This is what happens the night Eames’s sister comes back to town. Cue Bucky over by the pinball machines with a horde of friends watching him, two or three guys sucking on sodas and hanging over his shoulders. Two or three guys isn’t really a horde, but Bucky has a way of making it feel like there are more people around him than there actually are. His broad shoulders stick up all sharp when he plays, because he’s the best pinball player in Cherry and because he’s concentrating, hard.
Cue me, behind the prize rack, wearing a purple Dreamscape Arcade tee shirt. I just finished setting up a birthday party and my fingers still kind of smell like pizza, even though they’re clean. People bring me their tickets from Skee Ball and Donkey Kong and I let them pick their prizes.
It’s a Thursday night and the line is coming and going, sometimes with clusters of people I know from school. Dreamscape is popular in the summer, because the pool closes at five and there’s nothing really to do afterward, unless you’ve got a car and you want to drive to Lake Sewell thirty-five miles away. People congregate by the soda machine and the air hockey tables, and if they stay here late enough, sometimes Rodney, my manager, will let them play laser tag at a discount. Eames is here with his friend Mickey, both of them sort of dopes, taking turns hunching over Galaga like it’s the only thing on this Earth that ever mattered. Over by the soda machines are a couple of cheerleaders, Penny Fairday and a girl I used to date for a little while, Brenda James.
That’s sort of how we’re all laid out at ten-thirty or so, when the glass door swishes open and Eames’s sister walks in.
His sister is Maria. Maria Alvarez Eames, and she’s different from him in every possible way. While he’s short enough to be made fun of for it, Maria is tall and slender. He’s always wearing stained shirts from some cartoon movie or videogame or another, but when Maria walks in she’s wearing a soft peach sundress that stops a little above her knees. Also, Eames has two eyes, or four if you count his square black glasses. Maria has only one.
She looks around for a minute with her one normal eye and her black eyepatch, then walks over to the Galaga machines to watch her brother. The place doesn’t all change in one moment; it’s more like a succession of moments, as one by one, and group by group, we notice her. Brenda James and Penny Fairday shift a little where they stand, twirling the straws in their cherry sodas, and straighten off the walls where they’ve been leaning. Bucky’s shadows, Dane and Luca, see her at about the same time, and they both nudge Bucky right as he finishes off a new high score at the pinball machine. He turns and he looks over at Maria like there’s something scary waking up in him, and then the three of them start moving as a group across the arcade floor.
“Hi Maria,” says Mickey, and he starts to step toward her for a hug, then catches himself halfway through and sways back with his hand closed like a fist. Mickey is a freckly mess with a horrible crush on pretty much any girl who happens to get near him.
“Hi, Mickey.” Maria stops by the chair where her brother, Eames, is sitting, his eyes still locked into the dark pixelly screen, his fingers clenched around the controllers. “You gonna say hi to me or what?” she asks.
“In a second.”
He’s about to take out a fleet of enemy ships. I’m leaning over the counter at this point, watching as much as I can see. There’s not a lot that really goes on in Cherry, so whenever something unusual comes up—like this beautiful girl showing up in the arcade after none of us have seen her for years—there’s only so much ordinary stuff that can happen before somebody decides to step up and address things. Also, Maria had two eyes the last time we saw her.
She steps in front of the screen, blocking her brother’s view.
“Maria, move. Knock it off. Maria.”
She throws out both arms for a hug, just as he game overs. He rolls his eyes, drops the controller, and hugs her. Eames isn’t as stricken as the rest of us are to see Maria; he’s her brother and he’s probably seen her more recently than we have, and he would’ve known she was coming. Only he didn’t tell us because none of us ever really talk to Eames.
Maria lives with her father down in Minneapolis—she and Eames’s parents did one of those split-custody things people sometimes do when they get divorced. She used to come to Cherry every so often for weekends, just like Eames would sometimes go down to Minneapolis. So they’ve always spent a lot of time being toggled back and forth between their parents, sometimes together, sometimes separate. But Maria’s lived in Cherry before—the longest amount of time would’ve been back in middle school, when she and Bucky dated for a couple of weeks. I don’t know how official they were, but I know it’s the closest Bucky’s ever come to a real girlfriend in his life. That was the last time she was here, and she didn’t tell any of us a single thing about when she was planning on leaving, not even Bucky. She just up and left.
