The Skin That Cost Eight Weeks

The tin had a picture of a mountain on the lid and had once had sweets in it. Now it had notes in it, folded small, and a lot of coins.

Tarun got a hundred rupees on Sundays. The deal was that the hundred was his and nobody asked about it. In return, nobody topped it up in the middle of the week either. The tin lived at the back of the second shelf, behind the box files. By the seventh week it was heavy. You could not shake it without it sounding like a drawer of spoons.

He was saving for the Copper Fox.

He had worked it out on the back page of a notebook, in pencil, in a table with eight rows in it. One row for each Sunday.

Skyline was a racing game and the Copper Fox was a skin. When you had it, your kart left a thin orange tail behind it on the corners, like a fox going through long grass. It made a sound no other kart made. Eight hundred rupees.

Everyone at school knew who had it. At break they sat along the wall by the water tank with their phones out, and you could tell from four steps away whose kart had the tail on it. Three boys in Class 7 had it. One of them was Vivaan, whose cousin had bought it for him. Class 7 held that Vivaan had not really got it at all.

Tarun counted the tin out on his bed on the eighth Sunday. He tipped the whole lot onto the sheet. Eight hundred exactly, in notes and a heap of coins. He flattened the notes under a book, and he stacked the coins in fives to be sure, and the stacks fell over twice.

He gave the notes to his mother. She put it on her card. It took about forty seconds, and then she said, “Done.”

It was brilliant.

He played it on the bed with the door shut and the fan on, and a plate of biscuits going soft beside him on the sheet.

It was genuinely, completely brilliant. That evening he raced for two hours. The tail came off the back of the kart on every corner in a long orange curve and he could hear the sound over everything. Vivaan asked him twice how long he had saved. Three people he had never spoken to added him.

On the fourth day his father looked over his shoulder at it for a while.

“So what is it?” said his father. “What does it do?”

“It’s a skin,” said Tarun. “It’s how the kart looks.”

“Does it go faster?”

“No. It just looks like that.”

His father watched two more corners, leaning in a little, with his glasses pushed down.

“Eight hundred,” he said, in a wondering sort of voice. He went to the kitchen and put the pan on for tea, and came back with two cups, and gave one to Tarun without saying anything else about it.

Eleven days after that, Skyline put up a notice.

It came up when you opened the game, in a grey box, and you had to press OK to get past it. The servers would close on the thirtieth. The team thanked everybody for four wonderful years.

Tarun read it three times. Then he went and looked it up, and it was on all the sites, and it was true.

Thirty days.

He wrote the date on his hand in pen, and then washed it off, and then wrote it on the last page of the notebook instead.

He played a lot in those thirty days. Everybody did. The lobbies were fuller than they had been all year. People who had not played since March came back. For about two weeks it was the best the game had ever been. On the last Saturday somebody organised a race where forty-one karts all drove backwards round the track together, very slowly, and nobody won it. It rained on the track the whole way round, because somebody had set the weather to rain.

Then on the thirtieth it stopped working.

The icon stayed on his phone. It just went flat and grey, and when you pressed it, it opened for one second and said it could not connect, and shut itself.

He deleted it in January, on the bus, with his bag on his knees.

Here is the part Tarun could not get straight in his head. He never tried to explain it to anybody. He did not have the words for it, and he did not want to sound stupid.

If he had bought a bat with the eight hundred, he would still have the bat. If he had bought eight hundred rupees of anything else, there would be something. Shoes. A cricket ball. Forty ice creams over a summer. Even the ice creams would have been forty separate afternoons.

The Copper Fox had been completely real for eleven days. Then it was not anywhere.

Not lost. Not broken. Just not anywhere.

No box. No shelf. No tin.

His mother never mentioned it. His father never said one single word about the eight hundred. Not once. Not even the joking kind of word. Tarun noticed.

For about a week afterwards, his thumb kept going to the third spot on the second row of the home screen. That was where the icon used to be. It went there before he had decided to open anything at all.

The tin went back on the shelf behind the box files with the lid off and nothing in it.

There was a weather app in the third spot now. After a while his thumb stopped.