Chapter 45 Skypark
Skypark
I try not to let the sadness seep into my words as I read out an Adventureverse clue for the final time.
Teams must make their way to Skypark Sentosa, home of the tallest tower on Sentosa Island. Once there, they will join countless thrill seekers before them in seeing Singapore from new heights.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” says Yumi, burying her face in her hands. “One final fuck you from The Adventureverse, huh?”
I grimace. “They have done a weird number of heights things this season, haven’t they?”
“Yeah, weird,” she says, emphasizing the word. “Also, weird that they cast two people who would rather eat worms than climb a ladder, yet there was no worm-eating challenge. Where was the worm-eating challenge, Jonathan?” Yumi asks the camera.
I laugh. “Would you have eaten balut?”
She’s eaten the classic half-formed fermented chick fetus right out of the shell exactly one single time.
Her mom mentioned it was a delicacy, and after a young, impressionable Yumi looked up what delicacy meant, she insisted on trying it.
Despite her parents’ attempts to dissuade her (to be fair, they did lie for years about coffee ice cream being “too spicy” to keep her from eating it), she annoyed them about it until they caved.
She took one bite, looked me directly in the eyes, and wailed, I can see its eyes!
Then she demanded a funeral for it. We had it in her backyard. Yumi was not in attendance because it was “too gross,” and honestly that was for the best because my dad’s hardboiled egg joke would have gone down about as well as the balut itself.
“Yes,” she says now, nodding emphatically at the camera. “Oh my God, happily. I would have eaten balut, Jonathan, but you just wanted to keep dropping me from things.”
She’s different all of a sudden. In the disappointment of the loss, she’s also become lighter, the weight of the show off her shoulders.
For this moment, we have the gift of being on The Adventureverse without the pressure it brings—at least until production tries to drop her from something one last time.
“Let’s go see what this is about, at least,” she says on a sigh.
We back up to the rising tideline, looking for the tallest building on the small island.
“Oh.”
Yumi follows my gaze to the concrete structure looming over the section of beach I’ve just spent a fugue-state number of hours cleaning up. It doesn’t look like a tower. It looks like a skyscraper construction zone.
She pales. “Oh, that…that can’t be it, right?”
“No. No way. It can’t be.”
But it is.
Of course it is.
Several beach-goers assure us of this on our short walk over to the entrance, a huge metal banner informing us that Skypark Sentosa is home to Singapore’s First and Only Bungy Jump. Yumi pretends to spit at this information as we pass beneath it.
Just past the entrance sits our last purple-and-yellow clue box. I open the lid, holding it up for Yumi to reach in.
There’s one envelope left. We’ve never been the last team to take an envelope before, and the void it leaves behind is…weird. I pause, drinking in the finality of the moment, the confirmation that our game is well and truly over.
She tears the envelope in two unceremoniously, handing one of the halves to me.
“Why?” I ask, taking it from her hand and turning it over.
“Think of it as a souvenir,” she says in a terrible Southern accent.
A surprised cackle bursts from me.
Her deadpan expression doesn’t break as she holds up the group challenge envelopes for me to choose from. “ ‘Team Challenge: FALL or FLY?’ ”
I consider the options, trying to put myself in the head of a drama-loving reality TV producer. “You don’t think FALL is Singapore’s ‘first and only bungy jump’?”
“I do not,” Yumi confirms, holding up the FALL card. “Should we open it?”
“Might as well,” I deadpan.
She lifts the envelope, as if toasting me, then pops it open.
FALL: On Skypark Sentosa’s Giant Swing, couples will be harnessed in together and winched 131 feet into the air, where they will pull a rip cord that will send them soaring over the ground at speeds of up to 75 mph.
Once the Adventurers have completed this challenge, the ride operator will hand them their next clue.
It’s a shallow victory, but I say, “Well, you were right.”
She huffs a laugh. “Hate that for me.”
“We could try the other one?”
“Noelle,” she chides flatly. “If the other one isn’t the bungee jumping, I’ll go skydiving. What else could it be?”
She’s right. I lower my voice. “Okay, but, Yums, we don’t have to do it. We’ve already lost, right? Let’s make JSP come to us for a change.”
Teams can skip challenges at any time and take a four-hour penalty.
It only ever works out in their favor on a non-elimination leg, but it is a feasible way for Yumi to avoid this.
If the team is still waiting out their four hours when everyone else has checked in, JSP will go to them and let them know they’ve been eliminated.
Cue the sad music and low-key implication that we weren’t strong enough to overcome our fears. There’s comfort in knowing that real fans recognize futility when they see it in a torturous reality TV show challenge. I always did. I think they’d let us off the hook for this.
“You think I’d take a penalty now? Right now?” Yumi asks.
“I mean, it’s…” My voice trails off sheepishly.
Yumi holds my gaze as she whips her notebook out, only looking down to thumb through it.
“I took a lift seven hundred feet down into a volcano in Iceland.” She flips a few pages.
“I dangled two thousand feet above the Lauterbrunnen Valley floor.” Flip, flip, flip.
“Climbed four hundred steps up a two-hundred-eighty-nine-foot-high structurally questionable tower—”
“Hey, don’t take this out on the Italians,” I cut in. “Their tower was fine.”
She squints, turning a page with a dramatic flourish. “They have a track record. Piza. And I sang on national TV. But now you’re gonna ask me if I want to bail? On a swing?”
I feel the need to defend myself. “Only because we don’t have to do it. We had to do all those other ones.”
Her glare is piercing and only partially playful. “You didn’t take the penalty on the beach.”
I frown, tilting my head. “Kinda wish I had. It would’ve been shorter.”
This, at least, makes her laugh. “Can we just get out there, please?”
Finally, I take her hand and tug her forward. “Okay, let’s get out there.”
