Page 77 of One Adult, Please

"Joel."

"I read that word and I didn't feel anything. That's the part I remember. I read adequate and I thought: yes. That's right. That's exactly what I am. And I went back to my apartment and I ate the same dinner I'd eaten every night for three years and I went to sleep and I woke up and I came back here and I checked the pressure gauges."

"Joel."

"I was sleepwalking." The word tastes strange. True. "And I didn't know it because I'd never been awake. And then the world ended and I woke up. I don't know what to do with the fact that I feel more alive right now, in an apocalypse, than I ever felt when things were normal."

She's looking at me. The mozzarella stick is forgotten in her hand, halfway to her mouth.

"That's messed up," she says finally. "Like, genuinely concerning."

"I know."

"You're telling me the zombie apocalypse is the best thing that ever happened to you."

"I'm telling you I didn't know I was dead until I had to survive."

"Yeah," she says quietly. "I get that."

"You do?"

"The... not the dead part. Not exactly. But the..." She puts the mozzarella stick down. Wipes her fingers on her pants. Tucks her hair behind her ear, and the movement is so small, so human. "I was overlooked. Before. That was my thing. Not dead. Just... invisible."

"You're not invisible."

"I am, though. I was. The clumsy girl. The one who trips over things and says the wrong word and makes everything into a joke. People looked at me and they saw..." She waves her hand vaguely at herself. "This. The mess. The falling down. And they'd pat me on the head and move past because I was funny and harmless and not worth taking seriously."

"Grace."

"I learned to lean into it. If I was already laughing, then it didn't matter if they were laughing too, because we were all laughing together, right? Same joke. Same target. Ha ha, look at Grace, how funny, how quirky, how..." She stops. Swallows. "How safe to dismiss."

The emergency light flickers. Just enough to remind us both that we're in a dead restaurant in a dead park in a world that's mostly dead and the light keeping us visible is running on borrowed power.

"You're not funny," I say.

Her head snaps up. "Wow. Rude."

I turn on the stool so I'm facing her fully. "You're not the joke. You've never been the joke. You're brave, and people laughed so they didn't have to take it seriously."

She doesn't say anything.

"You walked into an apocalypse with a foam trident. You climbed over a turnstile because a man in a ticket booth told you no. You looked at a horde of the wrong people and decided we were keeping this park because the logic was sound and the walls were good. You held a funeral for a stabby fork. You named everything you saw so it couldn't scare you." I'm talking too much. I never talk this much. "You're the bravest person I've ever met."

The amber-copper thing in her eyes is wet now, just at the edges.

"Joel." Her voice is smaller than I've ever heard it. "You can't just say things like that."

"I'm not a person who says things. I don't know why I said that. I don't know why I said any of this."

"You called me brave."

"You are brave."

"You said I'm not funny."

"You're not. You're devastating. There's a difference."

I watch her throat move. I watch her hands, which are gripping the edge of the counter, knuckles white. She's shaking. I did that. I want to undo it and I also never want to stop doing it because this right here is the truest I've ever seen her.