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Leo glanced nervously around the noisy, bustling food court. He didn’t like being in crowds, there were too many people, too many opportunities for someone to recognize him and– He shook his head. The mall was the safest bet for him right now. Nobody was going to notice a loner twelve year old kid at the mall. The mall was where weird loner twelve year old kids were supposed to be. Then again, he might be better off finding a new place to camp out. He hadn’t eaten in better than twelve hours and the smell of all the food was making him very hungry. He could go to a department store, maybe? Or a bookstore. He’d seen other kids his age just sitting in the aisles, reading books they were never going to buy. If he was quiet and didn't draw attention to himself he could–
Then, suddenly, the seat across from Leo was filled, and Leo felt his heart start hammering loud and fast in his chest. The guy who had all but flung himself in the chair was obviously older than him, but probably not an adult. Sixteen, maybe? Seventeen? Leo didn’t have much luck when it came to guessing ages. He wasn’t huge, but he was obviously tall, and a thick black leather jacket covered in all sorts of pins and patches hung loose on his shoulders making him look bigger than he was. Leo would have to remember that for future reference. Knowing how to look bigger than he actually was would surely come in handy sooner rather than later. The guy had bright hazel eyes and a crooked grin that looked more like a smirk than anything else, and his hair was bright red, but it was faded and patchy in that way that screamed it was an at-home job done with a shitty box dye you could buy from the grocery store.
Leo narrowed his eyes and pulled the meanest expression he could muster. “What do you want?”
The guy didn’t seem phased in the slightest. In fact, his grin got wider, and he offered Leo a giant soft pretzel. “You want one? I charmed the pants off that old lady at the pretzel stand, and she gave me two.”
Leo cast a glance over at the pretzel stand where a kindly old lady with her silver hair pulled up in a neat bun was selling pretzels. He scowled back at the guy. “Why’re you trynna to give it to me, then? You do something gross to it or something?”
The guy reared back in mock outrage. “What? Do you want me to try and eat both of these things? Think of the sodium. I'd die of high blood pressure before I hit my 20s. Do you really want that on your conscience?”
Leo looked him up and down. “I wouldn’t mind.”
The guy actually tipped his head back and let out a laugh so loud and boisterous it startled Leo. He calmed down after a moment and when he did he put on a smile so charming that Leo suddenly understood why the pretzel lady had given him extra food. “You’re funny, kid. I like you.”
Leo felt his cheeks go warm and his heart fluttered in his chest. “You… think I’m funny?”
“Yeah,” the guy said easily. “Come on don’t tell me no one’s ever told you you’re funny.”
Leo looked down at the table and started rhythmically tapping. “My mamá used to think I was funny.”
“Well, I think you’re a riot,” the guy said firmly. “Now, seriously, do you want this thing or not? Because I look like a dork sitting here holding two pretzels.”
After another moment of hesitation, Leo reached out and took the offering. Even if the guy had done something gross to it, Leo wasn’t in much of a position to be too terribly picky. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” the guy grinned, taking a big bite of his own pretzel and encouraging Leo to do the same. They sat there eating their snacks in silence for a bit before he spoke again, “So, what’s your name kid?”
Immediately, Leo’s hackles went straight up and he twisted his face up in a scowl. “None of your business.”
“Whoa there, Cottontail,” the guy laughed, putting both hands, pretzel included, up in surrender. “You don’t have to tell me anything, I was just making small talk. I’m Dayze.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Nah, don’t sweat it, Cottontail,” Dayze dismissed. “We all know the rules of stranger danger. I’m sure your mom would be thrilled to know you’re practicing it well.”
Leo’s eyes stung at the mention of his mamá, but he refused to acknowledge it. Instead he cleared his throat. “Why do you keep calling me Cottontail?”
“Well, I can’t just keep calling you kid, that would be lame as hell,” Dayze explained. “And you may be too fierce to be a bunny, but there’s no denying that you’re one jumpy little rabbit, Cottontail.”
Leo’s face suddenly flushed vermilion, and he couldn’t look Dayze in the eye. “Uh, yeah, that makes sense, I guess.”
Dayze grinned at him, charming and crooked, and his eyes sparkled enough to make Leo’s heart race. “Glad you approve, Cottontail.”
After another moment, Leo managed to work up the courage to look at Dayze again. “So, how come you didn’t just give the extra pretzel to one of your friends like a normal person? Why’d you choose to sit with the srawniest pre-teen in the mall?”
“You’re how old? and here I was thinking you were in your 20’s,” Dayze gasped in shock. Leo just arched an eyebrow, and Dayze arched one right back. “What’s the matter? Can't a guy just do something nice for a stranger these days? So suspicious.”
Leo was unimpressed. “You don’t have any friends, do you?”
“Yeesh! What are they teaching you kids in school these days? That was fucking brutal,” Dayze laughed. “And, for the record, I do have friends.”
