The plane comes to a stop, the seat belt sign blinking off and ambitious aisle-seaters hopping up to grab luggage from the overhead bins. Yumi pushes herself to her feet without another word, slinging her bag over one shoulder and looking down at me, waiting for me to stand.
“You good?” she asks.
I want, I want, I want, I—
“I’m good.”
Chapter 15
Think of It as a Souvenir
The mimes are there whenwe disembark, holding up signs with our names on them. The show is letting us off easy for the first challenge, I suppose. The one spinningYumi and Noellecheers silently the entire time we approach.
“They’re all different,” Yumi remarks under her breath, quiet enough that the three other teams won’t overhear.
I follow her line of sight to the—What do you call a group of mimes? A pack? A parliament? A murder?—murder of mimes. Each of them with distinctive black-and-white face paint. She’s right; this is exactly the type of detailTheAdventureverseloves to use in their finale challenge.Which mime was yours?
The right half of our mime’s face is sad-clown, teardrops zigzagging down his cheeks. The left half is happy, black paint around his mouth upturned in a smile. An elongated triangle cuts vertically through his left eye. As Yumi draws a perfect re-creation of his face in her notebook, I take the gold envelope he offers.
He waves goodbye, riding an imaginary escalator to the bottom of a potted plant—a move my dad could only dream of pulling off.
Any exhaustion that crept into my bones after that hellish flight is washed away the moment I tear my firstAdventureverseenvelope open. I pull the tear strip’s tab, revealing a hefty cardstock note within, as well as two smaller envelopes.
“ ‘FORCE or FINESSE?’ ” I ask loudly and clearly for the camera. “ ‘Note: A team may only switch tasks once per Adventure.’ ”
“FORCE.”
“Yup,” I agree, tearing open the FORCE envelope. It’s the only choice, really. Anything that requires finesse onThe Adventureversealso takes a million years to complete.
FORCE: Romantics all across the world are familiar with Paris’s famous Pont des Arts, also formerly known as the love locks bridge. Couples used to flock to the City of Light to attach a lock to the bridge’s rails as a symbol of their affection. However, the structural strain caused by the weight of those locks eventually resulted in the partial collapse of the Pont des Arts in 2014.
Teams, make your way to this iconic landmark at the heart of the city and find the Bridgemaster. Once you have removed twenty padlocks, he will present you with your next clue.
I glance at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that line the concourse. The rain shows no sign of stopping.
Yumi follows my gaze, frowning. “Well, at least we brought raincoats?”
Imagine you are in a house that is burning down. Everything is aflame, hopeless and beyond saving. You see a candle tipped over on its side, rush to it, pick it up, and blow it out, but the house is still burning.Thatis what wearing a raincoat is like right now.
I uselessly wipe at the goggles they’ve given us, but they remain fogged up, impossible to see through. I adjust my work gloves. They’re drenched and heavy, but without them, my hands just slip right off the bolt cutters. I grit my teeth and try to push the handles together, steel biting through steel painfully slowly.
“This sucks,” I say out loud, though nobody could possibly hear me over the downpour. Even Yumi, who stands right beside me, could barely hear earlier when I asked if we should switch tasks. After a few moments of yelling, we decided to stick with this challenge.No, we reasoned.Switching tasks is always a bad idea. And this won’t be too bad once we get the hang of it.That was an hour ago. We’ve cut six locks since then. Six and a half if you count the one that’s currently kicking my ass.
On the plus side, the noise has also drowned out the Ball-and-Chain team, who seem intent on putting on a Tony Award–winning performance ofDomestic Dysfunction: The Musical.
“Who are you doing this for?”he’d warbled.“Whoever it is, you’re letting them down.”
“Shut up, Clyde. You wanna sleep on the hotel floor tonight?”
Masterful.
I already hated this archetype. For me, a big part of the appeal of watchingThe Adventureverseis the joy, the wonder, the fun, and couples like this are joy-eaters. But being with them in person has given me a whole new perspective, a better vantage point to hate them from. Why do these people get to succeed? Why do they get to be together, bitter and flat-out horrible, when my parents got so little time? It’s not fair. I’m much happier drowning than listening to them.
But that isn’t to say I’m happy drowning. It’s just better. It’s notgood.
We work without talking for a bit, the occasional car throwing up a wall of water. It’s not like it makes us wetter, but it is slightly more humiliating. I nearly bite through my tongue the next time my bolt cutters snap a lock.Only thirteen left, I think miserably, wiggling the lock free of the fence and tossing it into our basket. I am water-worn, like a stone at the bottom of a babbling brook, all my fight and sharpness eroded away—and then I hear Him.
“Off the left here,” the man says, his Southern US accent echoing through one of those microphone/megaphone things you can only get in a game of White Elephant, “you can see the beautiful scaffolding of the cathedral. Many people are upset when they get to Paris and see the scaffolding, but how lucky you are! For hundreds of years, people have seen the normal cathedral—come back in ten years and you’ll see it yourself. But only you, you lucky ducks, get to witness the restoration.” Holding a large black umbrella, the man walks backward, leading a tour group of equally enormous umbrellas (presumably with people beneath them) across the bridge.
