What Game Will You Play

Chapter 31

(Edited)

The voices in my head are getting too loud, and they are not helping me calm down.

"Can you talk to me again? I think that helps," I tell Aiden when it starts becoming hard for me to breathe.

It takes a second for Aiden to start talking, "I was fifteen when I met Theon. We became friends almost instantly," Aiden lets out a little laugh. "I remember sitting at lunch one day in school, and all of a sudden, I got hit in the face with an apple. It hit me so hard it broke my jaw."

Aiden stops talking as the sound of footsteps approaches. He continues again after the sound fades. "He did not mean to hit me in the face, nonetheless, break my jaw, but he was fooling around with some of his friends, and I got caught in the crossfire. He kept apologizing to me long after I had forgiven him and told him to stop saying sorry. After that, though, we became best friends and hung out almost every day together."

"He didn't grow any less stupid as we got older," Aiden continues, "When we were seventeen, he tried to steal a bag of blueberries from our local store just to see if he could get away with it. He didn't. He thought that he could hide it in his pocket and no one would ask questions, but the blueberries stuck out, and the salesperson looked at him as if she knew, which she did, of course, since it was very obvious. Theon panicked and tried making a run for it. The second he ran out the door, he slipped on black ice, and he was caught instantly."

I try to picture it in my head as he is telling me this story, and the more I think about it, the funnier it is becoming.

"Wait, it gets better. I helped him up, and the salesperson told him that if he gave back what he had taken, then she wouldn't get him in trouble. When Theon went to take the berries out of his pocket, they were mostly smushed, and I guess Theon didn't know what to do at that point, so he scraped up as much of the berries as he could out of his pocket and handed it to the salesperson who looked at him with the most disgusted and shocked face. I swear it was one of the funniest things I have ever seen him do."

I have to fight to muffle the sound of my laughing. When I can catch my breath again, I ask him what happened next.

"So because Theon technically gave them back the blueberries, they had to let him go, so we left afterward, but each time we went into that same store after that, one of the salespeople had to follow him around. Luckily, he did it at one of the stores at the other end of town, so we didn't really need to visit it frequently unless it had something that the other stores didn't have, like salt," Aiden says.

"I don't understand it, but salt was so hard to get. Do you guys have that problem here?" Aiden asks.

"No, I never had trouble getting salt. It must be a Tundris thing," I tell him. "We have a problem getting things like fruit, but at least we can grow our own here when the weather is right."

Aiden turns his body more to face me better before speaking again. "We had a fruit problem, too, but it was always too cold to grow our own. We could grow apples, cherries, and peaches, though, which was nice, but that was about it."

"We did always have an abundance of acorns, though, so if you ever need those, then I know where to go. They were always around. If they were not falling on your head, then you were probably slipping on them," Aiden says.

I laugh at that, "What do you do with all of them?"

Aiden thinks for a second before responding. "Well, we had some people go around gathering them, and they would be turned into things like flour, or some people would bake and eat them or use them in decorations."

"Well, at least you were able to turn them into something instead of getting beaten up by acorns all day. Too bad you couldn't use them against the guards when they came."