Page 106 of One Adult, Please

"That's his way of showing trust."

"That's his way of showing me a lizard's internal organs, Grant."

Beck snorts.

I look at the crayon plan. I look at the three men in the thinking box and I think about the thing I'm not ready to think about.

"So," I say.

The tone shift is instant. Beck stops grinning. Joel's scan goes still. Grant's hand on Pepper goes motionless.

"So we're all doing the feeling thing?" I say. "Together? Like a team feeling? A group..." I make a gesture that's supposed to encompass the enormity of what I'm trying to say and instead encompasses approximately the space of a medium pizza. "Heart situation?"

"Nailed it," Beck says quietly.

Joel opens his mouth. "She means..."

"They know what I mean, Joel."

"I'm just trying to..."

"Everyone in this room knows what I mean. Even Pepper knows what I mean and Pepper is a marsupial infant."

Grant's hand moves gently over Pepper's back. "She's actually quite perceptive for her age."

"Grant, I adore you, but I'm not workshopping wallaby intelligence right now, I'm trying to have a..." I wave my hands again. The pizza gesture expands. It's a large pizza now. Family size. "A conversation about the... us... the group... the..."

"Group heart situation," Beck supplies.

"Thank you. The group heart situation. Which is a thing that exists. That we're all participating in. Individually and also together in a way that I haven't seen a pamphlet for."

I'm standing now. My body made the executive decision that this conversation required verticality, which is bold given my body's history, but here we are. Upright for now.

"Look," I say, and I grab the crayon plan and hold it up. "This plan has gotten us through everything. It got us through clearing the parts and Kevin and Gregory and approximately forty-seven wrong people and the time Beck's fish vest got stuck in the log flume grate and the time Joel electrified a fence and the time Grant's bird ate a rat on my shoe while I was still wearing the shoe. The crayon plan works because we put everything on it. Everything real. Everything that matters. And this..." I gesture between the four of us. The gesture is generous. The gesture includes the bench and the floor and the porthole and the entire thinking box. "This matters. This is a real thing. And it's not on the plan."

I pick up the periwinkle and write, in the margin, in letters so small they're practically a secret:

Item twenty-seven: THE GROUP HEART SITUATION.

I underline it. The periwinkle protests. I underline it anyway.

"There," I say. "Now it's on the plan. Now it's official. We are four people who have feelings about each other in a combination that I'm pretty sure doesn't have a section in the greeting card aisle but that's fine because Hallmark wasn't prepared for this and frankly neither was I but here we are."

My hands are shaking a little.I put the crayon down.

"I've been calling this a relationship in my head for a while," Beck says. "So. Glad we're catching up."

Joel's the kind of quiet that has texture, like denim. He's looking at the porthole but he's not scanning.

"Joel," I say.

He turns. His face is doing the novel thing, the small-font thing, every micro-expression a sentence I have to squint to read. And what I read is: he wants this and it terrifies him.

"I'm not good at this," he says.

"I called it a group heart situation. Do I seem good at this?"

His mouth moves. The actual smile. It's there for maybe two seconds and it rewrites his entire face and then it's gone. I'm going to think about it for the rest of my life.