door when she said, "Oh! I almost forgot. There's some kind of beginner's game night happening at Mega Comics tomorrow night. They said it should be relatively small, and they've got a couple side rooms to section off groups. I already told David I'd take him."
That gave me pause, and I sent her an incredulous look. "Are you sure that's a good idea?"
"You know how much he wants to play, and he doesn't feel welcome at the club at school. I think it's worth a try. If it starts to get bad, we'll leave."
I drew in another long breath, running my fingers through my hair. "Alright. But if he starts to show any signs of having a breakdown, get him out of there immediately."
"I'm not new to this, Reu. Stop worrying so much." She inclined her head, her gaze sent over my shoulder. "Now go teach him some algebraic equations or something."
I rolled my eyes at her but wished her a safe drive to the restaurant before shutting the door. Padding into the apartment, I hit the kitchen first to grab myself a beer. I didn't like to drink to excess when David was around, but one beer barely affected me, and me drinking it had never seemed to bother him.
"Hey, David, you want a drink or anything?"
"Ice water. Five ice cubes." Belatedly, he added, "please."
I pulled a glass out of the dishwasher, held it under my ice maker until five cubes dropped in, then filled it with filtered water from the fridge. They were steps in a ritual I was well familiar with by this point. Ruth and I had both needed to get the same sort of ice maker our sister had so we could make the ice he wanted. It was a comfort thing. Something that signaled a routine and said everything was going to be okay.
I couldn't say I minded. The thing made good ice. The setting David liked it on was large cubes, but it also had one for little chips that I liked. I decided to go ahead and fill up a glass of my own with them, pouring my beer over that before I headed into the kitchen where David was seated at the card table I'd "borrowed" from my parents' house.
Setting the water down in front of him, I looked over his shoulder to see that sure enough, he had the D&D Beyond app open. While neither Ruth or I really got D&D, we'd watched enough Critical Role with him to know the basics and knew that this app was one where you could create characters for use in games. So far, David hadn't had the chance to play in any games. He just loved creating characters, and a subscription to this app was the only thing he'd wanted for his birthday.
"What are you making now?" I asked, trying to ease into the topic as I set the algebra book down on the table.
"A multi-class bard and barbarian." He laughed at that, and I wondered if I'd missed some joke. When he looked over at me, it was obvious I had. "Barbarians are a constitution class. Charisma is usually their lowest stat. Bards are a charisma class. It shouldn't be compatible, but--"
My eyes started to glaze over a bit as he talked about stats and numbers. One of his favorite things in creating these characters was assigning points to them to maximize their potential. He was deep into the numbers of the game -- his therapist said it was his primary fixation -- and it was so hard for me to keep up when he started doing probability calculations on the fly.
Hearing all of this, I had no idea why he was even in basic algebra. He was a math genius, as far as I was concerned, but he only liked to do math as it applied to Dungeons & Dragons.
"I heard Ruth's taking you to Mega Comics tomorrow to play a game. You think you'll use this character?"
He shook his head. "No. He's not optimized for an actual game. He'd hold the party back. I'll probably just wait until everyone else makes their characters and choose whatever the party needs most."
I smiled at that, giving him a thumbs up. It was what I did whenever I wanted to pat him on the shoulder or ruffle his hair or something. He didn't like being touched, so I'd had to come up with some signal to let him know I was proud of