Under the Dusty Moon (6 page)

They put the cast on — plain white, despite Mom's insistence that I choose something more interesting — and told me not to get it wet.

“It's just like in
Gremlins
,” Mom said excitedly on our cab ride home, trying to keep things upbeat despite our unresolved argument.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said. I didn't want to offer her anything that could be construed as curiosity.

“Oh, come on,” she said, reaching to slap my arm before remembering that it was now wrapped up in a plain vanilla cast. “You know. That movie? They were these, like, cute, fuzzy little
critter-guys
, but if you got them wet or fed them after midnight or — I forget, there was some third rule — they'd turn into gremlins. And they terrorized the city!”

“I still have no idea what you're talking about,” I said.

“I think you might need a few more T3s to get yourself prepared,” she said, jabbing the little pharmacy bag of painkillers that lay between us on the car's back seat.

“The drugs for my broken freaking arm are not to be used to help you conjure some dumb movie that doesn't even exist,” I said, trying to sound as snooty and offended as I could, which was tough because I was so completely zonked and also I was still pretty stoned.

“The dope fairy has a lot of rules, huh?”

“What does that even mean?” I said. “Are we going to finish what we started talking about back in the hospital, like, ever?”

“We will, sweets,” she said, “of course. But I think you've had enough for the night. Let's just watch a movie and sort this stuff out later.” She'd totally read my mind, but I wasn't willing to give up the fight just yet.

“You do know that this isn't how normal parents act, right?” I said.

“No one in the history of the world has ever accused me of being a normal parent.”

“Obviously.” I exhaled audibly and tried my best to let it go, just for the night. “And anyway, you're totally making this movie up.
Gremlins
is not a thing. And it's definitely not on Netflix.”

“That's it? You're finished with your attack on my
child-rearing
capabilities?”

“Rearing?” I asked. “Since when have you reared anything?” But I stopped myself from going any further. Plus the word
rear
was sounding really weird in my mouth. “Look, I'm exhausted, okay?” And I was. There were so many more things I wanted to say to her, even yell at her. But right then all I wanted to do was crawl into her bed and watch a movie on the laptop we share custody of. “I'll make it up to you tomorrow.”

“I'll bet.” She put her hand over mine on the back seat of the cab and held it there for almost a whole minute without speaking.

“But I can't believe I never showed you
Gremlins
! It's the best. The best. It was basically my
all-time
favourite movie growing up.”

“So it was a stone age blockbuster? I hear their DVD players sucked.”

“The ice age, actually. Their
Blu-rays
were surprisingly advanced.”

“Oh yeah, chiselled out of snow and permafrost, right?”

“Exactly. And
Gremlins
was the best of the icy best. Hmm, you're sure it's not on Netflix?” She raised her voice then, and called to the driver, “Excuse me, slight change of plans. Can you drop us off at
7-24
Video, please?” The
worst-named
place in town, which was also our regular. “It's right at Fuller, just up here.”

Yes, my mom and I are probably the last people in the world who still rent movies. Blame it on Mom's downloadophobia. Like that's the most surprising thing about us?

I crawled out of the backseat, hauling my smashed arm behind me, while Mom paid the driver.

I wanted so badly to believe that we could just have a normal movie night and pretend that nothing had happened, and that we had nothing more to talk about and could just go back to being ourselves. But I could tell that things were bubbling up just below the surface. I wanted my
perfectly-normal
-
to-us
life. For nothing to change, even though I sometimes hated Mom for being the weirdo she was. But it was already happening, I could tell.

M
om
and I stayed up until almost two in the morning watching
Gremlins
, which, as it turned out was a thing. It was pretty good. The parts of it that I saw, anyway. I passed out, drooling on Mom's shoulder for the last hour of the movie, jolting awake just as the credits started to roll.

We were slow getting out of bed the next morning.

“You mind making breakfast?” Mom called as she finished doing her makeup in the bathroom.

“You do remember that I broke my arm, right?”

“Aw, come on,” she said. “You can still fry up a couple of eggs, can't you? Please? I'm so late.”

“What,” I asked, getting the carton of eggs out of the fridge, “did you finally get sick of the muffins at work?”

“Are you kidding?” Mom said. “Francisco's muffins are the best in the state!” Francisco is Sal's boyfriend, practically his husband, and does all the baking for Northeast Southwest.

“Canada, Mom,” I said as I took the skillet out of the cupboard. “We live in Canada.”

“I know,” she said. “But best in the province doesn't have nearly the same ring to it.”

She had a point. “Okay,” I called, “so why no muffins, then?”

“I've just been starving lately, I go through four or five muffins during a shift and Sal's not such a fan of me scarfing down his profits.”

“At least someone has business sense,” I said, clumsily cracking an egg with my left hand. Half a dozen fragments of shell landed in the skillet along with it. These eggs would definitely be Mom's. “Besides, how can you be so hungry with this heat?”