Anyway it’s been two, three years since then. Common knowledge is that their parents got into some big fight or something and decided to stop trading their kids and talking to each other at all for a while, but here she is now which means they must’ve made up, and Lord has she grown. She’s almost taller than Pen Fairday now, even though she’s a year younger than all of us. Her long hair hangs damp against the sundress, which means she must’ve just gotten done swimming in Eames’s mom’s backyard pool.
So now she’s good and established herself, she’s said hi to Eames. Penny and Brenda are still playing it cool by the soda machine, but it’s about this time that Bucky comes strutting over, his shadows at his shoulders. He puts a hand on one of the machines right next to Maria, leans into it and says, “I can’t even remember the last time you were here.”
Maria gives him a little smile. She looks so perfect, with her drying sundress and her bare shoulders and flip flops. “I can’t even remember who you are,” she says.
That ruffles him a little. It’s easy to tell when Bucky’s bothered, even when he’s trying not to show it, because his face goes all pinchy. “Yeah, you do,” he says. “Middle school? We went to the Jiffy Treet a few times? And the lake?”
I never knew they’d gone all the way out to the lake, but it must’ve been quite the time, because Bucky grins through every single one of his yellow teeth when he says the word, and something changes in Maria’s face. She definitely remembers. All the same, she tilts her head lightly, lets her damp hair flip back behind her shoulder and tries to play it off like she doesn’t. “Hmmm.”
“C’mon,” says Bucky, almost wheedling now. “I play videogames with your brother, like, every day!”
“No, you don’t.”
“The hell I don’t!”
“He said you were a total cheater. That you only play to mess things up for other people.”
“Not a cheater,” says Eames, even though nobody’s paying attention to him. “A griefer.”
“Whatever,” says Maria.
He’s right, Bucky is a griefer—which is to say he gets a kick out of making sure other people don’t have fun. He plays games not for the winning, just for the sake of sabotaging them. I know he does it because little kids will come running up to the counter every so often, begging me or Rodney to kick him out because it’s not fair, but there’s not a whole lot we can really do—it’s not like it’s against the rules.
I’m so preoccupied watching Bucky’s face go red from across the arcade, I don’t even notice Penny Fairday standing at the counter in front of me until she rings the little bell for service. She cocks her head at me like she’s annoyed, her milky golden hair spilling out from where it was tucked behind one of her ears. Really quick I swap her tickets out for two jumbo lollipops.
“You know, she’s only in town for a couple of days,” she says.
My eyes have already gone back to the Galaga machines, but I snap them back over to her. “Sorry, Pen. What?”
She sighs and turns away. “Never mind.” Then she glides back across the arcade and hands Brenda one of the lollipops. I used to have quite a crush on Penny, up until about the very second Maria walked in.
Now that I’m free to keep listening in, I can see that they’re making a deal.
“So whichever team wins,” says Maria, “that’s who I’ll hang out with tonight. And you gotta play fair.”
“What if I don’t want to hang out with you?” Eames asks peevishly.
Mickey shoves him. “C’mon, man, I do.”
Eventually they settle down, four people and one game: Call of Duty, Bucky versus Eames with Luca and Mickey backing them up respectively. Once they’re off, Maria watches them go at it on the screens for maybe five seconds, then gets bored and saunters away across the arcade, through the darkness with the colors of all the different games taking turns lightly on her face. She keeps walking, slowly, all the way up to me.
“Is this where I order a drink?” she asks.
“No,” I say, staring at her. I want to ask her what happened to her eye, but I’m sure we all do and it feels like it would be rude.
“Oh.” She smiles and doesn’t leave—I think she can tell that I like her, which makes me feel really dumb, but I can’t help it. “You’re funny-looking,” she says. “I don’t think I remember you.”
I’m not that funny-looking really, it’s just that I’ve got acne and my nose is really bent. Noticeably, like a witch’s. I fight the urge to tell her she’s the one with only one eye. “I don’t hang out with Eames all that much,” I say. “I mean, your brother,” because all we ever call him is Eames and I can’t actually remember his first name.
“That makes two of us,” she says.
I can’t really say anything sympathetic—I have a sister, Jo Ann, but we’re fine, I mean we actually hang out and stuff. So instead I say, “You want any tickets or anything?” Which is the dumbest, squarest possible thing to say, but she’s looking right at me and it’s all I can think of.
