All the Missing Pieces (UNDER REVISION)

Six

           It's four o'clock and James O'Connor is sitting on my sofa. His feet are hanging over the arm, gently hitting the side, and his head is on a pillow about a foot away from where I sit, but I'm too busy kicking ass at Mario Kart to notice. "Come on, come on, come on, yeah!" I let out a triumphant shout, pulling into the finish line .058 seconds before Luigi, that bitch. "How have you never played this before?" I inquire, "This is literally the paramount of all video games." James merely rolls his eyes. "Come on," I insist, "You've gotta try." I offer him the controller.
"Nah, I'm good."
"Would you do it for a Scooby Snack?" He cracks a smile. I've been bullying him since lunch about his Mystery Machine shirt. "It's vintage," He argued. "It's lame," I declared. "Oh my god, you're unbelievable," he says, pulling himself upright, "Fine, fine. Whatever." He reluctantly takes the controller from my hand and starts the next race. "I'm gonna warn you though, when I say I've never played before, I mean I have never touched a Wii in my life."
"That's just sad." He rolls his eyes again and crosses his legs on the sofa. The TV counts down 3, 2, 1, beeeeep! James hits the gas button too soon and false starts.

            As fate would have it, James sucks at Mario Kart. He comes in ninth place. "Happy now?" He says, shoving the controller back into my hand. I shake my head. "Do you want food or something? We've got, like, Wheat Thins and cheese, probably."
"I was promised Scooby Snacks," he says. "Alright, Wheat Thins and cheese it is." He rolls his eyes again and follows me into the kitchen.

           At the moment, James and I are the only occupants of our humble residence. My parents are still working, and Casey is at a movie with some of her friends from school. I grab a box of Wheat Thins from the pantry, a small broom closet with no door. In the place of said nonexistent door, there is a giant Costa Rican flag fluttering down in its place. It's probably disrespectful to walk through a curtain made of your home country's flag, but who cares? Certainly not my dad. Every opportunity he has to "Costa Ricanize" something he seized with no second-guessing. "Este país," He'd said, "¡Ellos no quieren que mantengamos nuestra cultura! ¡Necesitamos rebelarnos!" And apparently his idea of 'rebel' was 'hang a Costa Rican flag in front of the pantry'.

            "Can you grab a plate? They're in the cabinet to the left of the sink." I call out to James. He nods as I return from the pantry, and head to the fridge to look for cheese. James looks over my shoulder into the void also known as our fridge. It's a seemingly never ending stockpile of food that we, surprisingly enough, always consume before the expiration date. "Dude, your fridge looks like a hurricane went through it," James notes. "Hurricane Karina? More like Hurricane Tortilla." I say. James glares at me and sighs. "You're ridiculous. I can't believe you're quoting vine. He rubs the back of his neck. Why do you need so much food anyways?"
"If there isn't constantly a mass of food we would all starve to death. My mom stress cooks and the rest of us stress eat. You should come around for Sunday dinner sometime. Family dinner night is probably a bigger disaster than you can imagine. Between the four of us, it takes forty minutes to clean the kitchen."
"That's nice."
"It can be kind of annoying though, 'cause I always put off my homework until Sunday night."
"I mean, my dad and I never eat together. Or, like, talk." I shrug. "Grass is greener on the other side." He nods in agreement.

            Once I find the cheese, James and I bring the plate of snacks to my room. It's sort of a weird thought, James coming into my room. My parents really don't really care about that kind of stuff. They're pretty chill as far as parents go, and they're not super huge on the 'no one you would screw in your room' rule, but nonetheless, it seems unnatural for James to be sitting in the wooden rocking chair next to my closet. "You have a lot of baseball stuff," he observes. I forgot that he'd never actually been in my room before. The last time he came over we just watched movies. Or, well, he watched movies. I watched him. Is that creepy? Ugh.