Page 35 of We Fell Apart
Meer puts his arm around me and we start walking again. “I like strange, angry nerd-girls,” he says. “If that’s what you are. I’d totally eat with you in the cafeteria.”
“Oh good,” I say. “I’d eat with you, too.” We reach a place where the pathway stretches around the perimeter of the island, and I follow Meer as we walk along a cliff’s edge. “Are you going to college?” I ask. “I mean, I get that you don’t like institutions. But are you doing something like that, anyway?”
“College isn’t for me.”
“I meant somethinglikethat.”
“What would I do?”
“Like, apprentice to a tattoo artist or a cheesemaker or something. Or do an outdoor education course where you trek across mountains.” Kingsley clearly has so much money, Meer could go anywhere, learn anything. Does he just want to be idle?
“Whatever,” he says. “I don’t want to be a cheesemaker.”
“Travel to Japan? Become a high-level ukulele player? I don’t know. What are you into?”
He doesn’t answer for a beat. “What areyougonna do?” he finally asks.
“Study game design at UC Irvine.”
“Like what, like board games?”
“Video. Invent them, code them, design how they look, that kind of thing.”
“I’m so game deprived,” says Meer. “I feel like I’m into them, but I don’t even know where to start. I triedTemple Run,but it made me sweat.”
I laugh.
“What’s the best game you’ve played? Tell me.”
I’m not sure what he’ll like, but I describeKiller Odyssey.And thenArkham City.Meer keeps asking, “What happens next?,” so I tell him the plot twists like stories as we make our way through the dark.
24
Brock and Tatumare volleying on the tennis court. Dim night-lights shine onto the green clay. Brock plays shirtless, wearing board shorts and Crocs. Tatum has rolled up the sleeves on his sweater.
“Where did you get racquets?” calls Meer.
“There’s a hutch,” says Tatum, breathing hard. “It isn’t locked.” He serves, and his sweater rides up to show a strip of skin above his pants. “It’s got a mini fridge with water and soda if you’re thirsty. And there was a basket of balls.”
“Plus a weird lemon,” says Brock, who has missed the serve and is now running after a ball.
“An ordinary lemon in a weird place,” Tatum corrects him. “It was in with the balls, like a joke.”
“Did you all take lessons?” I ask. I don’t know how to play tennis.
“I taught them both everything I know,” says Brock, failing again to return Tatum’s serve.
Tatum turns to me and Meer. “It was a gym option in school,” he says. “Should we play snowball?”
Snowball turns out to be a ridiculous game in which we put ten tennis balls on one side of the court and nine plus the lemon on the other. Brock and I throw our balls (and lemon) to Meer and Tatum’s side while they’re throwing theirs over to our side.
The team with the most balls on their side of the court loses.
It’s frantic and fierce. The lemon falls apart with repeated injuries. I get hit with balls many times—and manage to hit Tatum with almost as many. We play for half an hour, maybe? Forty minutes? I lose track of time, but my breathing is hard and I am staggering.
Suddenly, I stumble and skid across the court, scraping my palms and wrists. Pain shoots through me, and when I pick my hands up, they are bloody.
The boys stop throwing. The balls bounce and roll to stillness. The lemon does nothing.
