The Farewell Spin

[agnellaoral]

I have a rule about goodbyes. I don’t do them. I’m the guy who leaves parties without telling anyone, who ends phone calls with “alright, talk later” and then doesn’t talk later. Clean breaks feel wrong to me. Like ripping off a bandage that’s not ready to come off. So when my best friend Marcus announced he was moving to Seattle for a job, I did what I always do. I nodded, said “that’s huge, man,” and changed the subject.

He left in three weeks. We both pretended it wasn’t happening.

Marcus and I go back thirteen years. College roommates who somehow survived sharing a dorm the size of a closet. He’s the organized one. I’m the chaos. He plans vacations six months in advance. I show up at the airport hoping my passport isn’t expired. We shouldn’t work as friends, but we do. Or we did. Now he was moving two thousand miles away, and I was handling it by not handling it.

The Friday before his departure, he showed up at my apartment with a six-pack and a look I recognized. The look that said “we’re talking about this whether you like it or not.”

“One last night,” he said, setting the beers on my counter. “No avoiding it. We’re doing something stupid.”

I laughed. “Define stupid.”

He thought for a second. “Remember when we used to play poker in the dorm? Before you got all responsible and boring?”

“I’m not boring. I’m selectively adventurous.”

“Same thing.” He grabbed two beers, popped the caps, and handed me one. “I’m not leaving without one night of bad decisions. That’s the deal.”

So I agreed. We ordered terrible Chinese food, the kind with more MSG than actual ingredients, and sat on my couch trying to figure out what “one night of bad decisions” actually meant. We were too old for bars. Too tired for clubs. Marcus suggested a casino, but neither of us wanted to drive forty minutes to the nearest one.

That’s when I remembered the account I hadn’t touched in months. I’d signed up during a slow work week, played a few rounds, forgotten about it. I pulled it up on my laptop. Marcus raised his eyebrows.

“Didn’t peg you for an online casino guy,” he said.

“I’m not. But you wanted bad decisions.”

He grinned. “Fair enough.”

I deposited a hundred bucks. Figured if we were going to do this, we’d do it right. We pushed the coffee table aside, put the laptop between us on the couch, and dove into the Vavada casino games. Marcus took the first spin on a slot with a pirate theme. Lost. I took the next. Lost. We went back and forth, laughing at the animations, making up voices for the characters, treating it like the arcade games we played as kids.

Forty minutes in, we were down to thirty dollars. Marcus looked at me. “Last ten spins,” he said. “Winner picks the goodbye spot. Where we have our final dinner before I leave.”

I liked that. A real stake. Not money, but memory.

We took turns. Spin one. Nothing. Spin two. Small win. We were up to thirty-five. Spin three. Nothing. Spin four. Another small win. We were treading water, not drowning. Spin five. Nothing. Spin six. Nothing. We were down to our last four spins, balance hovering around twenty dollars.

Spin seven was mine. I clicked the button. The reels spun. I was about to say something sarcastic when the screen changed. The music shifted. A bonus round triggered. Marcus grabbed my arm.

“Don’t mess this up,” he said.

“I’m not doing anything. It’s automatic.”

The bonus round played out. Free spins with multipliers. I sat there, helpless, watching numbers climb. Twenty dollars became fifty. Fifty became a hundred and twenty. A hundred and twenty became three hundred. By the time the bonus ended, our balance was sitting at four hundred and sixty dollars.

Marcus leaned back. I leaned forward. Neither of us spoke for a solid ten seconds.

Then he said, “Okay. That’s it. Cash out.”

I did. No hesitation. No “one more spin.” I hit withdraw, closed the laptop, and we sat there in the silence of my apartment, two beers between us, a container of cold lo mein growing stiff on the coffee table.

“Guess you pick the spot,” I said.

He shook his head. “We both pick. That was a team effort.”

We went to a diner the next night. The kind with cracked vinyl booths and coffee that tastes like it’s been sitting since 1992. His choice. Or ours, I guess. We sat there for three hours, talking about nothing and everything. He told me he was scared about the move. I told him I was scared about him leaving. For once, I didn’t change the subject.

The money from that night covered his gas for the drive west. He texted me from Utah, then Nevada, then California. Every night, a new photo of some random roadside attraction. When he finally made it to Seattle, he sent me a picture of his new apartment key with the caption “next time you visit, you’re sleeping on the floor.”

I still have the account. I don’t play often, but sometimes on a Friday when I’m feeling nostalgic, I’ll pull it up. I stick to the Vavada casino games we played that night. The pirate one, mostly. I never win big. Most nights I lose the twenty bucks I put in and close the laptop without a second thought.

But sometimes, when the bonus round triggers and the screen lights up, I remember that night. The Chinese food. The beers. My best friend grabbing my arm like we were nineteen again in a dorm room that smelled like ramen and cheap cologne.

Marcus calls every Sunday now. We talk about work, about life, about whether his new apartment has good enough lighting for my eventual visit. We don’t talk about that night much. We don’t have to.

Some goodbyes aren’t really goodbyes. Sometimes they’re just a pause before the next spin.