21. The Dolphin Breastplate Stays On
THE DOLPHIN brEASTPLATE STAYS ON
BECK
Iknow what happened in the tunnel yesterday. When two people walk out of a room looking like they've been hit by the same beautiful truck, you don't need a detective's badge to solve it.
I'm not jealous.
Jealousy is for people who think something was theirs and got taken. Grace wasn't mine. I had proximity. Banter. I had the way she renamed my world in the first thirty minutes.
But I didn't make a move. Joel did.
Not jealous. It's more the feeling of standing on a platform watching a train you didn't know you wanted to catch pulling away from the station, and you didn't miss it because you were late, you missed it because you didn't know you were at a station until the doors closed.
That. Whatever that is. I'm that.
That was yesterday. We went back to the crime boat before dark, ate dinner, and pretended nothing had changed.
Grace slept. Joel didn’t. I reorganized the weapons rack, reorganized the dessert armory, and eventually passed out surrounded by evidence that I handle feelings like an overcaffeinated warehouse manager.
This morning, we start rebuilding the barricades that worked for me but won’t protect four people and a small, poorly governed zoo.
"This whole section needs to come down," Joel says, examining the queue-railing wall I built across Mythic Frontier's main avenue. "The gap at the bottom is a vulnerability. The railing joints aren't welded. Under sustained pressure from a group, this collapses inward."
"Then we unbuild the wall," Grace says, arriving behind us with a tote bag full of tools that she insisted on carrying and that is visibly too heavy for her. "We take it apart and then we build a better one. A group wall. We're four people and two round friends and an angry pirate bird and Kevin."
"Kevin doesn't need a wall."
"Kevin doesn't respect walls, which is exactly why Kevin-proofing is a structural requirement."
We start unbuilding.
Joel and I handle the structural work. Grant is at the perimeter with Captain, doing a sweep.
Grace is carrying a board. The board ends extend past her arms on both sides, which means she can't see where the board ends.
It hits the barricade. It hits a lamppost. It hits Joel in the back of the shoulder.
He doesn't react because Joel has developed a physical tolerance for Grace-related impacts and absorbs them into his structural integrity.
"Sorry. Sorry, the board is long."
"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."
"He's a goat. He eats things. That's his whole deal."
"His deal is vandalism."
I pick Kevin up. Kevin's legs go stiff. I carry him to the other side of the barricade and set him down. Kevin stands there, offended, processes the indignity, and walks in a circle. Then he begins eating a different section of the barricade.
Grace stares at Kevin. Kevin stares at nothing.
"Kevin wins," she says.
"Kevin always wins."
She looks at me. "You reorganized the dessert armory twice yesterday. You alphabetized the weapons rack. Who alphabetizes weapons, Beck?"
"They're categorized by type and size."
"You alphabetized them. I saw the labels. They go: Axe, Axe (large), Axe (small), Dagger, Mace. That's alphabetical order. You put your weapons in alphabetical order."
"Efficient retrieval."
"You're doing the busy thing." She says it gently. "You're moving so fast your feelings can't find you."
"That's annoyingly accurate," I say.
"I'm the same way. I fall down and get up. You build and move. We're both running."
She looks at me, I look at her, Kevin eats the barricade, and I feel the wall I built before the outbreak cracking.
"Come on," she says. "Show me the dessert armory."
"Why?"
"Because I want funnel cake and you need to stand still for five minutes and both of those things happen in the same room."
She walks toward the courtyard. I follow her because following Grace is what I do now, the way Joel follows her while pretending he's only checking the route, the way Grant follows the group while pretending he's only observing it.
I go in first, make sure the place is clear and safe.
She walks in leading with confidence, her coordination trailing several feet behind.
Her foot catches on the threshold. She pitches forward into the counter, rebounds off it, staggers sideways into the doorframe, and somehow ends up blocking the exit with her body, wedged between the counter and the wall.
"I meant to do that," she says, from inside the doorframe.
"You're stuck."
"I'm not stuck. I'm positioned. I'm strategically blocking the exit so you can't leave."
"I wasn't leaving."
"Good. Because I'm blocking the exit. Strategically."
I sit on the counter. She unsticks herself from the doorway and sits on the other counter, across from me, picks up a stale funnel cake from the stack, takes a bite, and chews.
The fryer pilot light flickers between us.
"Cornerstone Insurance Solutions," I say.
She looks up. Funnel cake crumbs on her lips. Powdered sugar on her chin.
"That was the job. Data entry. I sat in a cubicle and entered data into fields. The fields didn't care and the data didn't matter. I stood up in a Thursday morning meeting, and I walked out."
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."