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The parking lot was sticky.
Veronica did not investigate. She filed it under environmental hazards and kept walking.
"Mommy, come on."
Isadore had her hand and was pulling with the conviction of a five year old who had been promised something and intended to collect, which was, Veronica had noted over the past five years, a disposition she had come by entirely honestly. She was wearing the birthday crown Adrianna had constructed that morning from cardboard and electrical tape and a strip of reflective material whose origin Veronica had decided not to pursue. It sat crooked on her head. Both of them had attempted to straighten it. Both had been refused.
"I'm coming," Veronica said.
"You're walking sooo slow."
"I am walking at a normal pace. You are walking at an unreasonable one, love."
Izzy considered this and pulled harder, which Veronica allowed, because it was her birthday, and because Adrianna was already at the entrance wearing the expression she got when handed a space with no liability waivers and every intention of making the most of it. She had been like this since the parking lot. Since the drive over, if Veronica was being precise, since 7:45 that morning when she had come downstairs and announced that she had once extracted four hundred and twelve tickets from a single machine at a place like this and intended to share this skill with their daughter.
Veronica had not asked how. She already knew.
The doors opened and the noise arrived first.
She had prepared for this. Three reviews, average decibel estimates, acoustic considerations for low ceilings over linoleum. She had prepared, and it was still a great deal of noise delivered at close range with no warning beyond the half second it took the doors to open.
The interior was dim in the way places were dim when they needed you looking at the lights and the screens rather than the floors, which bore the pattern of carpet that had either been designed to hide stains or had simply developed camouflage over time as a survival mechanism. The air smelled like pizza with something beneath it the pizza was working hard to cover.
Izzy let go of her hand and stopped.
She stood in the entrance and looked at all of it, the lights and the machines and the noise and the children moving through it, and her face did the thing it did when something exceeded her expectations, which was go very still before going very bright.
"Mama," she said. "It's so big."
"Right?" Adrianna crouched beside her. "Okay. Arcade is there, that's our first stop. Pizza later. Playground in the back, we'll get there." She stood and took Izzy's hand. "Come on Ronnie, we're losing daylight."
They were inside a building. There was no daylight.
Veronica followed.
Adrianna walked into the arcade the way she walked into most spaces, like she had already done a reconnaissance Veronica hadn't been informed about, and led Izzy directly to a specific ticket machine in the far corner. Veronica stood at the edge of the arcade and watched her crouch down, position Izzy's hands, and tap the side of the machine twice in a specific location before inserting the token.
The machine produced an unreasonable number of tickets.
Izzy stared at it.
"How did you do that?" she said.
"Pattern recognition. These machines run on a cycle. You find the cycle."
A pause.
"Is that cheating?"
"It's…" Adrianna said, with the specific pause that preceded her more defensible reframings, "applied mathematics."
Veronica said nothing. The tickets were already coming out. She watched her daughter's face move through wonder and into something more calculating and thought, not for the first time, that Isadore was going to be formidable at something specific and they would likely find out what during a phone call from a school administrator.
She did not say anything about the cheating.
The tickets kept coming.
Izzy gathered them with careful seriousness, clutching the entire stack in one fist as if someone might attempt to repossess them.
They found a table that was cleaner than the others by a margin Veronica established through observation alone, because she was not touching the surface to confirm. A college-aged employee arrived to take their order, glassy-eyed, running on whatever passed for morale four hours into a shift like this one.
"What pizza do you have?" Veronica said.
He listed them. They were variations on the same pizza.
"And the ingredients. Where are they sourced?"
He blinked.
"The cheese," Veronica said. "The flour. Supplier information."
"I can," he said, "go ask someone…?"
He did not go ask someone. He returned seven minutes later with the pizza and the look of a man who had brought the question as far as the kitchen door and left it there.
Veronica accepted this. She had expected nothing different. This was a restaurant staffed by minimum wage college students operating under a corporate model that had optimized for atmosphere over product, which was a legitimate strategic choice and not one she had any particular respect for.
Izzy ate two slices and reached for a third. Adrianna provided it while stealing a piece herself, folding it in half the way she always did, eating it in four bites.
Veronica looked at her own slice.
The pizza was thin, the sauce slightly sweet in the wrong direction, the cheese carrying the memory of having been frozen. Objectively not good.
