What If It's Us

by Becky Albertalli

  Arthur scans the room. “Claw machine?”

  “Amateur move, Arthur. If you win something early, then you have to carry it around all night. Let’s go race motorcycles.”

  We head over. Arthur looks even more compact on a motorcycle. His feet hover above the platform when they’re not resting on the pedals. We choose the same track and rev up. I’m really focused because I always play to win.

  “I’m so mad because I’d just gotten my license back home when we came up here, and now it’s pointless,” Arthur says. “It’s all trains and buses and Citi Bikes. Maybe I’ll rent a motorcycle.”

  Arthur is in last place and going the opposite direction. He should not rent a motorcycle.

  I want to ask him more about Georgia, but I’m in third place right now and have to get ahead.

  The game ends.

  “You got second place!” Arthur says. “Congrats.”

  “Second place sucks.”

  “Oh, you’re one of those. Second place is the first loser, right?”

  “Sort of. A couple years ago my mother almost won the lottery. She was off by two numbers.” I get off the motorcycle. Not going to tell him how big that jackpot would’ve been for my family. “We were first losers.”

  “What would you have done if you won the money?”

  Moved into a bigger apartment. Bought a car because yeah, the trains and buses are fine, but if we had our own car, we could take trips outside the city where the trains and buses don’t go. Get one of those memory foam beds. “Buy every gaming console.” Admitting practical needs isn’t first-date talk. “And maybe brave my first flight ever so I can go to that Harry Potter park in Florida.”

  “I’ve never been either! Maybe we can go one day,” Arthur says. He’s beaming, like a first date automatically equals a couple’s trip to Universal Studios. Definitely jumping ahead a bit. “You need a new wand anyway.”

  “What?”

  “The wand in that box you were returning to your boyfriend.”

  The box still sitting in my bedroom. “Yeah. Exactly.” I lead the way to a Pop-A-Shot. “Have you made any friends here yet?”

  “These girls at my internship, Namrata and Juliet,” Arthur says. “They were rooting for me to try and find you. They had suggested Craigslist, but my mom wasn’t having it.”

  I stop. “You talking about missed connections?”

  “Yeah! You know it?” Arthur reaches out and touches my shoulder. “Wait. Did you put up a listing for me?”

  “Oh. Um. No,” I say. I wish I had lied to spare us from all this blushing. “But my dad had mentioned it, and I checked to see if you were looking for me too.”

  Arthur is smiling. “I didn’t know you were looking for me. At all.”

  “Well yeah.” I run my hands through my hair as I move toward the hoops again. “So . . . motorcycles weren’t your speed, but maybe basketball? You just got to get the basketball in the hoop as many times as possible in one minute.”

  He nods, but I’m not sure he’s actually heard me. I probably only need one guess to know what he’s thinking: we were looking for each other. He went to greater lengths, but hearing I wanted to find him too? Well, we all love having our feelings reciprocated.

  We play against each other plus some random kid being shadowed by his dad. Making two notes to myself right now: 1) Don’t talk shit when I beat Arthur and the kid. 2) Don’t call “bullshit” if Arthur or the kid wins.

  The timer starts and I’m doing okay, six shots in ten seconds. The kid is keeping up though. Twenty seconds in and Arthur scores his first shot.

  “YES!” He turns to me. “King of the world!”

  “You’re wasting time,” I say. He has no chance of catching up, but he can try harder. Or at least stop distracting me. I. Play. To. Win.

  Arthur keeps at it until his basketball bounces out of the booth, and he chases it like a bull wrangler.

  Time’s up.

  23 to 1 to 25.

  “That’s bull—” I don’t give props to the kid because he’s laughing at me. Maybe an arcade wasn’t such a great idea for a first date. My sore-loser side is more third-date material, maybe fourth.

  Arthur returns with his basketball. Shoots it. Misses.

  Hudson was a better opponent. He would’ve also schooled that kid.

  I pop some Skittles.

  “Want to play air hockey?” Arthur asks. “I promise you’ll come in first.”

  Or I’ll end up in the hospital when Arthur sends a rogue striker my way.

