Page 34 of All the way home

“Anyway, I propose a game.”

Oh no.

Zach’s palms prickle with sweat. “What sort of game?”

Glancing at his watch—it’s a fancy smart one, Zach notes, like in the ads, but not obnoxiously flashy—Kieran nods. “Well, since we’ll be here a while longer, we may as well get to know one another.”

It’s like a pleasant little bubble pops, and the reality of his situation comes crashing back in. He’s been so distracted trying to figure Kieran out that he’d almost forgotten the catastrophe with his bag, and his phone, and Seth. Breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth, Zach forces himself to calm down.

“We don’t have to, if you’d rather not,” Kieran adds, a bit hastily, and Zach realizes he hasn’t responded at all.

“No,” Zach blurts out. “No, sorry, I was just thinking.”

“Again, it’s just a suggestion.” Kieran raises both hands in surrender.

With a deep breath, Zach pivots. There’s nothing more he can do about any of his various crises, and if he’s on the move, he has a better chance of finding his bag, anyway. Besides, anything is better than sitting back at the gate trying not to dwell on Delta Air Lines Flight 1086. “I want to. What were you going to say?”

“Info trade,” Kieran tells him with a curious glance over. “I’ll ask you a question, and then you can ask me one. And if you don’t like the question, you can pass on it, because it’s a game, not an interrogation.”

“And here I thought you were trying to get me to tell you the name of my childhood pet and my first-grade teacher.”

For a second, Kieran just stares at him. Then he laughs, the sound bright and echoing. “You’re funny.”

Cheeks flaring with heat, Zach flexes his fingers. “Uh, thanks.”

He’s never really thought so.

You are funny, though, Mara tells him whenever he invariably sinks into a deep pit of self-loathing and needs to be drawn out with much sympathy and coddling. No, seriously. You’re the funniest person I know. You just keep most of it locked up.

Then, every time, she knocks on the top of his skull, which starts a tussle that doesn’t end until one of them is on the ground.

Usually Zach.

“Do you want to contest the rules?” Kieran asks.

“Uh, no?”

“Excellent.” Without missing a beat, waltzing through each passing second like he’s afraid of wasting them, Kieran starts. “You get one person to text before you die. Who is it?”

Really, Zach should have known better than to expect basic questions, considering present company. “Does it have to be someone whose number I already have?”

“That”—Kieran sidesteps a kid in light-up shoes running full-tilt down the concourse and almost knocks into Zach—“is a phenomenal question. I’ll say both. One answer for each.”

After a moment, Zach hums. “For prepossessed numbers, a group text, to my family and my best friend, Mara.”

“That’s cheating,” Kieran informs him with a comically mournful air. “Can’t be a group text.”

“My mom, then. She might be the only one who’d remember to tell everyone I died.”

Kieran laughs.

Absurdly pleased, Zach smiles and shoves his hands in his pockets, ducking his head.

“What about for an unknown number?”

The only answer he can come up with in the moment requires a lot more bravery than Zach currently has, so he lifts a shoulder. “I don’t know. I’ll have to get back to you on that one.”

And then it’s his turn. At once, Zach is struck by how terminally uninteresting he is. It doesn’t help that there’s something about the plaintive expectation in Kieran’s expression that makes Zach feel like he’s supposed to be intriguing.