Chapter 4

The table where Henry and Will sat was a plastic round white table, with six chairs, five of them occupied by their friends. Henry sat beside Will, and to the right of Will was a seat reserved for Wendy and the one next to that was taken by Adam.

Seeing the chair wasn’t used, Adam moved to sit beside Will, waiting to catch up with him. Will sensed this and gave a big sigh, hoping Adam would pick up on it.

“Hey, Will. How’ve you been?”

“Good…”

“Anything new’?”

“Nope.” He answered dryly, thinking short, quick answers would send the message.

“Still programming?”

Will paused having heard his question. He fixed his attention back to the cards in his hands.

“What do my cards mean?” Will asked, showing Henry the cards he was holding. Henry observed it with knitted brows.

“It’s crap. Just fold.” Henry said.

Thinking Will hadn't heard him Adam, he asked him again.

“Someone already sits on that chair.” Will said.

“Oh, c’mon, seriously?” Adam said.

“Fold.” Will said, putting his cards down, trying not to look in Adam’s direction. “I hate this dumb poker game.” He said to himself.

“But, you love coding!” Adam continued. “Remember that time when we made that game we called ‘Samurai X’ made up of just ASCII characters, and used ‘X’ Kenshi Himura’s character?”

“Wait. What’s that now, ‘Askee’… characters?” Belle asked, a friend sitting beside Henry.

Will snorted, “Oh God,—“

“ASCII characters,” Adam explained, as he cut Will off. “it stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, it’s a coding standard – “

“It just means all those letters, numbers and those other symbols you see on your keyboard.” Will interrupted, looking at Adam hopelessly.

“Why do you always have to interrupt while I’m talking? We used to talk a lot about this--”

“Coz’ I figured you just want to look smart in front of everybody, while painstakingly and needlessly trying to explain everything about something that trivial.”

“He has a point.” Henry said.

“Thank you!” Will said. “Finally, someone –“

“Not you… Adam. You like talking about these things -- computers, programming and… other geeky stuff.” Henry observed. “Why are you suddenly avoiding it? Royal Flush! Haha, I love this game. Give me all those chocolate chips.”

“I’m avoiding long useless conversations.” Will annoyingly pointed out, while vulgarly stealing his winnings. “Like this one. And this is a stupid game.”

“You only avoid things for two reasons. Either it’s boring, or it’s something that upsets you. Since I don’t think you ever found computers boring, so that leaves–“

“I think I remember it now.” Belle said. “Wasn’t that game you made in that black window box you see when you go to start, run, and type in uh…”

“cmd or command. Yeah, that would be the command prompt. We had to use it, coz’ we didn’t really know how to use graphics yet. It was too complicated.” Adam answered. His face suddenly instantly changed after examining her statement. “By the way, I don’t think I appreciate you putting air quotes when you said ‘game’. It took us months to build that thing! You have no idea how hard it is --pulling your hair out, just trying to find where the problem is.”

“Hmm, I guess that explains your M-shaped hairline, and your personality, or a lack thereof.” Belle added, laughing heartily.

Will rolled his eyes and sighed hearing the two endlessly go on, as Wendy arrived with two plates in her hand and gave each of them to Will and Henry.

“What’s going on?” Wendy asked.

“We we’re just talking about the game Will and Adam made.”

“Oh, I remember that --”

Adam moved back to his seat Wendy before she could refuse the offer.

“Isn’t that the one where you used the dollar sign as the bad guys and the forward-slash, back-slash and hyphen as your sword? And I think the hero’s special power was being able to use them all at the same time.” Wendy continued, infecting everyone with her hysterical laugh, except Adam of course.

The two of them ate the food brought by Wendy. Henry finished a lot quicker than Will, which gave him a chance to observe his friend’s sudden silence. He saw Will frown once in a while staring blankly at his plate.

“I thought you said you guys haven’t eaten.” Wendy asked.

“We already did. Will was just trying to make a point about everything about this wake sucks.”

Henry studied Will and noticed him not even responding. Why did he suddenly fall silent? He wondered. Maybe it was something Adam said? His gaze shifted to Wendy, and noticed her observing Will in the same manner. Wendy looked at Henry with concerned eyes, seemingly reading each other’s thoughts.