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BEN OFFERED TO MEET me at the school, but the chairs weren’t very comfortable, my laptop was almost dead, and I was starving. I hadn’t really noticed any of that while I was working. I hadn’t noticed time passing. But now that the spell was broken, I needed food.
He recommended his favorite barbecue place, but I still couldn’t go anywhere in public. “I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes,” I told him. “Just gotta stop by my place for a charger and a mask.”
I spent the whole drive thinking about my conversation with the college kid. It did feel really good to see someone else get excited about the thing I was making. It also gave me a lot of faith in the platform. Even if the only people Exelichai ever attracted were other game devs, there were a lot of us. We all played games even more than we created them. And, in all honesty, we all spent way more money on them than we had. And as I’d seen firsthand, the product sold itself. Word-of-mouth for the Arcade was going to be like wildfire.
I still wasn’t sure that I’d be able to capture any of that money, but I was more convinced every day that Exelichai was going to make some people into billionaires. It would change the industry.
I forgot all that when I pulled into the apartment complex. My front door stood open with a giant trash bin parked in my spot, and construction guys moving in and out like ants from an anthill. It seemed like way too much effort for a little hole in my ceiling.
I parked in a neighbor’s spot and squeezed into the crowd heading into my tiny apartment. A foreman standing by the door looked up from his clipboard as I approached and stopped me (as well as everyone in line behind me) with a hand on my chest.
“Where the hell’s your mask?”
I gestured inside. “In there. I’m just here to get it.”
His eyes narrowed, and then he looked me up and down and seemed to realize I wasn’t one of his workers. “This your place?”
“Yeah.”
He shook his head. “Can’t have you in here while we’re working. Insurance.”
“I just need my mask,” I said. “I’ll be in and out. I can’t go anywhere without it.”
It took him a moment to see reason, but at last he relented. “In and out,” he said. “No dawdling.”
“None,” I promised. He dropped his hand, and I went in.
It looked like a disaster area. The tiny hole in my bathroom ceiling had become a thick coat of drywall dust on every surface in the place. Not only that, but they’d leaned my mattress and box springs up against a wall to clear some space, and shoved my clothes piles (clean and dirty commingled together) into a corner.
A power saw screamed like a banshee from the bathroom, and after a horrific crashing sound, a burly dude came out carrying a chunk of the ceiling in each hand. I rounded on the foreman.
“What are they doing? It was just a small hole!”
He frowned at me. “In and out, you said. Get out.”
I pulled away before he could stop me and went to grab my things. The phone charger and laptop cord were both plugged into the outlet behind the bed, but I managed to get them free without knocking the mattresses over.
I went to the kitchenette to grab my mask and found a big butt taking up most of the room in front of the fridge. Somebody was down on hands and knees digging through my kitchen cabinets!
“Hey!” I shouted over the screaming saw. “Hey, what are you doing?” I almost kicked him, but I didn’t want a fight with any of these dudes.
I leaned down to pat his back instead, and shouted again, “What are you doing?”
The saw snapped off just then, and my question came out a hysterical shriek. Then the big butt came out of my pantry, and it was Mr. Hauser.
“Dammit, kid! I told you you’re not allowed here. This is a work area.”
“What are you doing in the kitchen, though? What do you need with my pots and pans?”
He scowled at me and took a moment to calm himself before answering. “Bathroom is right on the other side of that wall,” he explained with pained patience. “My guys busted a pipe in the wall, and I’m checking to make sure the water damage didn’t get through the drywall on this side, or we’d have to rip out this whole cabinet and redo most of the kitchen.”
“Oh,” I said. “Jeez. You busted a pipe?”
“Sure did. It’s a major repair job now. Probably need another week to fix everything.”
“But this is my home!”
“Not for another week, it ain’t. Now get out of here before you get something else broken.”
When I didn’t comply immediately, he leaned past me and called toward the door, “Hey, Manuel!”
The foreman looked in, saw me, and turned angry real fast.
“I’m going!” I assured them both. “Jeez! I just—” I grabbed my mask off the counter and rushed out.
The mask was caked in drywall dust. Wearing it would probably do more damage to my lungs than catching the disease at this point. But none of these guys was going to apologize.
I slapped it twice against the side of my car, and it stenciled two ghostly silhouettes of itself onto the faded paint, but the mask itself looked as dusty as ever. I gave up with a sigh and headed toward the restaurant.