I’d been so lucky. My dad never liked the pageant stuff, but he came anyway. I felt his love for me in a way I’ve never felt from anyone before or since. After the spectacle of a pageant night, I always drove home with him whenever possible. The two of us could be quiet together, comfortable sharing the same space. It allowed me to decompress, and he understood that need.
“You there?” Doug asked.
“Yep.”
There was a long pause, and I stared up at my ceiling where there were dozens of glow-in-the-dark plastic stars. My sisters’ rooms had become proper guest bedrooms when they moved away and married, but mine was still like a shrine to my childhood, despite telling my mother she could throw all this away.
“So, um, you want names?”
“What?” Had I missed something? I tried to rewind the thread of our conversation.
“The nerds at my house. The people, I mean. Let’s stop calling them nerds.”
“Do I want names? No. Give me descriptions and how you know them.”
Doug groaned. “Why? Are you going to take notes, Officer Stanton?”
“I might.” What I really wanted was a picture strong enough to push every other thought off the stage of my mind.
“Okay, so Nelson’s cousin is here. He’s adopted, so he looks nothing like him. Huge dude with red hair buzzed so short you can see the freckles on his scalp. He’s the serious gamer. We never thought sitting at home playing video games would pay off for him, but he makes pretty good money testing and designing them. Also, he has a big following on YouTube of people who watch him play.”
“Go on.” I closed my eyes and kicked off my shoes.
“Cody is a friend I met at an audition years ago. Our moms bonded too, and they made a scary force to be reckoned with. He was on a PBS kids show for a couple years, and now he teaches drama at a high school, which his mom hates. His wife is the high school chemistry teacher, and she hates her mother-in-law with a fiery passion. She’s here tonight too.”
“Who’s there, the mother-in-law?”
“No, Cody’s wife, the chemistry teacher.”
I smiled. Doug was very good at creating pictures in my mind. “Are there more?”
“You want me to go on?”
“Yes, Doug. Keep talking.”
Doug
Willa kept me talking for the next half-hour, until she fell asleep. Yes. Fully asleep. Her soft snores were adorable. She must’ve had the phone still up to her face. I called her name several times, but when she didn’t answer, I hung up.
Seriously. The woman had used me as a sleeping pill. That was a new low in my love life. Which was saying something, because I’d hit some lows in my time.
Nelson came outside while I was still staring at my phone as if it might explain to me what had just happened.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“Oh, just work stuff.” If Nelson knew I was talking to Willa, he’d pester me about it forever. “Did you guys pass the level you were trying to reach? Where you had to kill the dragon warlord guy?”
Nelson stared me down. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, do you?”
“Not a clue.”
“Doug, you don’t have to hide out here. We’ll turn everything off and play Settlers of Catan. Cody brought the Seafarer’s expansion pack.”
“You don’t have to do that for me.”
Nelson ignored my half-hearted protest. We both knew I’d take an all-night board game session over video games any day. Or a good dystopian series where ninety-percent of the population had been decimated by disease or zombies. Too bad reading wasn’t a group activity.
We walked back in, and Nelson flipped the lights on and off. “It’s time for Settlers of Catan, people.”
I tried to picture Willa here on a night like this, but it was too foreign. I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be taking the fake dating to this level. It would all be for the cameras. She’d have her life, and I’d have mine.
