Page 22 of One Adult, Please

I don't know what I expected. Something like the fish part, maybe. Damaged but intact. Systems failing but structure holding. The bones of the place still recognizable beneath the crisis.

It looks like a medieval village lost a fight with a junk drawer. The main pathway, a wide cobblestone avenue themed to look like a medieval village, is littered with debris. A coaster car sits sideways in the middle of the path, derailed, its lap bars still down like it was holding ghosts.

A facade, one of those painted plywood fronts designed to look like a tavern, has collapsed into the street, splintering across the cobblestones in a spray of fake timber and real nails. The animatronic knight that used to stand by the castle entrance is lying face-down on the ground, his sword arm bent at an angle that suggests he lost his last battle.

There's a barricade across the main avenue, built from ride parts. Pieces of queue railing welded or bolted or just jammed together into a wall of interlocking steel. It's not pretty. It's not engineered with Joel-level precision. But it's intentional.

"Joel. Someone built that."

"I see it."

We move closer. The barricade extends across the full width of the avenue, anchored on both sides to the building facades. There's a gap at the bottom where something could crawl through, but it's been stuffed with rolled-up crowd-control banners. WAIT TIME FROM THIS POINT: 45 MINUTES, says one of the banners. The wait time has changed considerably.

Beyond the barricade, the path continues and the modifications get more elaborate. Trip wires strung at ankle height across the pathway, tied to posts and railings and the legs of overturned benches.

Beyond the trip wires, a section of roller coaster track has been collapsed. The track curves down from an overhead section and terminates in a jagged opening that points straight into a pit, which is actually just the maintenance trench beneath the coaster, covered on three sides with more ride parts and open on the fourth. The barricade funnels toward it.

"This is..." Joel pauses. "This isn't bad."

From Joel, "not bad" is Joel getting on one knee and proposing to someone's structural engineering.

"Should we go through?" I ask. "Or around?"

"Through is the only way deeper into the zone. The barricade blocks the alternates." He examines the gap at the bottom. "We can fit."

"I want you to remember who you're talking to. And you want me to army-crawl under a barricade made of sharp metal in a minefield of trip wires set up by someone who's apparently the MacGyver of theme park violence."

"Yes."

"Great. Let's do it."

Joel goes first, shoving the supply totes through the gap, then sliding through with the efficient worm-motion of a man whose body does exactly what he tells it.

I follow. My tote bag catches on a bolt. My friendship paddle won't fit through at the angle I'm holding it, so I have to back out, reposition, and re-enter the gap at a diagonal, which adds approximately ninety seconds and three new scrapes to my collection. The stabby fork, still strapped to the tote bag, drags across the ground and picks up a crowd-control banner that trails behind me like a train on a very ugly wedding dress.

"You have a banner," Joel says from the other side.

"I'm aware of the banner. The banner and I are in a committed relationship now. We didn't choose this."

I pull the banner free and we move forward, into the trip wire field.

Joel maps the wires. He points to each one. I step over them with careful, exaggerated movements.

First wire: success. Second wire: success. Third wire: success. Confidence growing. I'm a wire-stepping champion. I was born for this.

I step forward before Joel's hand comes up for the fourth.

My shin catches the trigger line. A loop hidden against the cobblestones snaps tight around my ankle. Somewhere overhead, a counterweight drops, the rope pulls taut, my foot goes up, and the rest of me goes with it.

I'm hanging upside down from a queue rope attached to a pulley system rigged to an overhead coaster support beam, and I'm about four feet off the ground. My hoodie is falling over my face, and my tote bag is dangling from my shoulder spilling gummy sharks onto the cobblestones, and my friendship paddle is still in my hand because my grip on that oar is the one reliable thing about my body and I won't let go of it even in the face of gravitational betrayal.

"Joel. I'm upside down."

"I see that."

"Fix it."

He's already at the rope, pulling a folding utility knife from his belt as he examines the knot.