5. Worst Fish Ever
WORST FISH EVER
GRACE
The glass hallway is the most beautiful place I've ever been.
The glass is seamless, a continuous wall that wraps from floor to waist height on both sides and then over the top like a bubble.
On the other side of that glass, the ocean lives.
The WonderSphere version, which is bluer and cleaner and has better lighting than anything nature ever produced.
The fish don't know they're fake-ocean fish.
They're just swimming. Doing their thing.
The floor of the tunnel is that rubberized pathway stuff, same as the rest of the fish part.
There are benches built into the walls every twenty feet, curved to match the tunnel.
The lighting is all blue, coming from the tank itself.
It makes everything look like a mood ring that's stuck on contemplative.
Joel walks ahead of me, checking corners that don't exist because the tunnel's a tube and there are no corners to check.
His shoulders look load-bearing, which is extremely unfair because I'm already emotionally susceptible to walls.
The WonderSphere polo is stretched across his back in a way that suggests Human Resources has never met him from behind.
He should be listed under emergency resources. Flashlight. Water. First-aid kit. Joel.
"Public entrance," he says, pointing at the door behind us. "Locked. Nothing's gotten through it."
A heavy door, steel frame, with a lock. He locked it. I watched his hands do it, because my eyes have developed an independent interest in Joel's hands that I didn't authorize and am not supervising.
"What about the other end?"
"Maintenance access, also locked. I have the key."
"So we're in a locked tube. Under millions of gallons of water. And that's... the safe option."
His face does something that I think wants to be patient. "You're safer in this tunnel than in any room in this building."
"You say that, but I once broke a window by leaning on it. There were witnesses."
He stares at me for a few blinks. Then he turns and keeps walking.
The stare itself is the problem because Joel has dark eyes and when he aims them at you with that much focus it feels like being looked at by a searchlight with judgment issues.
Possibly flirting. Possibly just cheekbones.
I don't have enough data and this is a terrible time to collect it.
We walk to roughly the middle of the tunnel.
Joel informs me it's the optimal position because it gives us maximum reaction time from either entrance.
He says "maximum reaction time" like a person who's thought about this and also like a person who says things like "maximum reaction time" in casual conversation.
"Okay," I say, dropping my tote bag on a bench and sitting down so hard the bench shakes. My legs are done. My feet have filed a formal complaint. "So we just... stay in the fish tube?"
"It's a viewing tunnel."
"It's a fish tube, Joel. We're in a tube and there are fish. I'm not wrong."
He cocks his head. "You're not wrong."
"Thank you." I pull my tote bag onto my lap and start taking inventory.
"Okay. I started with four water bottles.
One's in the stingray tank and one died saving me from the wrong man.
Two water bottles, a bag of trail mix, chocolate pretzels, dolphin shortbread, gummy sharks, two rain ponchos, six glow sticks, a snow globe, a sweatshirt for my mom, and a stabby fork. " I hold it up. "For protection."
"That's a toy trident."
"It's a stabby fork and it's already saved my life once."
"How?"
"Emotionally."
He does the stare. I'm getting used to the stare.
"What do you have?" I ask.
He holds up the crescent wrench. "This."
"That's it? No snacks?"
"I have a few protein bars. More in the mechanical room."
"What kind of protein bars?" I ask, because priorities.
"The kind that taste like compressed sawdust with a chocolate coating that's lying about being chocolate."
"So the bad kind."
"There's a good kind?"
"Joel. There are so many good kinds. There are ones with caramel and ones with peanut butter and ones that are basically candy bars pretending to be healthy and those are the best ones because they've committed to the lie and I respect that."
He sits down on the bench across from me. From here, he smells like machine oil, clean sweat, and something that's probably just soap but my brain has labeled it 'Joel.'
A shark passes overhead, close enough that I see the individual pores on its skin, and I flinch so hard I almost drop the stabby fork.
"They can't get through," Joel says.
The shark loops back around. It's very big. It has the kind of face that says "I've never worried about anything in my life and I don't intend to start now." I want the emotional stability of a sand tiger shark in a controlled environment.
"How long have you worked here?" I ask, because I fill silence the way some people fill swimming pools. Aggressively and with no plan for drainage.
"Three years."
"Do you like it?"
"I already told you no."
"Right, but people are sometimes dramatic when they first meet someone. Like a defense mechanism. You say you hate your job but really you just had a bad day and normally it's fine."
"It's not fine. It's a theme park. I fix things that break and everything breaks constantly because sixty thousand people touch everything and children are essentially a destructive force of nature in light-up sneakers."
"So you fix things. What kind of things?"
"Plumbing. Electrical. HVAC. Pump systems. Ride maintenance when the ride team is short. Generator management. Water treatment for the marine exhibits." He lists them the way someone else might list groceries.
A man listing mechanical skills in a blue-lit tunnel while holding a crescent wrench should not be doing anything to my internal organs, and yet here I am, in the fish tube, one HVAC away from making choices my mother would want me to hydrate through.
"So you keep the whole building alive."
He looks at me like I accidentally said the right thing and he wasn't prepared for me to be capable of that.
"I keep the systems running," he says. "The building does the rest."
"You know that's the same thing, right? Without you the systems stop and the building is just... walls with nothing inside."
He looks at the tank. A school of little silver fish flickers past.
