Page 23 of One Adult, Please

Blood rushes to my head with the enthusiasm of a liquid that's been waiting its whole life for this moment. My strawberry purse has swung around and is now hanging beneath me, brushing the cobblestones.

"Joel, I can feel my brain filling up."

"That's not how blood circulation works."

"My brain is filling up and it's going to overflow and I'm going to pass out and the last thing I'm going to see is the inside of a Wondie hoodie and that's not the death I planned."

"You're not going to die. The knot's a modified bowline. Give me thirty seconds."

"I don't have thirty seconds, I have maybe ten seconds of consciousness left and I'm spending them all on yelling."

I hear something from the avenue behind me, from the direction of the barricade, from the other side of the trip wire field. A shuffling sound. The wrong-footed drag that I've learned to recognize the way you learn to recognize the sound of your alarm clock or your mother's ringtone or any other sound that your brain categorizes as "pay attention to this immediately."

"Joel. Is it?"

"Yes."

The rope goes taut above me.

"Don't move," Joel says.

"I'm upside down. My movement options are limited to panic and light rotation."

"I mean it. If I cut the wrong line, you drop on your head."

That's a terrible sentence to hear from a man holding a knife.

The shuffling gets closer. There's a metallic scrape of something bumping into the barricade. Followed by the wet, gurgling sound of a throat that's still producing noise but has forgotten why.

Oh. Great. Great great great. My friendship paddle is in my hand but I can't aim because I don't know where anything is and the blood in my head is throwing a party that I didn't authorize.

Then I hear a different sound. Faster. More coordinated. Not shuffling. Scrambling.

I drop the oar, yank my hoodie away from my face. The blood rush makes everything pulse red at the edges.

The wrong person is coming through the gap under the barricade. The same gap we crawled through. It's doing the army-crawl, or its version of it, which is less army and more "determined meat puppet navigating an obstacle through sheer persistence."

I'm swinging, slowly, the rope creaking, and I can see the cobblestones above me and the sky below.

The wrong person is through the barricade now, on its feet, shuffling toward the trip wire field.

Joel swears. The rope shifts above me as he moves, then stops hard.

"Joel?"

"The release line runs across the wires. If I cross now, I might drop you."

"Love that for us."

The wrong person hits the first wire, stumbles, and keeps coming.

Joel pins the rope beneath one boot, folds the knife closed, and grabs a loose piece of themed masonry and throws it. It sails past the wrong person's shoulder and cracks against the cobblestones.

"That wasn't your best work," I say.

"I'm trying not to hit you."

"Lower standard. Hit the wrong person."