The Truth About Giuseppe

The Backstory

This all started when I was in sixth grade.

My squad consisted of people I will call (for confidentiality purposes) Haglet, Herman, Hamilton, and Granny Smith, all of whom are girls. Haglet and Granny Smith don't really like each other, but they're forced to tolerate the other. At lunch, we all sat at one of the round tables in the cafeteria, and had a grand old time, despite not being the popular kids. We weren't bullied, as this was a fairly strict private school, but people didn't swarm around us at all points, which made us low-key enough to experience this storm in peace.

Now, in every grade there are bound to be those birthday parties where everyone is invited, whether that's out of a desire for as many presents as possible, or a request from the parents, and I was invited to one of those. It was held at a bowling place with an adjacent arcade in which we got to play after the bowling and meal were finished.

The birthday girl's dad gave us each some tokens to use in the arcade. I floated around, trying out a few games, until my token stash was depleted, at which point I floated around some more, watching people play. I was chilling with those third tier friends (the friends you don't really like but pretend to like), as I didn't know where the rest of my squad was, and this lasted until the birthday party ended.

Haglet and I, living almost in the same neighborhood, carpool lots of places together: school, swim meets, everywhere that we would go together. Naturally, we rode home together, and Haglet was telling me about how she and Granny Smith finally put aside their differences, and played a game together. They found that their only common interest was playing the game where you throw balls at clown stand-ups in the hopes that you can knock them down, and that they wanted to design a clown game of their own.

And that is where things went downhill.