I tap on a sheet of paper taped to the side of the machine. “See those eighteen tally marks? Mine.”
“That’s a lot of plushies.”
“You heard Suze. I’ve never lost once,” I say. “Now you try.”
“I never win those things,” she says with a shake of her head.
“That’s the point. If you win, something’s up.”
“Me playing will convince you either way?”
I nod. “But you need to actually try to win.”
She considers it for a few seconds before adding quarters into the machine. It beeps back to life. Hazel pushes the handle forward until the claw is centered over the soft pretzel. She presses down on the button. The claw descends, gripping the pretzel through the loop. It stays put, even when the jerking motion happens.
Hazel’s clearly shocked by her win as she claims her reward. “But—but I’m the person who somehow gets quarters stuck inside pinball machines. And not the money slot part. The actual game.”
“Must be beginner’s luck,” I say, writing her name on the paper and adding a tally mark next to it. “Or… flipped fortunes.”
Hazel still looks skeptical. She tries again, this time winning a stuffed rat. After racking up five tally marks in a row, she seems slightly more convinced… or confused.
“Come with me,” I say, heading back to the table just as Suze brings our food. She drops off fries as an apology for the milkshake machine being out of commission. “First, it was the milkshake, which is the best in the city, by the way.”
Hazel sets her mound of plushies on the chair next to her. “I guess I can’t corroborate your statement without that machine.”
“Watch. Normally, this pizza is perfectly crisp on the outside with a soft and doughy crust.” I lift the slices. The bottoms are burned while the middle is still raw.
Hazel gestures with the soft pretzel toward her plate. “Check my slices! It’s probably not just yours.”
Both sides of her pizza are golden and crisp, the middle perfectly baked. She pulls her slices apart, the cheese stretching from one half to the other, the way it does in commercials.
“And these fries?” I add. “Crisp. I don’t know when they switched to waffle fries, but the crinkle fries were”—I shudder—“not good.”
Hazel crunches into one. “These are tasty.” She thinks for a moment. “I’m not saying you’re right, but a pipe had burst in my apartment building.”
“I remember.”
“It was fixed the next day. Repairs with that kind of speed are unheard of.”
“But?”
“But for all the good things that happened, there have been worse things,” Hazel says as she seems to debate something. “My brother broke his legs.”
I set the fry down. “Did you say legs, plural? Is he okay?”
“He’s recovering. But it’s why I need the money. There will be a lot more bills coming on top of… everything else.”
“I’m sorry. That’s stressful.” The words “break” and “legs” bring forward something else to mind. “Oh my god. I told an actor before one of his performance rehearsals to break a leg earlier this week,” I recall. “Do you think that somehow transferred to your brother?”
She scrunches her forehead. “What’s with that saying? I never understood it.”
“It’s theater superstition,” I say. “There are actually quite a few theories on how it originated—Never mind. It’s a thing people say when you want to wish them good luck.”
She sips her juice. “It’s just odd to me. Why don’t we say things like, hope you get laid off today, so people can, you know, keep their jobs?”
“You want that to catch on? We can try to make it a thing,” I offer.
Hazel smirks.
