts are the kind that come back.” Maura grinned. “Feeding the Dead to help them cross—it’s a whole thing in, like, a dozen different traditions. Japan. China. Mexico. Ancient Egypt. I figured it’d be up your alley.”

Another ghost attacked then, catching Kostya in a pincer. Womp-womp.

“Except you really suck at getting away,” Maura scolded, snatching his controller. “Here. Let me.”

AFTER THE ARCADE,they wandered through Tompkins Square Park, darkness falling around them. Maura’s hand laced through his felt so right, a warm feeling gathering in Kostya’s belly like a big bowl of soup. She ledhim along a dim, tree-lined path, finally stopping at a bench where they sat, his arm draped around her shoulder.

“So,” he asked her, “there some secret in the park, too? Some tree branch you pull to get into a rave?”

She laughed. “I just used to come here a lot. Most of my classes were across the street.”

“Visual effects, right?”

“Yeah.” She gave a tight smile. “I really thought I was gonna make games for a living.”

“What happened?”

Maura sighed, her eyes carefully fixed on the ground. “I made it through fall of senior year. Started my big thesis project. But then I dropped out. Because Everleigh died.”

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