Page 49 of Fraternizing with the Enemy
“Do you play basketball?” I asked him as he popped more quarters into the new game. “I asked you that before.”
“Right,” Logan said, shaking his head. “And I said?—”
“‘The better question would be do I play well?’” I grinned, rolling the ball between my hands. “Perfect.”
I didn’t grow up playing basketball—actually, the first sport I ever tried out for was cheering—but the basket wasn’t too far from where we stood. When the timer dinged, signaling us to start, I sank a basket immediately. And then another. And another.
Logan put too much strength into each of his throws, which caused the basketballs to ricochet harshly against the backboard.
I laughed. “Ohh, yousuckat this!”
When the scoreboard ticked down with five seconds left, and Logan was nearly fifteen baskets behind, he resorted to reaching over and slapping down every one of my throws.
“Hey!” I gasped, but my outrage was immediately swallowed by our laughter. “Who’s the cheater now?”
The only saving grace was that Logan couldn’t sink a basket one-handed while distracting me, so when the timer buzzed, I still won with a hefty lead.
His pouting face was nearly as adorable as his flustered one. “Let’s move onto the next,” he grumbled, and I giggled, plucking the tickets from the machine and following him along.
Never would I ever have thought twice about the arcade. If I’d stumbled upon it with Jade, we’d have rolled our eyes and cracked a joke or two. If a guy had asked me to an old arcade for a first date, I probably would’ve laughed aloud. It just seemed so… dweeby. Lame.
And here I was now, actually havingfun.
Logan picked a zombie shooting game for our next one, with two different booths that had plastic guns sitting on the dash of the game. I picked up my gun and gave him an expectant look. “Is this the part where you put your arms around me and show me how to shoot?”
“I was kind of hoping you’d do that to me.” Logan picked up his plastic gun, giving it a little jiggle. “I don’t know how to hold this thing.”
My cheeks were beginning to hurt.
The game wasfarmore graphic than I expected it to be, with each shot causing the gun in my hands to vibrate and blood to splatter across the screen in a semi-transparent haze. Logan and I were characters stuck in the woods on a crappy hiking trail, trying to defend from zombies coming left and right. Logan had better aim than I did, but the zombies didn’t have that high of a threshold. A bullet to the arm would cause them to explode in a spray of decomposing guts.
“This would make Jade faint,” I said with a little laugh, holding down the trigger.
Logan swung his gun around, and from a quickglance over, I could see he had his eyes squinted. “So,” he began, firing. “Why were you put on the list?”
I flinched as a zombie head exploded right in front of my screen, smattering blood everywhere. “The list?” I echoed.
“The Most Likely To list.” The mindless shooting from Logan’s set nearly drowned out his voice, which was soft, hesitant. “Jade was the one who put you on it?”
I hesitated shooting the zombie that came at me. By the time I lifted my gun high enough, my health had gone down ten percent. “It’s because I didn’t vote a label for the list. It’s a ‘if you don’t vote, you’re on it’ sort of rule.”
“Why didn’t you vote?”
I shot another zombie, another headshot. “It was the day we saw you at Expresso’s.”
Logan lowered his gun a little. “Ah,” he murmured. “So itwasmy fault.”
“I just wasn’t in the mood,” I said quickly, feeling awkward. I’d blamed him in the heat of the moment yesterday, but that hadn’t exactly been fair. “And then I forgot about it, and instead of reminding me, they just put me on the list. Withthatlabel. It was?—”
“Cruel.”
The zombies were multiplying quickly now, and my health was depleting fast. I couldn’t swing my gun around quickly enough. “I was going to saynot nice.”
It was no secret that Jade had a mean streak, but I wasn’t used to being inthatline of fire. She’d apologized for it, but the pain of it still lingered, a papercut that was slow to heal.
“That guy you were with that day…” Logan began slowly. “The one whose lap you were sitting on. I’m assuming you two aren’t…”
“I’d rather die,” I deadpanned. And almost on cue, my screen flashed red as my health bottomed out, and my screen tilted as my character fell to the ground. The camera angle panned up as zombies swarmed where my character had fallen, the wordDEADscrawling across the screen. “Seriously. Kyle is…” I shuddered.
