He Started It

‘Oh my God, I forgot about that,’ Portia says. She’s still facing backward, watching the road.

Eddie says, ‘Oh shit, Beth’s right. Everyone has to play.’

‘Oh shit?’ Krista says.

‘It’s just a question game,’ Felix says.

I nod and smile. ‘So we can get to know you.’

Krista’s shoulders sink a little as she relaxes. ‘Oh. Okay.’

Felix opens his laptop and pulls up a Word document. Answers to the twelve questions are documented, preserved for all time, just in case they come back to bite you. That usually happens during the holidays.

The first five questions are easy. Where were you born? Brothers and sisters? Do you have any kids? Where did you go to school? What do you do for a living? Krista answers them without hesitation.

The next five aren’t as simple.

‘Three words to describe your personality,’ I say.

‘Outgoing,’ Krista says, stating the obvious. ‘Kindhearted aaaand … fun. I’m pretty fun.’

‘You are,’ Eddie says.

‘I’m gagging back here,’ Portia yells.

‘Next,’ I say. ‘Three words to describe your mother’s personality.’

Krista looks surprised. The question surprises everyone, and it’s a hundred times more revealing than the previous one.

‘Okay …’ she says. ‘My mom is sweet, complicated, and a deep thinker.’

‘Now your father.’

‘Funny, successful, a big softie.’

That tells us a lot.

‘Next, what job would you hate to have?’ I say.

‘Ummm … I’d hate to be a fisherman. I don’t want to smell like fish all the time.’

‘Good answer,’ Eddie says.

‘If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?’ I say.

‘I’d like to be more patient. I’m not very good at waiting.’

Eddie laughs and then shuts up quick. We aren’t supposed to comment on the answers because the Twelve is a serious game. Grandpa taught it to us.

We learned it before the road trip. Uncle Stephen, our father’s brother, got engaged to a woman named Ella and they both came to our house for dinner. Grandpa was there and we learned about the game.

Ella was very pretty. She had shiny red hair and wore a black velvet jacket that looked so soft I wanted to lie on top of it. One by one, she answered Grandpa’s questions. Ella didn’t get upset, didn’t look shocked. She kept her cool the whole time. That’s how it seemed to me, though perhaps I’m remembering it wrong. What I do remember is that Grandpa didn’t like her.

‘Won’t last,’ he said later.

He was wrong for five years, then he was right.

On the road trip, he made all of us play. We already knew the questions, even Portia, so none were a surprise. I still have the spiral notebook with all of our answers, though I haven’t looked at it in a long time.

As an adult, I learned Grandpa didn’t invent the game. One day I was doing something random on the Internet, and there it was. The same questions in the same order, with one difference: The real game was called the Ten. Grandpa had added the last two.

‘Question eleven,’ I say to Krista. ‘If you could kill one person, who would it be?’

She gasps. ‘Are you serious?’

‘It’s just a question.’

This one takes her longer to answer than the first ten combined.

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘In high school, there was this guy. Jeff Skilling. A real asshole, like, the king of all the other assholes. He went out with this girl for a few months and when they broke up, he put these embarrassing pictures of her on the Internet. The worst kind of embarrassing. Sexual things.’ Krista pauses, then nods her head once. ‘Him. I’d kill Jeff Skilling.’

No one says anything. I would bet my entire inheritance that we’re all thinking the same thing: Krista has to be the girl in the story.

‘Last question,’ I say. ‘How would you kill him?’

‘I’d shoot him.’ No hesitation.

We all stare at her, a little stunned.

‘Well, that’s violent,’ Eddie says.

Krista smiles. ‘My dad taught me and I wouldn’t miss.’

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Those are the twelve questions.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Did I pass?’

Eddie smiles at her. ‘Of course.’

Felix closes the file called Krista: The Twelve. Honestly, it’s only necessary for the first ten questions. Everyone remembers the answers to the last two. I still remember ours.

Our first road trip was in August, and the heat was stifling inside and out – much hotter than it is now, in September. By the time we got to the questions, I was paranoid about my own grandfather, who still alternated between adventurous and angry. Portia had been cooped up too long and was driving everyone crazy. When Grandpa got to the question about who we would kill, Eddie answered first.

He wanted to kill a friend of his who was rich and had all the new gadgets and bragged about it. Andy Fastow had everything and made fun of people who didn’t.

‘I’d shoot him,’ Eddie said.

Portia wanted to kill her teacher, who made her first-grade class do all sorts of boring things and they never got to have any fun.

‘I guess I’d shoot her, too. Like Eddie,’ she said.

When it was my turn, I said I’d kill the guy who shot up the school in the next county over. He was just a kid like me, but he deserved to die.

‘I’d give him a bunch of sleeping pills,’ I said. ‘He’d just die in his sleep, never knowing he wouldn’t wake up.’

I still think that’s the best way to kill someone. No sense in making a bloody mess.

MONDAY, NO IDEA WHAT THE DATE IS. DOESN’T MATTER.

What is your favorite memory?

Before Grandma got sick, we used to go out to lunch on her birthday. All the girls, Mom would say. We all got dressed up and wore big hats, like church hats, and even lacy gloves. I hated it at first, because all we did was sit around in the sun and eat tiny sandwiches while Grandma talked. It was her day, Mom used to say. After a few years, I started saying the same thing.

I don’t know when that changed. I just remember that her stories were actually pretty interesting so I stopped pretending they weren’t.

The last birthday we had was over a year ago, right before the doctor said she was sick. I wore this light green dress with a giant matching hat. It was a costume, just like Grandma wore. Now I know that. Back then I thought we were just dressing up. Grandma wasn’t. She was playing a part.

I didn’t know that. Not until I learned that all those great things Grandma used to say about Grandpa were lies. When the truth came out, she wasn’t all dressed up in a hat and fancy clothes.

She was lying in bed, too thin, too pale, and too sick to worry about what she was wearing or how she looked. Cancer was making her waste away, and it was like whatever energy she had left all went to telling the truth about Grandpa.

‘No way,’ Felix says.

Eddie smiles. ‘Way.’