Her mother used to get pizza like this on Friday nights. She would ask Veronica if she liked it, every time, setting the box on the table between them the way she did when she hoped it was enough. Veronica had said yes every time.
She had thought cheap pizza was what pizza was.
She took another bite.
"You okay?" Adrianna said, beside her, quietly enough that Izzy didn't look up.
"Fine," Veronica said. "Eat your pizza."
Adrianna held her gaze for a moment with the attention she deployed when she had noticed something and was deciding what to do with it. Then she stole another slice, tore half of it off, and held it out to Izzy, who accepted it with the gravity of a concluded negotiation, and the moment closed.
The employee reappeared at their table having apparently decided, somewhere between the kitchen and here, that he was going to make this birthday happen.
"So," he said, "I hear somebody's turning five today."
Izzy looked up from her tickets immediately. "Me!" she said. "I am!"
"Well then." He produced a small cake from behind his back with a single lit candle in the center, chocolate frosting, the Chuck E. Cheese logo piped in orange across the top, which Veronica noted and filed under intellectual property licensing she could have told them was overpriced. "I think that means it's time for the birthday song."
What happened next was something Veronica had not fully accounted for in her preparation.
The employee produced a small handheld device. Pressed a button. A recording began playing, a birthday jingle occupying the specific frequency range designed to carry across a loud room, and then he was singing along to it, and then the two employees at the nearest station were singing, and then somehow the tables around them had joined in, strangers, other children, a grandmother near the window who had committed fully, and Chuck E. Cheese himself materialized from somewhere in the middle distance and was now standing at the end of their table doing a small choreographed movement that involved his arms and his hips and a level of structural confidence Veronica found alarming given the animatronic conversation of twenty minutes prior.
Izzy's face.
That was the thing. That was the thing Veronica had not prepared for. Izzy's face when the song started, when she realized it was for her, when she understood that the entire room was oriented toward her and singing, was so completely and wholly delighted that Veronica found she had stopped thinking about anything at all for a moment.
She was five. She was five years old and she had chocolate frosting on the cake in front of her and a room full of strangers singing at her and she thought this was the best thing that had ever happened.
Adrianna was already singing along, off-key and enthusiastic, which was the only way Adrianna sang anything. She caught Veronica's eye mid-verse and grinned, the version without performance behind it, and Veronica looked back at Izzy instead because that was safer.
The song ended. The room applauded briefly and returned to itself.
"Okay Iz," Adrianna said, leaning in. "Make a wish. Eyes closed, really think about it."
Izzy closed her eyes with the gravity of an undertaking she had decided mattered. Her brow furrowed slightly. She was taking this seriously, which she took most things, and the crown was still crooked and there was a small smear of arcade grime on her cheek from the skee-ball machines and she looked so completely like herself that Veronica felt something move through her that stopped everything else, briefly, the same way it had at the prize counter, and she let it.
Izzy opened her eyes and blew out the candle.
The room applauded again. The employee beamed. Chuck E. Cheese performed another movement with his hips.
"What did you wish for?" Adrianna said.
"You can't tell," Izzy said, with great authority. "Or it won't come true."
"That's fair."
"I know."
Veronica cut the cake into three pieces, because the employee had provided a plastic knife and she was not going to wait for him to do it, and distributed them. Izzy ate hers with the focused reverence she usually reserved for things Adrianna was explaining to her. Adrianna ate hers in four bites. Veronica ate hers slowly and it was chocolate and it was good, actually, genuinely good, which she had not expected and which she was not going to mention.
Chuck E. Cheese lingered at the end of the table.
"You can go," Veronica told him.
He went.
The animatronics occupied a stage near the back wall.
Veronica had catalogued them on arrival and assigned them low priority. She reassigned them now because Adrianna was standing in front of the stage with her arms crossed and her head at the angle that meant she had found something technically interesting, the same angle she'd had right before she dismantled the kitchen timer, the hotel television remote, and one item Veronica still could not identify the original purpose of.
"The servos on that one are going," Adrianna said.
"Don't."
"I'm just looking."
"You have never just looked at machinery."
This was true and required no elaboration. Adrianna's version of looking was the first step in a process that ended with components arranged on the kitchen table and Adrianna saying she knew exactly where everything went.
