“I don’t know if—”
She clucks her tongue.
“Are you actually making chicken sounds?”
She keeps clucking and tucks her fists into her armpits, flapping her elbows with all her might.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this.”
“If you ain’t bakin’, you’re quakin’.” She drops her voice. “In fear. Quaking in fear.”
“I got it.” I focus, trying to reconstruct the contents of the fridge and the pantry in my mind. Do we have what I need?
“Okay,” I tell her. “Quit flapping your wings and let’s go.”
I get a text from Mom as we get to the house, reminding me that she’ll be home late tonight. Mom likes to think I don’t know that her occasional “nights out” are late visits to her therapist. I don’t disabuse her of the notion.
Even though my house is no smaller than Aneesa’s, a part of me still feels shame at inviting her in. My home is not shabby or dirty or poorly decorated, but there is a haze of sadness and loss that permeates its atmosphere, almost tangible, just visible enough to dim the lighting. It hangs in the silent halls and hovers over the living spaces like emotional smog.
Aneesa doesn’t see it, can’t see it. She is numb and blind to it. She simply glances around the split-level foyer and says, “Nice.”
In the kitchen, I wrestle the heavy stand mixer into position. There’s no time to thaw out a dough ball from the freezer, and microwaving it never works, so I have to make the crust from scratch. Fortunately, we always have those ingredients in stock.
I prep the yeast in warm water, then tilt it into the bowl of the stand mixer. I add whole wheat flour and some herbs for a chewy, fragrant crust. The dough hook rotates, whipping along until the dough peels away from the bowl and clings to the hook.
“Now what?” Aneesa asks. She’s been watching silently the whole time, sitting at the kitchen table.
“Now we have to let it rise. We have about an hour.”
“So, do we just sit around and wait?”
“Nah. Let me show you my room.”
As soon as I say it, I feel like a creep. But Aneesa just nods and says, “Okay.”
When she crosses into my bedroom, she inhales audibly. “It’s The Land that Time Forgot.…”
“Ha-ha.” I gesture her to my desk chair and she sits, then blinks at my MacBook.
“Oh. So, there is something from the past thirty years in here.”
My room is a museum to the old, to the things I love. Movie posters for Krull and Raiders of the Lost Ark. An old CRT television hooked up to a vintage Intellivision console. A gigantic, top-loading VCR from antediluvian days. Ancient copies of TV Guide and Rolling Stone from the seventies and eighties framed on the walls. Fruits of all my garage-sale labors on display.
“You live in the past,” she says in something like awe. “You figured out time travel, didn’t you?”
“I just like old things.”
“No kidding.”
I’m not sure what I was thinking when I suggested showing her my room. The accoutrements of and from the past are comforting to me, but to Aneesa, they must be as relevant and as interesting as a typewriter.
“I thought I’d be walking into a sweaty dungeon of Maxim posters and video games,” she says.
Video games!
I switch on the Intellivision and the TV. “Ever seen one of these?”
She swivels in the chair and looks at the control pad I hold out to her. “What planet are you from?”
“C’mon. Give it a shot.”
Soon, she’s giggling at the pixelated islands of Utopia. It’s the progenitor of the god game genre, in which each player controls the resources of one of two island nations. It’s really designed for two people, but no one I know will play against me, so I usually end up playing as one island or the other, reaching for higher and higher scores.
“You run this island,” I tell her. “And you can plant crops and build cities and there are random storms that come through—”
“Like Civilization or FarmVille,” she says. “But easier.”
“Not easier. Just less complicated.”
She regards me doubtfully. “Aren’t they the same?”
“Play me and find out.”
I nearly forget about the rising dough in the kitchen as we get started. After a quick session to demonstrate the basics and let Aneesa get a feel for the admittedly quirky Intellivision control pad, we launch into an actual game. At first, I have the upper hand, but playing against a real person is different from playing for my personal best and the posterity of a high score. Aneesa’s an amateur at the game, but when it comes to building forts and establishing rebels on the opposing island, we’re equally matched. And I’ve never used the PT boats, so they’re not part of my plan… until Aneesa uses one to sink my fishing boat. All my usual patterns and routines crumble, and I love it.
“No, no, no!” Aneesa shrieks. A hurricane—a blocky pixelated grind of flailing white arms—descends from the upper left corner of the screen, headed straight toward her island. The last hurricane nicked my island and wiped out a factory, reducing my gold accumulation and making a new school harder to build. Now Mother Nature is bearing down on her.
I chortle in a very unsportsmanlike way and sit back to enjoy the devastation, but the hurricane pauses briefly over one of her acres of crops… and then moves off the island, vanishing off the bottom of the screen. Her crop yield doubles for the turn.
“What just happened?” she asks.
“That happens sometimes,” I mutter.
She grins at me. “This is what happens when you live a virtuous life,” she intones with mock solemnity.
“Bite me,” I surprise myself by saying.
She clacks her teeth together loudly, and my phone alarm goes off, reminding me about the dough.
“Time to make pizza,” I tell her, hopping up.
I shut off the game and head for the hallway. “Sore loser!” she shouts, following me.
“I’m nowhere near losing,” I tell her, whipping the towel off the bowl of pizza dough. “You’re just keeping my score down into the mere-mortal range.”
The dough has risen nicely. I wash my hands as Aneesa fumes, arms crossed over her chest, then I pluck the dough from the bowl and begin kneading it.
“I can’t believe you quit while I was ahead,” she says.
“In your dreams.”
“Next time we play, I will unequivocally kick your butt. Your island will disappear like Atlantis.”
“You’re welcome to try.” I roll out the dough, giddy at the prospect of a next time. Then a thought occurs to me.
“Turn around,” I tell her.
She squints at me with distrust. “Why? What are you up to?”
“I want to surprise you with this pizza. I don’t want you to see the ingredients.”
Her smile is sudden and open and delighted. Without another word, she turns away, and I hustle to open a can, snag spices from the cabinet, shred cheese. Soon, the pizza goes into the oven.