"The same way a team owns a goal in, like, anything else?" he says. "And maybe you count up separately per ball, so that gives everybody four points with no ridiculous throws, I meant that word when I said it, but they'll be tough to get because now everybody's fighting like cats over everybody else's balls, and wow that got dirty fast."

"Yeah, good plan. And the first team to four points wins. Or five if we wanna force everybody to be ridiculous at least once a game."

"Five points or - two hours followed by sudden death in case of tie? Will people generally tolerate playing a sport for that length of time?"

"Sure they will. You can make it an hour and a half, that's about how long a game of soccer takes, I think."

"So if someone gets five points, game ends, they win - if no one does, then whoever has the most points at an hour and a half wins - if two or three teams are tied at that time, whoever scores the next point wins." She chews her lip a little. "But if two or three are tied at four points, then they have to be ridiculous in sudden death mode. So if the tie is at four, they only have to make a two-bounce?"

"Well, if you wanna make it easy on 'em, sure," he says generously.

"I just have some compassion for the people in the stands, sitting there for six hours waiting for someone to pull off a triple," she shrugs.

"Aren't you nice. Okay, I'll give it to ya," he says, making a gesture as though handing her an invisible object - perhaps the rulebook for this mythical game.

"I'm going to start writing this down," she announces, and pulls out her notebook. She starts writing down a summary of the rules they've worked out so far. "So," she adds, glancing at an earlier note to self. "Why'd you move here?"

"It came to me in a dream," Bella says agreeably. "An extremely secret dream."

"The parents don't let me touch actual money. I wanted some. Plus it was fun." His hand drops away from the scar; he shrugs. "Mostly, anyway."

"I suppose if there's a clientele at all here it would be smaller," Bella says. "If I'd had to guess what you'd do if itching for income I would have guessed something like "steal any of several hundred knicknacks in the house and hock it", but perhaps that's not even mostly fun? Or substantially more hazardous?"

"One, there are way, way more guys in New York who want to get their dicks wet and don't really care how than there are valuable little goodies in even my stupidly huge house," he says. "Two, it is way, way easier to get caught stealing from my own house than it is to get caught being fucked in an alley. And yeah, three, it's not as much fun."

"So if that fellow from the cafeteria brawl the other day had discreetly taken you up on your offer and indiscreetly informed anyone afterwards, you'd be moving to - I don't even know what's next down on the ladder from Forks. Siberia?"

"Probably," he agrees. "Or I would've bitten it off and then I'd have a whole different set of problems."

Bella crosses her eyes trying to erase the mental image. "Rather." She brushes her hair back from her face. "What do you do with money, when you have it, that they don't want you to do?"

"Buy stuff I actually want."

"Such as?"

"Well, I was saving up for a sewing machine," he offers as an example.

That seems utterly harmless. "Your parents wouldn't let you have a sewing machine?"

"Nope."