I open the dolphin shortbread and offer him one. He looks at it like I've offered him a small ceramic dog.
"It's a cookie," I say. "Shaped like a dolphin. It's not complicated."
He takes one. His fingers brush mine when he takes it and I feel that in my whole arm, which is a disproportionate response to a cookie handoff and my nervous system needs to get a grip.
He bites the tail off and chews. I watch for a reaction. His face gives me absolutely nothing. This man could eat a cookie or receive devastating news and his face would be the same face. I find that both impressive and deeply concerning.
"We need to sleep at some point," I say, looking around the tunnel. The benches are about five feet long. Not quite enough for a full human in the horizontal position, definitely not comfortable, but better than the floor and significantly better than the space between two animatronic mermaids.
"You sleep," Joel says. "I'll keep watch."
"For how long?"
"Until you wake up."
"Joel, that's not... you have to sleep too. Your eyes look like they're applying for a vacation. There's bags under your bags. It's very distracting. Not the bags. The face. The face is distracting. I'm worried about the bags. These are two separate observations."
He stares. Longer this time. I think I've offended him. Or impressed him. With Joel it's genuinely impossible to tell.
"I'll sleep when it's safe," he says.
"It's safe. You said so. Really thick glass. Locked tube. You just said this is the safest room in the building."
"Reinforced acrylic. I said safer. Not safe."
"Oh, so we're doing grammar now. Very comforting. The world is ending but at least we have proper word usage."
He almost smiles. A micro-movement at the corner of his mouth that lasts maybe half a second before his face catches it and puts it back into storage.
But it was there. I saw it. I'm counting it.
I'm putting it in my pocket. If Joel's face is a slot machine, I just got one cherry, and unfortunately I'm now a woman with a purse full of emotional quarters.
I take first sleep because my body is making non-negotiable demands and Joel takes first watch because he appears to be fueled by stress, protein bars, and a low-grade refusal to be vulnerable.
I get a bench. He gets the bench across from me.
I use one of the rain ponchos as a pillow, which is a terrible pillow, but my head is horizontal and at this point that's all I need.
"Hey, Joel? If I snore, I'm sorry. I've been told I snore like a pug with a head cold."
"Who told you that?"
"My cat. Not verbally. But she leaves the room and sleeps on the couch instead and that's a review."
"Go to sleep, Grace."
"Okay. Goodnight. Thank you for not being a wrong person."
"Goodnight, Grace."
I close my eyes. The tank hums. The building is still alive because Joel from Operations apparently looked at the apocalypse and said not on my shift, which is an unreasonable level of competence and I resent how comforting it is.
I sleep. I don't dream.
I wake up to blue light and the sound of Joel's voice saying, "Don't scream." Which is a terrible way to wake someone up because the first thing I want to do is scream.
"What. What is it. What's happening."
"Nothing. There's one in the tank and I didn't want you to scream and draw more." He points at the glass.
I sit up. My poncho pillow crinkles. My neck has a crick that feels like it was installed by a professional. I blink until the blue blur resolves into shapes.
Something's floating on the other side of the glass.
It's too big to be a fish and the wrong shape.
It's not swimming so much as drifting, bumping gently against the acrylic with the slow, mindless persistence of a pool toy caught in a current.
It's a person. Was a person. The WonderSphere polo is billowing in the water, inflated like a tiny parachute.
The face is pressed against the glass and the eyes are open and the mouth is doing something that might be chewing or might be the water moving the jaw.
"That's the worst fish I've ever seen," I say. "How did it get in the tank?"
"Fell through the open-top feeding platform on the upper level. It's a twenty-foot drop into the deep end." He says it with the detachment of a man who's already processed this information and filed it under Things I Can't Fix. "It's been circling for a while."
"How long is a while?"
"Since before you got here."
"You put me to sleep next to a body in a tank and you didn't mention it?"
"You needed to sleep. And it can't get through the reinforced acrylic."
"That's not the point. The point is ambiance, Joel. I was having the best sleep of my life in the fish tube and there was a floater three feet from my head."
"Two feet."
"Oh, that's better."
The body bumps the glass again.
I pull my poncho pillow closer to me. I think about Sheldon the Sea Turtle, the gray man in the mermaid room, and the wet smear on the theater carpet.
The radio and the alerts, my mom and Biscuit, and the Walgreens rotisserie-chicken man, who was alive and gross in the normal way, the human way, the way where you're disgusting because you chose to be and not because something rewrote your operating system.
"I don't think anyone's coming for us," I say.
He's quiet for a long time. The body drifts past the glass and away.
"Why do you say that?" he asks.
"I don't know. I just... I've never really been the kind of person people come looking for.
Not in a tragic orphan way. I have a mom.
She texts. She worries. She would fight a raccoon for me if the raccoon started it.
I just mean I'm usually the person who ends up in the wrong place with the wrong shoes and a snack plan, and then everyone assumes I'll figure it out because somehow I always do.
Badly. With bruises. But technically sorted. "
"Well," he says. "I'm here."
"Yeah." I pull my knees up to my chest. The tunnel hums. A shark passes overhead. "Yeah, you are."
He holds out a protein bar. The bad kind. Compressed sawdust with a lying chocolate coating.
I take it.
It's terrible.
I eat the whole thing anyway because this is a relationship built on trust, trauma, and the worst chocolate-adjacent rectangle I've ever met.