She looks around idly, then down at the prizes—little plastic army men and Tootsie Rolls and pouches of invisible ink—but there’s something in her expression, like she’s seeing something else instead. “I’m sort of cold,” she says.
“You go swimming or something?”
She nods, smiling quickly back up at me. “My mom’s pool. It’s the first thing I like to do when I get here.”
She keeps looking at me, and I feel kind of self-conscious all of the sudden. There’s nothing I can do about the air conditioning, that’s Rodney’s domain, but then I remember the sweatshirt tied around my waist. It’s an old evergreen one that says CHERRY HIGH SCHOOL across the front in white block letters. I untie it quickly and offer it to her in a big lumpy handful. “Would this help?”
She grins. “Thanks.” She pulls it over her head and stretches her arms a little awkwardly through the sleeves, until she’s clutching the ends in her fists, the way girls do. It’s a little big for her, and the end of her sundress barely peeks out from underneath it. “So,” she says, “where can I get a drink?”
I lead her over to the soda machine, which is free now because Brenda and Penny are crowding around the Call of Duty machines with Dane. Eames and Bucky are going at it with their respective sidekicks, shooting their enemies’ hearts out, smashing each other to pieces without even making eye contact. Bucky’s face is drawn tight, and Eames is glaring into the bright colors. Brenda looks bored and Penny is looking at me and trying not to show it.
I get Maria a strawberry soda and then, just because I feel like it, another one for myself, and I don’t charge either of us. Then we go back to the prize counter and I’m just grabbing a jumbo lollipop when Rodney comes over, a folder in one hand and his Dreamscape Arcade tee shirt tucked into his slacks.
“Excuse me,” he says to Maria. His voice is thin and grating. “You gonna pay for that soda?”
“Relax, Rodney,” I say.
“I can’t relax. I’m the manager.” Which, to his credit, is true—he’s twenty-three, and this job is his only source of income, so to speak. He looks between Maria’s eye and her eye patch, then down at her flip flops. Her toenails are shiny with chipped red nail polish. “Are you planning on playing laser tag?” he asks. “You know, you’re gonna need close-toed shoes if you want to play laser tag.”
“What if she wore socks?” I ask. “Would socks be okay? Here.” I bend over and take off my shoes, feeling awkward as hell but it’s too late to stop now. I take off my socks and hand them to Maria, who grins and puts them on as I pull my shoes back on my bare feet.
Rodney actually laughs at that a little, which surprises Maria and makes me smile. Rodney’s like that—he takes a lot of pride in working at Dreamscape and as a result he can be a little uptight, but he’s not a bad manager all-in-all. He practically grew up at Dreamscape, spending all his free time playing Dig Dug and laser tag here when he was a kid, and sometimes you’ll get a glimpse of that.
Then he seems to catch himself. “I wouldn’t put it past you, kid, no indeed, I would not,” he rambles to me, without me really knowing what he’s talking about. Then he tells Maria, “You just make sure you pay for that soda.” He hurries away after that, and Maria actually smiles and high-fives me. Which I take to mean we’ve circumvented the establishment or whatever: we’ve won.
Over on the other side of the arcade, Bucky and Eames play that shooting game for so long that you get the sense they’ve forgotten what they were playing for to begin with. Bucky and Luca keep wrecking the game in random ways, undercutting the fairness—shooting random people, barricading important doors, hurting themselves just as much as Eames and Mickey—and they keep having to start over or rematch, each time promising that this time it’ll be a fair fight.
Meanwhile, I talk to Maria. She says she likes Minneapolis but wishes she knew her stepdad better. She tells me her second eye didn’t get clawed out by a stray dog or by her father or anything crazy like that, but that it just got sick and a doctor took it out, simple as that. The eye patch looks a little less mysterious and dark after she says that, a little friendlier, plus I feel good because nobody else knows that right now but me. She says she wants to go to college to study marine biology, and I can’t even believe she’s thinking about college already, since none of us are thinking about it yet and she’s a year younger than us.
At one point Eames comes over. He glares at me as if I’ve somehow done something to hurt him, then tells Maria, “I don’t want to play anymore. Bucky doesn’t play fair, and it’s not fun anyway. We’re gonna call it a tie.”
“If it’s a tie, then I won’t hang out with either of you,” Maria says.
