It was on the Tuesday after I'd granted Bri her new, extended curfew and permission to hang out with Bradley—no matter how unhappy I was about that whole "boyfriend" business—that she decided to test her limits.

I was sitting at work, poring through the prior quarter's numbers for the upcoming financial review my boss had with the board, when I got her text.

[Hanging out w Brad after school!! Headed to the arcade again. On your own for dinner. Cool?

I frowned at the text. Not cool. Not with me, anyway. But I'd promised her she could hang out with him, and she was following all the rules I'd set, so it's not like I could really complain.

[Be home by 8 SHARP] I texted back.

[Duh. See you @ 8! xoxo Wink [https://forum.royalroadl.com/images/smilies/wink.png] ]

I set my phone aside, feeling grumpy, and returned to my analysis, but after a while I found that I was having trouble concentrating on the work. It was a pointless exercise anyway. I knew that the numbers were solid. I'd pulled them from the database myself, and I was the one who'd crunched them. Going over them yet again was just a way to kill some time and avoid heading home to a house I now had confirmation would be empty.

Maybe it's time I started thinking about dating again, I mused. Women hadn't even been on the table for me over the last decade. Oh, the mothers in Bri's school fawned over me, absolutely—are you kidding? A caring, single older sibling with a tragic backstory and an adorable little sister? That shit is like catnip for women, and I had plenty of interesting invitations. Bri was an even better chick magnet than a cute puppy would have been. But relationships in your early twenties with girls your same age aren't known for their stability, and that was what Brianna needed after everything she'd gone through. I wasn't about to put her through a revolving door of women as I tried to manage building a romantic relationship at the same time I was trying to learn how to parent.

But even now the timing was all wrong. When Bri's teen romance went the way those things go and Bradley broke up with her, or better still, when she wised up and dumped him, she was going to need me to be around for her again. I'd waited for ten years to have a steady girlfriend. What was three more? Then Brianna would head off to college, and I could figure out what the hell I was supposed to do next and date whoever I wanted to. Anyway, I was in no hurry to experiment with online dating, which seemed to be the primary way to meet people now. The horror stories I'd heard made it sound absolutely awful.

I rubbed my eyes and pushed my chair back from my desk. It was almost 5:00pm, which meant I'd already put in a nine hour day. This was dumb. I was making busywork for myself when I could be gaming at home. The house wouldn't really be empty, because I'd be there, right?

I grabbed my coat and nodded a curt goodbye to officemates as I headed out to my car. They politely nodded back, barely even registering me. Everyone at my office was nice enough, but they were all about fifteen years older than me and thoroughly uninterested in my hobbies. I worked in the finance department for a mid-sized, family-owned company that offered a variety of business and professional services to real estate developers. Scintillating stuff, I know, but beggars can't be choosers. Before they'd moved away to be closer to Mark, Mr. Johnson had helped me land a position there as a junior data analyst through his work contacts right around the same time Bri and I were running out of money from our insurance settlement.

I was lucky to be getting a white-collar job at all without a college education, no matter how good my SAT scores had been, and I knew it. I thanked them for the opportunity, kept my head down, and worked hard while Bri made her way through grade school. Fortunately, the work itself turned out to be a cakewalk for me. Numbers come easy to someone who's spent their whole life playing games that revolved around min-maxing statistics. When I got frustrated waiting for our office admin to pull the monthly financials for me—which he fucked up more often than not—I taught myself SQL and started getting them without his help. Within a few years, I'd been promoted to analyst and then senior analyst. I was great at my job, and I still got to spend half my day browsing Reddit. It might not be sexy, but it paid our bills.

When I arrived home from work, I immediately tried to make the house feel as lively as possible while fighting my constant urge to check my phone just one more time. I turned on the television, flushed the toilet, and made myself a double-decker club sandwich with all my favorite ingredients. Bri is going to be fine, I told myself as I scraped a thick layer of mayo over the bread with more force than was probably necessary. Bri is going to follow the rules and be home at eight sharp, just like she promised.

