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Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem and Private Jasper Jacks awake in a dark, empty
room approximately twelve feet square.
Isaac pointed toward the TV, like I should talk to it or something. “Um,” I
said. “Is there a light switch?”
No.
“Is there a door?”
Private Jacks locates the door. It is locked.
Isaac jumped in. “There’s a key above the door frame.”
Yes, there is.
“Mayhem opens the door.”
The darkness is still complete.
“Take out knife,” Isaac said.
“Take out knife,” I added.
A kid—Isaac’s brother, I assume—darted out from the kitchen. He was maybe
ten, wiry and overenergetic, and he kind of skipped across the living room before
shouting in a really good imitation of Isaac’s voice, “KILL MYSELF.”
Sergeant Mayhem places his knife to his neck. Are you sure you—
“No,” Isaac said. “Pause. Graham, don’t make me kick your ass.” Graham
laughed giddily and skipped off down a hallway.
As Mayhem and Jacks, Isaac and I felt our way forward in the cavern until we
bumped into a guy whom we stabbed after getting him to tell us that we were in
a Ukrainian prison cave, more than a mile beneath the ground. As we continued,
sound effects—a raging underground river, voices speaking in Ukrainian and
accented English—led you through the cave, but there was nothing to see in this
game. After playing for an hour, we began to hear the cries of a desperate
prisoner, pleading, “God, help me. God, help me.”
“Pause,” Isaac said. “This is when Gus always insists on finding the prisoner,
even though that keeps you from winning the game, and the only way to
actually
free
the prisoner is to win the game.”
“Yeah, he takes video games too seriously,” I said. “He’s a bit too enamored
with metaphor.”
“Do you like him?” Isaac asked.
“Of course I like him. He’s great.”
“But you don’t want to hook up with him?”
I shrugged. “It’s complicated.”
“I know what you’re trying to do. You don’t want to give him something he
can’t handle. You don’t want him to Monica you,” he said.
“Kinda,” I said. But it wasn’t that. The truth was, I didn’t want to Isaac him.
“To be fair to Monica,” I said, “what you did to her wasn’t very nice either.”
“What’d
I
do to her?” he asked, defensive.
“You know, going blind and everything.”
“But that’s not my fault,” Isaac said.
“I’m not saying it was your
fault
. I’m saying it wasn’t
nice
.”
Chapter Ten
We could only take one suitcase. I couldn’t carry one, and Mom insisted that she
couldn’t carry two, so we had to jockey for space in this black suitcase my
parents had gotten as a wedding present a million years ago, a suitcase that was
supposed to spend its life in exotic locales but ended up mostly going back and
forth to Dayton, where Morris Property, Inc., had a satellite office that Dad often
visited.
I argued with Mom that I should have slightly more than half of the suitcase,
since without me and my cancer, we’d never be going to Amsterdam in the first
place. Mom countered that since she was twice as large as me and therefore
required more physical fabric to preserve her modesty, she deserved at least two-
thirds of the suitcase.
In the end, we both lost. So it goes.
Our flight didn’t leave until noon, but Mom woke me up at five thirty, turning
on the light and shouting, “AMSTERDAM!” She ran around all morning making
sure we had international plug adapters and quadruple-checking that we had the
right number of oxygen tanks to get there and that they were all full, etc., while I
just rolled out of bed, put on my Travel to Amsterdam Outfit (jeans, a pink tank
top, and a black cardigan in case the plane was cold).
The car was packed by six fifteen, whereupon Mom insisted that we eat
breakfast with Dad, although I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on
the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying
myself for a day in the fields. But anyway, I tried to stomach down some eggs
while Mom and Dad enjoyed these homemade versions of Egg McMuffins they
liked.
“Why are breakfast foods breakfast foods?” I asked them. “Like, why don’t
we have curry for breakfast?”
“Hazel, eat.”
“But
why
?” I asked. “I mean, seriously: How did scrambled eggs get stuck
with breakfast exclusivity? You can put bacon on a sandwich without anyone
freaking out. But the moment your sandwich has an egg, boom, it’s a
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