  “Let’s do the claw machine,” I say. “But we’ll make it interesting.”

  He follows me into the corner. We’re not playing for any stuffed Pokémon, screw that.

  “Interesting? Like strip poker interesting? I hope I’m wearing the right underwear for this,” Arthur says.

  “Do you have wrong underwear, in general?”

  “We all have our laundry-day underwear,” Arthur says.

  “Truth. Well, your pants are staying on for this challenge.” There’s a claw machine for jewelry. Pretty necklaces, ugly bracelets, fake diamond rings, and so on. “Whatever we win, the other one has to wear. Game?”

  “Game!”

  “I’ll go first,” I say. Might help him to see someone else play. “That jeweled necklace in the corner will go nicely with your eyes.” I get moving with the claw, holding my hand on the lever while peeking around the case—this is good. I press the button and the claw reaches down, expands, hits the case, and is thrown off completely. It returns with nothing. “This is not my day.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Good chance you’ll have a wonderful accessory in the next minute or so.”

  “Good chance?”

  Arthur points at a necklace with a bejeweled peace sign the size of my iPhone. He gets the claw going and surveys the case from all angles—crouches, tiptoes, shifts left, shifts right, adjusts the claw, rinse and repeat—and hits the button. The claw scoops up the necklace and deposits it.

  Arthur retrieves the necklace and smiles. “You won a necklace!”

  “Did you just hustle me?”

  He’s laughing—impish, alien hustler. “You chose the game.”

  “That’s what makes it such a brilliant hustle. I mean, you can’t even get a basketball in a big-ass hoop, but you can grab a tiny necklace with a claw?”

  “I have a very particular set of skills,” Arthur says, quoting Taken, which gets him a dozen cool points. “I’m sort of a god when it comes to claw machines.” He closes the space between us, staring at the floor before looking at me and holding up the necklace. “Okay. Peace time.”

  He’s close to my face and I think about how kissing him will be awkward. Not this second, though that would be awkward too. Way too early. Talking about the height difference. Hudson and I were on an even playing field, and Arthur is not at my level. That sounds bad. And I hate that I think about this, but I do. I can’t help it if height is important for me. The way other people refuse to date someone who plays in a band or someone whose geekiness is so strong they can name all of the original one hundred and fifty Pokémon.

  Arthur puts the necklace on me and his knuckles brush against my skin. He looks like he wants to kiss me. I can’t see him making the first move. Not like at the post office.

  “How do I look?” I ask.

  “Like someone who wants gay peace on earth,” Arthur says. “And whose breath smells like the wrong green Skittles.”

  “Like sexy Skittles?”

  “Like sexy Skittles,” Arthur says. His shoulders straighten. His neck cranes.

  “Let’s grab a drink,” I say.

  We go to the bar. I get water and Arthur gets a Coke. I’m a little hungry, but I don’t want to make this a dinner date because I get uncomfortable eating across from people. Not friends. I can watch Dylan talk with his mouth full for a disturbingly long amount of time. But with Hudson, we only ate at places where we didn’t have to sit across from each other, like counters at
pizzerias and in our bedrooms while watching movies. It’s this strangling fear that we’ll be sitting there and we’ll run out of something to say and I’ll be able to witness the exact moment someone falls out of love with me because I don’t have enough substance to keep a conversation alive over a meal. Why would you want to talk to me for the rest of your life?

  Our drinks arrive. “I got this,” Arthur says. He pulls out his wallet and hands the bartender some cash. “I have that high-powered law firm intern money.”

  “Thanks.”

  We cross the arcade floor to the windows. Arthur is staring outside at Times Square like he wants to be out there getting an exaggerated portrait drawn for thirty dollars, finding his name on one of those license plate magnets, catching a musical, running into a celebrity, or standing around the sidewalk until he sees himself appear on one of those jumbotrons.

  Arthur catches me staring at him. “Oh. I’m being an obvious New York noob.”

  “You are. It’s cute. You still have that tourist glow. I can’t remember what it’s like to be wowed by Times Square. Or anything in New York.”

