*
“The purpose of the whole thing is to defeat the evil goblin—he’s this huge giant who rules the kingdom and has a million minions. So in every level you have to defeat some of his minions, and they come in all forms—sometimes they’re warlocks, sometimes they’re beautiful sirens. The siren levels are brilliant. There’s something about beautiful girls being totally evil that I really dig for some reason.”
“Strong female characters?” I said.
“Exactly. I care very much about the feminist cause. I consider myself a feminist, actually.”
“I think that’s amazing.”
Rupert K. and I sat by the edge of the pool on chaise lounges, and he was telling me about his favorite thing in the world—Goblin Gerald’s Kingdom, a computer game. Of course, I already knew this was his favorite thing in the world, and I’d even tried to play the game myself a couple of times before giving up completely after I realized I really did not care about dragons and swords and witches. But I let him keep talking about it because the important thing you have to realize here is that he was sharing something with me. He was sharing his favorite thing. If you switched a few things up and squinted a little, this could even look like a date. And also, how cute was he, talking about what a feminist he was?
I hoped he couldn’t tell that I was totally swooning. Was it a visible thing when girls swooned? Did we suddenly look faint? Were we all red and puffy-faced, our eyelids aflutter? All I know is if it was possible to look swoony, I did.
“By the way, are you aware that your shirt has a huge stain on it?”
I looked down at my white sweater, marred with a full bib of Coke. I was completely mortified. “Crisis,” I said under my breath. “This is embarrassing.”
“It’s no biggie.”
Rupert K. stood to walk up to the edge of the pool, and in the meantime I wondered if it would be too forward of me to take off my sweater right in front of him. I concluded that it would be.
I took off my sweater.
It was only when I looked down at my tank top that I remembered I was wearing my special Rupert K. shirt. His stenciled and faded face was smiling back at me, and I scrambled to put my sweater back on before the actual, three-dimensional Rupert K. turned around.
“You alright?” Rupert K. said.
I popped my head through the neck hole. “I’m great!”
“So now you know what I like to do when I have a moment to myself,” he said. “What about you?”
“Me?” I go to school, I come home, I check Twitter and Tumblr and Isabel’s site for updates on your every move, I write fanfic about you that you’d consider very embarrassing. Who am I kidding—that anybody would consider embarrassing. I watch hours of YouTube videos of you. I make gifs of you goofing around and smiling. I eat dinner. Repeat steps three to five and then I sleep. I wake up and the cycle begins again. “I don’t have too many hobbies.”
“Come on, there must be something Sloane Peterson enjoys.”
Well, in the movie Sloane Peterson liked … “Fast red cars. Ditching class. Museums. Nice restaurants. Random dance parties in the middle of heavily populated city squares.”
Rupert K.’s eyebrows dipped, his eyes narrowed. “Well, that’s rather specific.”
And then I decided to tell him something real about me. The real me. “I also like to write.”
“Really? That’s amazing. What do you write?”
“Fiction.” Fanfiction was still fiction.
“Wow. I couldn’t write a word, not even with a gun to my head.”
“It’s not that hard.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You think up whole characters … whole worlds.”
“I tell lies.”
His lips twitched into a smirk, and I commenced with the swooning. “That’s a funny way to think of it.”
I gave in. If he wasn’t selling me short, then neither should I. “Okay, yeah, I like to write. I like stories. I’m good at telling them.”
“That’s the attitude. I’d love to read one of your stories one day.”
This was the part of the conversation where I totally LMAO in my head because Rupert K.? Reading one of my fics about him?
HAHAHAHAHAHA no.
But it got me to thinking about my most popular fic—the one about the “I do” tattoo on his forearm. The only tattoo he had. My entire fic was an imagining of what that tattoo meant to him—what those words meant to him. “I do” meant he was a take-action sort of guy. It meant he was a romantic, maybe. It meant he was waiting for the day when he could say those words to the love of his life and he etched them onto his skin so that he’d be reminded every day that every action he took was in preparation for meeting that special someone.
“Can I ask you something?” I said. “What does your tattoo mean?”