Re: Eddie and Julia: the Arcade
The arcade owner was old enough to be Nick's age, maybe. Old enough that taking a little joy out of eating radioactive-colored dots was something that showed character. Julia watched the balancing act go a little before she experimented with the same, and she didn't know shit about fixing machines except she could do it with a little feeling and very little thought. This guy, she bet, had manuals a long time ago and now knew them down to the page-number.
"Back home," she repeated, and she stuck her spoon in the cup to drink water instead, "Jersey? You sound like home to me. The kids here, if they stay the way they came into the world all the way through high school, I think they come out lucky, you know? Getting worn out this way, it's better than campfires in the woods with wolves around. I'm Julia," and she said it without segue, without any sort of introduction. "And I grew up with an arcade. Came to a place like this with a fistful of quarters and my brother and we wasted hours."