Pale Gray Mirrors

            Kairn flicked on his Game Boy Advanced SP. A rainbow wave of pixels bloomed in the shape of its logo, accompanied by that iconic title jingle: Waaaa, bing! Accompanied momentarily, that is, before he smashed the volume slider down. But that first warbled note—a G, he recognized—rang out across the dining room from under the table.

            “Hey. Away.” His mother spoke sternly, like he was a squirrel on a bird feeder. Kairn rolled his eyes.

            “Fine,” he said, but he didn’t turn the device off, just closed the cobalt blue clamshell and held it in a nest between his palms.

            “Away.” She narrowed her eyes. Kairn made a noise between a sigh and a grumble and pushed out his chair; it screeched against the hardwood floor. Behind him, on the counter, there was a nook between the fruit bowl and Dede’s rat sculpture. He set his SP down there, too annoyed to remember to shut it down. If she didn’t want him on the thing, why did she buy it for him?

            Nobody spoke until he sat back down, and his mother took a deep breath. According to her, family dinner was a time of togetherness, they could have real conversations if only they put down their devices. She wouldn’t even let his father watch his game shows. “Now. How was everybody’s day?”

            “We did painting,” Dede said. Her head swung from side to side while she scooped peas one at a time. “Daddy bought new watercolors for everyone.”

            “Mm-hm.” His father’s mouth was full. Kairn watched him attempt to divide his steak in half with a fork.

            “You used the coupons?”

            “I went to Michael’s, not Hobby Lobby.”

            His parents locked eyes. Kairn glanced behind him, then started chewing faster.

            “Why’d you drive so far?” his mother asked. She paced out each word, like she asked five different questions. Resigned to his knife, his father took a large bite. The house itself waited while he chewed. “I was already over there.”

            “Really?” His mother’s plate was untouched.

            “MOMMY LOOK!” Dede raised her arm; her sleeve was covered in ketchup. The tiny, circular Tupperware container where the condiment had been poured was empty, and her plate looked like one of those paintings that people stare at and go my four-year-old can do that. Kairn’s mother’s hands rose to her mouth, and then she shot up and scooped her daughter in her arms. She mouthed later at her husband, and then carried Dede upstairs. Her footsteps creaked on each of the fourteen stairs, and disappeared in the direction of her bedroom.

            As usual, it was quiet when it was just the two of them. The women in their family were passerine presences, certainly, but to Kairn it felt like his father simply had nothing to say to him. When he picked him up from practice, there was no how was your day or what pieces are you working on or even what’s the gossip with you and the first chair, just car radio static and rubber on asphalt. Even now, he silently picked at his mashed potatoes, his eyes down, or he wiped at an invisible stain on the tablecloth, while Kairn, his food finished, reached back for his SP. He leaned dangerously far back in his chair, and the sheer oily surface slipped from his grip once, twice, before he could pinch the machine at its corner and drag it into his grasp. He opened it to the title screen of Super Mario Bros. 3, its glow warm against his Coke-bottle glasses. He started a new game. His father shot him a swan song look, then retired to his crumbs.

            Thinking back on his childhood, even decades after he had touched anything that could be considered a Nintendo, Kairn could recall with glee the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3. Its 8-bit chiptunes played on repeat in his head, his dreams were shaded in the pastels—blue, pink, green—of its raised platforms, and whenever he drew a cloud, he always added little eyes. He spent hours floating past watchful cumulonimbi in level 1-1. The Super Leaf power-up was his all-time favorite—he craved the sense of endlessness that came from soaring above the level where no enemies could reach. At the dinner table that night, he raced for the falling Tanuki leaf and took to the skies. First above the two green Parakoopa enemies, to grab the extra life hidden on a sky platform, then to duck into a hidden pipe. The game had no secrets from him. Inside the pipe was a small, dark room, and a handful of extra coins in the shape of an eight. Why an eight he didn’t know, but sometimes, when he snuck his Game Boy under the covers late at night and played lying on his side, it looked like the symbol for infinity.

            Soon enough, Kairn’s thumb got tired from mashing the fly button. At the end of each level there was a zig-zag screen transition, where everything faded to black. He aligned himself with it, tapping the directional pad left, right, left, and then ran full speed into the goal. That was the surefire way to time collecting a reward star. He ran, ran, jumped—and the whole screen went black.

            “Fuck.”

“Language,” his father said. He had finished with his food and moved to the sink. Plates and serving bowls stood stacked on the kitchen island behind him. Kairn’s own plate was gone, as were his mother and Dede, still. Without another word, he pushed out his chair and flew upstairs in search of his charger.

            Usually, along with his spare phone battery, his power adapter sat in the corner of his room, plugged into the outlet. But now a heap of laundry towered against the wall, and when he pushed it to the side nothing was there. It wasn’t on his Beatles sheets. It wasn’t on his dresser. It wasn’t in his desk. But there he eyed an open pack of Pokémon cards, torn at the edge with everything still inside. Nothing good, though, one rare of which he already had two. They were pooled, with his other favorites, in a tin his uncle gave him, originally meant to hold guitar picks. Where was his tin? Kairn sifted through his desk and found it tucked against the back corner of the drawer. Good. No charger there, though. He clutched his SP through the fabric of his pocket. If his mother didn’t yell at him to turn it off so abruptly, he would have enough charge to make it to the second or third world, at least. She would know where the charger went. She was better at these things.

