Lucky Caller(33)

Jamie nodded. “Nice.”

“What are you gonna major in?” Rose asked him.

Jamie shrugged, pulling his bowl closer. “I’m not sure yet. I don’t really care what I do, to be honest. I just want to make a lot of money.”

It was so un-Jamie-like. I looked over at him.

“For real? You? Cutthroat businessman fueled by capitalism?”

He shook his head. “Not for myself. Not for, like, cars and watches and stuff.” He picked up his spoon. “I just want to be able to take care of them. My grandma and grandpa. Like how they’ve taken care of me. I just want them to not have to worry about anything, ever. Like, something comes up, it’s handled. Done. I got it.” He nodded, more to himself than to us. “That’s what I want.”

Rose leaned back in her chair. “Maybe I need some kind of motivation like that,” she said. “Maybe I’m too selfish.”

“You’re not selfish at all,” Jamie replied.

“Thanks for that, but we haven’t hung out in a while.” Rose smiled wryly. “Maybe I’ve gotten way more selfish since then.”

“I wouldn’t believe that,” Jamie said. “Just … based on your track record.”

“Yeah? What’s my track record?”

Jamie’s eyes shone. “Well, Iliana was the most generous bounty-hunter-slash-assassin-slash-rogue in the land.”

“That’s it—I should be more like Iliana,” Rose said. “She always had her shit together.”

“She definitely saved my life a bunch of times,” Jamie replied with a grin.





30.


FOR THAT FINAL GAME OF Kingdom in the autumn of my eighth-grade year, Sidney insisted that Jamie join us. And not only that, she made a big fuss about all of us dressing up.

It was one thing to play a game like that when we were in fourth or fifth grade like Sid was. Rose and I were that age when we originally thought up Kingdom, after all. But now I was in junior high—and Rose had just started high school, for god’s sake!—and Sidney not only wanted us to play a make-believe game, but she also wanted us to do so while wearing costumes.

That was our hard line. Rose refused to dress up, which meant that I refused too.

“It’s enough just to play,” Rose said. “We don’t have to … wear special outfits for it or anything.”

“Jamie will dress up!”

“He won’t.”

Sid was adamant: “He will!”

He had answered neutrally enough to my text when I invited him to join us. That was a minefield in itself, figuring out how to even ask. I tried to explain that it was an important thing to Sidney, tried to make it sound like she dragged us into it, to convey that it was definitely embarrassing. But Jamie just texted back promptly: Sure. Let me know when. No reservations, no further questions.

We picked a weekday afternoon purposefully so the game wouldn’t drag on. Mom was still at work, but Rose was in charge of us after school at this point. There was a short stretch of time between us arriving home on the bus and Mom getting back from work, and that’s the time we picked to play.

A knock sounded at the door that afternoon, and when I opened it, Jamie was standing there in the hallway wearing jeans, a white button-down, a scarf tied into a belt, and snow boots. A worn plaid throw hung over his shoulders, fashioned like a hooded cape.

“Where’s your outfit?” he said, frowning.

Something in my chest seized uncomfortably, like my heart was temporarily too big for my rib cage.

Sidney appeared at my side and jumped up and down, knocking me on the arm. “I told you! I told you he would dress up!”

Rose appeared too, saw Jamie’s outfit, and her lips curved into a small smile. “Okay, Hapless. I guess we’re really doing this.”



* * *



Rose put on a pair of Mom’s old cargo pants and a bomber jacket. She took a belt and attached some stuff to it with hair ties—a ruler, a protractor, a TV remote, and a hairbrush.

“Hairbrush?” Jamie said.

“The bristles are blow darts.”

“Nice.”

I wore Rose’s eighth-grade formal dress—it was puffy and gold, with layers of tulle—with a pair of boots and threw her middle school graduation gown over it like some kind of wizard robe. Back in the day, Sidney’s Quad outfit had been made out of an old pillowcase, like some kind of bootleg Dobby. But this time she took one of Rose’s shirts, a long, dark plaid thing with rips in it, and wore it like a tunic, along with the knee, elbow, and wrist pads my mom insisted on after our dad got us skates for Christmas one year.

“Armor,” she informed me. “In case we go into battle!”

“So what’s our backstory?” Jamie said when we were all dressed and assembled in the living room. “Where have we been the last few years?”

“Adventuring,” Rose said, at the same time that I said, “Counting our riches,” because even though the last game of Kingdom never had a definitive ending—it kind of just faded away—that’s where I would’ve wanted us to end up.

“Who cares where we were?” Sidney said. “We’re back together now because Hapless has been put under a spell.”