There was a basketball hoop I had set up behind my garage a while ago, just if I ever felt like being outside. Dribbling was impossible on the ground, but you could still shoot. The four of us went back there once after we started meeting at my house and just shot idly while we talked.
Actually, Jo was the only one shooting. Sophia and I were sitting on a picnic table bench, because we thought it was too hot to do anything strenuous and Quentin was sitting on the table shuffling a pack of cards. I looked over and saw they weren't playing cards. "Quentin, what are those things?"
"God cards. You know what 'Gods of the Realm' is?"
"No, what are they?"
"Oh great, here we go," Jo said.
"It's a card game. You take your deck and play it against another guy's deck, you have to build your decks so that you have enough belief points, followers, and shrines to win."
"What?"
"Those are your attacks, you need enough belief points so you can build up a good following so you can start building shrines and then you can attack the other gods and their followers."
"Wait a minute, what do you mean by building a deck?"
"You build a deck, you buy cards, you can trade them. I got an elder god shrine for five dollars, that's pretty good."
"Wait a minute, you can buy your own cards?"
"Yeah, the good cards you can get for about thirty dollars, and you can trade them like baseball cards. And you can get them in singles or in expansion packs and booster packs. I usually get singles because then you always know what you're getting, you can't do that in packs. And you shouldn't get expansion packs because you just get a bunch of useless cards."
"Expansion packs?"
"Yeah, every six months or so they make a revised edition and they revise the cards so that they're better, easier to read, and they add new cards and new rules."
"Is that allowed?"
"Of course it's allowed. You see, at first they only had three packs: Olympia, Immortal, and The Almighty and those were pretty good. If you find an unopened pack of any of those they'll probably be around seventy or eighty dollars. And then came Apocalypse, Creation, Revelation, Divinity, and Divinity was terrible, no one liked Divinity because it had a lot of weak cards and nobody liked them, and Omniscience was bad too. Then people stopped playing the game for a while, it lost popularity, but then they came out with Olympia Second Edition and everybody liked that and everybody started playing again and..."
"All right! All right! That's enough, shut up already!" I exclaimed.
"Boy, are you sorry you asked," Jo said.
"Well, I'm just trying to explain this so you'll understand," Quentin said.
"I don't care about the life history of your little cards, I just asked out of curiosity."
"Curiosity killed the cat," Jo added.
"Well, I just thought you might be interested. But I guess you're not."
"Sorry, I've got better things to spend my money on."
"How much have you spent on those cards?" Jo prodded antagonistically.
"Well, I just bought a focus lightning card in the last month, and a pack of followers, and I just traded my Tranaryan priest for a sea wind and a quarry that was..."
"In the last month how much have you spent on God cards?" Jo demanded to know.
"About eighty dollars."
This was too silly. "Let me get this straight," I said, "In the last month you have wasted eighty dollars on those little cards."
"I didn't waste it."
"Don't you think you should save some money for more important stuff? If you spend eighty dollars a month on trading cards you aren't going to have a lot of money."
"I'll manage."
"Quentin, no offense, but you are not planning for your future."
"Ha, yeah, right," Josiah laughed, "Like any of us have got a future."
"What?" Quentin asked.
"Come on, look at us, we're in all the slacker classes at school, if we even go to class. You two," pointing at Sophia and me, "Even had to go to a remedial class with the ambiguously gay teacher."
"I think the fact that we went says something. You never would have gone," Sophia argued.
"Right, I wouldn't have. Doesn't matter anyway. All the guys in the honors classes and math and debate teams are gonna have the great careers, all the football players and their cheerleaders are gonna have all the money, driving around in their BMWs while we're still riding the subway to our dead-end job at McDonald's. We ain't got no future."
"Speak for yourself, I've got my future set," Quentin piped up.
"Yeah, right, what are you going to do?"
"I think I'm going to go into writing computer games."
"Computer games?!" Josiah stopped in the middle of his shot with an incredulous look on his face. "You can't write a computer game."
"Oh yeah? What about Resident Evil 2, Final Fantasy VII, Legend of Zelda, those all have got huge plots - someone's writing them."
"And you're going to be the next guy to write them?"
"Yep."
"Quentin," Sophia interjected, "You haven't taken an English course yet that you haven't failed."
"I'm still hearing what the teacher says. I just don't do the assignments cause they're lame. You read a story and then it's like 'figure out the metaphorical significance of this lamp'. When you write, you shouldn't worry about metaphors and stuff, just write whatever comes to mind and let it flow like water."
"Yeah, down the drain," Josiah laughed hard at his own joke.
"No," he said angrily. "I once wrote a pretty good story about 'Gods of the Realm'. It was real short, about eight pages. And I've created lots of cards," he held up one of his cards, "See, they've got little stories and descriptions of their personality. I've got a pile of them in my locker. I'll bring 'em next time."
"If he can find them," Sophia interjected. "I've seen his locker, we aren't going to see him until next year."
"It's all just tapes and CD's. I bring a lot of ear candy to school."
"I bet all of his teachers have at least two of his Walkmans in their drawers."
"I hate it when teachers take stuff away from you," Quentin added. "It's not theirs, they shouldn't take it. I lost my Dr. Dre tape once because a teacher took it from me. She took away my Walkman and the tape was in there and when I got it back it wasn't there."
"Did you say anything?" I asked.
"Yeah... well, probably not as strongly as I should have. I just sort of asked loudly where it was."
"If it was me I would have bitch-slapped her until I got it back," Jo added.
"Dr. Dre was missing from the scene for a while," Sophia commented.
"Yeah, she's probably still listening to it," Quentin said.
"No, she means the guy, dumbass," Jo exclaimed.
"Oh, never mind," he paused. "Hey, did you ever realize that all the good rappers were really fat. Dr. Dre, Heavy D, The Fat Boys, Notorious B.I.G."
"Notorious B.I.G.'s dead," Jo said, "And when was the last time you heard about The Fat Boys and Heavy D," he added.
"Point made, I guess," Quentin said.
"Of course," Jo finished, sinking a basket.
"Now all the rap songs sound the same, like copies of Puff Daddy... or songs that Puff Daddy copied," Sophia said.
"I hate Puff Daddy. He totally ruined the rap industry with that stupid-ass remix of Missing You," Josiah said. "Whenever he comes on the radio I switch it."
"I don't like him, but I'll listen to him. It's not like I'm gonna go to his concerts or anything though," Quentin said.
"That's another thing," Josiah continued, "He's got the whole rap music industry under his little finger, too. He's got his own record empire, and he's making profits off a dead guy's songs just by remixing him in."
"Not like that's new, Natalie Cole did that," Quentin said.
"Who the hell is Natalie Cole?"
"She's Nat King Cole's daughter, they remixed her in with one of his songs so it sounded like she was doing a duet. Don't you remember that song from the early '90's or something?"
"Never heard of her, never heard of either of them," Josiah said.
"Now it seems it's like everybody is ripping off everybody else. All the ideas have been thought of," I said.
"Well, that's why I'm gonna write computer games. I think I've got some original ideas," Quentin piped in.
"Yeah, if you pull them out of your ass, QT," Jo laughed.
"I'll be someone. You'll see. I've got a future."
"Sooner you realize we ain't got no future, the sooner you'll be happier."
Yeah, Jo, I thought, you look real happy to me.