“It’s fine, Ivy,” I say. “We’re all bad at this.”
“I’m not bad at it,” Ethan says. “I’m quite good.”
It’s funny how sometimes you can tell that someone’s autistic from a short sentence that’s not even technically wrong in any way.
I get up. “My turn.”
They sit down while I cradle my ball and survey the lane. Then I send both my balls wobbling into the gutter. I don’t knock down a single pin.
I turn around with an indifferent shrug and a cheerful “oh, well!”
Ivy’s mouth is wide open. “Chloe! You’re so bad at this! I thought you knew how to do it.”
“I thought so too. Guess I forgot how hard it is.”
“It’s okay,” Ethan says. “Don’t worry about it, Chloe. You’re still tied with us.”
“Yeah.” Ivy sits up, her face brightening. “We’re tied.”
I slip back into the chair next to David.
“Bad luck,” he says gravely.
“The worst,” I agree.
Ethan’s up next. He really is a decent bowler—?better than me, anyway, even when I’m not deliberately aiming for the gutter. He just misses the spare and has to settle for eight pins down.
Then it’s David’s turn. He easily knocks down seven pins with his first ball but sends his second sailing into the empty space between the remaining pins.
When he returns to his chair, I whisper, “Takes a lot of skill to knock down exactly the number of pins you want to.”
“Yeah,” he whispers back. “Would have been easier to get a spare.” He records his score.
Ethan gets up when Ivy does and watches from a foot away as she bowls.
Her first ball is a flop, and you can tell she’s bummed, but her second one creaks slowly down the alley and actually manages to nip off two pins before disappearing. She gasps, and Ethan pats her shoulder, saying, “That’s so good!”
I hit four pins with my first ball and aim for the gutter with my second.
And so it goes.
David and I work hard to stay within a point or two of our siblings’ scores, which turns out to be just as challenging as trying to get a strike every time—?and maybe more fun? The team scores stay close, and Ivy loses her worried look. She even starts to jump up eagerly when it’s her turn.
Ethan cheers for her every time, raising his arms and pumping his fists into the air when she knocks down a pin. She happily high-fives him after each of their turns.
David and I don’t bother with the high-fives, but we do shoot amused glances at each other following the success or failure of our attempts to keep the score as even as possible. At one point, he gets a strike, and the others congratulate him, but he whispers to me when he sits down that he’s pissed at his bad aim: he was trying to knock down nine pins, not ten.
“I suck,” he says with disgust. “No control.”
Because of that strike, he and I end up winning, but only by a couple of points, and Ethan and Ivy take it well.
“We’ll beat them next time,” Ethan says to her.
“We might not,” she says.
Thirteen
“IT’S ACTUALLY GOOD we won,” David says to me a couple of minutes later. He and I are making a pilgrimage to the vending machines at the far end of the bowling alley to score some sodas and snacks before the next game. “Don’t want them to think we’re not trying.”
“It’s sort of like we invented a whole new game,” I say. “Trying to get just the right number of points without getting too many.”
“We’re like Harold Swerg.”
“Who?”
“You don’t know Harold Swerg?”
“Is he in our grade?”
He laughs. I’ve never seen David Fields laugh before. Amazingly, the earth doesn’t stop turning.
“Not a kid,” he says. “A character in a Jules Feiffer cartoon. You know Feiffer’s stuff?”
“I think so?”
“He did the illustrations for The Phantom Tollbooth. You ever read that?”
“Oh, right! Okay, I know exactly who he is.”
We reach the vending machines and stand side by side, studying the choices, while he explains. “So he made this cartoon about a guy named Harold Swerg, who’s, like, the greatest athlete in the world at every single sport. And he gets sent to the Olympics, and the Americans are really excited because he’s going to win for them. Only he doesn’t win. He ties at everything—?even the long jump. Everyone’s mad at him for not winning, but he says he wasn’t trying to win, that he was trying to tie, and that tying is much harder than winning.”
“I like that.”
“Yeah, you should see it with the drawings. They’re pretty great. I read it in this collection in my grandmother’s house. When she moved to a nursing home, I asked my dad if I could have it, but he said he was hiring someone to box and sell all her books and it was too big a pain to start picking stuff out.”
“Doesn’t seem that hard to grab one book.”
“I know. I could just buy my own copy, but it pisses me off that I have to.”
“Do you have any other grandparents?”
“Well, I had the usual four, but my father’s father is dead, and his mother doesn’t recognize anyone anymore—?Alzheimer’s.”
“What about your mother’s?”
“They’re alive. They send us birthday cards and stuff and see us once in a while, but it’s weird. My mother has this whole other family now, and I think they feel much closer to those kids.”
“Why did your mother leave? Do you mind my asking?”