KAT
ON MONDAY AT LUNCH, MEG APPEARS OUT OF NOWHERE AND FALLS INTO stride beside me as I head to my locker. “You going to the caf?” she asks.
I wasn’t planning on going to the cafeteria. I was going to spend my lunch in the library, playing LotS. But here’s the thing: food isn’t allowed in the library. Which means I’d have to scarf down bites of my sandwich in the hallway and hope I didn’t stand out as that freak girl who eats like a friendless, famished hobo.
But here’s the other thing: Meg didn’t explicitly ask to eat with me. She might just be making small talk. Or she might just want to walk together, and then once we step inside the door, she’ll wave a cheery good-bye, leaving me standing alone on a cliff, staring at not just a pack of wolves, but the entire extended-family reunion. A horde. And no bow or arrows anywhere in sight.
“I’m thinking about it.” It’s the most ambiguous, noncommittal answer I can conjure up.
“Great. You getting your lunch from your locker? I have to grab mine. What’s your locker number? I can meet you there in a minute.”
That’s a lot of work to go to just to walk with someone and then ditch them. One cantaloupe . . . two be brave . . .
“It’s five ninety-two.”
“By the science labs? Got it. See you in a jiff.”
I don’t particularly like this plan—waiting alone in the hallway for an indeterminate amount of time like some hopeful, jilted loser—but she scurries off before I can suggest we meet at her locker instead. I needn’t have worried, though. I’ve barely lined my textbooks up on the top shelf before Meg is back, panting over my shoulder.
“Did you run?”
“I—uh—” She breaks off awkwardly, and when I look at her, her mouth hangs open a bit—though whether from trying to catch her breath or something else, I can’t tell. “Is that weird?” The question is part challenge, part worry. Part brave gladiator, part scared child.
All those glinting wolf eyes would have leered at her as she went flailing by. Yes, it’s weird. But also brave. “No,” I say. “It’s not.”
“I’m trying to be more normal,” she says. Maybe I should adopt that as my life mantra.
I needn’t have worried about the cafeteria either. Meg plops down at the nearest empty table and starts gabbing away to me about the livestream, reliving all the funniest moments, before I’m even sitting. Her chatter lasts through every slow-chewed bite of my sandwich and at least partway through my apple, and it’s distracting enough that it makes this whole sitting-in-the-cafeteria thing okay. Or mostly okay. Okay enough that I can handle it.
As I start on the baby carrots, though, her voice fades away, and I look up to see her surveying the room.
I follow her gaze around the place—the lunch line, the back windows, the throngs of people filling the cafeteria’s long tables. Nowhere in particular, it seems.
“Hey, do you know that guy over there? I keep seeing him around. The way he clenches his jaw when he’s thinking reminds me of Legs.” Her voice is airy, as if she’s trying to whisper but forgot to turn down the volume knob.
“Which one?” There are at least a hundred guys in here.
“Over there. Floppy brown hair, red shirt. White, but kind of tan. Boxers usually showing, though you can’t see that from here.”
That doesn’t help at all, but considering that I know the names of approximately two people in this entire school, the chances are that I don’t know him. So many people, and I don’t know any of them. I shake my head.
“I call him Boxer Boy. Because of the boxers thing. I mean, not to his face. I don’t actually know him. I think he’s a grade above us. But he’s got a jawline just like LumberLegs, so I bet he’s as hilarious as Legs. Well, no one’s as hilarious as Legs, but I bet he’s close. If I can’t marry Legs, Boxer Boy would definitely do.”
I scan the room again, searching for red shirts. Literal red shirts, not Star Trek crew members destined to die. There are so many people. So many annoyances attacking my brain. The prattling strangers, the fluorescent lights, the ever-present aroma of nacho cheese. One disco ball . . . two migraine . . . three stampede . . .
I was wrong; I can’t handle this. “Want to go to the library to work on our science project?” I ask, a little too abruptly.
Her head snaps back to me. “Oh hell no! Are you kidding me? It’s like a cardinal sin to do homework at lunchtime. The only homework I’ll do at lunchtime is history, and that’s not really homework, it’s just reading random books about epic and weird stuff.”
“Well, when are we supposed to do it then? We still need a topic.”
“You can come over to my house this weekend. You said yourself that we have lots of time.”
