Read Games People Play for Free Online

sight.
    ‘Cool,’ I said, like an over-enthusiastic Labrador puppy, ‘I love the Velvet Underground.’ I watched him intently as he held the LP between his middle fingers and dropped it delicately over the spike in the centre of the turntable.
    ‘So where are you from?’ I cringed as I said it. Corinna and I were already fed up with being asked that, but I couldn’t stop myself bouncing round his feet asking questions.
    ‘England. Like you. But my mother is Croatian, from Yugoslavia.’
    ‘I know where Croatia is,’ I said, forcing a high laugh into my voice so he wouldn’t think I was criticizing him.
    ‘Yes. Sorry. I’m used to Americans asking me. Most of them have never heard of it. I’m here on a tennis scholarship.’
    ‘Oh.’ I might know that Croatia was part of Yugoslavia, but I’d never heard of a tennis scholarship. ‘So that means you must be pretty good at it?’
    Ivan looked at me through half-closed eyes, as if he thought I must be joking.
    ‘I turned professional two years ago,’ he said with an air of finality, implying that was all I needed to know. In fact it didn’t enlighten me much further. How good did you have to be, to be professional?
    ‘Do you play?’ he asked, sounding bored, as if he already knew the answer.
    ‘No.’ I glanced at the table of food, realizing that I was starving, but still nobody else was eating. Odd: I hadn’t been hungry when I arrived. I decided that it must be all that lust coursing through my veins.
    Raylene and Sara came up to us. I was about to broach the subject of lunch when Sara produced a huge joint, held a match to it and inhaled. She handed it wordlessly to me, and for a moment I considered dropping it. It seemed like such a fierce, uncontrollable thing, and I’d never held one before. But I didn’t want to appear naïve or square, so I held it tentatively to my lips and puffed. Raylene engaged Ivan in conversation, and I looked away, disappointed. Ivan had turned his back on me with such alacrity that I thought he’d probably been dying for an excuse to escape.
    The smoke went straight to my head, but in a pleasant way, so I took another drag. My hunger instantly left my stomach and swam up towards my brain instead, where it circled gently for a while. It was quite a nice feeling, I decided. I looked for Corinna, to offer her the joint too, but she was ensconced in the kitchen, laughing with Calvin. Their heads were almost touching, and the sight of his black dreads was striking against her bleached blonde crop. They looked good together, and I wondered if she was feeling better about not going to California.
    The small, cluttered room seemed to be getting a bit stuffy, so I excused myself and went to stand on the porch for a while.
    It was so hot, even in mid-September. I hadn’t got used to the particular sort of cloying heat that blew in across the wheatfields and prairies, as if an enormous oven door had been opened somewhere. Baking hot, literally. I’d never been in a house with airconditioning before either, and kept forgetting the thirty-degree hike in the temperature every time I stepped outside.
    Raylene’s street was a neat block of detached cube houses, but there was nobody about – as usual. I rarely saw people walking. It clearly wasn’t the done thing to walk anywhere. Occasionally a huge, low-slung car, usually containing at least five people, would drag itself past, as if the heat affected acceleration; otherwise everything was still, bleached out, exhausted.
    I began to feel ill. My mouth dried up, and my legs started to jiggle and weaken, like someone was unfastening nuts at my knees. I sat down, too suddenly, in the stillness, and felt the rough planks of the porch under my thighs. I was embarrassed – two puffs of a joint and I was out of it? Pathetic. I groaned, and felt worse. I wanted my mother, but she had died six years earlier.
    Things went from bad to worse. As I sat there sweating, enormous tears, the size