The Gratitude Game

Okay, so, I'm twenty-eight years old and I like to think of myself as a rational person. I write software for a living, I keep a spreadsheet for my grocery budget, and I have never once in my life done anything impulsive, which is exactly why what happened this spring bothers me so much. Because I owed my neighbor Ivan a favor so big that my brain apparently short-circuited and produced, as a solution, a road trip role-play game.

Here's how we got there. Ivan, thirty-two, mechanic, lives next door to me in our building in Vegas, had climbed out his window and then across a gap and then up my fire escape to rescue my cat, Mr. Waffles, from a fire escape ledge three stories up, and he did it barefoot, and my cat would absolutely be dead otherwise. I tried to thank him with cash and he refused it. I tried a gift card and he refused that. So my brain, being my brain, decided the only acceptable thank you was an elaborate three-day pretend game on the drive to Reno, where my sister lives, in his brother's loaned station wagon, and for some insane reason he said yes.

The rules meeting happened in the parking lot of a gas station on the edge of town, and it went badly almost immediately.

"So we're strangers," I said, pacing in front of the wagon with my index cards, which yes, I had index cards. "We meet at a diner, we realize we're both in trouble, and we drive north together because there are people after us. I'm Della Vane, fugitive heiress. You're, uh, Jack Mechanic."

"That's not a name."

"It's an alias."

"Jack Mechanic sounds like a brand of cheese, Daniella." He was leaning against the wagon with his arms crossed and this grin he gets when he's about to enjoy my suffering. "Like you'd see it on a deli cooler. Jack Mechanic smoked gouda."

"You're not supposed to break character in the parking lot, the parking lot is prep."

"I haven't started yet, this is still you talking to me."

I took a breath and consulted card number three. "Fine. Your name is Jack Jamal."

"Better. Go on."

"And we can't break character until Reno. Whatever happens on the road, we're these people. It's a game, it's fun, it's structured, and at the end of it your favor is officially repaid because you're getting a whole experience."

He looked at me for a while, and then he said, "You know you could've just bought me a steak," but he got in the wagon anyway, and that's the thing about Ivan, he complains the entire time and he never once says no.

The wagon is a vintage station wagon his brother keeps in the garage, wood paneling on the sides, a radio that only gets AM, and it hummed north out of the city with the desert going flat and gold on both sides of us. I had a whole backstory ready for the first leg. Della Vane, disowned heiress, on the run from a crooked family lawyer who framed her for a thing I hadn't fully specified yet, and I was about two minutes into delivering it in my noir voice when Ivan said he was hungry and pulled into a gas station outside Beatty.

"Jack," I hissed as we walked in. "Stay in character. We're fugitives. Fugitives don't announce they're hungry, they acquire provisions."

"Della," he said, and hearing him use the fake name in that flat midwestern way of his nearly broke me, "I'm a fugitive who skipped breakfast. A fugitive's gotta eat."

Inside, he went straight to the roller grill and stood there studying the rotating hot dogs like they were an engine he was diagnosing. I stationed myself by the window, scanning the parking lot with what I felt was convincing paranoia, and when the clerk asked if we wanted anything else, Ivan said, "Give me the big one, the one that's been spinning since noon, that's got the most character," in a completely normal voice, and then he winked at me over the mustard pump.

"You're ruining the mood," I told him at the counter.

"How? You're a fugitive. I'm a hungry fugitive. This is the most in-character I've ever been in my life."

"Fugitives don't wink."

"This fugitive winks." He paid in cash, which fine, okay, that part was actually in character, and we ate standing next to the ice machine while I tried to explain that my character had a tortured relationship with her family's lawyer, and he asked questions like "does the lawyer have a name" and "is the lawyer also a brand of cheese," and by the time we got back on the road I had abandoned the noir voice entirely and we were just two adults in a station wagon arguing about whether a fictional lawyer named Sheri Bristle was a good name, and I could say it was annoying, but honestly he had me laughing so hard I snorted, and I don't snort, that's how much I was laughing.

The second disaster happened outside Tonopah, and this one wasn't even Ivan's fault, this one was entirely mine.

You should know this about me: I triple-check everything. I check locks twice, I back up my files to two clouds, I have never in my adult life lost a key. So when we stopped at a scenic overlook because Ivan wanted to look at what he called "a genuinely upsetting amount of nothing," I got out, we walked to the railing, we looked at the nothing, and then we came back and the doors were locked and the keys were in the ignition, where I had left them while the engine idled, because I was mid-monologue about Sheri Bristle's betrayal and apparently gesturing with the hand that usually holds keys.

"Oh no," I said.

"Yep," Ivan said.

"No, no, I never do this. I have a system."

"You were doing a voice." He walked around the wagon, tried his door, tried mine, and looked in the window at the keys sitting there smugly in the ignition. "Okay. Give me ten minutes and a wire coat hanger, I saw one in the back."

"You're going to break into a car in the middle of the desert?"

"I'm going to break into your car in the middle of the desert, and you're going to stand there and keep lookout like a normal accomplice." He found the coat hanger behind the jumper cables, untwisted it with his hands the way you'd think a mechanic could, and started working it into the window seal, and I, because apparently I cannot stop myself, decided this was a narrative opportunity.

"So," I said, crouching next to him, dropping back into the noir voice. "This is just like the night in Marseille."

"There's no Marseille in my backstory, Daniella."

"Della. And there is now. The valet double-crossed us, remember, he took the keys to the Cigarette and we had to break into our own car outside the hotel while the family lawyer's men closed in, and I turned to you and I said, Jack, we've got maybe four minutes, and you said, I've picked harder locks for worse people."

Ivan stopped working the hanger and looked at me, and his mouth was doing the thing where he's trying not to laugh. "You're improvising a whole movie right now while I pick your lock."

"It's called staying in character."

"It's called you had this story written before we left the parking lot." He went back to the hanger, tongue between his teeth, and after another minute there was a pop and the lock came up and he pulled the door open and bowed, actually bowed, like a doorman. "Your car, madam."

"You're supposed to be Jack Jamal, not a butler."

"Jack Jamal has range." He tossed the bent hanger into the wagon and looked north up the highway, squinting at the heat shimmer over the asphalt, and then he said, kind of casual, like it was nothing, "So there's a motel an hour up the road with a neon sign I can already see from here. We should probably stop there for the night, since it's getting late."

And I said yes before I even thought about it, which, given everything that came after, was maybe the second most impulsive thing I've ever done.

The motel was the kind of place where the neon sign buzzed louder than the highway, and the pool was out back under a string of dying lights, and the office clerk gave us two keys without once looking up from his crossword, which Ivan said was the most in-character hospitality either of us had received all day. We changed into our swimsuits in our separate rooms, because even fugitives have boundaries apparently, and met at the pool around nine, and that's where the whole game went to hell.

It started fine. I floated on a lounge chair that had a crack in one strap and Ivan sat on the edge with his feet in the water, and I said, in my noir voice, "So Jack, we need to talk about the money in Reno," and he said, "Sure, doll," which made me snort again, and then he just kept going. That was the mistake. I gave him an inch of improv and he took the whole pool deck.

"Course, the money in Reno ain't the half of it," he said, settling in, squinting at nothing like the desert had wronged him. "See, before I met you, I ran with the Cirque Soleil Rouge for six seasons. I was a clown. Rogue clown, technically, since the incident."

"The incident."

"The incident in Reno, which is why we're going to Reno, Della, keep up. I juggled chainsaws. Live chainsaws, running ones. And the ringmaster, Big Magnus Pagoda