NINE TACOS
DOLLY
A real one. Small, handheld, taco on it, made it myself with a glue gun and righteous purpose. You plant a flag when you conquer territory. This is just history. Look it up.
Tatty was already there, leaning against the skee-ball lanes with two fresh cups of tokens, dressed — per my instructions — in something he could lose in.
Black shirt. The tattoos out. The fangirl table would have required medical attention, and I noted, neutrally, for the war ledger, that the arcade’s lighting was doing him a series of unearned favors.
“You brought the flag,” he said.
“I SAID I’d bring a flag.”
“You did.” He handed me a cup of tokens like a man handing over a sword before a duel. “For the record, I’ve never seen anyone follow through on a flag threat.”
“Then you’ve been fighting amateurs.”
Let me tell you about skee-ball.
Skee-ball is a sacred sport of angles and audacity, and I am its unranked, undisputed, self-appointed world champion. I have a technique. The technique is called the Granny Roll of Champions, it is legal in all fifty states, and it involves a two-handed underhand launch, a small hop, and yelling.
“That’s how toddlers bowl,” Tatty observed, around game two.
“THAT’S HOW WINNERS BOWL.” The ball banked off the side rail and dropped into the 40 pocket. I planted one foot on the ball return like a mountaineer. “Forty! FORTY! Photograph this!”
“I’m not photographing that.”
“COWARD.”
He was good, is the infuriating thing. Smooth, easy form, the ball leaving his hand like they’d discussed the route beforehand.
Every one of my shrieking bank-shot miracles, he answered with something quiet and efficient, and by the final frame of the final game we were separated by — I am not making this up, I have witnesses, the witness is an arcade employee named Deshawn who was pretending not to watch — TEN POINTS.
One ball each.
I went first, because queens lead from the front. Granny Roll. Hop. Yell. The ball climbed the ramp, kissed the rail, wobbled on the lip of the 30…
…and dropped in.
“THIRTY!” I spun to face him and planted the flag directly in his cup of remaining tokens. “BEAT THAT, THIEF.”
He needed a 40 to win. He stepped up. And here’s where I have to describe something carefully, because I’ve thought about it since, at night.
His wind-up was perfect. Same easy form as all evening, the form that had been dropping 40s like it was rent. The ball left his hand —
— and went wide. Way wide. It hopped the rail, skipped across two lanes, and landed in someone else’s gutter three lanes down with a sad clonk.
Ten points.
I stared at the ball. I stared at him.
“Choked,” he said, hands in his pockets, face as smooth as a fresh tortilla. “Pressure got me.”
Now.
I have seen this man carry six drinks through a lunch rush without looking down. I have seen him catch a falling salsa cup behind his back while making change. Pressure does not GET this man. Pressure sends this man a holiday card.
I squinted at him. He gazed back with the wide, innocent eyes of a criminal in a hat, and somewhere in my head, the war council reviewed the evidence and reached its official ruling, which is that victory tastes like tacos and truth tastes like nothing, and the crown knows how to pick.
“VICTORY!” I announced, to Deshawn, to the dance machine, to the claw machine full of off-brand ducks. “TEN TACOS! IN THE HAT! WEEPING!”
“Devastated,” said Tatty, who has never looked less devastated in his life.
The rink shares a wall with the arcade, and my blood was up, and one of us — I’m not saying who, the records were destroyed in the fire I will set — suggested we settle DOUBLE OR NOTHING on skates.
I would now like to enter into evidence what I said, verbatim, while renting skates:
“I’ll have you know I am DEVASTATING on wheels.”
I want that on my monument. Carve it deep.
He knelt down in front of my bench — just, down he went, no announcement — took one look at the knot situation developing on my left skate, and confiscated my laces.
“HEY—”
“Your knots are a public hazard.” He was already re-lacing, quick and neat, tongue of the skate straightened, tension checked at every eyelet like this was a pit stop and I was the car. “You had a granny knot on top of a slip knot. That’s not a lacing pattern, that’s a cry for help.”
“It’s a PROPRIETARY SYSTEM—”
“Other foot.”
And I just… gave him the other foot.
I want to be honest with you, because you’ve come this far with me: I gave the enemy of the crown my foot, and he laced my skate like it mattered, double-knotted, tucked the loops, gave the toe a little tap when he was done — tap tap, like sending me off — and something in my chest filed an unauthorized document in triplicate, and I did NOT read it, because we were at WAR and I was about to be DEVASTATING ON WHEELS.
Reader, I was devastating on wheels.
To others.
I made it four feet. My legs went two separate directions with two separate plans, my arms became propellers, and I took down a birthday party’s worth of civilians on my way to the floor — one, two, three, a teenager, a man in a bowling shirt, somebody’s aunt — human dominoes, toppling in a beautiful arc across the hardwood while the disco ball spun on, indifferent, like the ceiling fan of the gods.
From the floor, tangled in strangers, I heard wheels. Smooth ones.
Tatty glided to a stop in front of me — GLIDED, backward, hands loose, like the rink had sponsored him personally — and looked down at the wreckage of my empire with a grin he didn’t even TRY to hide.
“Need a hand, my little taco tornado?”
Taco tornado. TACO TORNADO. Filing that one too — separate cabinet, the one with the lock.
“I’m fine,” I announced from beneath somebody’s aunt.
“You’re fine.”
“I’m regrouping.”
“You’re under a woman.”
“WE’RE REGROUPING.”
He extended a hand anyway, big and steady and patient, and here is where the crown’s tactical brilliance truly shone, because I reached up, took it, established a firm grip —
— and yanked him down with everything I had.
He came down like scaffolding. Long limbs everywhere, a full octopus deployment, WHUMP, flat on the hardwood beside me, and the birthday party CHEERED, and the disco ball threw stupid little lights over both of us, and I rolled onto my back and howled.
“HA! HA HA! VICTORY! THE QUEEN TAKES THE RINK!”
“You—” he was laughing too hard to finish, that big warm rumbling thing, both of us flat on our backs in a debris field of strangers, wheezing at the ceiling like two people who’d been struck by the same very specific lightning — “you shook my HAND at the restaurant. We had TERMS.”
“TERMS ARE FOR LAND WARS. THIS IS THE SEA NOW.”
“It’s a ROLLER RINK—”
“THE WOODEN SEA.”
And we lay there until our sides hurt, until somebody’s aunt crawled clear, until Deshawn’s rink-side counterpart made an announcement pointedly about “keeping the floor moving,” and I looked over at him — flushed, wrecked, grinning at the disco ball like it owed him money — and had a thought that I immediately classified at the highest level:
Losing might not be the worst thing in the world.
As long as it’s to me. Obviously. He was the one losing. Twenty tacos now, double or nothing, sea rules — the accounting was complicated but the crown’s auditors would sort it out.
“Twenty tacos,” I said, to the ceiling.
“Twenty tacos,” he agreed, to the ceiling.
“In the hat.”
“In the hat.”
“Weeping.”
“We’ll see what the night produces.”
We turned in our skates — he untied mine, tap tap, unauthorized, unstopped — and stepped out into the evening, and my feet turned toward Twisty Tacos without being asked, the way compass needles do, and he fell in beside me like he’d been issued there.
Best military engagement of my year. Possibly my life.
Filed under: single combat, decisive victory, nothing else to report.
The cabinet with the lock was getting full. I’d deal with it never.