I Feel Guilty When King Robert Dies
By Adriana DeNoble
I feel guilty when King Robert dies, being that I’m the one in charge of saving him. I also resent that he always gets himself into so much trouble. Whether he’s starting a fire in his royal kitchen, or accidentally locking himself in his hungry dragon’s lair, it’s me who must save him. If I do, I get a measly reward of fifty coins, which is nothing compared to the nine hundred it costs for five extra moves. If I run out of time or run out of moves — if I don’t save him, the king is dead. The kingdom is left without its ruler.
I’m the one in charge of building his castle, which is a project that seems never-ending. I’m on level 2,288, and I’m only halfway done with Area 41, the Magic Room. From what I know, there are ninety-eight areas, the final being his airport. I don’t know why he would want to fly anywhere with a castle like his. Maybe he wants to get away from the construction.
Most evenings begin the same way. I log off Microsoft Teams. I move five steps from the desk I bought off Amazon, to the couch I bought on Kaiyo. I lay on my side and look at my phone. I open the Royal Match app. I X-out of the promotional pop-ups, unless there is a good deal going on. If so, I’ll drop $2.99 on a value pack of coins and power-ups. I play Royal Match while I listen to The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City play on Peacock. I move from screen to screen, and I find rest somewhere in between. The seasons are transitioning from Summer to Fall, so the windows are open. This helps me save on my Con Edison bill. I look at my Sallie Mae app. There is no help with that bill. The sounds of New York City float through my half-open windows on a breeze. There are horns, and movement, and often, a man yelling.
My best friend Olivia and I live together. We were born a day apart and have been best friends since we were nine years old. We are twenty-six now. When Olivia and I are both home at the same time, she will join me on the couch and play Royal Match on her phone. Olivia’s mom, Melissa, plays too, from Olivia’s childhood home in New Jersey. The three of us belong to a group within the game, one that we created, called Cheez Plz. The group contains forty-seven loyal members. I know that our group members are loyal because when Melissa sees a player’s activity level drop, she will kick them out of the group. Our activity level is green: High.
Olivia and I have always been synonymous with each other. Sharing birthday parties, matching our outfits, playing the same games. Being friends with someone who knows the child-you and adult-you is a warm place. You retreat into it. It’s a place that decides between your past, present, and future, and still chooses you. As I grow, and Olivia grows, we together get caught in what feels like a dark room between girlhood and womanhood. And, because it’s dark, we often turn the wrong corner, but we laugh when one of us walks into a wall.
I must consistently remind my team that the hard work we do to build the kingdom is because we have a benevolent ruler. King Robert, although powerful, and perhaps clumsy, rules fairly. I am an adult in a world that has been clumsily ruled; I often wonder whether we got here by poor or brilliant design. I cannot tell if spending fifty-one dollars on ice cream, dishwasher pods, paper towels, and body lotion sparks resentment against the mysterious people in offices who make up rules about the economy, or gratitude that I am lucky enough to make rent in New York City.
I grew into adulthood during a pandemic, where all the adults in charge didn’t know what they were doing either. There was a lot of looking around, like when a teacher asks a question to a room of students who didn’t study. I try to relate to these adults in charge, only because it makes me feel better. They were once children too. In the beginning of the pandemic, I started grad school from home. Halfway through, I moved to New York to finish grad school in-person. Then, with what felt like the snap of a rubber band against my wrist, my student loan payments were due.
I have pretended to be an adult for a long time. I knew what adult problems sounded like, the ones that seep through bedroom walls, before I knew what certain curse words meant. I knew how to change diapers at eleven, cook at twelve, forge my parents’ signature at thirteen, because that’s what I needed to do. I spent my adolescence looking for places to leave my childhood home that didn’t have much childhood for me. When I left at eighteen, I was legally an adult — the law had no childhood left for me.
I sometimes look for the little girl I once was in my mind, and I cannot find her. Now, at twenty-six, I try hard not to resent the authority figures around me, the politicians, the MTA, the IRS, my parents, because the rebellion has nowhere to go. Instead, I stamp out that fire with the quiet peace of what comes with being an adult: being able to decide. I can choose things. Like when to be angry, and where to take the train to, and if I want to save King Robert or skip a level.
Each area of King Robert’s castle is kept in a book. From the dining room to the bowling alley, the hard work of his devoted builders is carefully documented in his bible entitled “Areas.” There is no reason to, but should you want to, you can tap the book to be reminded of all the rooms you built for the king. You can flip through the pages to see what room is next. There is always work to be done.
In my mind, I fast-forward to a reality in which I no longer feel embarrassed, I no longer feel broke, and I no longer feel unsure. It is a reality I work toward. One in which I have long grey hair that falls at my waist. I wear red lipstick the bleeds into the wrinkles around my mouth. I wear the funky reading glasses that cool, artsy older women wear. I am in good shape for my age, but I carry an ornate cane, just for the aesthetic, and to get younger people to do stuff for me for the sake of my “aching knees.” In this future, I look back at my life and I flip through the pages of my twenties, tell my peers how relieved I am to have grown out of them. I revel in the memory of a career I am proud of, the life I built for myself. In this reality, age has been an elixir; it has cured me.