"The bear's left arm actuator is running behind. You can see it in the lag. Whoever maintains these hasn't recalibrated in months." She paused. "This reminds me of a place I used to go as a kid. Similar setup, animatronics, pizza, arcade. Eventually got shut down."
"Good," Veronica said.
"There were incidents. Missing kids, some biting incidents with the animatron—"
"Adrianna."
Izzy had looked up from her tickets.
"The skeeball machines," Adrianna said, without missing a beat, "were reportedly very bad. Very upsetting. Nothing like here. Here the skeeball is great, right Iz?"
Izzy, already losing interest, nodded and went back to her tickets.
Veronica looked at Adrianna.
Adrianna looked at the bear.
The bear looked at nothing, which was its only available expression, and Veronica found it no more reassuring for that.
"Don't," Veronica said.
"I'm not doing anything."
She was going to do something. Veronica knew this the way she knew most things about Adrianna, through accumulated evidence and pattern recognition, which was, now that she thought about it, exactly what Adrianna had taught Izzy to do to the ticket machine.
She filed this under problems to address later and moved on.
The prize counter ran along the far wall, backlit, arranged with the aggressive optimism of a display that assumed children would not immediately calculate that the ticket-to-value ratio was essentially punitive. Veronica ran the numbers while Izzy pressed her face against the glass and breathed on it, and decided the margin on this operation was actually quite healthy once you factored in sunk token costs.
There was a section near the end with licensed merchandise.
Stuffed animals. Keychains. Small figures. And then, occupying more display space than could be justified by any reasonable demographic analysis, a Wonder Woman section. A doll. Keychains. A foam shield. A cardboard standee of Diana of Themyscira, smiling with the benevolent ease of someone who had never had to earn anything in Man's World because Man's World had simply opened its arms and asked her in.
Veronica had read Reflections twice. The first time to understand it. The second time to find every place the argument only held if you began with the structural advantages of a demi-goddess and simply hadn't noticed.
What a narcissist.
She moved on.
"Mommy." Izzy pointed at a stuffed bear behind the counter, a smaller cousin of the animatronic on stage, which was a design choice someone should have reconsidered. "Can I get that one?"
Veronica checked the ticket price. Checked the stack Izzy was holding, which was, thanks to applied mathematics, substantial.
"Do you have enough?"
Izzy counted with the focused precision she brought to most things, Veronica's precision in a smaller face with Adrianna's patience behind it, and announced she had forty-seven more than required.
"Then yes," Veronica said.
Izzy handed over the tickets and received the bear, which was nearly as large as she was. She hugged it immediately, both arms, chin over the top of its head.
The mascot found them near the skee-ball machines.
She heard him before she saw him, the particular sound of an adult moving through a space in a costume not built for adults, and then he was there, two feet away, head tilted in a fixed approximation of warmth, pointed directly at her.
"Hi there!" Muffled cheerfulness through foam. "Are we having fun today?"
"My daughter is," Veronica said. "That was the objective."
He turned toward Izzy, who studied him for a moment and then waved, which was apparently the verdict.
He began to crouch toward her.
"She's five today," Veronica said. "She'll tell you herself if she wants you to know. She doesn't need a photograph taken without her consent, and if you are carrying balloon-making equipment I will need hygiene documentation before it comes within three feet of her."
The mascot straightened slowly.
Adrianna materialized at her shoulder. "We're all good," she said, deploying the easy tone she reserved for situations Veronica had escalated. "Thanks though."
He retreated. Adrianna watched him go.
"He's a college kid in a suit," she said.
"I'm aware."
"Just checking." A beat. "The head movement mechanism is interesting though. The hydraulics on the neck joint—"
"Adrianna."
"Right. Yes. Birthday."
The playground was in the back.
The structure rose through the available space in tubes and nets and platforms, all of it in primary colors that had faded into something more muted, the whole thing humming faintly with the energy of children moving through it. A sign at the entrance read, in large cheerful letters: FOR CHILDREN 12 AND UNDER.
Veronica read the sign.
She watched Adrianna read the sign.
She watched Adrianna follow Izzy through the entrance anyway.
"The sign," Veronica said.
"I see it," Adrianna called back, already inside.