“Maria…”
“Rules are rules!”
He looks at her for a moment, then groans loudly and heads back over to the Call of Duty machines. Back to the game, to win some time with his sister.
We keep talking as if he’d never even come over. She asks me questions. I don’t have too much to tell her but she asks anyway, about my parents and my sister, about how I like living in Cherry—which I do, as far as I can tell. She asks me for gossip, so I tell her everything I know about Bucky—all the gross things he’s ever said to Brenda and Penny and other girls at school, and his horrible dad and how he lives on the East Side—because he’s just about the only person I don’t care about hurting with gossip. I tell her he’s good at pinball but that he’s been a griefer as long as he’s been alive. I tell her about the suffering that hangs around him like a cloud: the time he said the N word in social studies and didn’t apologize, and the time he wrecked my sister Jo Ann’s Halloween costume with paint from the art room, after my mom worked hard on it for weeks. I even share with her the locker-room knowledge shared by every guy at school, the way Bucky’s bare torso is speckled front and back with grey circlets, each one shaped like the end of a cigarette. At school we swap regular legends about Bucky’s home life: legends, I tell her clearly, only myths to keep us busy.
“The scar thing is true,” she says.
“So you do remember?”
She nods, sucking on the straw of her soda. It’s almost empty and you can hear the ice at the bottom. “He’s a shitty guy,” she says.
We refill our sodas. When Rodney’s in his office, we play two-person laser tag, ducking behind barricades, sneaking around corners, shooting each other and giggling when we get hit instead of feeling anything. We challenge each other in arcade games. We don’t play Dance Dance Revolution because it’s right near where the others are all clustered and we don’t want them to remember us, but we play Skee Ball and we win enough tickets to fill up a whole plastic bag with candy at the prize counter. I like Skee Ball, the way the white balls roll so hard over the wood and click-clack together and clunk when they fall through the targets. They remind me of crystal balls.
Around two, my shift ends and me and Maria go outside. I need to help Rodney close, but I tell him I’ll be back in a minute. There’s nothing but parking lot outside the Dreamscape, crummy asphalt facing the road and some nearby strip malls, basically a lot of gray. We sit on the curb and sort through our plastic bag of winnings.
“I’ll trade you a Jolly Rancher for two Tootsie Rolls,” I say.
“Excuse you,” she says. “I value my Tootsie Rolls.”
“More than I value my Jolly Ranchers?”
“I’m pretty sure I won all of these, anyway,” she comments, smiling a little as she picks through the bag. “Remind me again what you brought to the Dig Dug table, exactly, other than moral support?”
I’m about to tell her she’s undervaluing my talents and I actually brought a hell of a lot to the Dig Dug table, but then Rodney kicks the rest of them out, and through the doors they spill: Bucky and Eames and the girls and the other guys. Eames looks furious. Actually, they all do.
“It’s not fair!” shouts Eames.
Bucky’s grinning like a maniac. “Life isn’t fair.”
“But that was supposed to be!”
“I thought you didn’t wanna hang out with her anyway,” says Dane, in a really taunting voice for someone who wasn’t even playing. None of them are even looking at me and Maria, they’re all too wrapped up in their own drama.
“Of course I do, she’s my sister!”
“I’ve been here all night,” says Maria sharply. She doesn’t move from the curb next to me, a Jolly Rancher wrapper crinkling open between her fingers.
“I came over to you,” says Eames, facing her now. “I came. And you said to go away.” Then I notice his lower lip is trembling a little, and I think, poor Eames, he’s just a kid through and through. What a dope. Always acting like he’s too cool for his little sister, only because that’s better than the other way around.
Maria shrugs. “You gotta learn to stick up for yourself.” Then she stands up, and automatically I stand with her.
Eames looks like he doesn’t really know what to say—he’s just scowling, still, like the world’s cheated him out of something behind his back. Dane and Luca are doing what shadows do—hanging around, background smiles, they knew they’d win but haven’t really been in this for anything serious. Then Bucky takes a couple of steps toward Maria, toward us. “C’mon,” he says, grinning. He’s standing right under the neon Dreamscape sign, and his face looks unnaturally bright. “I won, now let’s go hang out. You said you would.”
“That was, like, a billion rematches ago,” she says lazily. “Besides, I found something better to do.” My heart goes all warm when she says that, and I smile before I can stop myself.
