Page 30 of One Adult, Please

"A hot snail."

"Grace, please don't call it a hot snail."

"A golden spiral of delicious intent."

"That's worse."

She grabs the squeeze bottle I've been using for the batter, fills it from the mixing bowl, holds it over the fryer, and begins to pour.

The first spiral is actually pretty good. Tight center, expanding outward, even thickness.

She's focused. Her tongue is poking out the side of her mouth in concentration.

The second spiral goes wider. Still okay.

The third spiral gets ambitious. She's trying to connect to the first one, trying to build a lattice, and her wrist does a thing that wrists shouldn't do at that angle, a sort of enthusiastic over-rotation, and the squeeze bottle slips.

It squirts a jet of batter sideways, across the counter, across the friendship paddle, and directly into the face-painting menu, where it hits the laminated surface and splatters back onto Grace's hoodie.

She flinches. Her whole body participates. Her feet shuffle. Her shoulders jump. Her left foot slides on the batter that's now on the floor. Her right foot tries to compensate. The compensation is worse than the original problem.

She goes down.

Not backward, which would at least have the advantage of taking her away from the three-hundred-fifty-degree oil. Forward. Toward the fryer. And my entire body goes electric because forward toward the fryer is the wrong direction.

I grab the back of her hoodie. The fabric bunches in my fist, her forward momentum stops, and she jerks backward. Her feet scramble for purchase on the battered cobblestone and she finds it. She stabilizes, she's upright with funnel cake batter on her hoodie, her face, and probably her soul.

My hand is still on her hoodie. I'm still holding her.

"I'm fine," she says.

"You almost fell into a deep fryer."

"I didn't, though. Because you caught me. So technically this is a success story." She straightens. Adjusts the hoodie. Wipes the batter off her face with her sleeve, which just redistributes the batter from her cheek to her sleeve and improves nothing but she seems satisfied with the effort. "Also I need you to know that wasn't my fault. The bottle malfunctioned."

"The bottle malfunctioned."

"The bottle has a design flaw. That's a manufacturing issue. I'm not responsible for manufacturing issues."

I let go of her hoodie. The absence registers harder than it should.

Although, actually, why not? The rules are different now. The rules have been different since Thursday. The old rules said you don't catch feelings for someone you just met, you don't immediately adopt their vocabulary, you don't stand in a theme park courtyard having a moment over a funnel cake fryer. The new rules don't exist yet. The new rules are being written in real time.

Joel appears. "We need to talk about the plan."

"We have a plan," Grace says, squeezing a new spiral into the fryer. "Zone by zone. Clear and keep."

"We need specifics. Entry points. Coverage. We can't just walk into each zone and hope."

"Why not? That's what I did when I got here and it's been working out," Grace says.

"You fell into a snare trap forty minutes ago."

"And I scored a point! Beck said it was a ten-pointer. Beck, tell him it was a ten-pointer."

I look at Joel. We're on opposite sides of a woman who is simultaneously the most chaotic and most correct person I've ever met and we're both trying to figure out how to exist in that gap.

"It was a ten-pointer," I say.