hear her steps
“AND THE QUEEN gave birth to a child who was called Asterion…”
- Jorge Luis Borges, The House of Asterion
CHAPTER three
The confrontation with Valentine Lee and Bobby Kentucky puts Morgan into a bad mood by the time she arrives at the Starlight Arcade.
The arcade is pretty crowded, but it’s a Friday afternoon in the middle of summer so it’s not entirely unexpected. There’s always something comforting about the Starlight Arcade. Something about the warm glow on the old neon lights and the worn down auburn carpet that hasn’t been changed for twenty years and is thick with dustballs. It has a chaos, but it’s a good chaos. No fights. Some yelling and screaming, but that’s from little kids who don’t know any better. There’s a general understanding among the patrons that everyone is there to have a good time and everyone makes a small effort to not upset that balance.
It bothers Morgan that Scout doesn’t seem to understand, or even see that balance, at least not anymore. But she knows there’s not much she can do about it, so she just rolls with it.
She finds Scout and Rat by the skee-ball machine. Scout has climbed up the ramp and is casually dropping the balls into the 100 point bulls-eye as tickets pour out with every insertion. Rat is lying on the floor casually, a beanie pulled over his eyes, apparently asleep.
Every once in a while a kid will approach Scout asking to play since she’s occupying the sole working skee-ball machine (the other two have been broken since last year) and Scout simply scares them off with vulgar threats. And every once in a while a worker will stop and watch Scout, debating about telling her off, but everyone, even old janitor Barley and the manager Katie, know not to mess with Scout.
Scout sees Morgan approaching and shoots her a cat-like grin.
“How’s my main girl doin’?” Scout asks, chucking another ball into the bullseye.
Scout has three things she calls her acquaintances: 1) main girl/boy, 2) my girl/boy, and 3) chief/champ. She only calls her closest friends main girl/boy. She calls people she tolerates my girl/boy. And she calls people she hates chief/champ because she finds it condescending.
“Alright,” Morgan shrugs.
“Ophelia forget you again?”
“Yeah.”
“That bitch. Not like she has anything to do anyway, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Bitch.”
“Yeah.”
“She’s a bitch, huh, Rat?”
Rat just nods.
“Hey Rat.”
Rat just waves at Morgan. Rat’s a pretty quiet guy.
“I’m trying to win the guitar,” Scout points to the instrument in the prize section. “I just need 60 more tickets.”
“You play guitar?”
“Nah. But it’s the most expensive item here.”
“That’s dumb.”
“Bitch, shut up. At least help me. Roll the balls up to me so I don’t have to keep going back and forth. Rat’s too lazy to help.”
“My arm’s tired,” Rat mumbles, but it’s too low for Scout to hear.
Morgan sits next to the ball dispenser and rolls them up the ramp to Scout, who catches them and tosses them in as more tickets pour out.
“You know what I did?”
“What?” Scout asks, slightly distracted.
“I beat up Timmy Kentucky.”
“You-what?” and that gets her attention. “No kiddin’? You get him good?”
“Yeah. Landed flat on his ass. Gave him a bloody nose. Knocked out a tooth.”
“He lost a tooth? Now he’ll look like that gap-toothed motherfucker,” Scout cackles.
“Yeah. Look,” and Morgan holds up her knuckles proudly, which are still smeared with a little blood and a lot of dirt.
“Damn,” Scout whistles. “You see that Rat?”
Rat nods even though he possibly can’t from his position on the floor and shoots Morgan a thumbs-up. Morgan appreciates the acknowledgement anyway.
“I hate those fuckers,” Scout says. “Kansas bitches and that gap-toothed motherfucker and his ditzy girl.”
“Kentucky.”
“Huh?”
“It’s Kentucky, not Kansas.”
“Whatever. I heard they fuck cows.”
Scout always hated that crowd. The football players and the cheerleaders. She would tell Morgan, “Look what happened between you and Valentine. That’s what happens when you hang around them.”
Scout took Morgan under her wing after Valentine became a bitch. She’s Morgan’s neighbor and they’ve known each other for years, but only casually. It was only after Scout had found Morgan crying behind the gas station after Valentine made fun of her acne that Scout welcomed her as a “main girl” with a half-eaten hotdog and a melted Twix bar she stole from the gas station. Up until that point Morgan had only known Scout by reputation.
She was the “bad girl”. The one who flirted with college boys to get alcohol. The one who carved “saggy hag” on Mrs. Wilson’s old yellow buggy after she flunked out of Algebra. The one who got spit on people from the second floor of the Westside Mall. But those were all allegations. Because Morgan doesn’t know how else to describe Scout as anything other than “effortlessly cool”.
Scout got a tattoo of a mermaid from her cousin in a basement at Peggy Wilson’s sixteenth birthday party a year ago. She dyes her hair a different color every two months (right now it’s a deep pink that makes Morgan think of a guava). She gave her own ears second and third piercings four months ago with her mom’s old sewing needles. She hitchhiked to the Pacific Ocean by herself two summers ago before she could drive because she had become deeply enamoured with the film “Beyond the Golden Fields” where a kid and his dog walk to the ocean after a fire burns down the family farm. She still talks about that experience religiously.
“Fuck yeah,” Scout says as she hits her 1000th ticket. “Get your ass up Rat, help me with these tickets.”
It takes all three of them to get the tickets to the counter. The worker is unimpressed as he feeds the tickets through the counter and hands the guitar over. It probably would have been cheaper if Scout just bought her own guitar.
“Sweet.” Scout holds her prize proudly. It’s not even a guitar. It’s a pink ukulele decorated with a hibiscus flower pattern. But Scout doesn’t seem to care.
“Either of you know how to play this shit?” she asks. She’s holding it upside down.
Both Morgan and Scout Rat shake their heads.
“What about you?” Scout asks the guy at the counter.
“Huh? Oh, um, yeah. I can play a ukulele, if you want I can show you some-”
“Cool,” and Scout turns to Morgan and Rat. “So where do my main girl and boy wanna chill now?”
Rat shrugs. Morgan shrugs as well. The storm is getting closer and a light rain begins outside and she should probably be heading home. And Morgan learned a long time ago that there’s no point in giving Scout suggestions because Scout always did what she wanted to do and you either followed along or got left behind. And Morgan doesn’t want to be left behind.
“Let’s go to the Big Dipper. We can see if Rat can break his record of five burgers in one sitting. Sound good?”
“Yeah.”
“Sweet. Think you can do it Rat?”
Rat shakes his head.
“Sweet. Let’s roll.”
As they leave the Starlight Arcade and pile into Scout’s old janky car, Morgan feels like something is watching her. But when she turns around no one is there.