“Dunno,” she said, coming out of the bathroom, with her hair still
half-wet
and hanging around her shoulders, but with flawless eyeliner — somehow on her that combination looked good. “Maybe I'm pregnant again.”

“Not funny,” I said, trying my best to flip her sloppy eggs. “You've got to finish with one daughter before you start on number two.”

“But don't you see?” she said, coming up behind me to give me a weird
half-hug
. “I could fix all the
screw-ups
I made with you. I could have a perfect kid!”

She was joking. I knew she was joking. But the fact that we still hadn't resolved our conversation from the night before and she was feeding me lines like this, ones she knew would irk me, got me pissed. While Mom crossed the apartment to change, I turned up the heat on the stove and watched her eggs slowly sizzle and burn.

“Geez, Vic,” she said a couple of minutes later when she'd finally finished getting ready. “It stinks in here.”

I scooped her scorched eggs out of the skillet and onto one of the plates I'd set out. Putting down the serving spoon, I handed them to her. I was amazed at how long it took to do anything with only one good arm. “Breakfast.”

“Huh,” she said, surveying the slop. “Guess I better work on my material, eh?”

“It's better than you deserve,” I said, half under my breath.

“Ouch. Hey, be nice. Remember who your human slobber rag was last night.”

“You're the worst,” I said, turning the heat back down on the stove so I could cook my own breakfast.

“Hey, Vic, look at me.” She put down her plate and, taking me by the shoulders, made me turn to face her.

“Ow, god, Mom, my arm, remember?” I struggled out of her grip and massaged my right shoulder like I was in serious pain, even though it didn't actually hurt. If Mom was going to be as annoying with all of this stuff as she was, I was going to play up the arm as much as I could.

“Oh right, yikes, sorry!” she said, trying to pet my arm like a dog, as if that was going to help. “But, look, can we talk about this?”

“What, now?” I said. “You're on your way to work.”

“Okay, fine, then when I get home?”

“You're sure Sal isn't going to ask you to work a double again?”

“I'll tell him no,” Mom said. “You and me, okay? Tonight.”

“Fine.”

“Great,” she said, picking up her plate again and dumping the burnt mess into the garbage. “But I told you, I don't like my eggs flambéd.”

I knew it was stupid and wasteful, but still felt smug satisfaction as I ate my own eggs, which were a little sloppier than usual but still delicious, and definitely not burned. I cleaned my plate and then checked the time.
Ten-thirty
. What was I supposed to do with myself all day?

I pulled out my phone and texted Lucy. It took me ten minutes just to type my message out. Apparently the fingers of my left hand were a lot rustier than I thought.

You have to come over
, I texted.
I broke my arm.

What?
Lucy answered,
How?

Just come over. Please?

K
, Lucy texted,
be there soon.

It was almost two hours before Lucy got there. I went back to bed for an hour and then screwed around on the computer for a bit, checking Instagram and looking up random stuff on Wikipedia, including a page that looked like a
twelve-year
-old girl had been using it as her diary. Weird.

Everything was harder with just my left hand, and turning the doorknob and opening the door when Lucy finally rang the bell was a surprisingly difficult job.

“What took you so long?” I asked, as I let Lucy in.

“Oh stop it,” Lucy said, racing up the stairs to our apartment, “this is worth the wait, trust me.”

“What,” I said, “did you bring me a new arm from your parents' store?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, pausing to get a good look at my cast. “That looks bad. What happened?”

“Ugh. Long story,” I said, grateful for some sympathy from someone who wasn't about to take off on tour without me. “Sit down, you want a popsicle?”

“Sure,” Lucy said. “Purple me.”

“Clearly.”

I clumsily grabbed two ice pops out of the freezer and dropped them on the coffee table in front of the couch.

“Can you open mine for me?” I asked, pointing to the pink one.

“Wow,” she said, “you really can't do anything now, can you?”

“Let's just say that
LoA
is on hold.”

“Yeah,” she said, “I figured.” She gestured to my arm. “So?”

“I got doored,” I said. “On my bike. I was riding home from the Island. I was on a — you know, I was hanging out with Shaun.”

“Oh?” she said, sucking thoughtfully on her popsicle. “I thought you said he was an idiot.”

“You said he was an idiot. I like him.”

“Why?” she asked. Hadn't we been through this before?

“'Cause he's cool and cute and, you know …”

“What?” she bit the rest of her popsicle and pulled the sticks out of her mouth. My teeth hurt just watching her.

“I like him, okay? I really like him. But I totally screwed up. It was so embarrassing.” I hugged my knees to my chest with my one good arm and waited for Lucy to ask me how the date had gone so badly, but it was clear that she had something else on her mind entirely.

“Yeah,” she said, “that sucks. But, look, I've got to show you what I found.”

“What is it?” I asked, as Lucy opened up the laptop on the coffee table. “A new
LoA
trailer or something?”

“Just wait,” she said. “Jazleen was posting about this last night. She's so jealous 'cause she lives in Peterborough and they don't have one.”

