Plus, we’d killed nearly an hour and a half in the process.
When the bowling lane we’d requested, the one farthest from the door and away from the bar and the check-in counter, finally came available, we traded our shoes for the well-worn rentals and picked our not-fancy-or-polished balls from the racks against the wall. I bent down and laced my shoes as I watched Simon try to explain to Natty the finer points of knocking pins down with a ten-pound ball.
Her first approach was comical, and her release was less than impressive. She took three awkward steps and launched the ball as hard as she could, which was also entirely too late, resulting in a loud, and totally attention-grabbing, crash against the hardwoods.
She definitely wasn’t a natural.
Nervously I glanced around, but only a few disinterested gazes even drifted our way, and it was clear it wasn’t the first time someone had mishandled a bowling ball in this place.
Her ball rolled listlessly toward the gutter, and as if she’d expected a strike her first go-round, Natty stomped her foot and muttered, “Darn it!” which was probably the equivalent of a swear, coming from Natty.
“Really?” I scoffed, because how could she not have known that thing was headed to the gutter?
She shrugged, and we both sat on our bench and watched as Simon took his turn. He was actually pretty good. A million times better than Natty, and he probably could’ve given some of the leaguers a run for their money.
His first roll wasn’t a strike, but on his second, he bowled a split, sending one of his two remaining pins careening into the other and clearing the lane. Even if he’d done it by accident, he was taking full credit for the maneuver as he strolled back confidently, his chest all puffed up. “Time to see what you can do, Hollingsworth.”
Natty nudged me, reminding me that I was Hollingsworth, and I sprang into action.
I doubt it would surprise anyone to know I was competitive . . . or at least that Kyra Agnew, all-star pitcher, was competitive. There wasn’t a chance in H-E-double hockey sticks I was letting Simon one-up me, not if I could help it. And the fact that I’d grown up in Burlington, Washington, where sometimes the only thing to do on a rainy Saturday afternoon was go to the bowling alley with your parents, probably didn’t hurt any.
I clutched my bowling ball against my chest as I took my first step.
One . . . I took a step and eased my arm down in front of me, letting it fall to my side. Two . . . Another step as I lunged with my left knee and I began the forward arc of the ball. Three . . . I released it, not early, and not late the way Natty had, but just as I reached the line at the top of the lane.
I knew the moment I let it go, though, that I’d done something wrong. I was stunned as I watched the heavy ball barrel down the lane so fast it was a singular black smudge.
It reached the end of the lane and ripped through the pins on the right side, exactly the way it should have. But instead of landing in whatever opening was back there waiting to swallow it and carry it back to the return the way the rest of the balls did, this one just kept going. It hurtled right over the top of the chasm.
The sound that followed was a terrible screeching noise. Not a crash, but almost like metal scraping, or crunching, or collapsing. It was loud and harsh.
I heard Natty gasp, and even without looking, I knew Simon had jumped to his feet behind me.
This time the eyes that turned our way were not disinterested in the least.
They were interested-fascinated-downright stunned. And I couldn’t blame them.
“Kyra?” Even Simon forgot to call me by my fake name as he appeared at my back.
I stammered, “I don’t know . . . I didn’t mean to . . .” How could I make him understand? It was like the time I’d jokingly chucked the softball at Tyler, only it hadn’t been funny when the ball had rocketed toward him rather than lobbing the way I’d meant it to. I’d nearly torn a hole through the backstop that day.
“Crap,” Simon—whose new ID said his name was Barry Pomeroy—whispered as he gripped my shoulder and dragged me stumbling back to where Natty was already frantically stripping off her rental shoes and looking around anxiously. “Take these back and get ours.” He handed his shoes to Natty while I kicked mine off too.
Natty had just gathered all three pairs when the scoreboard over our lane began to flash. Clearly whatever had happened back there, where that god-awful sound had come from, my ball had caused a malfunction of some sort.
Nice. Way to not draw attention.
“It’s fine,” Simon told me while my heart hammered and my gaze slid uneasily around to the other lanes, to where everyone had all but stopped what they were doing, and their watchful stares were pinned to me now. “We’ll just get our things and go. No one’ll ever even know we were here.”
Except he was wrong.
The guy trudging toward us had a look in his eyes that made my heart stutter. And from the way his nostrils were flaring as those eyes locked on us, I knew we were in seriously deep shit. His blue-and-black bowling shirt—the same color-blocked kind the waitress and the guy behind the shoe rental counter had been wearing—strained around his bulging belly with each heavy step he took. But he had an air about him that made it clear: this was the guy in charge.
“You goddamned kids!” he bellowed before he’d even reached us. “Always breakin’ things! Always up to no goddamned good! What’d you do this time?”
Simon stepped forward, but I slipped in front of him, pasting on my most innocent it-wasn’t-my-fault expression. It was a look I generally reserved for crisis situations, and even then only pulled out for those of the male persuasion—I’d used similar looks on my dad, Austin, and on guy teachers and coaches. Women tended to be impervious since most of them kept similar looks of their own for just such an emergency.