Page 28 of One Adult, Please

But now there are three of us.

The adventure part is just getting started.

9

FISH VEST MEANS HE'S FRIENDLY

BECK

Here's the thing about the end of the world: it's the best thing that's ever happened to me, and I'm self-aware enough to know that says more about me than it does about the apocalypse.

Yesterday morning I was Beck Alvarez, data entry specialist at Cornerstone Insurance Solutions, a company whose name has three words and zero soul.

I entered data. Into fields. On screens. For eight hours a day, five days a week, in a cubicle with a motivational poster that said TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK except someone had crossed out DREAM and written OVERTIME in Sharpie and management never removed it because management never looked at anything below eye level.

I quit. Or got fired. The story changes depending on who's asking and how much I like them. The accurate version is that I stood up during a Thursday morning stand-up meeting and said, "I can't do this anymore," and my supervisor said, "The meeting?" and I said, "Any of it," and then I walked out and drove to WonderSphere because it was the first thing I saw on the highway billboard and the single-day pass was thirty percent off and I thought: sure. Roller coasters. Why not. The universe is telling me to ride something that goes fast and screams.

That was Thursday.

It's Friday now. I think. The days have gotten blurry in the way that days get blurry when you stop measuring them by clock-ins and start measuring them by how many of the dead ones you've redirected into the maintenance trench. Current count: fourteen. Fifteen if you count the one Grace kicked in while hanging upside down from my snare trap.

I haven't slept in a real bed. I've eaten funnel cake for at least four meals. I've killed zero people because the things in the park aren't people anymore and the distinction matters, It matters a lot actually.

The point is: I'm thriving. In the way that a plant you forgot about on a windowsill suddenly starts growing toward whatever light it can find. I'm the plant. The apocalypse is the light. The metaphor is concerning and I'm keeping it.

And now there are people on my crime boat.

Grace is standing on the main deck examining my supply layout with the intensity of a general reviewing troop formations, except the troops are funnel cakes and the general is five foot four in a hoodie that could fit two of her and has a decorative oar she calls "the friendship paddle."

I still don't entirely understand the naming convention but I don't need to because it's perfect. Everything she says is like that. Wrong and perfect. Wrong in a way that loops all the way around and arrives at a kind of perfect that regular words can't reach.

Joel is leaning against the mainmast doing inventory with his eyes. He's been counting since he got here and his face hasn't changed once, which I find fascinating because my face changes approximately forty times a minute.

I've never understood people who can just... not do that. People who have one face. How do you only have one face? Where does everything else go?

"Beck," Grace says, and the way she says my name is like she's already known me for a year and has been saying it that whole time. Just my name, used casually, like a tool she picked up and immediately knew how to hold. "Where did you get all of these?"

She's pointing at the funnel cake crate. The stack has diminished since I gave her one. She ate it in under two minutes and her face while eating it went through a journey that started at "this is terrible" and passed through "this is still terrible" and arrived at "I've accepted that this is terrible and I love it." I watched the whole thing and I couldn't look away.

"Funnel cake stand on the other side of the courtyard. Gas fryers. The line's still live."

"Wait." She turns. Her eyes do something that I'm going to call ignition. "The fryers still work?"

"Yeah, I said that earlier."

"You said it but I didn't hear it because I was processing the crime boat and the fish vest and the trip wire situation and my brain was full, Beck, my brain has a limited number of tabs and they were all open." She's already moving toward the gangplank. "We can make fresh ones."

"That's what I've been doing."

"You've been making them for you. Now we can make them for the dessert armory."

I stop walking. "The what?"

She's halfway down the gangplank, friendship paddle in one hand, the other hand on the rope rail. She turns back to look at me and her face is the face of someone who has just said something completely normal and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

"The dessert armory," she says. "The funnel cake stash. The strategic reserve of fried dough. The dessert armory, Beck."

Because in Grace's head, funnel cakes are munitions and the fryer is a forge and snacks are a military asset and she's right. She's insane but she's right because morale is a resource and sugar is morale and I've been making funnel cakes for exactly this reason.