I can see Bucky’s face going hot and red, and it occurs to me that this might be the first time in years anyone’s just decided out of nowhere they didn’t feel like hanging out with him. It gives me a little pleasure seeing him shut down like this. Then I see him stalk over toward us with his hands balled up into fists.
“You think you can play a guy like that?”
“Hey!” Eames runs over, jumps between Bucky and us and shoves Bucky. “Back off. I’ll fight you!”
“I can’t fight you,” Bucky spits. “You’re half my height.”
“Seems like that should make it easier,” Eames says boldly.
For a second I wonder if they’re going to do it. Really go at each other, but in person this time, in real life. They’re definitely mad enough. But then they back down—it’s hard to say who backs down first, it’s less a movement thing and more just an obvious feeling that settles over everyone at once, that they’re not going to do it.
“You guys are so lame,” says Brenda finally.
“Tell me about it,” says Bucky, looking at Eames and Mickey with flat-out scorn.
“All of you. Let’s go, Pen.”
One of the shadows drove them all here—Luca, I think—but Brenda starts strutting off anyway, her shoulders high and square. Penny Fairday starts to follow her, but stops right before she passes me.
“We still on for that movie?” she asks quietly.
I completely forgot. I told Pen I’d take her to the Rave this weekend to see a movie, any movie she wanted. Brenda is rolling her eyes—she broke up with me last summer because I don’t have very many aspirations and because of my witch-nose, and she clearly can’t see why Penny would want to get with a guy like that.
I can feel Maria watching me, and even though Maria will be gone by the end of this weekend it doesn’t feel like that to me, it feels like she’ll be here forever. All the same, I know it would be a jerk move to leave Penny out to dry like that, so I say, “Sure, Pen. I’ll let you know.”
The two girls walk off toward the main road to call a taxi, or maybe just to walk home. It’s a warm summer night and none of us live very far.
Suddenly, Mickey says “Game over, man. Game over!” He says it in the same high-pitched voice that comes over the speaker system at the end of laser tag, and he must think this is really funny, because as soon as he says it he bends over giggling.
Bucky looks at him with so much distaste, the air itself feels different. Then he looks over at Eames.
“C’mon, Bucky,” says Dane. “Let’s get out of this dump.”
But Bucky has resolved himself to Eames. I can tell. He thinks Eames is a loser, he always says so. A stained-shirt loser whose parents both hate him and who can’t play pinball worth anything, who isn’t tall enough to ride a rollercoaster, who can’t run more than a quarter mile at a time without keeling over. And now—“You know,” he says, “your sister’s a real bitch.”
Maria by my side has gone tense. Eames fidgets, his mouth hanging open like he doesn’t quite know what to say.
Then Bucky’s on him. I mean he straight-up tackles Eames to the ground.
Maria screams and turns instinctively inward to me, clutching my tee shirt. I’ve never heard her scream like that before, but then again, it occurs to me, I guess I’ve only really known her this one night. Eames screams, too, less loudly, he just sort of gargles and cries out a bunch and thrashes up against Bucky, trying to punch back. It’s sort of pitiful to watch. Mickey starts shouting Leave him alone! Get off of him! But the shadows are giggling and Bucky’s still going, punching ruthlessly and almost without aiming, smashing Eames further and further into the cold, real asphalt.
“Hey! Hey!”
At first I don’t know where the voice is coming from, because Luca and Dane are still laughing and I’m utterly frozen, and Maria is crying into my Dreamscape shirt. Then I see a figure sprinting out through the front door of the arcade and toward us, wilder and faster than I ever would’ve seen coming. It’s Rodney.
“Hey! Hey! Heyheyheyheyhey—”
It’s as if he can’t think of any other words. He grabs Bucky by the back of his shirt collar first, then latches onto his arms and pulls him back up off of Eames. He shoves him away and bends down to see if Eames is okay. Bucky stands there panting, brushing his hands off on his jeans.
Mickey and Rodney both help Eames to his feet. He’s not hurt that bad really, now that we’ve got a clear look at him: his lip is cut and bleeding and there’s a bruise smeared into one of his eyes, but he looks fine other than that.
“The hell is wrong with you?” Rodney spits at Bucky, letting go of Eames and stepping away from him. Then he remembers what he’s representing and draws himself up, even though his purple shirt is untucked from his pants now and a little rumpled. “We don’t tolerate that sort of thing here. Not at Dreamscape.”