I’ve never said that—she’s the one who repeated it as she settled into our home like she owned it—but the bustle of the cafeteria and the daunting thought of going to Meg’s unfamiliar house and the smell of that plastic cheese are all too loud and jumbled in my head to say that. Four unexplored territory . . . five fluorescent lights . . . six science project . . .
“Fine. Any chance you want to get out of here and go for a walk then?”
“Yes!” she practically shouts, and leaps to her feet, then sits right back down again. “Sorry, it’s just—no one ever wants to go for a walk at lunch. They just sit around blabbing on and on.”
I don’t bother pointing out the irony in her statement. “Well, let’s go then,” I say, rising. I gather the remains of my lunch. I should finish the baby carrots to prevent heart disease and eyesight deterioration, but sometimes I chew and chew and chew carrots to mulch in my mouth and still can’t figure out how to swallow them. I head toward the door, and Meg scurries after me and snatches the bag of carrots out of my hand. She pops one into her mouth like a gumdrop. “Don’t choke on that,” I warn her. “I don’t know the Heimlich.”
“Can’t I just throw myself over a chair or something?”
Okay, I lied—I do know the Heimlich, at least in theory. But we’re almost out of this noisy place, and I’m not stopping to explain.
I shrug and Meg pops another carrot in her mouth as we make it out the door.
We spend the rest of the lunch hour wandering about the school yard, walking laps around the football field and parking lot. Or at least, I walk. Meg’s walk is more of a saunter—sometimes forward, sometimes backward facing me, sometimes almost skipping around me like those whirling green shells in MarioKart.
It’s admittedly not the worst way to spend lunch. Better than being in the caf. Maybe tomorrow I’ll eat my lunch outside before going to the library to play LotS.
But at the end of lunch, Meg walks with me to my locker, then says, “See you tomorrow! Same time, same space! No, place. You know what I mean.” Then she’s off running down the hall.
So . . . I guess this is a thing now. Which shouldn’t make me smile, but for some reason it does.
LEGENDS OF THE STONE
[]Sythlight has entered the waterlands.
KittyKat: I like your new cloak
[]Sythlight: Thanks. I designed it myself.
KittyKat: really? how?
[]Sythlight: You can upload your own textures to the online profile. Not many people do it because it’s uber complex.
KittyKat: well it looks amazing. I <3 the black hood.
[]Sythlight: Thanks. I did one with a red hood too . . . couldn’t decide which looked better. Want to give me your opinion? www.blog.sythlight.com/art
[]Sythlight: So what do you think?
[]Sythlight has entered the barrenlands.
[]Sythlight: Found another rift.
[]Sythlight: You still there?
KittyKat: sorry, got distracted by all the stuff on your page. this artwork is incredible. I love the painting with the rocks and the darkening sky and the little duckling. it feels lonely. in a good way.
[]Sythlight: Thanks . . . I think. I did up that one for my final project last year.
KittyKat: I love it. what are you working on now?
[]Sythlight: For art class? Nothing. My dad thinks that since I’m a senior, I should be taking all “serious” classes to increase my chances of getting into university.
KittyKat: aren’t your grade ten and eleven classes more important? since they won’t even see this year’s marks until after you’re accepted?
[]Sythlight has entered the waterlands.
[]Sythlight: Don’t tell my dad that. He’ll figure out some way to create a time machine, go back in time, and retroactively remove me from grade ten and eleven art. Then, poof, that painting will disappear into nonexistence.
KittyKat: noooooooooo! not the painting! not nonexistence!
[]Sythlight: lol
[]Sythlight: waterling behind you
KittyKat: thanks
[]Sythlight: So which do you like better?
KittyKat: what?
[]Sythlight: The hoods . . . black or red?
KittyKat: oh right
KittyKat: black
KittyKat: the red is good too, but the black is particularly . . . I don’t know . . . . . . dark?
[]Sythlight: Profound. :P
KittyKat: shut up. I’m not an artist. how am I supposed to know what to say about artwork?
[]Sythlight: You don’t draw or do crafty stuff or anything?
KittyKat: nope, I can barely draw a circle
[]Sythlight: lol. You have other hobbies then?
KittyKat: yes. gaming. duh.
[]Sythlight: Ha ha. Guess we should do some of that, then, eh?
KittyKat: yes. stop distracting me with your airy aristocratic painterly ways. to the rift!
KittyKat has entered the barrenlands.