  “What! Let me mansplain your city to you.” Arthur spills a little of his soda and rubs the rug dry with his sneaker. He recovers and keeps his cool. “You can order food at, like, any time. And if you can’t order it, you can find it. These streets will still be busy at two in the morning. Movies are filmed in Georgia all the time, but they’re not always about Georgia. Movies are made about New York. I could go on.”

  “I’m sure you can. You miss Georgia?”

  He shrugs. “Yeah, I miss my best friends, Jessie and Ethan. And my house. The guest room we have at home is bigger than my uncle Milton’s bedrooms.”

  “That’s the New York way,” I say. It’s sad thinking about how if we picked up our lives and left behind extended family, ass-smacking Dylan, and late-night food-delivery services, I could live in a big house. “You excited to go back?”

  “Not thinking about that right now. I’m just basking in that New York magic.” He points at me, himself, and me again. “The city made this happen.”

  I nod. “Good call.” I look around at the other games. There’s the roulette for tickets, where I once spent a lot of credits only for someone to come up right after me and immediately win five hundred tickets. There’s Just Dance, which Dylan usually wins, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Arthur has moves. Mario Kart racing is always fun. “Are you a scary movie fan?”

  “I don’t totally hate them.”

  “So yes.”

  “Sure.”

  “Great.”

  We go into this booth for Dark Escape 4D. It’s a really immersive game that plays on people’s fears. The seats vibrate, air blows at your face, the surround sound makes you feel like a madman with a knife is creeping up on you, and there’s a panic sensor to track your heart rate so you can see who was the most scared.

  “What do we have to do to win?” Arthur asks. “Is it who can outlive the other?”

  “It’s a team game. We have to survive together.” I put on the 3D glasses as we look over the stages: Prison for those scared of the dead, Death Chamber for those scared of the dark, Cabin for those scared of pursuit in tight spaces, Laboratory for those scared of vermin.

  “Is there an option for a large green field with butterflies chasing us?” Arthur asks.

  “Maybe in the next edition. But the butterflies will probably be bats. And the green field will probably be a cave.”

  “So not what I said at all. Got it.” Arthur puts on his 3D glasses and grabs the blaster with a tight grip. “Let’s kill some escaped zombie convicts.”

  The game starts off fairly creepy. The prison is only lit with a swinging lightbulb as our characters drag their feet into the darkness. A cell door creaks open, but it’s just the wind—no, no, fuck, no, it’s not just the wind, it’s an old man with half a face.

  “Why is he in prison?!” Arthur yells.

  “I don’t know!” I yell back.

  “Death sentence him! Death sentence him!”

  We shoot up the grandpa zombie—and wake up the entire prison and walking dead. One lunges at us in 3D and tries to choke me and Arthur blasts him to death. I shift closer to Arthur, like I once did with Hudson. Our legs are now touching and he scoots closer too. The vibrations of every step as the zombie convicts charge toward us has my heart racing.

  “How are you—ah! Shit, he’s eating my arm—doing?” I ask.

  “Scared. But could be worse.”

  “What would be the scariest thing that can pop up on that screen? That fucker in the corner?”

  We see a zombie in the corner eating a guard’s decapitated head like it’s roasted chicken. “Him too. And I don’t know. Maybe my parents getting divorced?”

  “Oh. Is that . . . happening?”

  “I think so. I don’t know, they’re just—zombie on your right!”

  I let go of the blaster and push my 3D glasses to the top of my head. The zombies have their way with my character. “Want to talk about it?” It’s weird to picture anything bad happening in Arthur’s life. He’s a “high-powered intern” at sixteen, just relocated to New York, seems really smart. I guess no one’s life is perfect. Even those who seem to have it all.

  Arthur pauses. “Okay, new scariest thing. Ethan hitting the high note in ‘Music of the Night’ from Phantom.”

  I’ll take that as a no for talking about his parents. “Ethan’s your best friend, right?”

  “Yeah, I think?” Arthur turns to me with his glasses still on. I can’t see his eyes. “Things have changed since I came out. I knew they would, but—I don’t know. I didn’t expect my best friends to exit stage left.”

