When I caught up with Irving, he was already peering at a computer board, asking questions to a woman who looked a bit like my mom Aliya, only with way longer hair.
“But you’re sure that the cartridges came with the board?” Irving asked, gesturing to some ancient technology in a box. “They seemed to belong together?”
“Far as I can tell,” she said, crossing her arms. “But I don’t know the first thing about those games. That was Harry’s hobby, and he gave it up at least a decade ago anyway. When I came to it, this was all in a dusty box no one had thought about in years.”
Irving smiled, apparently satisfied with the answer. “Great, I’ll take it all then.”
“Fantastic!”
I helped Irving gather the pieces together and pay the nice women, carrying the box to the car with him and buying myself a little necklace with a shooting star at the bottom along the way. He popped the trunk, and we set both of the boxes inside.
“You think it’s what you want?”
“Maybe. It’s definitely a CP System. I just don’t know what titles the ROMs are.”
“And I just don’t know what any of that means,” I joked.
He half-smiled again, his cheek going crooked in a way that was ridiculously cute. “I used to really love this old arcade game in my hometown, Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, so I’ve been tracking down the parts to build myself a version of it to play at home.”
“Oh.” I thought about it for a second. “That’s cool.”
He shrugged, leaning back against the car. “Not many friends. It makes you pretty attached to games.”
“Hey,” I said, “things must be turning around a little bit. You got Brick, at least.”
Irving snorted, waving his hand in the air and heading back toward the driver seat. “Trust me, Brick is not a part of my life. I just went to the bar last night and met him for a second and had to go back to get the wallet I lost.”
I hopped into the seat beside him, and when he started the car back up, another cheesy 80s song came on. “You all talked, though?”
He grimaced as he backed the car up, pointing it back toward the main road. “He flirted with me, I think, and then he acted like an asshole. That’s really the whole story. He’s an asshole, and nothing happened. Why do you keep asking? Is he causing you all problems at the store or something?”
I sighed, slumping back into the seat. From the look on Irving’s face, I had no doubt Brick had treated him poorly. “No, it’s not that at all. I thought he was going to help me with something, but now I’m not so sure anymore.”
Irving nodded, then turned the music up a little bit. A Boy George fan, apparently. “Sorry,” he said. “I think he might be a jerk.”
“Yeah,” I said, staring out the window. “I guess so.”