[]Sythlight: To the rift!
[]Sythlight has entered the barrenlands.
KAT
GRANDDAD’S FAVORITE GAME IS CHESS. WHICH IS A PROBLEM. NOT BECAUSE I don’t know how to play—I do—or because Granddad is beating me—he is, but only barely—but because we shouldn’t really be playing at all. I can hear my mother’s interrogation already.
“So, what did you do to help Granddad clean out his old house this week, darling daughter?”
“Um, well, I let him beat me at chess. To get his morale up, you know?”
“Katherine Putnam Daley,” she’ll say with a sigh, “you’re supposed to be packing and cleaning, not playing chess.” My parents want to get Granddad’s house ready to put on the market, since he lives with us now, but Granddad won’t let anyone work on it unless he’s there to supervise. Somehow I got put on the rotation, so I’m stuck here for the evening in this house whose insides are being stripped away until not even memories can live here. Alone with Granddad in this half-empty shell of a place.
When he asked me to play, I thought of saying, “No, sorry. You sit there and tell me which of your treasured belongings we should throw in the trash so we can sell this house full of a lifetime of memories and you can prepare for your impending death.” Really, what else could I say except, “Okay”?
I glance around Granddad’s tiny living room while he thinks about his next move. The kitchen’s been packed up entirely, leaving only a skeleton, but the living room still looks the same as it did when we visited a couple of years ago. The same as it did every time we drove out to visit before that. A worn, flowered couch. An entire wall of jam-packed bookshelves. A piano that I’ve never seen anyone play. And atop the piano, a framed photo of child-sized Luke and me, dressed in matching red shirts and black pants, sitting in front of a Christmas tree.
That was the year Granddad gave me a doll for Christmas. She had long, dirty-blond hair, just like my own, and she came with not one but three different dresses, and two pairs of shoes. I’ve always loved dolls—tiny, perfect humans who don’t try to talk to me or yell or expect me to be anything I’m not—but she was my favorite. She still sits on a shelf beside my bed.
The best part wasn’t that first Christmas, but every birthday and Christmas for almost a decade, when Granddad gave me outfit after outfit for her. I think the first was a frilly bubble-gum-pink tutu and a sequined top. After opening the gift, I escaped up to my room, where I dressed my doll, then dragged a fluffy pink skirt out of my own closet. In my birthday photo, the two of us—my doll and me—matched.
I sometimes wonder if my mom had a chat with Granddad about gender stereotyping, because after that there was a real mishmash—navy overalls and a jean jacket, a silky black evening dress, doctor’s scrubs with a mini stethoscope, shorts and a soccer jersey.
Luke got something different from Granddad every time—a video game, roller skates, some levitating magnets, a Hardy Boys book—like Granddad’s feelings for him were always changing. My gift from Granddad was always predictable, and always perfect. As I opened each package and carefully smoothed out the outfit inside, I was conscious—in the way that one is conscious that the sun will rise tomorrow—that Granddad loved me best.
I study him now as he considers the chessboard—head poking out of his sweater-vest like a turtle’s out of its shell, eyebrows bushy with almost as much hair as he has left on his head. His jaw rises and falls as if he is chewing a wad of tobacco, though I’m pretty sure his mouth is empty.
When I was younger, I thought the reason I was too scared to talk to Granddad was because I only saw him a couple of times a year. But now I see him every day, and I still never know what to say.
That’s not quite right. I know what I want to say, I just don’t say it. My heart thumps loud enough to drown out the words in my head. I want to ask him about the doll clothes, where he got them, how he came up with the idea, but I don’t. I can’t.
One pink tutu . . . two corduroy jacket . . .
No, that’s enough. I’m being ridiculous.
“Granddad, where did you get all those doll outfits you gave me?” I replay the words in my head. Yes, the sentence was coherent. Yes, the words made sense.
“My friend Margaret,” he replies, looking up at me. “She lived next door. I told her the plan when I bought the doll, and she was excited to help. Measured the doll before I wrapped it up so she could make sure the outfits would fit her. She loved to sew. I’d tell her my idea and we’d go fabric shopping together. Though really, beyond the initial idea for each outfit, I had very little say.” He chuckles hoarsely.
“Why did you stop?” I ask, though I don’t really mean to. I already know the answer. It’s obvious—I got older. Of course he would stop.