  “Jessie too?”

  “Oh no, she’s cool. She’s amazing. We’ve always been pretty extra together, and now we’re extra about boys.” He finally removes the 3D glasses. “Can I ask how out you are?”

  “Super out. In freshman year I was sleeping over at Dylan’s and we were watching The Avengers. He went on about how many crimes he would commit if it meant Black Widow would track him down so he could meet her. I talked about hammering Thor and he respected that choice. That was that.” Now that I hear about Ethan sucking in this department, I’m extra grateful for Dylan. “Same deal with my parents. I came out over dinner while Dylan was there, and my dad assumed we were dating. I just thought my parents would make a bigger deal about it. When they didn’t, I was underwhelmed. I thought it was going to be some major event. Balloons, parade, I don’t know.”

  “That’s good though, right?”

  “Yeah, now I’m glad it wasn’t. I wanted it to be normal and it was.”

  “Because it is. You said you’re super out. So everyone knows?”

  “Yeah. I put up an Instagram post on Thanksgiving a couple years ago. Said that I was thankful for all the people in my life who are cool enough to love me as I am. And everyone else could unfriend me online and in real life. I had even checked my follower count before posting.”

  “Mass exodus? Modest exodus?”

  “No exodus,” I say. It’s surprising. I thought people were going to care more than they did.

  “Can I be honest about something?”

  “You are a cartoon porn fanatic, aren’t you?”

  “Well yeah, but . . . I’m not an arcade fanatic. I have failed you.”

  “This explains a lot,” I say.

  “We make a great team though!”

  “No we don’t. We literally lost because we stopped playing midway.”

  “Logistics.”

  We put away the 3D glasses and get out.

  “So no more playing is what you’re telling me,” I say. I still have credits, and they don’t exactly let you get your money back because your date doesn’t like arcades. He really is an alien. “Now what?”

  “I have an idea,” Arthur says. He leads me to the photo booth, puts in five dollars, and takes a seat. “Come on!”

  I don�
�t even get the chance to decide if this is what I want—the photo, this moment with Arthur—but I follow him inside the booth because not doing so is awkward and a waste of five bucks. I sit and all I can think about are the stupid faces Hudson and I made when we were here months ago. But Arthur is not Hudson. And I can’t let Hudson spoil any chance at making new memories in old places. Not just here at Dave & Buster’s, but everywhere in the city. School, parks, you name it. Arthur is his own person. Not a plaything. Not a distraction. I got to do this right.

  “What’s our motivation?” I ask. “We get three shots.”

  “I am not throwing away my shot,” Arthur says. He looks at me expectantly. “Hamilton?”

  “Oh. Right.” People are obsessed with that show. I haven’t heard a single song, but it’s not something I should bring up now.

  “I have so much to teach you, Ben.”

  A timer counts down from three. For the first photo, we wing it. Arthur leans against me and we both smile, super simple. For the second photo Arthur sticks out his tongue and says “Aaaaaah” like a doctor is inspecting his mouth. I do an exaggerated wink. For the third photo Arthur turns to me. My heart is racing because he looks like he wants to kiss, but I’m not there yet. I know this is all really cute, that I’m actually reunited with the boy I met at the post office, but no matter how charming he is, I can’t force myself to kiss him before I’m ready. Before I mean it. We just stare and smile at each other when that last flash goes off.

  We step out of the booth and we each get a reel to keep. We’re actually really cute together.

  “That last photo is something,” Arthur says. “I . . . Never mind.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Arthur stares at his sneakers. “I look way happier than you. It’s cool if you want to call this quits. If you’re still caught up on your ex, I get it. Well, I don’t get it. But I can imagine.”

  “No, I just . . . I had a lot of fun, but I know I wasn’t fully here,” I say. That’s my fault. I brought my date somewhere I used to come with my ex-boyfriend. I also don’t know how much I should really be investing in this since Arthur is just going to leave at the end of the summer anyway.

  We’re both quiet. I really want to see Arthur the way he sees me. It might take time though, and time isn’t really on our side.