Page 57 of Sort of Seeing Someone

“Nice work on the wheel, Oliver,” Sebastian says.

“It’sOllie.”

Sebastian then takes out what looks like a mini bag of unbranded gummy bears. “Care for an edible, O-man?”

Sebastian holds out two in his palm—a red one and an orange one. Living in San Diego, one becomes very fluent in the world of edibles. You can’t go a city block without seeing a shop selling it or a courier delivering it. Even though I didn’t really get into them, I admit I’ve indulged before and figure it might be time now again.

I take my chances on the red one and toss it in my mouth. Cherry. I bring the orange one to my partner.

“Here you go,” I say to Ollie like I’m handing him a Tylenol.

“What even is that?” Ollie asks, holding a giant piece of plastic cheese in his hand.

“I think it’s tangerine.”

“Yeah but tangerinewhat?”

It hits me then that Ollie may not be familiar with the stoner version of gummy bears.

“It’s a weed gummy,” I explain, distracted by the fake cheese. “Did you find another clue?”

“I don’t know, this was in the drawer. There may be a key inside. If you all would help me solve this riddle, we could find out.” He raises his voice for attention on that last part.

Just then, Tommy comes on the intercom.

“Fifty minutes, everyone. That’s five-zero minutes to escape.”

The gummy is becoming one with my sweaty palm as I gesture once more for Ollie to take it.

“No thank you. You heard the guy. We’ve got fifty minutes left to get out of here. I don’t thinknowis the time to be popping weed gummies,” Ollie says, sounding impressively like a middle-aged suburban dad.

“On the contrary,” I argue. “We’ve got fifty minutes left of being trapped in a room with a bunch of drunks who aren’t going to contribute shit toward our fate of being put through the wood chipper. Thesegummies will take twenty minutes to kick in, leaving us with thirty minutes of semi-tolerable interaction with these idiots.”

As I rest my case, Ollie looks to Dan and Sebastian who have failed to realize that the giant-sized rodent water bottle is nothing more than an aesthetic element as they crawl around on their hands and knees attempting to suckle water out of the plastic prop. This is the reason I haven’t created a Tinder profile since being back, by the way.

“Oh, fuck it,” he says, snatching the gummy from my hand and popping it in his mouth.

As I begin to explore the room on my own, I stumble across an old typewriter. In it is a piece of paper with the beginnings of a poem or something. It says:

Despite all my rage…

Suddenly, the old Smashing Pumpkins song “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” pops into my head and I punch the rest of the lyrics into the typewriter:I’m still just a rat in a cage.

When I put the period on the lyric, a door opens, leading us out of the colorful room we started in and into a literal human-sized cage.

“Oh shit,” I say aloud. “I think I broke something.”

Ollie rushes over to me as I explain what happened.

“Quite the opposite,Moonie. You solved the clue to get us to the next lair. Nice job. And that door opening like that? Talk about impressive hydraulics. Remind me to ask Tommy what kind of air compressor they got for that when we leave.”

He holds out his hand to high-five me. Knowingwhat’llhappen if we touch palms, I make the executive decision to throw my arms around his stomach and go in for a quick hug instead. I can’t risk being side tracked by a vision of us doinggod knows whatlater on tonight.

“Sorry, thegummiesmake me kind oftouchy-feely,” I say, blaming the THC for my burst of faux affection. Ollie smiles and puts his hand on the crook of my back to usher me into the cage room.

The floor of the cage room is covered in a thick layer of hamster bedding—like a ball pit made of hay. The drunks kick it at each other. Meg comments that she hopes there’s “rat poop” in there as she hurls a load at her boyfriend, Dan.

“Ugh, what does this allmeeeeannnn?” Anna exclaims as if the cage room triggers an existential crisis.

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