Olivia spends the nights bartending and the days applying to nursing schools. I check the mail for her just in case she gets a decision letter. She lost her mail key, and we haven’t made a copy yet because we haven’t needed to. We’re mostly together. For work, I spend five days a week putting on my best adult voice, dressing myself in big-girl confidence, and I tell people much older than me my opinions on things. I am lucky that I get paid to do that. I push my shoulders back and breathe a few times before speaking to smooth the bumps out of my voice. I tell them what I think about this and that. I am grateful they listen. I imagine they were once ironing their voice out too, hoping the people around them didn’t hear it shake.
Those who are closest to me call me “Age,” which is short for my full name, “Adriana.” It’s how I separate those who know me the most from those who know me the least. I don’t remember the last time Olivia called me “Adriana.” I am only Age to her. I tell her about the future me I work toward, the one that wears the cool glasses. She says Age, you need to start appreciating the current moment. We’re going to be sixty some day and we’re going to be pissed we didn’t appreciate our wrinkle-free foreheads, the nights we didn’t have kids to take care of. I tell her that she’s probably right, but the current moment feels as if it’s a size too large, and I still need to grow into it. She says, it’s probably a Capricorn thing. We are never satisfied unless we’re working toward something.
King Robert not only has loyal players to protect him, King Robert also has friends. He has two best friends: his butler and his dog. The butler’s name is Winston. He is a tall, slim man with a mustache. He is always dressed in a suit. The dog’s name is Duke. Around the castle, bones and dog bowls are left out for him.
King Robert, Winston, and Duke are mostly together. They are depicted in different scenes across the game. In one scene, the three friends stand before a smoking volcano. The volcano is filled to the brim with lava. It is boiling, smoking, itching to erupt. The friends are not worried. King Robert holds a compass, Winston a fire extinguisher, Duke is equipped with a headlight. They smile, confident they can withstand an eruption. They are blinded by the warmth of friendship, blissfully unaware that lava can swallow things, like compasses, fire extinguishers, and headlamps, whole.
Sometimes when Olivia and I run out of new things to talk about, we talk about old things. Like the awful haircuts we had in fourth grade: hers, shoulder length with purple highlights, mine, shoulder length with red highlights. Or the American Spirits we smoked, the ones in the orange box, driving home from school our senior year. How well the cheap body spray we doused ourselves in hid the tobacco smell from our parents. Sometimes there is a memory on the tip of our tongues, and we can just grasp at it, but the details are blurry. I ask, what was the name of that weirdo teacher who would look at us like that? She’ll ask, how old were we when we got drunk for the first time? Because we have seen so much of each other’s lives, we can help each other fill in the gaps. When we ask each other for the missing details about the girls we once were, the girls with small shoulders that held the weights of the homes they came from, we say, don’t worry. I remember.
Earlier this summer, Olivia was accepted into nursing school. We were together when she got the email. An accelerated nursing program — we hugged and cried as I told her, it’ll happen so fast, in eleven months you will be a nurse. We know how quickly a year goes.
Every year, we visit Olivia’s grandparents in Florida. Patricia and Joe. Patricia wears wedged flip flops and Joe just got his first tattoo at 76. They’re snowbirds. In November they make the 24-hour drive from central New Jersey to Hollywood, Florida. Me and Olivia fly from New York to see them, and when the trip is over we hate to leave them. On the first day, Patricia and Joe take us to Publix. They buy us the snacks we like and bottles of wine to share by the retirement community’s pool. Throughout the week they take us to casinos, and the horse track, and the only good Italian restaurants in Florida, which are the restaurants all the other New York snowbirds go. We sleep in Joe and Pat’s guest room, we keep the ceiling fan on at night to stave off the sticky Florida heat, and we say we don’t want to leave and go back to work. It feels so good to be taken care of.
The last time we went, we sat on the couch with Patricia and watched reality TV. The three of us were eating ice cream from the freezer when a commercial came on. The commercial began with a shot of a woman sitting on a bench in a subway station. The station is not in New York, but in some unidentifiable, fictional place, where the subway station is clean, and no one is yelling. The only noise in that place comes from a guy with a man-bun busking by the subway car, guitar in hand, case open waiting for cash. The woman sitting, the protagonist of this scene, has great skin, a high pony, and an expensive-looking pink trench coat. She is smiling at her phone. Of course she is — she is playing Royal Match.
She smiles even wider as the camera snakes around her body, revealing that she is no longer waiting for her ride to or from work. She is no longer sitting on a bench underground; she is sitting on a throne. Her pink trench coat has turned into a pink dress fit for a queen. She looks up at the camera from her throne. Her phone is still in hand. She smirks at the people watching at home and crosses her legs. In the final scene, we see King Robert. He’s talking to us through the TV, telling us to get the “royal treatment.” He commands us, as our ruler, to “join the millions playing Royal Match today.” There are so many of us building his kingdom.
Adriana DeNoble is a copywriter based in Queens, New York. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing (Nonfiction) from Columbia University. Before her MFA, Adriana studied in Rome, Italy, where she earned the Premio America Award from the Italy USA Foundation for academic excellence and fostering U.S.-Italy relations. Her personal essay, Summertime Holly, has been published in 805 Lit, and nominated for Best of the Net Anthology.