I carried my food upstairs to my bedroom, set my phone on the desk, and sat down at my dual-monitor battle station to fire up Steam while I ate. I have many hundreds of games in my library—thank you, Humble Bundle!—but I've played less than a quarter of them. Bri actually goes and tries out all the goofy indie titles we end up with, and she really seems to like some of these weird new genres I hardly keep up with. I have a list of games a mile long I'm intending to try, but for some reason I always find myself reaching for old favorites instead: I have over five hundred hours logged on Skyrim, my Morrowind discs are so worn out that I had to convert to using digital backups, and I'm frankly embarrassed to say what my total /played time is across all my World of Warcraft characters.

Now I found myself listlessly scrolling through my games, feeling as vaguely distracted as I had at work. I realized after a moment that I wasn't even looking at the titles. Instead, my mind kept fixating on what Brianna might be doing with Bradley... or more precisely, what he might be doing to her. I remembered exactly how shitty teenage guys could be about the girls they were dating sometimes. When my phone buzzed, I nearly dove to pick it up, certain that something horrible had happened.

Bri had texted, but it was completely innocent: [dude have you ever seen this game before? wtf]

I let out a relieved sigh and studied the picture she'd sent. It was a blue and purple arcade console titled "Ataraxia," and it had pictures of generic-looking fantasy characters all along the sides and top locked in some kind of epic struggle. I was as baffled as Bri was. A quick Google search revealed nothing, but that wasn't too surprising. Despite it's multi-decade decline in the U.S., the arcade scene in Japan was still going strong, and it was possible she'd stumbled on some new import that wasn't yet documented in English, although I was impressed that the arcade in our small, boring town would take a chance on something like that.

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[nope. Home by 8! 😠] I texted back.

[yea yea. I'll let u know how it is -_- ]

I set my phone down with a grimace and launched Skyrim for the millionth time. Doing anything was better than sitting here and fretting about my sister like a chump, and I wasn't going to be that parent who texted just to 'check in' every half hour. I rolled a brand new character, feeling proud of myself for being mature enough to let my sister have her evening with her boyfriend despite my misgivings.

The next two hours were spent murdering Bradley the Breton in as many hilariously creative ways as I could come up with. Petty? No question. Juvenile? Sure. But it also ended up being surprisingly entertaining.

By 7:50pm, I was getting itchy for an update, and no amount of sacrificing Skyrim-Bradley to slaughterfish in ice-cold northern waters was soothing me anymore.

"She sure likes to cut things close..." I muttered. I left my character to drown one more time in a puddle and went downstairs to pace back and forth in front of our front door, peering anxiously toward our driveway through the living room window on each circuit. Bradley drove a red, 2010 Honda Civic, and I looked for it every time I saw headlights flash down our street. I promised myself I wouldn't text her until she was actually late.

Bri is responsible. You told her you trusted her, I reminded myself. She promised to be home on time. Give her a chance to keep her word before you freak out.

Ten minutes later, when no car had appeared in the driveway, I was mad. I whipped my phone out.

[It's 8:01pm and YOU ARE NOT HERE young lady]

By 8:15 I was livid.

[what the HELL bri? WHERE ARE YOU?]

By 8:30 I was worried. I'd settled down into our recliner to stare at the driveway, actively willing a red Civic to appear. I'd sent several more texts with varying levels of heat and none of them had been answered. Bri either hadn't seen them or she was ignoring me, and I simply didn't believe she'd ignore me for this long, knowing what it would put me through. I was beating myself up for not thinking to get Bradley's number so I could text him too.

[bri, please just reply to tell me you're not dead. I won't be mad. please] I typed out to her.

Then I stood up and grabbed my coat. Doing nothing was driving me crazy. If she was on her way home already, then she'd be safe when she arrived, and I could yell at her later. If she was in some kind of trouble, I wasn't going to sit around waiting for a police report to come in.

The mall was only fifteen minutes away, and the stores all closed at 9:00pm. I rolled in at ten 'til, and only a tiny smattering of cars remained in the lot. When I saw that Bradley's Civic was one of those, relief flooded my body. I felt even better after I confirmed that no teens were fucking in the backseat.

My momentary relief rapidly converted into white-hot rage, of course. If they were still here, that meant Bri had either purposely been ignoring me or something had happened to her phone and she'd lost track of time when she'd promised me that she wouldn't. Either way, she was never seeing a boy ever again... or the outside of our house, for that matter.

I stormed into the arcade for the second time in a week and made the same circuit I'd made last time, nostrils flaring.

