🎶 Cause that's the time we lie. No, they don't have to take you away. No, they don't have to take you away. 🎶
Moonbeam Arcade and Bowling, 2005
Ronnie's tennis shoes crunched on glass as she entered the empty arcade, careful not to scrape her knees and palms. Her legs were already plastered with multicolored band-aids from previous adventures that month; school had let out two weeks ago, and this was the third place to check off on her list of things she wanted, needed, to do this summer. "Gotta bout a month. Then its back to it." She had told Sam. Now, Sam was holding a flashlight between his teeth, working a splinter of glass from his palm.
The place has been mostly gutted, as they had expected. Geometric grime on the floor was all that was left of some arcade games. A plastic panel with the words "Space Rocketer" was left behind from one of them. Black wires hung from the ceiling from what used to be neon lights, and the peppered light from the black smeared windows cast a gloom over the place. Surprisingly, the place wasn't tattooed with graffiti.
"Yknow why this place was shut down right?" Ronnie said. "Shut down after one charity night event. One. Said it was held by the police department to raise money for missing people 'round town."
"Missing people? Huh. Spooky."
"Sure is. Heard it was over a game too. They brought it some kind of game where you could match faces to the missing people's pictures. Someone got so scared they died."
"You don't die because you're scared. Heart attack?" Sam said, annoyed at the sound of the sticky floor.
"I'm guessing."
Neither of them knew any missing people, but they had heard stories. A boy at their school had vanished at a time when their parents attended, and security had been upped for about two days. They talked about police cars milling about the roads near rivers and bridges, but Ronnie's dad, who had known the boy, claimed he wasn't "stupid like that". But whatever happened to the boy faded into town legend and tragedy, and his picture, a smiling kid in a camo baseball hat, was hung up in honor of him. It was the best they could do.
After rummaging around boxes of outdated electronics, there wasn't much else. The place wasn't huge; Ronnie remembered talk that they would expand the place with a skating rink, but that never came to fruition. While Sam looked over washed out wall art of shooting stars, moons, and ufos (all the aliens inside held up peace signs.) Ronnie bit back her diappointment. She'd beg ber parents to stop whenever they passed by here every other day on the way home from the grocery store to let her look inside, to see what creepiness lurked inside the abandoned arcade. She closed her eyes and tried to recall the sounds of hundreds of games pinging off and buzzing and singing around her, but it was empty, and not even the ghost remained.