It’s like Bucky doesn’t even hear him. He’s glaring at Maria. “You deserved everything,” he hisses. “Remember at the lake—”
Maria breaks away from me suddenly and shouts, “Youasshole!”
“Everything. I hope you lose another eye.”
“Hey!” says Rodney loudly. “You hear what I said or what? Get out of here!”
“Come on,” Bucky says to Dane and Luca, contemptuously, like he can hardly bear to look at the rest of us anymore. “Let’s go. She’s ugly now anyway,” he adds, loud enough for everyone to hear.
They pile into Luca’s car and rev the engine a whole bunch, so loud it’s almost scary. Then they speed past us so fast and sudden that Eames and Mickey have to practically dive to get out of their way before they hit them.
“Jesus,” Rodney exhales. He bends down where Maria and I were sitting before, like he’s too tired to stand, and then he lifts our bag of candy and starts picking through it.
Maria reaches up, forcefully wipes the tears from her face using the sleeve of my sweatshirt.
“Assholes,” says Eames decisively, turning to Maria. He sticks out his tongue, licks some of the blood off his lips.
Maria rolls her single eye, as if disgusted, and doesn’t look at him. “Don’t you two have a game of Dungeons & Dragons to be playing or something?”
Eames and Mickey both bristle at that, in a way that almost makes me feel bad. Maria tugs down the end of her sundress, which still looks awkward with my old green sweatshirt pulled over the top of it.
“You’re not coming home?” asks Eames.
“Not right now. I do what I want, I don’t care about Bucky.” There’s a pause, and then she looks at him, miffed. “What are you waiting for? Go get some Band-Aids out of Mom’s pantry or something. I’ll see you at home.” Then she softens a little and says, more quietly, “I’m really sorry he punched you.”
The kid looks just about heartbroken. But he says nothing, because I guess he’s learned nothing. “Okay,” he says, while Mickey slings an arm around his shoulders and silently scowls at Maria. “Okay, I’ll see you at home.”
Then Eames and Mickey head out in the same direction Brenda and Penny went off in, disappearing soon after them into the darkness. Now I’m alone with Maria in the empty parking lot, with Rodney still sitting there on the curb in front of the main doors, and I’m just starting to remember I’m supposed to go back inside eventually. Rodney is eating some of our Tootsie Rolls under the light of the Dreamscape sign. I open my mouth to say I don’t know what, and then Maria says, “Is there a CVS near here? I want some gum.”
The chill of the night is starting to get to me—not at my skin, but deeper somehow, under my ribs. “There’s one up the road,” I say. “I can walk you.”
“That’s okay,” she says. “I know you’ve got to finish closing.”
I’d ditch work in a second to stay with her, but for some reason, with her looking straight up at me like this, I can’t find the words to say this. All I can say is, “It’s so dark. It’s not safe.”
“It’s safe for me.” She says it in a way that makes me want to ask her some sort of question. Then she arches up on her tiptoes, leans in, and kisses me, so lightly, on the lips.
So lightly, she leans in, she kisses me. On the lips.
Her face is soft and smooth. I don’t have time to touch it before she pulls away. “I’ll see you around, okay?” she says.
Okay, I think—but I don’t manage to say this aloud, either, and this time I’m glad. To say it, to say anything, would’ve felt too much like I was sealing something in. When will I see you around? And what will happen if I ever see you? And will I get my sweatshirt and my socks back? Now that we’re not touching anymore, she looks different somehow, and I feel like I’ve broken out of something, like when you leave a movie theater in the middle of the day and you remember, suddenly, what all is a dream and what isn’t.
And even as she walks backward across the parking lot and then waves at me from the dimly lit street, I can’t help feeling a little bit like I’m the one that got played here, after everything. My shoes are kind of scraping against my heels after all that time without my socks on. I try not to think about this, because I’ve still got that bag of candy if I can get it back from Rodney and because she kissed me. I can hear crickets. I’m not sure where they’re coming from because there’s nothing all around me but pavement, but now that everyone’s gone I can hear them and I know they’re there, live things. And suddenly I realize my heart is beating really hard as Maria disappears from sight and I stand there, too far below for stars to see, listening out for the crickets as though it was me all along they were speaking to.
