“Uh, are we going grocery shopping, mailing a package, or getting our nails done?” he asks, scanning the storefronts.
“No to all of those. Look to the left of the postal place.”
“Little John’s?”
“Best pizza in Bainbridge, hands down. Come on,” I say, leading him inside. The overhead lights are dim, and on the far wall, there’s a mural of a man tossing pizzas in the air while ladies in white dresses stomp on grapes next to him. The tables all have that red-checked plastic tablecloth that’s standard in pizza joints.
“You want to grab a table? I’ll order,” I say. “Did you want cauliflower crust? Mel said it’s pretty good.”
“Yeah, actually, that’s perfect. And no meat, but as many veggies as they can fit on it.”
“Got it,” I say, heading toward the front. It takes a minute to place our order, then I step to the next counter to get two plastic cups filled to the brim with coins. I walk back to our table and I’m glad to see Booker looks a little better than he did half an hour ago at the coffee shop. But that’s probably got more to do with the prospect of food than anything else.
“This place is cool, but I’ve been here three years and never heard of it. How’d you find it?”
“My roommate freshman year worked here on the weekends. The pizza’s really good,” I tell him. “But the best part is the arcade.” I place the plastic cups on the table and push one toward him. “You won’t find NHL Ice here or anything, but when I was here last summer, they still had a Pac-Man machine.”
“Seriously? It’s like a time warp, but in a good way.”
“I know, right?” I say, picking up one of the coins. “And all the machines still use these tokens, though I’m sure they’ll go digital at some point.”
Our pizzas arrive, and we dig in. We’re both obviously hungry, which is fine. I have a feeling Booker has a lot on his mind, but he’s not ready to share it. That’s fine by me. I’m content to just hang out.
My pizza’s laden with extra cheese, pepperoni, and mushrooms, but I can only eat two slices. Meanwhile, Booker’s hoovered four of his own slices.
“I don’t get it. Where do you put it?” I ask.
He smiles. “That’s the secret. You don’t put it anywhere. You burn it off. But I’m lucky. With my workout schedule, I burn almost more than I can consume. That’s one of the reasons I try to eat as healthy as possible. After next year, when I’m done with hockey and am pushing papers in an office, I won’t have as much time to put in at the gym, you know?”
Shit. My attempt at innocuous small talk has steered us right back into tricky territory. So, to lighten the mood, I aim for a joke and pat my flat, but totally undefined belly. “In fact, I don’t know the first thing about putting time in at the gym.”
He looks at me and blushes. Shit. There are conversational landmines everywhere. “You look great. I just mean…the gym’s not for everyone, you know?”
“Definitely not for me. All those muscle heads? No, thank you. I played tennis in high school, and that was fun, but not so easy to do on my own. I picked up running in undergrad, but I’ve been so busy since grad school started that I haven’t had time to get back to it.”
A server comes to clear our plates and drop off boxes. I gratefully take mine, and Booker slides his last two slices into his.
“You up for some games?”
“Yeah,” he agrees, smiling. This is the most relaxed I’ve seen him in, well, probably ever.
The arcade is noisier than the dining room and a bunch of younger kids are darting around, so we sidestep them and head to the back. Booker zeroes in on the basketball hoops and plugs a few tokens in one. With ease, he makes all five baskets, and the machine spits him a long strand of tickets.
“Is there a sport you don’t play?”
“Football,” he answers immediately, then shakes his head. “My dad played pro, and when I was really little, he had this idea that I’d be just like him. There must be a thousand pictures of me in an oversized jersey holding a football that’s almost as big as I am. This was before he saw professional sports as a pathway to damnation, of course.” He smiles wryly, and I curse myself for letting the conversation veer in this direction.
“Anyway, my mom needed somewhere for me to burn off energy, and there was a kids’ hockey league starting. Whit signed up too. It was just supposed to be a way to kill a couple hours and give my mom a break. But it turned into one of the few things that made me truly happy. Maybe that’s the issue? Maybe if I’d have been half as good at his sport as I am at mine, things wouldn’t have gone so sideways.” He plugs in a few more tokens, shoots another ball, and misses. “See? That first round was just beginner’s luck.”
“Ok,” I agree easily. “Let’s see if beginner’s luck extends to men who are 5’8” with no real athletic ability.” I shoot my shot and miss. Finally, on the fourth try, the ball circles the rim and goes in.
“Yes!” Booker cheers.
My luck is short-lived, so I take my cup over to much more familiar and victorious territory: the Skee-Ball lanes.
“Oh, man. I haven’t played Skee-Ball since I was, like, twelve? Thirteen? There was this arcade at the beach, but it shut down. It’s one of those escape rooms now,” Booker tells me, loading tokens into the slot. “I never got that whole idea. Like, who wants to pay someone to trap you in a room? That’s pure craziness.”
“I’m right there with you. I’d never do it unless I could be by myself. But trusting four other people to all agree on a way out? Nope. No way. I’m not putting that much trust in anyone.”
