Page 15 of One Adult, Please

"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.

6

I DIDN'T COMMIT A MISDEMEANOR TO LEAVE

GRACE

Iwake up after drifting off again, to Joel saying "we should talk" which is the worst combination of words in the English language, ahead of "some assembly required" and "per my last email" and trailing only slightly behind "the test came back positive" depending on context.

"I'm asleep," I say, which is obviously a lie. I open one eye. Blue light. Fish. The tunnel. Joel sitting on the bench across from me with his protein bar wrappers in a neat little pile next to him. "What time is it?"

"Around seven. I checked the pump system an hour ago."

"You left?"

"Briefly. Locked the door behind me. You didn't move."

"Joel, you can't just leave me alone in the fish tube with a body doing laps."

"You were asleep. And the body can't get through the reinforced acrylic."

"That's not the point. The point is I could have woken up alone in an underwater tunnel with a floater and no context and my brain would have assumed I died and this was the weird afterlife I got assigned. I'd be sitting here trying to figure out what I did to deserve fish purgatory."

He does the stare. "I'll leave a note next time."