Page 108 of One Adult, Please

I pick up the periwinkle. Then I put it down and pick up the red because the red is for the adventure part but it's also for important things and this is important. I draw a line from the crime boat to the operations center. It goes through the big middle, past the food room, past the fountain that doesn't work anymore, and past the churro cart that's been empty a while that I still visit like a grave.

I mark the chokepoints in red. I mark the fallback routes in seafoam green. I mark the operations center with a star, and I draw the antenna on the roof with a little more care this time, so it looks less like bad hair.

I write item twenty-eight on the plan.

BRING BISCUIT.

I underline it twice.

Outside the porthole, the sun is going down over WonderSphere. The big middle is quiet in the amber light. Kevin is standing on the roof of the churro cart for no discernible reason. Kevin doesn't need reasons. Kevin operates on goat logic, which is a system of governance I don't endorse but have learned to accept as a permanent feature of our new civilization.

As I watch, Gregory shuffles into view from behind the fountain. He wanders into the big middle's main pathway doing his usual aimless stumble, heading vaguely in the direction of the crime boat, because Gregory has some sort of internal GPS that draws him toward any location where emotional progress is being made so he can interrupt it.

Kevin's head turns. He spots Gregory. His rectangular pupils do the thing that rectangular pupils do when they've identified a target. Kevin jumps off the churro cart. He trots toward Gregory with casual determination, deciding that patch of pathway is his jurisdiction and that shambling dead man is trespassing on it.

Gregory doesn't see Kevin coming. The bar for zombie perception is subterranean and Gregory brought a shovel.

Kevin, who has been perfecting the headbutt since birth, lowers his head. He accelerates. And hits Gregory in the left knee with full force, and Gregory goes sideways into the fountain basin.

Gregory flails. Gregory splashes. Gregory's motor skills were already bad and wet motor skills are worse motor skills. Kevin stands on the fountain's edge watching him with an expression of pure agricultural contempt.

"Kevin just put Gregory in the fountain," I announce.

All three men come to the porthole. We watch Kevin watch Gregory fail to navigate a three-foot fountain basin.

"Good goat," Beck says.

"Kevin isn't a good goat. Kevin's a war criminal who happened to do a useful thing. One useful thing doesn't erase a lifetime of crimes."

"He headbutted a zombie into a fountain for you," Beck says. "That's romantic."

"Nothing about Kevin is romantic. Kevin is the reason I had pond water in my ears for two days."

Grant's hand brushes mine. A contact so light it could be an accident except that Grant doesn't do accidents.

Joel's close. The Joel distance, which has been shrinking by centimeters since the first night in the fish tube and is now approximately the width of a sentence he hasn't said yet.

Beck's leaning against the wall behind me. I feel the warmth of him without looking and I don't look because if I look, I'll see his face and his face will be doing the thing where he's happy and doesn't know what to do with it and that will make me feel something and I've already felt enough things today to fill a swimming pool.

"Tomorrow," I say. "We fix the loud machine. We climb the sky pole. We call my mom."

"And tell her to bring the cat," Grant adds.

"And tell her to bring the cat."

"And snacks," Beck adds.

"And snacks."

Joel doesn't add anything.

The sun drops behind the fast mountain's silhouette, painting the big middle in golds and oranges and the shade of amber that theme parks were designed to look their best in.

I fold the plan carefully. I put it in my pocket. I keep the periwinkle behind my ear because that's where the periwinkle lives. Some things don't need to be on the plan to be permanent.

Some things just are.

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