Chapter Two — The Ordinary People Test (continued)

The arcade on Frankford Avenue had a flickering sign, a carpet patterned to conceal crimes against spilled soda, and an entrance machine that accepted dollar bills only after rejecting them twice.

Luna arrived six minutes early, which felt like a shameful concession to a man she'd known for less than twenty-four hours. She stood beneath the sign studying a hand-painted warning: PLEASE DO NOT KICK THE CHANGE MACHINE. IT IS DOING ITS BEST.

“That's a threatening amount of empathy for a machine,” Asher said behind her.

She turned. He wore dark jeans, a faded overshirt, and the expression of someone very pleased to have caught her smiling at a warning sign.

“I'm assessing the establishment,” she said. “For signs of corruption.”

“And?”

“High risk. The carpet knows too much.”

He held the door open, and an avalanche of beeps, electronic explosions, and children demanding additional money hit them both.

“Still willing?” he asked.

“Depends. Are you going to spend the night explaining how good you are at pinball?”

“Only if you're losing.”

“An ambitious opening statement for someone who hasn't seen the tables.”

Inside, a tiny girl in roller skates sailed past with a handful of prize tickets trailing behind her like a royal train. Luna stepped out of her way. Asher didn't, quite quickly enough; he wound up pressed beside Luna against a machine advertising a racing game from at least twenty years ago.

“Solid footwork,” she observed.

“I like to give the audience a dramatic entrance.”

He was close enough that she could see a small crease at the corner of his mouth when he tried not to laugh. Luna looked away first, toward the coin counter, and was mildly annoyed to discover that she had done so.

They agreed to split the cost of a fistful of tokens. Asher tried to buy an extra roll.

“You're not financing my athletic career,” Luna informed him.

“I'm investing in a promising prospect.”

“You haven't seen my record.”

“Exactly. Potential's infinite.”

Their first game was an ancient pinball table called METEOR RAID, its painted spaceship missing half a wing. Asher chose it because he liked the artwork. Luna chose it because someone had taped a handwritten note beneath the glass reading LEFT FLIPPER HAS PERSONAL ISSUES.

“That's relatable,” she said.

Asher went first. For someone who'd called himself an occasional music professional, he possessed an irritatingly precise sense of timing. He caught the ball, waited, then sent it skittering through a bank of targets with two sharp movements of his fingers.

Luna leaned closer to the scoreboard. “Are you sure you're not a professional criminal?”

“I have a very respectable relationship with flashing lights.”

“Concerning answer.”

He grinned, and in the fraction of a second he spent looking at her, the ball slipped between the flippers.

“Oh,” Luna said. “I think I've discovered the weakness.”

“Don't abuse it.”

She folded her hands sweetly. “Never.”

On his next turn she leaned against the cabinet and asked, “Do you always talk this much when you're nervous?”

He missed a shot so badly the ball ricocheted off the wrong bumper.

“That's deeply unethical,” he said.

“Data collection.”

“And what does your data say?”

“That you can absolutely be distracted.”

“I've only known you a day, Luna. It would be arrogant to pretend otherwise.”

That answer caught her off guard enough that she lost her own first ball almost immediately. Asher stepped back, laughing, while she stared at the machine as if it had betrayed a professional confidence.

“It's contagious,” he said.

“Don't flatter yourself. The flipper has issues.”

By the end of their third game they were one point apart and arguing over whether Luna's elbow on the cabinet constituted a legitimate strategy. She insisted it did. Asher argued that if moving furniture counted as skill, the building's maintenance staff were world champions.

They moved to skee-ball for the deciding round, each choosing one game for a combined score. The prize would go to whoever scored fewer points, on the principle that excellence should carry a cost.

“Your rules are monstrous,” Asher said.

“Good. You agreed before reading them.”

Asher won by twenty points. Luna demanded a recount; the machine did not appear open to an appeal. They carried their tickets to the prize counter, where a sleepy teenager offered them a choice between a rubber spider, a kazoo, and an alarming plush pigeon wearing a silver astronaut helmet.

The pigeon had one eyebrow higher than the other, giving it the look of a customs officer who'd discovered undeclared cheese.

“That,” Luna said at once.

“Absolutely not,” Asher said.

“The rules say the loser gets the prize.”

“The rules weren't meant to endanger the public.”

She took the pigeon and held it between them. “He needs a name.”

“Chairman Screech.”

“Cruel.”

“Admiral Screech?”

“I'm not giving him command of anything.”

Asher studied the crooked helmet. “Then he's an astronaut with a deeply questionable mission.”

“Ambassador,” Luna decided. “He's here to negotiate peace.”

“Between whom?”

“Me and your ego.”

He bowed slightly to the stuffed bird. “I wish you luck, Ambassador. She's a difficult government.”

They took the Ambassador to a diner a few doors down, where Luna placed him in the empty seat between the napkin dispenser and a chipped sugar bowl. The waitress didn't comment. Clearly, the establishment had seen worse dates.

Over fries and two sandwiches, the games gave way to ordinary questions. Luna told him about being ten and labeling the kitchen shelves like museum exhibits until her father started charging admission in buttons. She'd thought he'd been mocking her until she found the buttons carefully saved in a jar years later.

“Do you still do that?” Asher asked.

“Charge admission? No. Label things? Sometimes.” She dipped a fry in ketchup. “People throw away proof they were here. Ticket stubs, photographs with dates on the back, notes nobody thinks are important. At the library I get to persuade them to keep some of it.”

He didn't immediately make a joke. “And what do you keep?”

“Every terrible drawing a kid ever gave me. They're in a box under my bed.”

“That's an expensive amount of sentimentality.”

“It's free until I need a larger apartment.”

He admitted that his mother kept a tin of broken watch parts because she believed something from every one of them could be useful again. He'd inherited the habit of keeping scraps: bits of paper, phrases he overheard, sounds that caught his attention at inconvenient moments.

“Music scraps?” Luna asked.

“Mostly.”

“Do you enjoy the work, or are you one of those people who claims to love the thing while visibly hating every minute?”

“I love it,” he said. “I don't always know when to stop.”

“That's different.”

“Not always to the people waiting on me.” He picked up his water glass, then set it down. “My schedule can get ugly. I should probably say that before you decide I'm secretly an excellent planner.”

“Too late. You chose an arcade with a broken flipper. I've seen the evidence.”

“Fair.”

Her phone lit beside the Ambassador: another notification about VESPER's new record. Luna turned it face down. She caught Asher noticing, and nearly explained her extremely extensive history of behaving like an unsupervised fool about one masked singer.

Instead she asked, “What's a tiny thing that drives you insane?”

“People who say they're listening while typing an entirely different message.”

“Ouch. Specific.”

“You?”

“When someone calls my work babysitting.”

He nodded once. “I'll remember that.”

“You'd better. I have access to children's scissors.”

The waitress brought the bill. Luna insisted they split it; Asher offered no speech about gentlemanly duty, just handed her the pen when the receipt arrived. She liked that more than she wanted to.

At the door, he reached back for the Ambassador, rescuing it from the diner seat. He tucked it beneath one arm with the solemn care of a diplomatic escort.

“Walk you back toward the arcade?” he asked.

Luna looked at the ridiculous pigeon, then at him. “Only if you let me carry my own government official.”

He handed it over. Their fingers brushed around its soft, ridiculous helmet, and neither spoke for a moment.

Then she nudged the door open with her shoulder, stepping into the cooling evening air. He followed, still smiling. Their first date had produced a handful of stories, several insults, and a stuffed witness. What it hadn't produced, she realized, was a reason to wish the evening were over.