            Kairn left his room and meandered down the hallway, past the upstairs bathroom and the hall closet and Dede’s room. Her light was off, and his parents’ door was closed—were they still in there? Sometimes, Dede played on the floor by their bed, coloring her eighth marsupial of the week, but he wasn’t allowed to join unless he played his game on mute. He was about to knock when the door opened, and his sister came out. She wore a cowboy hat, a bedazzled Rugrats tee, and capri leggings underneath a pink tutu that jutted out in all directions. She shut the door behind her and turned towards the stairs.

            “Is mom in there?” Kairn asked.

            She nodded. “I’m coloring.”

            The hall clock read seven-thirty. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

            “I have to color a raccoon. Mom said.”

            Sometimes, Kairn had this premonition that Dede was going to do great things in life, and she and his parents would leave him in the dust. The first time it happened was when her sculpture won the Junior Arts prize. She got first place for their school, and runner-up in the state competition. The rat itself didn’t bother him, Dede was a good artist, he knew that. But seeing her stand next to all these other kids, all his age and younger, all with their blue-ribboned work, that made his stomach stir. Kairn liked two things—music and Mario—but he wasn’t that good at guitar, just had a decent ear, and nobody won any state awards for flying around the Mushroom Kingdom.

            He watched Dede shimmy down the stairs until she was out of sight, and then knocked on his parents’ door. “Mom?” Three more quick raps. “Mom!”

            There was no response, so he cracked open the door and crept in. Jeopardy blared on the TV. A towel, dotted with red stains, was splayed out on his father’s side of the bed. Past the main room, a right turn led to his mother’s work desk and the bathroom, and from this direction he heard snippets of a conversation. His mother whispered into her phone; Kairn slowed into a tiptoe.

            “I know it’s unfair, but it’s every other week now. And with Dedelia in the car? The agreement was, we both do our own thing discreetly. I—one second, Carol.” His mother poked her head around the corner. She spoke like a bomb with a lit fuse. “Hi Kee I’m on the phone right now what do you want?” Kee was his childhood nickname, the one no one else could use. Hearing it, Kee, one quick puff of air, reassured him. Her grin, which till then seemed forced, softened. She continued: “Also, what did we say about sneaking around? You’re getting older, you need to set a good example for your sister.”

            “I knocked. You were on the phone.”

            A moment passed in silence, mother and sons’ eyes pale gray mirrors.

            “Was that Aunt Carol?” he asked. They weren’t real sisters, just best friends, but Kairn thought they sounded awfully similar.

            “It was,” she resigned after a pause. “Do you need help with something?”

            Kairn held up his SP with both hands like The Lion King. His mother’s head tilted, and her smile changed again, this time as if to say, of course. “I can’t find my charger,” he said.

            “I told you to turn it off.”

            “We finished dinner.”

            “Twice.” She brought her phone to her lips, then tapped the unmute button. “Carol, I’ve got to go. See you soon?”

            Carol said something, and his mother repeated the words, “see you soon,” the way she told Dede that’s lovely shading when she meant it. She hung up. Then she beckoned to Kairn and walked past him out of the room. As he followed, he opened his dead SP and stared at his reflection in the blank screen.

            His mother found his charger under the pile of clothes by the outlet, and when she scolded him for barely looking, he complained that he did look and it wasn’t there. Then she told him that if he wanted to play more he had to stay downstairs and watch his sister. Couldn’t she watch herself? he thought but when she left the room with his cord, he followed without question. She plugged it in next to the table where Dede sat, unmoving, adding green stink lines to her raccoon. Her crayons stood lined up in a row in alphabetical order. “Kairn look,” she said, and she told him about the raccoon’s diet of mushrooms and tree sap while his parents whispered in the kitchen. Eventually, they retreated upstairs. “Stay down here,” his mother said, and his father added, “listen to your mother.”

            Powered on at last, Kairn’s SP felt weightless. He played the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 over and over—Super Leaf, one-up, secret pipe, zig-zag, star reward—until the buttons wore grooves into his fingers. He never switched the volume slider up, just chirped the chiptune to himself. His parents never came back down, and he began to check the clock every time he collected the 1-1 goal. Seven fifty-two. Seven fifty-six. Seven fifty-nine. Eight oh-one.

            “Hey Dede?”

            “What?”

            “When you and dad went to get watercolors, did anything weird happen?”

            His sister put down her crayon and looked at him. Her eyes were big, and dry from staring at the page. “He told me not to say.”

            Kairn’s hands tensed, and he shut his Gameboy. Then he reopened it, turned it off, and put it down again. Of course she knew. “You can tell me, Dee. It’ll be our secret.”

            “You told before.” A few months ago, she stayed up past her bedtime to watch TV. Kairn was mad at her because she snitched that he hadn’t practiced guitar all week, so he told on her and she got an hour of time-out. Then she hit him over the head with her metal fairy wand, and he ripped a few of her drawings from the wall behind his mother’s work desk and crumpled them into little balls, and then they both forgot why they were mad. “I want to play Mario,” she said.

            Kairn scoffed. Dede wasn’t allowed to play his game, just like she wasn’t allowed to call him Kee or watch TV after bedtime.

            “Please?” She kicked her heel at the ground. “You can do my drawing. I never get to play.”

            “I don’t care about your stupid drawing.”

            “It’s not stupid!” She turned her chin up. “Fine then. You’re never gonna know.”

            “Fine.”

            “Fine!”

            Dede snatched her drawing and turned away from him. She barricaded his view of the table with her left arm. In retaliation, he moved up against the wall, and hid his device in the cradle of his palm. It felt warm, like a blanket of downy feathers, lulling him to sleep.