Page 87 of One Adult, Please

"The board is standard length," Joel says. "You're short."

She sets the board down, picks up a hammer, and hits the nail. Once. Cleanly. A miracle. She hits the nail again. The nail shifts. Progress. She hits her thumb.

The sound she makes is a collection of consonants arranged in the shape of pain and delivered at a volume that startles a bird from the rooftop of the fake tavern. She drops the hammer, grabs her thumb, holds it to her chest.

"I hit my thumb, Beck. The hammer was supposed to hit the nail and it hit my thumb instead and those are two very different targets and the hammer should know the difference."

"Hammers don't have target discrimination."

"Then hammers should be redesigned."

She picks up the hammer again. With the other hand. Because Grace doesn't give up. Her thumb is already swelling and she's switched hands and she's going back to the nail.

I watch her swing the hammer with her non-dominant hand and hit the nail, barely, at an angle that sends it sideways. The board she's working on splits along the grain and a piece of it falls on her foot.

The sound she makes this time is shorter. "The board bit me."

"Boards don't bite."

"This board has a personal agenda." She kicks the broken board with the foot it didn't land on. The kick is more emotional than effective. "I'm taking a different board."

I walk over, take her hand, and check her thumb.

She looks up at me. We're six inches apart and her face is tilted up because I'm taller, and her eyes are wide and looking at me with something that I've been trying not to see because seeing it makes the platform-and-train thing worse.

"You think I'm funny," she says.

"I think you're a safety hazard."

"Same thing."

She's a disaster and the disaster is the most compelling thing I've ever watched.

"Yeah," I say. "Same thing."

She holds my gaze for a second. Two. Three. And then she looks away and picks up another board and the moment passes. I let it pass because I don't know what happens if I don't let it pass.

We work. We unbuild and rebuild. We finish the main avenue barricade by late afternoon. Joel tests every joint. I test the gates. Grace tests nothing because she's been banned from testing after the hammer incident.

"The fast mountain needs checked too," she says, pointing toward the roller coaster.

"The roller coaster," Joel says. "It's called Mythic Thunder."

"It's a mountain that goes fast. I'm not going to learn coaster names during the apocalypse. My brain has limited space and I'm using it for things that matter."

"Like crayon colors."

"Crayon colors matter."

Joel goes to check the coaster supports. Grant radios from the perimeter that the east wall is clear. And now it's just me and Grace in the avenue, and the quiet is the kind of quiet that means something is about to happen or nothing is about to happen and the difference depends entirely on whether I open my mouth.

Kevin walks into the avenue from the direction of the castle courtyard, chewing a piece of bunting from the medieval display, and positions himself exactly between me and Grace as if he was hired to chaperone.

"Kevin," Grace says.

Kevin looks at her with his horizontal pupils and his flat, psychotic calm, and begins eating the corner of the new barricade.

"Kevin. We just built that. Beck, Kevin's eating the wall."