Page 21 of Derivation

Sarai got up and headed into the kitchen, but that gave Arlowe a chance to steal Sarai’s seat, like Enya had done the last time she’d been here and they’d all been hanging out.

“Why don’t you go first?” Arlowe said to her. “Enya can guess the clue, and you can act it out. I’ll use my phone as the timer.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said and stood up to pull a clue from the bowl.

When Sarai came back, she looked at Arlowe, gave her a glare, and sat down on the other sofa next to Enya instead.

“Three words,” Enya guessed when Gabi began showing the clue. “First word.”

And on and on it went for well over an hour before they were finally done with playing charades. Sarai and Arlowe had come in third at the end. Enya and Gabi had placed second. And, surprising no one, the couple in the group had won it all. Arlowe then suggested that they move on to Monopoly and play with the official rules, which no one actually knew, so they spent the next twenty minutes reading the rule book and making sense of it before they each picked their piece.

“I think I’m going to sit this one out,” Enya said. “Can I just watch? I hate Monopoly.”

“Sure, Enya,” Arlowe said.

“Me too,” Sarai added. “I’m going to sit and watch.”

“What? Why?”

“Why was Enya let off the hook, but you’re questioning me?”

“Because you actually like Monopoly. You take it way too seriously and become this crazy person who wants all the properties and money and hates having to mortgage properties. You’re the reason I said we have to play by the real rules, because when we play by the house rules, you make it less like a game and more like–”

“A nightmare?” Violet finished.

“Hey!”

Gabi laughed and asked, “Are you really that bad?”

“I like to win,” Sarai replied, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Come on. Play. You can help me out if you want. I’m pretty bad at this game,” Gabi encouraged.

“I don’t think she wants you to see her dark side, Gabi,” Violet teased.

“I do not have a dark side,” Sarai argued. “And I’ll play, but when you all lose, I don’t want to hear any complaints.”

“Do I have to play against dark-side Sarai?” Stella asked.

“No, babe,” Violet replied, cupping Stella’s cheek. “You can watch, too, if you want.”

“Let’s roll to see who goes first,” Arlowe said.

“Is this going to be a regular thing now?” Gabi asked.

“What?”

“Game night. I haven’t had a roommate since my college dorm, so I don’t really know how it all works. You’re all best friends, too, and you also work together, so I guess you spend a lot of time together. Do you always eat dinner as a group, or is it kind of a just let people know your plan thing? Would I be invited to those dinners when it’s a group thing, since it’s your group and I just live here?”

“You’d be part of the group, Gabi,” Arlowe said. “And we sometimes eat together, but not all the time.”

“It’s a do-your-own-thing, but you can see what everyone else is up to kind of a thing, and if we’re ordering in or someone’s cooking, you just join,” Sarai said.

“Okay,” she replied and rolled the dice.

“And you’ll probably want to park your car in the back of the driveway since you’ll drive to work and we all stay here. There are some days we have to go, but we can let you know before that or take a different car if we have to,” Enya said. “You can street park, but there’s space in the driveway, too.”

“I can work from home. I just also like to work in the office sometimes.”