Weather Girl(54)

People are standing in clusters and in larger groups, some with snacks and almost all with their cameras ready, pointed at the sky. There’s a palpable energy here. An electricity. They all know what’s about to happen is special. Russell and I find a spot in the grass, near the edge of Puget Sound.

“Are you nervous?” he asks. “You’re so quiet.”

I shake my head. My heart is pounding, but it’s all giddy anticipation, not nerves. All we have to do is watch and let the universe do its thing.

As 1:02 approaches, the park falls silent. The sky is a grayish green now, this haunting loveliness in the middle of the day. Russell and I slip on our glasses, his fitting a little awkwardly over his regular ones. He slides his hand into mine and squeezes, and then—

Magic.

The whole sky seems to shimmer as the sun becomes a brilliant yellow crescent.

For those two minutes, everything is perfect.



* * *



? ? ?

THE DATE ISN’T over yet. Our next stop is an aging mall on the Eastside, one Alex and I used to go to all the time growing up, before millennials like us started killing malls the way we killed bar soap and napkins. I am sure there are still nice malls, the kinds of places with luxury stores and five-star restaurants and fountains that have been cleaned at some point this century. This mall, with its neon-patterned black carpet and food court full of bizarre knockoffs like Pizza House and Wowzaburger (which actually isn’t that bad), is not one of them.

“Oh my god,” Russell says once we’ve navigated through body jewelry kiosks and packs of sullen teenagers, arriving at a section of the mall with ARCADE spelled in glowing letters. “I haven’t been to a place like this in forever.”

The empty arcade is about as decrepit as the mall itself, with games that probably haven’t been updated since the early nineties. But there’s a nostalgia to the way they’re all beeping and buzzing and enticing us to play.

And most importantly, it has an air hockey table.

I feed a five-dollar bill into the machine, and as I’m waiting for my quarters, a warm body presses behind me.

“This is really great,” Russell says with his mouth next to my ear, breath rushing over my skin. I shiver against him, distantly aware we’re in public and wondering how it’s possible to be this turned on in a mall that still has a Sears. “Thank you.”

“I had to bring my A-game to welcome Russell Barringer back to the world of dating.” The air hockey table turns on and lights up with a low whooshing sound. I hold up my sling as I grip the scratched-up red paddle with my right hand. “I’m just going to point out that you have a distinct advantage here.” This distracts him, as I hoped it might, and I slam the puck right into his goal. “Ha! I thought you played goalie.”

“You tricked me!” He blows on the puck as if for good luck before dropping it back on the table. “Well then. It’s war now, weather girl. I’m not going easy on you.”

“Don’t you dare.”

We’re somewhat evenly matched during the first game, but with my arm, I grow tired easily, and he handily wins the second and third.

Eventually, we grab a pretzel from the nearby food court and slide into a secluded vinyl booth in one corner of the arcade, as a group of kids takes over the air hockey table.

“Tell me more about playing hockey in Michigan,” I say, tearing off a sugary hunk of pretzel.

“As a kid, I’d play out in the streets with friends over the summer. I didn’t hate school or anything, but that was the reason I always looked forward to summer. It wasn’t until middle school that I started playing on a team.” He takes a bite of the pretzel. “What did you do as a kid in Seattle?”

“I came here a lot with my brother.” I wave a hand around the arcade. “We’ve always been pretty close. Most of what I remember from childhood, Alex is there. You don’t have any siblings?”

“Only child. Which I think means I’m supposed to be antisocial and bossy?”

“That tracks.”

He snorts. “What about your parents? Do they still live in the area?”

I hope he doesn’t notice the way my body stiffens. “My mom does. My dad left when I was in elementary school.”

An ordinary day—that’s what I remember most. It was an ordinary day in an unseasonably warm October, school and afternoon snacks at a neighbor friend’s house before Alex and I came home to find our mother sprawled on the couch. Our dad had raised his voice at her the night before. “I can’t be around you when you’re like this,” he’d said, and I wasn’t sure what like this meant. “Can’t you just be happy for once in your goddamn life?” Naive kid that I was, his words hadn’t struck me as final. They argued from time to time, and I’d gotten used to it.

The TV was on, but she wasn’t watching it, and there was a box of pizza sweating on the coffee table in front of her. I’d wanted a slice so badly, but it looked like it had been sitting out for a while.

Dad’s spending some time with his parents for a while, she told us. Alex asked if they were sick, and she said no. Her rage must have been stronger than her sadness, because she suddenly got up, took the pizza box into the kitchen, and asked if we wanted to go to the movies, something we never would have done on a school night.