“Look at that!” he yelled, and did a mad dance across our lane and next door’s. “Strike first go!”
“Well done, Wills,” said Dad.
“You’re so lucky,” I groaned.
“S’not luck,” said Wills. “That’s pure skill, that is.”
My own first attempt bounced, then trickled slowly, slowly, into the gutter. Wills did the same mad dance as if he’d scored another strike, then clapped his hands loudly.
“Well done, bro. Great shooting.”
“It’s easier for you,” I said. “You’re bigger and stronger than me.”
“Bigger, stronger, and handsomer,” said Will.
“And very modest with it,” snorted Dad. “Now, watch the real expert at work.”
Dad picked up a ball, rocked backward and forward from his heels to his toes, then charged toward the pins, belly wobbling, and stepped over the line before skewing the bowl across the alley and straight into the gutter.
“Foul, Dad, that was a foul!” yelled Wills. “It wouldn’t have counted if you had scored.”
“Bit out of practice, that’s all,” puffed Dad.
Wills scored nine with his next ball, then missed the remaining pin, but his score leaped ahead because of the strike. I managed to clip two pins but missed the remaining eight completely with my second ball. And Dad scored three and four, which he said showed he was improving already and you wait till the second game.
We were nearly at the end of the first game, with Wills having twice as many points as Dad, and me trailing miserably behind, when two older boys, four lanes away, pointed at Wills and waved. Wills seemed not to notice them until I pointed them out, then he gave a brief wave back.
“Friends of yours?” asked Dad.
“Sort of,” replied Wills. “Your turn, Dad. Come on, I’m getting bored.”
Wills kept glancing over to the two boys after that, I noticed, though he was trying not to let anyone see. He bowled his next two balls straight into the gutter, and began to grumble that he didn’t want to play another game. Dad argued that he had already paid for two games and that he wasn’t going to throw the money away. When the first game was over—Wills winning it despite three bad last turns that rivaled mine—Wills dug his heels in and said that he wasn’t going to play, and that Dad and I would have to play for him. When Wills digs his heels in, it’s difficult to budge him. Dad was furious and neither of us could really be bothered to put much effort into the new game. Dad had been deprived of the challenge of trying to beat Wills, and I was on my way to another humiliatingly low score. Wills sat watching, unusually quiet, then disappeared in the direction of the toilets. I saw that the two boys were no longer at their lane.
Wills reappeared a few minutes later, on his own, just as Dad was beginning to mutter that there was something wrong with that boy’s bowels. He sat down next to me while Dad took his go, and he smelled strongly of cigarette smoke.
“You’ve been smoking,” I hissed at him.
“Haven’t,” he hissed back. “The toilets are all smoky, that’s all.”
“You’d better not let Dad smell you,” I warned. Dad would go nuts if he knew that Wills was smoking.
The two boys, one ginger, one dark, reappeared from the direction of the toilets and walked past the back of our lane. One of them flicked a cigarette butt at me and sniggered when I flinched. When Dad turned around, they said goodbye to him politely. I was angry when Dad smiled and said, “Goodbye, boys,” back, while Wills ignored them, got up, and took my turn.
We went home for lunch soon afterward, Dad happy that he had at least won one game, Wills crowing that that was only because he hadn’t played, and me wondering how many more secrets I was going to have to keep from Mom and Dad. After lunch we sat and watched football, just as we would at home, except that Dad’s living room was tiny, with only one chair and a small couch in it. Wills tried to take the chair but Dad muscled him out, so Wills and I shared the couch and I missed half the action. Home away from home, except that when we got too loud, someone thumped on the floor upstairs, which wouldn’t have happened at Mom’s because our next-door neighbors would have been watching as well. Mom’s …
“You’ll have to keep the noise down here, boys,” Dad whispered. “The walls and ceilings are a bit thin.”
I wanted to argue that it wasn’t me making the noise, but I didn’t, and within minutes Dad and Wills were yelling at the tops of their voices and the thumping on the floor upstairs started again. Didn’t those people realize that you can’t contain a hurricane and a volcano?
When it was all over, Wills sat on the arm of Dad’s chair to listen to the football results, so I went and sat on the other arm because I didn’t want to be left out. Wills toppled into Dad’s lap, and I toppled on top of Wills, and we fell on to the floor, all three of us, in a heap of tickling and giggling and screaming and punching (but not hard). It felt SO GOOD to let go and be silly and not care. I didn’t want it to stop, but at last Dad begged us to get off. He crawled out from underneath us, pink-faced, sweaty-headed, and puffing, and flopped on to the couch. Wills didn’t want it to stop either and tried to jump on Dad again, but Dad warned him and Wills obeyed. We sat on the floor, trying to catch our breath.
“That’s what lions do with their cubs,” I said. “They play fight with them