That’s not what he says, though. “She died,” he says simply. “A few years ago. Heart attack.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” I shouldn’t have asked. I should have picked up on the past tense. Lived next door. Loved to sew.
He nods and leans over the board, going back to planning his next move.
“What’s it like being so old that friends dying is normal?” I ask, not out loud—only in my head.
“Tiring,” he answers, not out loud or in my head, but in the way his shoulders fold in on themselves like a pleated paper fan. I want to hug him, but I don’t. I can’t.
Maybe I should get Mom to find me a new counselor.
Granddad reaches out and nudges a pawn forward one square. “Your turn.”
I hate doorbells. I mean, I guess they’re useful. But I hate standing on a porch, having just pressed that little white button, unsure whether the bell even rang. Hate having to decide whether it’s better to stand stupidly in the Saturday-afternoon cold and wait or to press it again and risk being that obnoxious jerk who rings the bell over and over because they don’t hear the people inside shouting, “I’m coming, I’m coming!”
I’m about to become that obnoxious jerk when the door is flung open, revealing a tiny bespectacled boy wearing a miniature black suit jacket. Freckles dot his dark-brown skin, and I feel stupid for not realizing until this moment that black people can have freckles.
“Um—oh—I’m here to see Meg,” I tell him. “We have plans. To work on our science project.” You’d think I’d be less awkward with kids than adults, but I’m not. If Meg had been willing to work on our project during lunch hours, we could have avoided this uncomfortableness altogether.
He holds out his hand. “May I take your coat, mam-le-zelle?” His voice is quiet, but so confident that I wonder if I’ve been pronouncing mademoiselle wrong my whole life.
“Um, sure, okay.” I step inside, happy to be out of the wind that tormented me all the way here. Mom and Dad weren’t free to drive me, and I hate the bus. I slide off my brown jacket and set it gently in his hand, releasing it slowly so its weight doesn’t drag him to the ground.
A loud thud announces Meg’s arrival at the bottom of the nearby stairs. “Hi. You got that, Nolan? He likes to play butler.”
“Butler?”
“Yep. Think he saw it in an Archie comic or something. He’s been doing it all week. Keeps his suit jacket by the front door and makes us all call him Jeeves.”
“Oh. Well, thanks, Jeeves.” Nolan grins at me as he reaches on his tiptoes for a hanger. “Is he going to be—”
“He’s fine. Mom normally likes to greet my friends, but she’s got to get a thing to the accountant by Monday or something like that, so she’s glued to her computer downstairs, and I’m pretty sure we’ll get the glare of death if we interrupt her. C’mon, let’s go to my room.”
Meg’s room is like a forgotten museum storeroom, cluttered with knickknacks and piles of books and layers of dust. Since I was about six, Mom has refused to let me have dessert unless my room’s clean. Meg’s mom clearly doesn’t have the same rule. She picks up the lime-green bra lying on her bed and tosses it into the corner before plopping herself down on the patchwork comforter.
A tank on a side table houses a turtle. He rests on a rock, head poking out of the water, eyes open but not moving.
“What’s his name?” I ask.
Meg scrunches up her entire face, as if she can’t quite remember. “Snappy,” she says at last.
“Hi, Snappy,” I coo at the little guy. He still doesn’t move.
A tiny bundle of purple charges into the room and onto Meg’s lap, and Meg kisses her head. Meg’s sister’s hair is a mass of natural, flyaway curls, just like Meg’s. “I still like the cantaloupe idea,” Meg says as she starts braiding the girl’s curls together. “We could throw them off my roof, right here. I go out there sometimes. The sidewalk is right below it, so we could drop them onto that.”
“Who’s going to pay for all the cantaloupes?”
Meg is still midbraid, but the girl on her lap pulls away, thuds to the floor, then skips over to me. She hugs my leg, kisses my jean-covered kneecap, then rushes out of the room with a giggle before I even have time to feel uncomfortable about the tiny stranger who was attached to my leg and now isn’t.
Meg doesn’t even blink. “My mom will buy them,” she says. “She’ll give me anything if I just ask her on the right weekend.”
Right weekend? I’m not sure I want to know. I’m definitely not going to ask. “Okay,” I say instead. “But then who’s going to clean up the mess?”
“We can—” she starts, then pauses. “Okay, point taken. But we have to come up with something, right? We could just tell Mr. Carter we’re doing the cantaloupe and change it later.”