“Oh, let me guess,” Leo said, making his voice drip with as much wide-eyed eagerness as he could stomach. “They go to another, so I wouldn’t know them.”
Dayze was now clutching his stomach he was laughing so hard and tears had welled in the corners of his eyes. “Jesus Christ, even if I managed a comeback, you wouldn’t give me the room to say it, would you? You are relentless, Cottontail.”
Leo felt giggles bubble past his lips and he was smiling so wide it felt like his cheeks were going to start cramping. “To be fair, you’re a pretty easy target.”
Dayze shot him a look that would have been dirty, if his eyes weren’t shining with mirth. “I’m not hanging out with my friends because they’re busy being employed, unlike some people I could mention.”
“Who? You?”
Dayze spluttered indignantly. “I have a job! How do you think I paid for the pretzels?”
Leo arched an eyebrow at him. “I thought you said the pretzel lady gave you one for free.”
“That is wildly irrelevant,” Dayze dismissed. “Just know that I have friends and a job; I just have a day off when they’re all working.”
“Uh-huh,” Leo drawled. “That’s what I’d say if I was a friendless, unemployed loser who hangs out with stranger kids at the mall on Thursdays, too.”
Dayze shot him another look. “You’re not letting me talk myself out of this, are you?” Leo giggled and shook his head, so Dayze let out a deep, put-upon sigh. “Fine then! Think what you will of me! See if I invite you to the arcade.”
Leo perked up, eyes wide. “Arcade?”
Dayze grinned at him and pulled out an actual leather coin purse from his jacket pocket and put it on the table between them. “Hell yeah. The arcade does half price tokens on Thursdays. I was going to ask if you wanted to come, buuuuut…”
“I take it back!” Leo yelped. “You’re not a loser and you’ve got lots of friends and a great job. Can I please still go to the arcade with you?”
Dayze laughed and stood up from the table and reached over to ruffle Leo’s curls. Leo let out a squeak and ducked his head in an attempt to hide his flush. Based on the chuckle he heard from Dayze, he was very unsuccessful. “I suppose I'd be pretty alright with that. Come on, Cottontail. Let's blow this popsicle stand.”
He started to walk away and Leo scrambled to follow after him. Dayze was even taller now that he wasn’t sitting, and his steps were so long that Leo had to do a little hop-skip every now and then to keep up. If he’d been with anyone else, he would have been embarrassed, but Dayze just gave him that heart-stopping grin when he saw it, so Leo made his hops even more exaggerated.
Dayze finally came to a stop outside of a black door with absolutely no defining features, other than a mail slot of tarnished gold and a matching placard sign. He gestured at it proudly. “Ta-da!”
Leo squinted at the door, then turned his suspicions on Dayze. “Are you a serial killer or something? Because if your grand plan was getting me to just lock myself in a closet with you so you can murder me, you’re gonna need to find a more gullible kid.”
“Sheesh, a little faith might do you some good every once in a while, Cottontail,” Dayze chided playfully, pushing open the door. “This is Gizmo’s. It used to just be a few clerical offices for the mall before Alice’s dad started renting it a few years back and turned it into an arcade. Speaking of: Alice? You in here?”
“Where the hell else would I be?” a girl’s voice called back. “If you’re gonna come in, do it. Don’t just stand in the doorway like an indecisive housecat.”
Dayze’s face lit up at the sound of her voice, and he grinned down at Leo as if to say See? Perfectly safe, just like I said , and gestured down the short hall on the other side of the door. Leo hesitated for a moment before he shrugged and stepped forward. He was pretty sure Dayze had no interest in murdering him, and even if he did, it wouldn’t really leave him that worse off. Sure enough though, after a few feet of blank walls, the hallway opened up into a decently large room. The walls were all exposed brick (which Leo was pretty sure was fake, though he didn’t know how he knew that) and covered in various neon signs and posters advertising games and movies Leo had never even heard of. Two of the walls were lined with all sorts of arcade cabinets, and in the middle were some of the bigger stand alone games like air hockey and DDR. At the far end of the room, a teenage girl around the same age as Dayze, who Leo could only assume was Alice, was sitting behind a glass counter filing her nails. She was wearing a t-shirt that had Mythomagic: Delphetic Visions over some artwork of various monsters erupting from a card like some sort of portal. Her hair was pulled up into two puffball pigtails on top of her head and she wore shimmery blue eyeshadow with bright purple eyeliner.
Alice looked up from her nail filing and when her gaze fell on Leo, her eyes widened. “Woah, didn’t take you for a cradle robber, Dayze. Who’s your date?”
Leo’s heart leapt into his throat and he thought his cheeks were going to burst into flame. “I– We’re not– He didn’t–”
Dayze cut him off with another boisterous laugh and a hair ruffle. “Chillax, Cottontail. You’re not the only person who likes to take untrue potshots at my character.”
