“You’ve gone and done it again!” Niall laughed, nudging my side. But this time, I didn’t stiffen. Instead, I laughed with him.
“You know, it’d be a ton easier if we’d figure out how to make the rest of it first,” I said, scooping up the mess of dominoes I’d just knocked over - again.
“We have the whole day to figure this out,” he answered, glancing at the clock, which read one-thirty in the afternoon. “Let’s just experiment for now.”
I nodded, pushing the dominoes back over to him. “You set them up, you’re better at it.”
Niall chuckled, making me smile a bit. “Whatever you say.”
I watched him set up another row of dominoes, lining them up perfectly to fit into our next set of the project. This piece was a pulley system. The last domino in the row fell into a cup, which knocked it over and pulled on a piece of yarn attached to it. In the map we’d drawn, when the yarn lifted on the other end, it released a ball that rolled down an incline and into another pulley-type system. So far, the dominoes had been stumping us.
“There,” he said, placing the last piece. He pointed toward the cup. “It should work to fall into this without problem.”
I nodded. “Alright. Shall we try it?”
Niall laughed. “Well then I would’ve set it up for nothing.”
I brushed a stray piece of hair behind my ear. “Well the point of this is trial and error, is it not?”
He shook his head and laughed. “That’s true, but I don’t want to take the time to set it up again.”
I playfully jutted out my lower lip. “And I don’t want to take the time to do this project - but the world just has a way of shoving inevitability in our faces.”
His smile dropped. “I suppose you’re right.”
His sudden seriousness surprised me. Niall only got serious right before he got angry. Had I done something wrong? I tried to read his expression, but I saw no sign of a coming anger that I knew too well.
I gave him a half smile before my gaze dropped to my hands that rested in my lap. We sat there for a minute, the quiet hum of the ventilation system sounding in the background. I felt weird just sitting there, wondering if I’d done something wrong. If I had, though, he sure wasn’t showing it.
“So,” he finally said, making me jump slightly. “How about that map?”
---
After nearly three hours, we’d finally gotten about half way done. Though this was only an experimental run and we’d have to film the actual set-up, we’d agreed that we wanted to at least figure out how to build it. So - with several snack breaks and teasing in between - we only had the last half to go.
“So this goes here,” Niall mumbled, tying a string from the end of a pencil to a SOLO cup with a hole in it. “And this should work like that.”
He rolled a ball down the ramp and into the cup, making it fall over and bring the pencil with it. I smiled, nodding in approval as I picked the ball up, after it had rolled a bit away. Niall beamed as I set it back up, in the exact place he’d put it before.
“This is turning out great,” he said, gesturing to the contraption we’d made, running up the stairs and curving into Niall’s room. “We just have to remember how this all goes together.”
I shrugged. “We could take a picture of it.”
He snapped his fingers. “Brilliant one you are!” he laughed, quickly hopping to his feet and maneuvering around what we’d made to go up the stairs.