“Maybe we should tell him we’re doing the grass durability one.”
“Ugh, that’s so boring.” She pitches backward onto the bed, sprawling out starfish-style. She has a desk along one wall, with a twirly, orange-cushioned chair and a laptop right there in her own room. And one, two . . . five LumberLegs posters. Five of them. Two of Legs doing speed runs, one of him fighting the filthworms with a boot, one of him beside his barrenlands castle, and one simple one with his character’s head and the words “BE AWESOME” in big bubble letters.
“You have a lot of posters,” I say, because I’m great at stating the obvious.
Meg pushes her shoulders into her mattress in what I think is supposed to be a shrug. “I got them after Stephen-the-Leaver left. He would have made me get just one or two, but screw you, Stephen. You can’t tell me what to do.”
I have no idea what to say to that, so I turn the chair to face her, then perch on the edge. Meg sits up with a start. “Do you play LotS?” she asks. “Like, not just watching Legs’s videos, but actually playing?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
She shakes her head vehemently. “I prefer funny over scary.”
“You find LotS scary? You’re kidding me.” In the short time I’ve known her, I’ve seen Meg dive down multiple flights of stairs, run through the hall without worrying about staring wolf eyes, and attempt to leap—unsuccessfully—onto our front step with her skateboard. I could probably manage that sort of thing in game, but she managed it in real life.
“No, I’m not. I scream every time a wingling attacks.” True, she did squeal when one ambushed LumberLegs during the livestream. But winglings are rare and not that hard to kill.
“You could try a speed run,” I suggest, though I’m not getting my hopes up that she actually will. “You don’t usually have to fight in those.”
“Can I make my own character?” she asks.
“Of course. What else would you do?”
“An excellent question. Okay, let’s do it,” she says, getting to her feet.
“What, now?”
“Of course!” She reaches over my shoulder and taps a button on the laptop to rouse it.
I should object, probably. We’re going to have to decide on a science project eventually. But we still have almost two weeks before it’s due, and I’ve done all the rest of my homework for the weekend, so I can always spend tomorrow afternoon researching more ideas, and what if she changes her mind later? I swivel my chair to face the screen.
Meg must have at least tried to play the game once before, because it’s already downloaded on her laptop, so I just have to update it and it’s ready to go.
When I get to the character creation screen, Meg practically pushes me out of the chair, as if she’s still worried that I wouldn’t let her make her own character for some weird reason. I cede the chair to her, settling on her bed instead.
I start explaining her options—the character classes, the color choices, the starting abilities. “I spent an hour making my elf warrior,” I say. She has pale skin and pink hair and an epic battle scar that stretches all the way from her right eyebrow to her left cheek.
She ignores my comments, goes straight to the skin color menu, and scrolls down to the browns. “Blah,” she says, crinkling her nose.
I’m unsure what she’s upset about until she holds her arm up to the screen, and then I get it. There are three brown options, but none of them really match the rich brown of Meg’s skin—one’s much darker, one’s much lighter, and one’s really more like tanned white skin than brown. “Are games usually like this?” I ask. Meg laughs humorlessly. “This is actually better than usual. Usually the choice is ‘Do I want to play that one black character or not?’”
“That sucks,” I say, which feels wholly inadequate.
“You got that right.” She frowns at the screen for a moment longer, then sits up and scrolls away from the skin color options. “All right,” she says, voice cheery again, as if shaking off systemic racism is something she’s practiced so often that she’s already an expert. “If I can’t make me, let’s go fantasy. Can’t I just—yes, here.” She clicks the randomize button in the bottom right corner over and over, and her character morphs from a blue dragonlord to a brown elf and everything in between. Then she stops abruptly. A squat dwarf knight with purple skin and bright-green hair glares out at us. “Perfect!”
I point toward the screen. “Okay, so if you want to customize—”
“Nah. Look how badass she is!”
She does look pretty fierce. “Well, you should at least—” But she hits the start button before I can suggest she choose a non-randomized starting ability or try out the different cloaks.
I sigh and Meg grins; then we play musical chairs again as I set up the speed run. It’s easier to go onto a public server that has speed runs set up server-side than to download the mod and set it up client-side like I’ve got at home, and Meg is hovering way too close, ready to take over the instant I’ve got a speed run started, so I log her on to one of the popular servers.
