“I hope so,” Yumi says wistfully. “It would be a nice break. Would your dad…?”
I try not to let hope settle in me too strongly, but still I stumble over my answer. “I—I’m not—it…Maybe. It depends on how he’s doing.”
Her face falls. “Right. Sorry.”
“My mom gets to be here, though,” I say, lifting the little globe. “So, even if it’s not family visits, I have her with me.”
Yumi reaches over and spins my mom on her axis. “I wonder who her favorite would be this season. Us excluded, of course.”
I bite my thumb, thinking. “KC and Gabriel, probably.” I glance over to where they sit in the grass, stretching their legs out and looking remarkably composed despite the heat. “But I don’t know. I mean, I thought you would have picked Zelda and Willard last season, so.” I shrug.
Yumi snorts. “Ididpick Zelda and Willard.”
“What?”
“I thought you knew that.”
“I did! But you said you picked the Beauty Queens.”
She narrows her eyes, giving me a look that implies I’m incredibly dense. “Yeah, because you were right and I didn’t want you to be right.”
“Why not?”
“Noelle.” She gasps, throwing her hands up. “Because I was mad at you! I had to watch Zelda and Willard lose, and you weren’t there.” The last few words are staccato as she jabs a finger at me in playful accusation.
“They were always going to lose,” I say, shaking my head. “You knew that. I knew that. They probably knew that.”
“I thought they were the ones,” she says, pouting.
“No, you didn’t. Youhopedthey were the ones.”
Yumi sighs and says, “It’s never the winner you want it to be.”
“Except us.”
“Except us,” she repeats.
A few minutes later, Clyde and Cora huff and puff their way into the courtyard, officially declaring Team Kendycane’s elimination. Before the Ball-and-Chain can even sit down, a production assistant pops their head out of the tower and beckons over KC and Gabriel.
A slightly shorter eternity after that, they finally call, “Noelle and Yumi?”
Chapter 39
Ants from Up Here
The inside of the Torredel Mangia is stickier than expected. I thought the ancient stone would be cool to the touch and give me the same kind of otherworldly chill that I’d felt in the Initiation Well. Instead, the short, narrow climb up to the ticket office, a round room just above the base of the tower, is warm and clammy.
The production assistant pauses, turning to stop us on the landing. “You’ll go up to the top one at a time. The other person will wait here for their turn.” She points to the queue area, empty save for an extra camera crew set up in front of a long stone bench. “It doesn’t matter which order you go in. Who wants to do what?”
Yumi eyes her suspiciously. “It really doesn’t matter?”
“It really doesn’t.” Her weariness indicates that we aren’t the first team to interrogate her on this. “It’s the exact same task, you just have to go one at a time.”
“Okay, give us a sec.” Yumi tilts her head further into the ticket room, like a few steps will give us any degree of privacy from the cameras and microphones. She takes my hands, pulling me into a huddle.
I whisper, “Do we think the order really doesn’t matter?”
“They said it doesn’t. They can’t lie to us, right? Like cops?”
