Arcade Night

I was not a cool kid growing up since I didn’t have many friends and wasn’t allowed to go to birthday parties. The one time I was allowed to go to a party, it was my cousin’s friend’s birthday at a REC center. I spent the entire afternoon playing Dance Dance Revolution by myself until my face turned pink. Many years later my boyfriend and I had one of our first dates together and all those years of playing arcade games paid off, I was going to win. As soon as we entered the arcade, the sounds of laughter, what seemingly sounded like lasers shooting, and a myriad of video games rang in our ears. While walking around, the lingering scent of Windex and sweat smacked us in the face. “Want to play that?” I eagerly said while pointing toward the DDR machine that glowed in the corner. A teenage boy dripping in sweat was shuffling and slamming his feet onto the colorful platform while a small crowd of people stared in awe. After waiting in line, the boy finally exhausted himself and it was finally our turn to play. I slid the play card into the card slot and Japanese vocaloid music began to blast. All my confidence withered away when I saw a crowd anticipating for us to dance the same way as our predecessor. My coordination was thrown off and I began tripping over my own feet. Slowly the crowd started to disperse when the machine gave us both an “F.” I was prideful, so card swipe after card swipe, we continued to dance. An hour later, our legs turned into jell-o and our faces were flushed. The competition results were out and we got numerous As. It was only after the crowd was gone, that our coordination finally started to come together.