Page 54 of Aftertaste

“Uh-huh. I’m gonna show you the city, Stan.”

She swept her arm out before them. A rat skittered out from beneath a dumpster.

“You know I live in Hell’s Kitchen, right?”

“But you don’t walk around with your eyes open.”

NO TWO PEOPLE,it seemed, experienced Manhattan in quite the same way, and the places Maura frequented, all her beloved haunts, made him feel even less cool than usual. Her version of the city was a different world. Full of nooks and crannies, holes-in-the-wall, secret entrances, spaces you’d never see unless shown.

SHE TOOK HIMfor zombies (warning: one per customer) at Fuego’s Shrunken Head, a Polynesian tiki bar above a laundromat, carpets sticky with decades of syrupy rum.

“They’re limiting the signature drink?” Kostya asked. “Tough look for a bar.”

“I don’t think they have a choice,” Maura said, plucking a paper umbrella from the rim and skewering a cherry. “These things are deadly. I sweet-talked the bartender into sneaking me a second one once. Blacked out an entire weekend.”

AFTERWARD, THEY STUMBLEDaround the corner to Big Apple Handyman, a hardware store wedged between a barbershop and nail salon.

“Our next stop,” Maura announced as she led him down the paint aisle, toward a door markedDanger: High Voltage. “Courtesy of my former employer.”

“You workedhere?” Kostya asked.

She nodded, entering a four-digit code on the door’s pinlock. “In art school. Before I dropped out.”

“You went to art school?” Lord, he knew astonishingly little about Maura.

“For visual effects and 3D animation. Lots of coding, logic, world-building—which is why I fought so hard for this job.” She turned the handle down slowly, felt the lock click open.

“In a hardware store?”

“No.” She pushed open the door. “In High Voltage.”

It was a private arcade—ten or twelve video game cabinets lining the walls of a small room, a machine in the corner that traded bills for quarters, and a tiny (no liquor license, surely?) bar in the back. It was an insider’s place, and, unlike The Library of Spirits, anactualsecret. A few groups huddled around two of the older-looking consoles, the players focused, the spectators watching, breath held.

“You play?” Maura asked him.

“Never had the money.”

“Well,” she said, loading a bill into the change machine and scooping out a fistful of quarters, “allow me to make up for your horrible childhood.”

MAURA CREAMED HIMat every game.

It wasn’t just that he was a novice, prone to button mashing; she was uniquely skilled, so good that other gamers paused to watch. Her eyes never left the screen, her fingers flitting across combinations of buttons, maneuvers of joysticks. It reminded him of the way she shuffled cards.

She moved to the next cabinet, sliding a quarter into a Japanese version of Ms. Pac-Man.

“This is the one I actually brought you here to play,” she said, her hands settling expertly onto the controls.

“You get this good just by working here?” Kostya asked.

“I’ve been gaming since I was a kid.” Ms. Pac-Man appeared on the screen, a maze loading, and Maura’s face shifted in concentration. “There was an arcade in town, and my sister and I—it was our happy place. We were safe there.”

Something about the way she said it unsettled Kostya.

“In a game,” she continued, “no matter how much you messed up, no matter how many times you died, you could come back. Play again.” On-screen, she chased down a set of flashing ghosts, swallowing them one by one, orange,then pink. “We spent hours playing after school. I loved everything about it. The puzzles. The levels. The way games follow rules. There’s a perfect logic to a game world. Orderly. Predictable. Not like real life.”

“You can see the bad guys coming.”

“Exactly.” She ate a cherry, then a Power Pellet, then swallowed the cyan ghost, sending him back into his little box. “And if you get really good, you can learn which rules to break. Unlock secret levels. Have an experience the creator intended only for a select few.”

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