No one was there. Not a single player. The arcade was one of those unattended types, so there wasn't even an employee to tell me when the kids had left. I stood fuming in the middle of the flashing game machines, arms crossed, glaring bloody murder at nothing in particular. This was bad. Cars weren't the only place that teenagers could sneak off for a private moment, but Brianna didn't seem like the type to want to make out in a mall stairwell. We hadn't had a bookstore here in ages, and I knew how lame my sister thought most of the other remaining shops were. Was it possible they'd decided to catch a movie? The movie theater was open until midnight, but that didn't feel right to me. Missing your curfew is one thing—settling into a two-hour film knowing it's going to carry you well past it requires a level of willful, premeditated rebellion that would be excessive even for Bri.

My next immediate idea was to run off half-cocked in a random direction while shouting their names into an empty mall, so I could tell I was grasping at straws.

I took a deep breath through my nose and then released it. What I needed to do was calm down and try to think logically about where they might have gone, and more importantly, why Bri might be unable or unwilling to text me back. When you search for lost people, the first thing you're always instructed to do is to search their last known location for clues. I was already at the arcade and hadn't seen any sign of her or Brad. But they'd been here at some point, because Bri had texted me a picture of that weird arcade game she found. That was the very last place I knew she'd been, roughly three hours ago. Searching that exact spot for clues ought to be my first step.

I passed through the arcade again, more deliberately this time, looking for the unfamiliar blue and purple machine my sister had sent a picture of. Our arcade was surprisingly large and well-stocked with games both new and old, but it didn't take me very long to find the one I was looking for, tucked away in the furthest back corner. There was no mistaking it—Ataraxia, a fantasy arcade game neither of us had ever heard of before. It looked strangely out of place in the dim corner, standing slightly apart from the other machines while it looped through a demo reel of fantasy heroes blasting and carving their way through legions of fantastic monsters. Under other circumstances, this was the type of game that would have immediately intrigued me, but right now I was only concerned with looking for signs of Bri.

I'm not sure what I was expecting to find, exactly. It's not like teenage girls drop breadcrumbs wherever they go, and a stray hairband wouldn't tell me anything I didn't already know. I was half afraid and half hoping to find her phone on the floor, just because I was desperate for any shred of information, but there was nothing at all on the faded carpeting around the machine.

Then a small glint of silver metal caught my eye. Just below the bottom right corner of Ataraxia's screen, above player 2's controls, someone had left a single quarter sitting on the arcade dash. Coin lines on games were hardly unusual for arcades, but they were unusual for our arcade, where there were never enough interested players to bother lining up quarters on the machine. It was something my dad had always done with his change as a matter of habit, a leftover from the golden age of arcade games in the 80s. I'd picked up the habit from him, and Bri had picked it up from me—it was a functional convenience for her, since her clothes didn't always have decent pockets, and otherwise she'd need to go diving for her messy purse and frantically search for a new coin during the time pressure of a continue countdown.

That had to be my sister's quarter. Seeing the abandoned coin made me feel even more uncomfortable than finding her phone on the floor would have, for some reason. This was the same girl who would go out of her way to pick up discarded pennies on the sidewalk. Bri might accidentally drop her phone, but she would never willingly walk away from a quarter she'd placed on an arcade dash. I stepped closer and picked it up, inspecting the worn ridges on the outside of the coin. It was a 2001 commemorative New York state quarter which had somehow managed to travel quite far away from its home, with the standard Washington head on one side and a picture of the Statue of Liberty on the other. The words "Gateway to Freedom" were embossed in small, raised letters beside the iconic statue. I rubbed my thumb across them nervously.

It's hard to say exactly why I did what I did next. With my sister missing, with her quarter abandoned, and with the night growing ever later and the mall about to close, playing some random arcade game I'd never seen before should have been the last thing on my mind. But there was something surreal about the whole situation that gave it an almost dreamlike quality. You know how sometimes in dreams, things get weird, even really weird, and you still just go along with them like it's totally normal? I definitely wasn't dreaming, but that's still kind of what this felt like. It just made sense—like I was inexplicably compelled, and couldn't possibly have done anything else.

I slipped Brianna's quarter into the game slot, took the controls, and hit the start button.