#famous(50)

“I don’t know. I figured you had a plan.”

“That’s where you vastly overestimated me.” I smiled widely, but I felt like an idiot. I should have had a plan. Why didn’t I have any plan?

“I mean, we could always go bowling,” Rachel said.

“Bowling? Where would you even go, Funtown?” I was pretty sure Rachel wasn’t serious about going to the kiddie birthday party spot. It was mostly an arcade, with a couple lanes of bumper bowling in back and a climbing wall that dominated the entire center of the building. Emma’s brother, Nathan, had his birthday there last year. She and I were the oldest non-parent people in the room.

Rachel twisted her mouth up in a half smile. It made a little dimple pop out in just her left cheek. I’d never noticed it before. I almost reached over to poke my finger into it—would it feel different? Softer?—then remembered not to be a psycho.

“You know there are other bowling alleys in the world, right?”

“I mean . . .” I looked over. She was clearly trying to repress a laugh. I felt myself smile back. “Yes. Obviously I know that. I just don’t know where any of them are. No one I know goes bowling.”

“That’s why bowling’s so awesome,” she said, looking out the window. “Get onto 169, I’ll show you how to get to a real bowling alley. One without a giant cat mascot walking around, making children cry.”

I worked my way to the highway, glancing at Rachel every few seconds. She was staring out the front window with the same half smile on her lips.

I still didn’t know what private joke or secret she was holding on to, but I wanted to find out.

“I probably didn’t explain this the first time. You actually want to avoid the gutters,” Rachel said from behind me.

My ball rolled past the untouched pins. It was the third frame in a row where I’d hit nothing.

Sucking this bad at bowling: not reducing my antsiness. Usually I was good at new games, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the flipping ball to stay in the middle. A couple times I’d randomly hit a few pins. One frame I even got a strike. But the next turn, I somehow overcompensated and the ball went straight into the left gutter.

I looked around the bowling alley. Maybe the atmosphere was making it harder for me to be good. The entire building was basically one big box that they’d forgotten to cut windows into. There were carpets everywhere. Threadbare, nasty-looking ones with blackened gum ground into them near the check-in desk and weird, nubbly brown ones climbing the walls by the lanes. They’d carpeted the walls. The screens hanging over each lane looked like computers in old movies, pixelated and out of focus and only in one color: neon blue. And everything else was dark. Ugly burgundy shelves for the balls. Brownish chairs turned grimy by years of butts. Two or three sad middle-aged men sucking the light out of the room a few lanes down.

This place: depression in a box. A concrete box.

I forced a smile. It was bad enough sucking, I didn’t want Rachel to think I cared.

“It’s all part of my master plan.” I turned. She was standing behind me, hands on her hips.

“Really.” She raised an eyebrow.

“I’m lulling you into complacency.”

“You’re doing an awesome job at that.” Rachel pointed to the TV above our lane. KYLE was trailing TREX by a little over fifty points. He also sounded pretty boring, since he hadn’t realized dino names were an option. I smiled. Of course Rachel wouldn’t just use her real name. TREX was somehow way more Rachel than KYLE was me.

“I didn’t want to say I was letting you win. That would have sounded mean.”

“It would also sound ridiculous, since I’m clearly spanking you.”

I gritted my teeth.

“Some of us play real sports.”

“Oooh.” Rachel put on a mock-impressed face.

“Yeah. Actually getting good at something that requires real skill makes it hard to find time to play pointless games.”

I sounded like a tool. But I also couldn’t stop my jaw from clenching and I couldn’t figure out how not to suck at this. Rachel grinned. It only pissed me off more.

“You’ve really never been bad at anything before, have you?”

I stared.

“Of course I have. I’m bad at tons of stuff.”

“What’s the last thing you tried that you were bad at?”

“I mean . . .” Ollie had crushed me at the most recent Grand Larceny game, but that definitely wasn’t what Rachel meant. “I’m pretty miserable at creative writing.”

“No you’re not, your writing’s good. At least it would be if you didn’t always write about boring people.” Oof. My last story had basically happened to Ollie and me after a game. “But you don’t really care about creative writing, anyway. You do care about sports.”

“I care.” Rachel looked at me blankly. Did she really think I only cared about sports? That made me . . . not angry really, more like sad. Just because I was good at lacrosse didn’t mean it was all I cared about. Jeez, I only played because Carter had first. Though that sounded even worse. . . . “Anyway, bowling is not a sport.”

“Fair. Let me rephrase. You’ve never been bad at something you’re truly trying to be good at. Especially something that is kind of like a sport, even if it isn’t really a sport.”