“I’m trying so hard not to throw up right now,” Yumi says as two lanky teenagers—they can’t be much older than us—clip our full body harness into a complicated rig.
We’ve been asked to remove our mic packs for safety purposes, and I almost miss the way it digs into my skin.
“Don’t throw up,” I advise, twisting my head to confirm I’m actually clipped to something.
The literal child behind me sees this and tugs on the webbing to prove it’s connected.
I give him a grateful smile before turning back to Yumi.
“If you throw up, you’ll fly right into it as we’re going down. Pass out instead. It’ll be cleaner.”
She narrows her eyes, half-playful, half-done-with-me. “Thanks.”
We’re herded up a freestanding flight of metal steps, the kind they use in Costco to restock the high shelves but with astroturf laid out on the platform.
The death trap’s operator instructs us to lean down and grab the railing, then the harnesses start to lift, swinging our feet out from under us so we’re parallel to the ground, facing downward.
A sharp inhale of breath pulls my attention to Yumi as someone slides the structure out from beneath us, our hands leaving the metal bar and dragging across the rough fake grass until we’re hovering ten feet off the ground and there’s nothing left to hold on to.
Her eyes are closed, but she opens them as the instructor on the ground begins to speak.
“Don’t worry. I can—”
“I’ll pull it,” Yumi says, wrapping a protective hand around the loop over her shoulder.
“Are you sure?”
Her chuckle is, surprisingly, more resigned than anxious. “We already lost The Adventureverse. Might as well go out doing something I will never”—she fixes me with a meaningful look—“do again.”
“So you’re telling me this isn’t the beginning of a new bungee jumping phase?”
“No. This is the bungee jumping phase’s last hurrah,” she says solemnly. “After today, I can say I did it. Hated every second, but I did it.”
A rush of pride goes through me, a cascading tingle from my head to my toes. “You did.”
I watch her face as the rules for pulling the rip cord are explained.
She’s so beautiful in this light. Unsurprising.
She’s always gorgeous, but it’s dusk now—the horizon in a fight between nightfall and sunlight, lavender clouds laced with gold holding back the night sky—and her profile glows in the LED strips that line our glide path.
God. I am suffering under the unbearable urge to trace a finger down the bridge of her nose, over her cupid’s bow, down her lips, and across her jaw.
And an even more unbearable urge to take the same path with my mouth.
When the instructor finishes his explanation, Yumi turns to find me staring at her. She blinks. “What?” But her face says she knows exactly what.
I raise my eyebrows at her. “You.”
“Me?”
I couldn’t have asked for a better setup. “Ping-Ponganiban.”
A light thwack hits my shoulder. “I am facing my biggest fear. You cannot call me You Me Ping-Ponganiban right now.”
I don’t know what takes over me, but I reach down and bring her free hand to my lips. “Sorry.”
Her eyes go wide at the exact moment the winch begins hoisting us up, so I don’t know if her gasp is at the way we sway as we’re raised or at the kiss.
Yumi was a little wrong about this being less terrifying than any of the other heights.
It may be shorter, but facing the ground as you leave it is a distinctly horrible experience—even for the non-fearful among us.
I can only imagine how she feels as the whir and clank of the cables shudders through the harness.
As the ground pulls away from us and the Top 40 pop song playing through the park’s speakers fades into the background.
“You all right?” I ask, squeezing her hand tightly.
She hums, but it sounds like neither assent nor denial.
My mind runs through a million responses—jokes I could make, silence I could hold—but one thought surfaces over and over again, insisting that I say it. “Hey, guess what?”
The moment stretches and expands, and I notice everything. The crisp, breezeless air. The distant sound of voices. The colorful lights of mainland Singapore just across the strait on the other side of the island. And Yumi, of course.
She turns to me, so close that her breath, warm and vaguely sweet, dances across my face and sends goose bumps down my back.
It’s cliché, I guess, but I could drown in her deep brown eyes.
It would be a slow death: molasses, La Brea tar pits, quicksand that compresses and consumes.
Almost black, like the volcanic soil of Iceland, soft and cool and infuriatingly vast.
“What?” It’s intoxicating, this girl—who has one foot in every future, whose attention is always split, always centered on the thing ahead—focused fully on me for a tiny sliver of time.
I smile. “We’re on The Adventureverse.”
“We are.” And she smiles, too, as if she’s surprised. Like she hadn’t considered this before. “We’re about to lose The Adventureverse.”
“We are,” I say through a laugh.
Her voice is softer, more tentative, when she asks, “Do you regret it? Was it the right choice?”
There’s no hesitation in any part of me. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
A grin breaks over her face. It’s wide and untempered and as beautiful as always.
“You?” I ask, trying not to hope for any specific answer.
“Best decision I ever made.” She holds the rip cord aloft. “You ready?”
I am. I’m ready for a lot. More than this plunge, more than the end of this Adventure. I’m ready. “Never been readier.”
Same, she mouths with her eyes fixed on me.
Yumi doesn’t look away when she pulls the rip cord. The swing drops out from beneath us. We enter a freefall, plummeting face-first toward the ground so fast my heart skips a beat. And I want to close my eyes against the fear, but Yumi is still staring at me. So I keep them open.
The swing catches with a jolt, and immediate relief fills me as I feel the harness take my full weight. We swing forward, free-falling for a few seconds before being tugged back.
As our pendulum slows to a stop, Yumi is laughing. Like, a full-throated belly laugh that I can feel the vibrations of through the harness that connects us.
“Still never doing this again?” I ask, prompted by her glee.
“Never,” she forces out between peals of laughter, eyes sparkling. “That’s why I’m so happy. No more falling.”
“What about for me?” I joke.
Yumi turns her big brown eyes on me and, with all sincerity, says, “Always.”