“One what?” I asked. Jazleen is one of Lucy's best online friends, and she's going to be visiting Toronto at the end of the month just to go to Fan Con. She's really cool but kind of intimidating. I follow her Tumblr and am constantly amazed that she seems to know more about what's going on in our city than I do.

“Just wait. This is going to blow your mind.”

Lucy typed a few short words into the search bar and then turned the computer around to face me.

“She Shoots?” I asked, reading the first search result.

“Keep reading,” Lucy said, perched over my shoulder like an oversized parrot.

I clicked the link and read the banner at the top of the page:
SHE SHOOTS — SUPPORTING GALS IN GAMES SINCE
2012.

“What is this?” I asked, confused, but somehow already excited.

Lucy's face was basically broken, she was smiling so hard, and she started talking a mile a minute as she caught me up on what was clearly her new favourite thing.

“Look, it's this group, right?” she said. “And they help you make your own games. It's amazing!”

It did sound kind of amazing, but I still had no idea what exactly Lucy was talking about. “How?” I asked.

“They hold these game jams, see?” Lucy said, pointing to an event listing on the screen. “Where you make a whole game over a weekend. They're doing a jam next month all about food, so all these people are going to get together and make games about, like, eating and stuff. Isn't that cool?”

I'd never seen her this excited, which was really saying something, because
LoA
made her practically rabid.

“And, like, anyone can join?” I asked.

“That's the best part,” Lucy said, “it's just girls. Or, you know, women. At least, some of the events are.”

“Wow,” I said. “Cool.”

“They're even tabling at Fan Con!”

“Great,” I said, “something else I'll be missing out on.”

“Oh right, sorry,” Lucy said distractedly. She was still poring over the site, like she was trying to drink in the coolness of the group through her eyeballs.

“So, like … should we join?” I asked.

I wasn't even sure if this was the kind of group where I'd fit in, but, I figured, it might at least help my case with the
LoA
ers. Besides, it was something to do, which meant that it met all of my basic requirements. And with Mom on her way out of the country and any more action with Shaun now officially impossible, it seemed like pretty much the only choice.

“That's kind of the problem,” Lucy said, finally pulling herself away from the screen. “I don't know if they'd let, like, kids join.”

“We're sixteen!” I said.

“I'm fifteen,” Lucy reminded me. “And anyway, I don't want to show up not having any idea what's going on. I want them to think we're …”

“What,” I said, “cool?”

“Experienced,” Lucy corrected me. “I don't want to look like some poser, you know?”

“Oh, come on. Nobody would ever accuse you of being a fake geek girl,” I said. “Your
LoA
obsession alone speaks for itself.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said, “but I don't know any of the systems they're using.”

“So?” I said. “Isn't this whole group about, like, teaching you that kind of stuff?”

“Look,” Lucy said, ignoring my reasoning, “they have a tutorial up on their website. It'll show us how to make a basic
text-based
game. You remember that game
Zork
I showed you a couple of months ago?”

I remembered sitting in front of Lucy's computer at her house, watching her type commands into a
text-prompt
that told us we were standing in front of a house. She told me that it was one of the
first-ever
computer games. Which was cool, but I had trouble picturing the scene the game was describing without any graphics, and we kept getting eaten by something called a Grue.

“Yeah,” I said. “Why? Can we make something like that?”

“Totally,” Lucy said. “And it can be about whatever we want.”

“Wow,” I said, “that sounds cool. But isn't it, like, hard?”

“Not really,” Lucy said, taking over the computer again to find another site. “There's this software called Twine that we can download for free. Then you just write your scenes and map them all out together. I already tried it at my place. It's great.”

“Except we can't download it. You know how my mom is.”

“Like she'd even notice.”

“No, seriously,” I said, “when she found out we'd downloaded those old system emulators last year she totally flipped out. She gave me this whole lecture about how we'd opened the gates of hell to a bunch of viruses or whatever.”

“Your mom's weird,” Lucy said. “That's her biggest concern?”

“She's a total technophobe. I'm just glad she hasn't started hassling me about sexting.”

“Yet,” said Lucy.

“Whatever,” I said, scanning the page that she'd pulled up, “look, there's an
in-browser
version anyway. Let's just use that.”

After a
two-second
tutorial on how to save our work, Lucy and were looking at a perfectly blank page.

We decided to write a tiny game, just as a test, so we put together a
seven-screen
story called
No, Seriously, I Really Love Lucy
about Lucy finding a unicorn hidden behind the chip rack at her parents' store and going on an incredibly short adventure. The first screen introduced the story and then gave you two different links to click on to decide what happened next; would Lucy try to speak to the unicorn or call magical pest control instead? Depending on which option you chose, you'd get a different screen with more story and another two choices until you finally reached
THE END
. The best ending saw Lucy and the unicorn flying off into space for more adventures, and the worst one had her eaten by a
family-size
bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. The game was super goofy, but it was pretty fun to make. And Lucy was right, it was easy. Between the two of us we could really make something cool.