Kairi Matsuda had rated three screams from the drop tower before ten in the morning. Two sixes and a nine. She marked them on the back of a napkin and leaned on her counter. Across the park, the ride operator with the gray-brown side part waved a family through the gate. Marcus. He had tipped her once and said keep up the good work. She had thought about it for three days. She wanted him to notice her again. But she could not cross the park to make him. The hot dog stand kept her pinned behind its counter, cheerful and red-striped and useless as a leash. Her cat sat on the stool by the ketchup bottles, fat and black, stuffed into the little hot dog costume Kairi had bought him. Avery blinked at her. "You get to sit," she told him. "I get to sit. Nobody gets to walk over there." A customer wanted two dogs with mustard. Kairi made them slow. She watched Marcus point a kid toward the coaster line. The distance between her stand and his gate felt like a country border. Then the nacho station went dark. Her coworker's stand, three booths down, sat empty and unlit. Kairi frowned. She knew that face when she saw it later. Petra came around the corner with a shrimp roll in one hand, cardigan sleeves pushed up, glasses smudged with grease. "Register's jammed at mine," Petra said. Flat. She bit the shrimp roll. "Manager pulled me. Said cover you if you need it." Kairi had ranked ride operators with a coworker once. Not this one. This one always stared past you like you were part of the wall. But Petra was already stepping behind the counter, setting her shrimp roll down beside Avery. "You want to go somewhere," Petra said. Not a question. "How—" "You keep looking at the Scrambler gate." Petra shrugged. "Go. I don't care." Kairi did not wait for her to say it twice. She untied her apron and dropped it over the stool. She fixed her uniform, the one she knew looked good, and stepped out from behind the counter for the first time all shift. The park opened up in front of her. She crossed the midway fast. Past the coaster, past the strollers, straight toward the gray-brown side part. Marcus saw her coming. He smiled, easy, and touched the brim of his cap. "Hot dog girl," he said. "On break?" "Something like that." Her heart went loud. She had crossed the whole park. She was standing in front of him. And now she had nothing planned to say. Behind her, three booths back, Petra rang up a customer at Kairi's stand. She wiped mustard off the counter. She looked at Avery in his little costume. Then she looked, a long moment, at the empty nacho station she had shut down herself.