“You and your stupid fucking nicknames,” Alice scoffed. She grinned at Leo. “So, you got an actual name you wanna use, kid?”
Leo shrank back behind Dayze a bit, expression hard as he looked at Alice. “Cottontail’s fine.”
Alice looked surprised at his answer, but she apparently had better things to do than dissect the neurosis of a twelve-year-old because she put her hands up in surrender and turned her attention to Dayze. “You want the usual number?”
“Nah, double it,” he answered, handing over his card and his coin purse. “You, my dear, are gonna spend aaaaalllllll afternoon with the two most handsome devils in this mall. Aren't you lucky?”
Alice snorted, but swiped his card and held up the coin purse to a machine that spat out a stream of shiny gold coins. She handed them both back with a smile. “Alright. Have fun, you two.”
“With you here, how could I not?” Dayze chirped and Alice visibly smothered her grin with her fist. Then he snatched up the satchel and stuffed it and his card back in his pocket, and turned his attention back to Leo, gesturing over his shoulder. “You ever see somebody get a high score on Interspace Encounters?” Leo shook his head, and Dayze’s eyes sparkled. “Come on, Cottontail. Lemme show you how it’s done.”
All Leo could do was eagerly follow along.
They spent hours at the arcade together. Dayze had a personal fondness for the really classic games (“They’re vintage, Cottontail.” “I think you mean old. Like you.”) that boasted their 16-bit pixel art with six whole colors in their palette. He was, admittedly, good at them, especially Interspace Encounters, which had a whole high score list of nothing but DYZ over and over again. He didn’t manage to beat his all-time record this time around, but he did make it on the board, and this time he entered his name as DNC. “Dayze ‘n’ Cottontail,” he'd explained when Leo cocked his head to the side. Leo bashfully ducked his head, unable to even think about looking at Dayze when his cheeks were so flushed.
Not that he’d really spent all that much time looking at Dayze in the first place, though that was a very deliberate choice, and a very difficult choice at that. He tried his best to keep his attention on the little pixelated avatars, but it wasn’t easy, not with Dayze standing right there. Not with Dayze standing right there, his laugh loud and bright and his voice pitching sharply and bouncing with excitement as he told Leo about all of the tricks and secrets he had discovered over the many many years he'd spent haunting various arcades around town. Every now and then, Leo's eyes would drift, and he found himself staring up at Dayze, heart thumping in his throat in something akin to wonder. Dayze managed to catch him basically every time, and Leo thought for sure he was going to die, but Dayze never made fun of him. Hazel eyes glinted with amusement and the wide grin below took on a teasing edge, but those snarky comments stayed tucked and hidden away behind flashing teeth. Leo was very grateful for that.
“Come on,” Dayze said suddenly, stepping away from the game cabinet he'd just bested. He gestured at it, eyebrow arched expectantly. “Show me what you’ve got, Cottontail.”
Leo did as he was told and fell into position. He'd always known that he was pretty good at video games, his reflexes were faster than anyone he knew and the machines seemed to arch up to meet his hands, but these old games were something else. Zip Zap Zop was a little maze runner game where he had to collect coins while avoiding the little balls of electricity that roamed the screen, and Leo could almost do it in his sleep. In fact, the enemies’ routing data seemed almost static, and Leo was pretty sure that given just a few days he could fully memorize it and actually play it in his sleep. He wasn’t quite at that point yet, though, so he was woefully disappointed when he lost his last life to the little red lightning ball.
He was less disappointed when the machine spat out five purple tickets, though. He looked up at Dayze, eyes wide. “This place does tickets?” he asked. “Are there prizes?”
“Some of them,” Dayze explained. “Most of the older machines don’t give tickets, so you have to play the more modern ones for that. I just come for the games, though.”
“How come the old ones don’t give out tickets?”
“Because of me,” he grinned smugly. “Alice convinced her dad to take away the tickets on Interspace Encounters and stuff like that, otherwise I’d have run them out of business.” He cleared his throat and raised his voice. “Isn’t that right, Alice?”
“Whatever you said, fuck you!”
Dayze beamed down at Leo, clearly delighted. “She’s so into me.”
Leo scowled over at the girl, who was typing away on her phone. “Great.”
Dayze just hummed and gestured over at another game, “Hey, if you wanna do the ticket thing, we can take a stab at the pinball machine. I think it’s got tickets. Fair warning: I suck at pinball.”
Leo did not suck at pinball. In fact, he was spectacular at it. For as useful as his reflexes were on videogames, it was nothing when compared to the mechanics of pinball. There was no lag, no graphics or invisible programming. It was just Leo, a little metal ball, some levers and a spring-loaded stick. He knew exactly how much force to apply, exactly when to flip the levers, and where the ball was going to go. He could practically figure out how many points he was going to get on any one particular game, and he got to put his own handle, CTL, on the leaderboard. The pinball machine also didn’t have a ticket function, but Dayze was watching him, clearly impressed, and that was way better than any trinket he could have gotten from the prize counter. He was in heaven.
