Page 89 of One Adult, Please

Grace listens the way she talks, with her whole body, leaning forward, eyes wide, absorbing everything through every available input.

"I didn't even want to come to a theme park. I just wanted to be somewhere that wasn't my apartment."

"What's wrong with your apartment?"

"Nothing's wrong with it. It has one chair. One plate. One fork."

"One fork?"

"I didn't need more than one fork. I'm one person. One person, one fork. The math is clean."

Grace looks at me. The funnel cake is forgotten. "You were alone before," she says.

"I've been alone for a while."

"How long is a while?"

"Long enough that the outbreak didn't take anything from me." I pause. The pilot light flickers. "The outbreak happened and something in me just clicked. Just 'okay, survival mode, let's go.' And I've been going ever since. Having the time of my life." I look at her. "I know that's not psychologically healthy."

"Beck."

"I know normal people don't thrive during the apocalypse."

"Beck." She's off the counter, standing in front of me. "You had one fork."

"Yeah."

"Now you have four." She holds up her fingers. "Joel fork. Beck fork. Grace fork. Grant fork. Your kitchen has four forks now."

"That's not how…"

"That's exactly how it works. You're not one person anymore. You're four people and two round friends and an angry pirate bird and a wallaby and an emotional support tortoise and Kevin, who doesn't count as a fork but definitely counts as a spoon because he stirs things up."

"Kevin is a spoon."

"Kevin is such a spoon."

The dessert armory smells like grease and sugar and the powdered-sugar ghost of every funnel cake I've made alone in this courtyard.

"You weren't alone because you were supposed to be," she says. "You were alone because nobody showed up yet. And then the outbreak happened and you came here and you built a fish vest and a crime boat and a kill chute and a dessert armory and you waited, Beck. You waited and now there are people on your crime boat and funnel cakes in your armory and four forks in your kitchen."

The math isn't clean anymore. Grace broke the math when she named my armor. Joel broke it when he agreed to stay. Grant broke it when he packed his bag and brought his animals to my ship.

I don't cry. Beck Alvarez doesn't cry in a funnel cake stand during the apocalypse. What Beck Alvarez does is sit on a counter with his hands on his knees and his jaw tight and his eyes hot and he breathes.

"Four forks," I say.

"Four forks," she says.

"Kevin is a spoon."

"The biggest spoon."

"The biggest chaotic spoon in the entire cutlery drawer."

She grins.

I don't know how she does that. She names things and the naming changes them. I'm being changed and I can feel it happening. I don't want it to stop.