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“Great. I’m thinking of an object. You’ve got twenty questions to figure out what it is. Go.”
Charlie knows the game. She played it on road trips with her parents, back when she was a little girl and they used to drive everywhere. Kings Island and Cedar Point, which were every-summer destinations. But also places outside of Ohio. Niagara Falls. Mount Rushmore. Disney World. Charlie spent every drive slumped in the back seat, sweltering because her father claimed that using the air conditioner wasted gas. When she inevitably got too bored and whiny, her mother would say, “Twenty questions, Charlie. Go.”
There was a standard question she’d always ask first. One designed to narrow things down immediately. Only now, at the start of a very different game, she can’t remember it to save her life. That lump of worry she still feels in her gut tells her Josh isn’t playing this just to amuse himself.
There are stakes involved.
Ones much higher than when she was a kid.
“You going to ask a question?” Josh says.
“Yeah. Just give me another second.”
Charlie closes her eyes and pictures those road trips like grainy home movies. Her father behind the wheel in ridiculous oversize sunglasses that clipped over his regular glasses. Her mother in the front seat with the window down, her hair trailing behind her. Her in the back seat, her sweaty legs sticking to Naugahyde, opening her mouth to speak.
The memory works. The mandatory first question pops into her head, fully formed.
“Is it bigger than a bread box?” she says.
Josh shakes his head. “Negative. One question down. Nineteen to go.”
Charlie’s memory hums like a film projector, quickly giving her the second question she’d always ask.
“Is it alive?”
“Interesting,” Josh says. “I’m going to say no, but someone smarter than me might say yes.”
Charlie considers his response, thinking hard, knowing that if she does, it might push aside all the other thoughts slithering through her brain. Scary thoughts. Ones she doesn’t want to think about. So she focuses on the game, pretending it really is just a game even though she knows it’s not.
Not for her.
“Is it associated with something alive?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s part of something.”
“Yes,” Josh says. “And I consider that a question even though it wasn’t phrased as one. That wouldn’t pass muster onJeopardy!”
“Animal or vegetable?”
It’s another one of the standard questions she’d ask her parents on those long-ago road trips. Even though it was technically two questions, her mother always let it slide. Josh, on the other hand, calls her out on it.
“You know I can only give you yes or no answers. Care to rephrase?”
Charlie no longer tries to think about the games she played with her parents in that hot, sticky car with its perpetual McDonald’s smell. She worries the current game will ruin those memories. She doubts she’ll ever willingly play Twenty Questions again. Even if Josh turns out to be harmless. A very big if.
“Is it vegetable?” Charlie says, ridding her brain of images of her father’s clip-on sunglasses and her mother’s wind-blown hair. Instead, she pictures plants and all the things attached to them. Leaves and branches. Thorns and berries.
“No.”
“It’s animal, then.”
“Yes,” Josh says, the answer narrowing things down but not a whole lot.
“Is this animal common?”
“Very.”