Veronica stood outside and waited and listened to Izzy narrating her route in real time, every turn and junction announced, which she had done since she learned to talk and which Veronica found, privately, extraordinary. Adrianna's responses came less frequently. Then stopped.
"Ronnie."
Veronica closed her eyes. Briefly.
"Ronnie, I need some help in here."
She looked at the sign one more time. She looked at the entrance. She looked at the parents nearby, two of whom had already turned toward the structure and settled in to watch, unhurried, with nowhere better to be.
She removed her blazer, folded it, set it on the nearest bench, and went in.
The tubes were not designed for adults. She had known this. It was different to know it and to be inside one confirming it through direct experience while wearing good trousers, the plastic warm and close, the smell of the pizza having followed her in. She moved through two junctions and up a ramp that did not accommodate her height and emerged onto a platform where Adrianna was sitting with one leg through a gap in the floor grating, wearing the expression that came at the natural conclusion of a sequence of bad decisions.
Izzy was beside her. "Mama went through the wrong hole," she reported.
"That does sound like her," Veronica said.
"The gap was bigger going in," Adrianna defended.
"They generally are."
"I'm not looking for commentary."
"I'm not providing any." Veronica crouched and assessed the situation. Below, through the net, she could see three parents and a Chuck E. Cheese employee looking up. She waved once, briefly, as if the situation were entirely under control. She turned back to Adrianna's leg. "Turn your knee toward me."
"I've been turning it."
"Further."
"Knees don't go further, Veronica."
"Then rotate from the hip. Flat." She got a hand on Adrianna's ankle, repositioned it, and felt the joint clear the grating with a movement that produced a sound she was going to ensure was never referenced again. "There."
Adrianna pulled her leg free and sat for a moment on the platform.
"Thank you," she said.
"My team will be handling the incident report Monday," Veronica said. "Don't mention this to anyone."
"The people below saw everything."
"I'm aware."
She stood, straightened her trousers, which had survived. Barely. Izzy was already moving toward the slide at the far end of the platform, entirely unbothered, the birthday crown still crooked.
"Ready?" Veronica said.
"Born ready," Adrianna said, which was not a phrase Veronica would have chosen but was, she had long accepted, very much Adrianna.
They went down the slide in order. Izzy first. Adrianna second. Veronica third, which was the most dignified available sequence. The ball pit at the bottom was not dignified. She surfaced from it and found the Chuck E. Cheese employee still watching.
She made a note to have this location's health inspection history on her desk before Sunday evening.
They left at 7:43pm. Izzy fell asleep before Veronica had cleared the parking lot, going from fully operational to completely unconscious between one breath and the next, the bear tucked under her arm, the crown still on. Adrianna buckled her in and they got in the front and Veronica pulled onto the main road and the drive settled into a quiet she found, despite everything, agreeable.
She was fifteen minutes from home when she checked the rearview mirror and made eye contact with the bear animatronic.
The car lurched. Someone behind her leaned on their horn. Izzy slept through all of it with the profound commitment of a child who had spent four hours at a Chuck E. Cheese and had simply left her body.
"What—" Adrianna started.
"There is," Veronica said, at the specific register she used when she was managing something very carefully, "an animatronic in my car."
Silence.
"It had a defective servo," Adrianna said.
"There is a Chuck E. Cheese animatronic in my car, Adrianna!"
"The left arm actuator was running behind. I mentioned it. Twice."
"You mentioned it." Veronica returned her eyes to the road. She breathed in once, steadily, and thought about what she was going to say, and then thought about Adrianna at the kitchen table that morning with the electrical tape and the cardboard, Izzy beside her holding the pieces in place while Adrianna explained structural integrity in the patient voice she used for things she found genuinely worth explaining.
"Fix it quickly," Veronica said.
Adrianna turned to look at her.
"Quietly," Veronica added. "And it is not coming inside the house."
"The garage?"
Veronica said nothing, which Adrianna correctly interpreted, and faced front.
In the back seat Izzy slept, the bear tucked under one arm, the birthday crown transferring small amounts of reflective material to the headrest. The animatronic sat beside her with its fixed expression aimed at the back of Veronica's head.
Veronica did not look at it again. She had learned her lesson.
She drove them home.