Page 120 of One Adult, Please

"Because of the strategy bed."

"There's no strategy bed, Joel, I misspoke. The thinking box is private because it's ours and some things get to be just ours even when we're sharing everything else and this is one of those things and I'm drawing a crayon line around it."

She drew a literal crayon line on the map. A red circle around the crime boat. Inside the circle, in tiny letters: OURS. NOT YOURS. THIS MEANS YOU, NEW PEOPLE. (SORRY BUT ALSO NOT SORRY.)

The sun crosses the Solar Plaza. The new people settle into the waiting garden: some pace, some sleep, some eat, some stare at the walls. Grace brings food. Canned goods. Water. She trips bringing the water and two bottles roll across the pavement. She picks them up and doesn't stop moving.

Carl is organizing. The man who was in charge of something is becoming in charge of something again, sorting supplies, establishing a watch rotation among his group.

I'm rebandaging Tom's leg (sprained, not broken, the swelling is consistent with a lateral ligament injury, which I know from horses and is identical in humans because knees are knees) when the screaming starts.

Captain is screaming from the roof of the food room where I positioned him an hour ago, and Captain's scream means threat. I'm on my feet before the scream finishes its first syllable.

Slumped against the side of the fountain in the middle of Solar Plaza there's a WonderSphere character costume. Wondie the Sphere, the mascot, a cartoon sphere wearing sunglasses, collapsed on the pavement. We all walked past it. I walked past it and noted it the way you note debris: present, inanimate, irrelevant.

It's not inanimate anymore. The noise of fourteen new voices, the clatter of cans, the scrape of benches, all of it reaches whatever is left inside the costume.

The costume moves slowly. Wondie's oversized sunglasses tilt. Its spherical body shifts. The stubby arms push against the pavement and it stands up in the middle of Solar Plaza, looking around with the vacant, hungry confusion of a mascot whose employee orientation has been replaced by a single directive: eat the guests.

Grace sees it. She's holding a snow globe. She picked it up this morning when she was reorganizing the bag and she's been holding it, absently, the way people hold objects that connect them to someone they're trying to reach.

Wondie lurches toward the waiting garden.

Grace is between Wondie and the waiting garden in four steps. She drives the snow globe into the black mesh behind one of Wondie's oversized sunglasses. It connects with the head inside the costume.

Wondie drops. The mascot costume crumples, collapsing onto the pavement of Solar Plaza.

The snow globe is cracked. Split down the middle. Glitter is everywhere. The little castle inside the globe is visible through the crack, tipped on its side, swimming in water and glitter in a world that just broke open.

Grace is standing over the body. Her arm still extended. Her face doing something I've never seen it do before, which is nothing. Absolute nothing.

"Four points!" Beck yells from across the plaza. Delighted by Grace's accidental violence. Then he sees Grace's face. The grin dies before it finishes forming.

Grace is staring at the snow globe. Glitter on her fingers. Water on her wrist. "I have to go shopping again," she says to nobody.

Beck checks the body and quietly finishes what the snow globe started.

I cross the plaza and stop beside her.

"That was Mom's," she says. "I got it for Mom. I was going to give it to her when... when the..." She looks at the cracked globe. "Now I have to go shopping again."

"You will," I say.

"The hoodie too. Look at the hoodie. It's been through so much. There's powdered sugar and…"

"You'll get a new one."

"She's going to be so sad about the snow globe," Grace says. "She had a whole shelf. The shelf had a system. The system was geographical. The WonderSphere one was going to go between Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. Now there's a gap. Mom hates gaps."

"Grace."

She stops and looks at me.

"I'm proud of you," I say.

The joke doesn't come.

"Thank you," she says.