Legs has it set up client-side, too, but I’ve seen other You-Tubers go onto this server. Being on it myself feels way more hectic than in their videos, though, with elves and dragonlords and dwarves scurrying past me and the chat log flying by so fast I can’t even read it and walk at the same time.
“You’re too slow. I’ve got this,” Meg says, and I have to leap out of the seat to avoid her sitting down right in my lap. By the time I’ve settled back on the bed, she’s already found the server’s speed-run menu.
“I think they’re divided by—” I break off as she clicks on one in the middle. And then she’s in a speed run. The lava bubbles up around her, and the first platform is just a sprint-jump away. “It’s w for forward,” I say. “Space to jump.”
Her character lunges forward, and she slams the space bar, leaping over the fiery gap. Almost over. Not really over at all. Her dwarf erupts into flames, and the screen reports, “You died,” in case that’s not obvious from the cartoony, charred body the camera pans out to show. Meg jabs the respawn button, and she’s back at the beginning.
“You have to—” I start to say, but she’s already off again. This time she tries to move slower, taps the space bar way too late, and walks right off the platform into the lava.
I laugh. I can’t help it.
“It’s not funny,” she says. She grimaces, and then her shoulders slump. “Apparently I’m crap at this. Like everything.”
I shake my head, and my cheeks flush hot at the words I know I’m about to say. “Epic fail,” I practically whisper, because quoting LumberLegs videos is a thing I usually do only in my head or online, not out loud.
The words hover between us, as if the heavy air has trapped them and refuses to send them on their way. Meg stares at her dwarf’s scorched corpse. I can’t see her face. Maybe I’ve gone too far.
But then she straightens and turns to me with a grin. “Epic fail!” she shouts, in a surprisingly good impression of Legs’s deep announcer voice.
I stifle the idiotic grin that’s trying to push its way onto my face. “Your timer is still running,” I say, pointing at the screen, and she swivels back around. And dies again. I could suggest she switch over to a much easier run, but I don’t. She could pout again, but she doesn’t. Instead, we both giggle.
Many deaths and cries of “epic fail” later, the screen reports her final time—forty-one minutes, eighteen seconds—and my stomach hurts from laughing.
MEG
DESPITE MY PROTESTS THAT NONINTERESTING HOMEWORK SHOULD NEVER BE done at lunchtime, Kat and I banter all week about our science project, as Kat continually insists on some boring grass thing, ignoring all my much flashier—and much better—suggestions. At last, in the middle of Thursday night, a new idea comes to me in a swirl of brilliance. I dream of my speed run. I become my purple dwarf self and try to run it, but I keep missing the final step and plunging into the lava below, and my armor gets heavier and heavier as it gets coated with more and more soot and ash, and when I finally land the jump, my eyes fly open and I know exactly what we should do for our science project. I flick on the light, grab my cell, and tap out a series of texts.
We shld do speed runs in LotS
Use them to test reaction times
Maybe after eating sugar? And before the sugar? And a little while later?
Or maybe coffee?
It’s perfect cuz the computer will time it for us
And we can use the same map every time
An easier one than the one I did
What do u think?
This idea is awesome. Kat can’t possibly shut it down like she did with all my others, which admittedly were nowhere near as good as this one. I cup the phone in my hand, staring at the screen, waiting for it to roar with a response. I’ve got Kat’s ringtone currently set to Chewbacca’s cry from Star Wars.
“Come on, Kat,” I whisper. “Wake up.” I don’t know how she can be sleeping when I’m having an Aristotle-apple moment! Or was it Einstein? Newton? Hercules? It can’t be Hercules, because there was that Disney movie about him and I don’t think there was an apple falling in it. If the apple guy was Canadian, I’d probably know. I should get a book about him, and one about Hercules, too.
I crinkle my nose in disgust at the silent phone, set it on my side table, and flick out the light. In the distance, a car alarm blares. The window by my bed breathes frosty air into the room, like Kenzie’s favorite Disney princess, Elsa, is turning the world to ice. Winter is coming. I wrap the covers tight around my shoulders.
I have just found a comfortable resting place on my lumpy pillow, preparing to drift back into the imaginary land of sleep, when the Wookiee roar comes. I snatch up my phone, counter-arguments ready to fly off my tongue—or out my fingers—then let my battle-ready face dissolve into a grin as I read her text.
I wish I’d thought of that.