“Damn, Cottontail, you’re really good at that.”
Leo stiffened, then turned around to see Alice standing beside him, grinning down at him. He scowled back at the game. “Thanks.”
Dayze cut in then, his voice bright and eager. “What’s up, Alice?”
“Nothing, I was just going to order a pizza, and I was wondering if you had any requests,” she said. She playfully elbowed Dayze in the side and he let out a comically pained wheeze. “Well, I came to ask Cottontail. I already know what you eat.”
“You wound me.”
Leo considered making a joke about how picky eating was for not-homeless kids, but he wasn’t sure if that would be funny or just plain sad, and he didn’t want to make Dayze think he wasn’t funny, so he kept that thought to himself. To answer her question, he shrugged. “Anything’s fine with me.”
“Cool. Sausage, olive, and mushroom’s good, then?”
Dayze swooned. “My favorite. Alice, you’re too good to me.”
“And don’t you forget it,” she laughed, flicking one of the pins on his jacket so it swung back and forth. She turned and walked back to her counter, waving over her shoulder at them. “Food should be here in, like ten minutes, so finish up whatever you’re doing!”
Leo didn’t really like the thought of finishing up, and he definitely didn’t like being told to do so by Alice, but the pretzel was already starting to fade from his stomach, and Dayze was starting to run out of tokens. The sun was setting fast on this golden afternoon, and try as he might there was nothing Leo could do to stop the flow of time itself. He swallowed thickly, and blinked down at the pinball machine in front of him, focusing very hard on not crying.
Dayze noticed immediately, and gently nudged him. “What’s the matter, Cottontail?”
Leo didn’t want to say it. He knew saying it would just make him sound like a crybaby. So he just shrugged and tried to play it off. “I don’t wanna finish up. I was having fun.”
“Well, we’re just finishing up for today,” Dayze pointed out. “This place is open every day, you know. We can meet up next Thursday again, if you want.”
Leo wanted to say yes. He wanted to say yes more than anything. He wanted to cling to Dayze’s jacket sleeve and follow him around like a little lost puppy until Dayze finally got sick of him and sent him away. But he couldn’t. He’d never meet up with Dayze at Gizmo’s for half-priced tokens on Thursdays ever again. If things went well, by Thursday he’d have escaped for good and he’d be far away from this town, and if they went sideways Theresa would have gotten her hands on him again. Either way, he wasn’t going to get to go to Gizmo’s. He shook his head. “I can’t.”
Dayze studied him for a moment, and Leo got the feeling that he somehow understood, just like he’d understood everything Leo hadn’t said all afternoon. Then, without a word, he took off his jacket, and carefully removed a pin from his sleeve, which he then held out to Leo. “Alright then, take this.”
Leo’s eyes went wide and he cupped his hands for Dayze to drop the trinket in. It was an enamel pin, a little larger than the tokens they’d been playing with, and in muted earth tones, it depicted a wild-eyed hare slipping through the mangled bars of a cage, and around the edge it said Can’t catch me in the same ruby-red of the hare’s eye. Leo’s breath hitched and he looked up at Dayze, blinking back a new wave of tears. “I-I can’t take this.”
Dayze just smiled at him, and while it was just as kind and warm as all of the others, it wasn’t as bright. It was more subdued and a little sad, like he’d just watched the end of a tragic movie that he still enjoyed. He ruffled Leo’s hair again. “Don’t think of it as taking; think of it as a loan. You can give it to me next time we meet up to play games, yeah?”
Leo’s lower lip wobbled, but before he could start crying, he dove forward and grabbed Dayze in a hug, hoping beyond hope that he wasn’t ruining everything. He wanted this one afternoon, this one moment. He wanted to just remember all the games he’d played with Dayze, and he wanted to eat pizza, and he wanted to pretend that everything was fine. Fortunately, Dayze just hugged him back. “Thank you.”
Leo kind of hoped that Dayze would assume the thanks was for the pin, or the tokens, or even the stupid pretzel, but he knew better than that. Dayze wasn’t stupid, he was just nice, and he just squeezed Leo a little tighter. “Any time, Cottontail.”
Leo clenched his fist until he felt the edges of the pin dig into his palm, and he smiled into Dayze’s shirt. Any time, Cottontail. It wasn’t much, but in that moment it felt like everything. He decided right then and there that he would return this pin to Dayze. He wasn’t sure how or when, but he’d do it, even if it took years. He’d meet with Dayze again some day and they’d play more video games and Dayze would accuse him of cheating and Leo would make fun of him and give him his pin back. He just had to hold on until then.
He could do that.