Page 19 of Dire Straights

“Really?” I asked doubtfully.

“Definitely.”

“I think I’d like that.”

“You want to watch football with me?” He asked, sounding surprised. I’d even surprised myself. I’d never had a single urge to watch football, or any sport, ever. But listening to Maddox explain something he liked for… however long a football game was, it didn’t sound bad at all.

“Um, yeah, I think so! Oh, wait, but that would be kind of annoying for you, right?” I realized. “With me asking questions all the time and everything?”

He stared at me for a few moments before answering. “No. It wouldn’t be annoying.”

When we got to the boardwalk, there was a ton of stuff for us to do. We popped into an old school style arcade, where I absolutely destroyed him in every game we faced against each other in. Then we played a virtual reality one where we had to work together to shoot a bunch of dinosaurs that were trying to attack our Jeep.

“You have good hand-eye coordination,” Maddox commented as we unloaded from the special seats for the game. They had shaken and tossed us around while we were shooting, which had made it even harder. “And you’re pretty tall, too. You should have played basketball in high school.”

“The problem is, only my hands are coordinated,” I said, ignoring the way his offhanded compliment had me feeling completely amped up. “The rest of my body just kind of does its own thing.”

“Does that mean we can skip, uh… Dance… Dance… Revolution?” Maddox asked, tilting his head as he read the name of the game out loud. There were already a bunch of people playing, frantically stomping the neon tiles to the rhythm of the song on the screen.

I laughed at his repulsed tone. “Yeah, we can skip that one.”

He paid for some cotton candy, as he’d promised, which I wolfed down like a starving peasant. Then afterward, as we approached another food stall, I looked over the menu.

“You’re not going to get mad if I eat, like, a corn dog, are you?” I asked.

He looked confused by my question, then when he understood my joke, he scoffed, shaking his head.

“You know I can kick your ass, right?”

“Totally,” I answered, but I couldn’t stop snickering at his expression. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it.”

“As long as you don’t deep throat it, I think we’ll be fine,” he finally said, laughing a little now, too.

I ended up getting a cheeseburger and some nachos, and Maddox ate the healthiest thing we could find in the area, a grilled chicken sandwich and an unsweetened tea. But he seemed happy with it, so I didn’t comment on how miserable I would have been in his place.

While we were looking for a table, he spotted a small group of guys from the swim team. I recognized a couple of them from the other day at the library.

“Christ,” he muttered under his breath, and clapped his hand down onto my shoulder to forcefully steer me away from them. “Let’s find somewhere else before they see us.”

“You don’t want to eat with them?” I guessed, and he let out a single sarcastic laugh.

“I have to eat with them every fucking weekday morning. I’d rather choke.”

When we found a picnic table a good distance away from them, we sat down to eat. While we were munching, Maddox commented on all the seagulls circling the area, and how many signs there were warning customers about dive-bombing gulls.

“Che kind of has one of these things as a pet, you know,” I said. Maddox’s eyes went wide.

“Gross. He keeps it in the dorm?”

“No,” I said. “It lives outside, but he feeds it and it recognizes him and stuff. When he walks out to the quad outside our dorm building, it flies right to him.”

“How does he know it’s the same one?” He wondered. “They all kind of look the same.”

“Well, the one he feeds has a messed up foot. He can walk okay and everything, but one of his feet has a chunk missing out of it.”

Grimacing a bit, Maddox shook his head. “So he thinks this bum foot seagull is his pet?”

“I mean, he feeds it and it seems to like him,” I said, shrugging. I thought it was interesting and kind of cute. “He even named it Eugene, but I don’t think he can tell if it’s a boy or a girl. It’s pretty funny, you should come out there with us some time.”