Episode 4: How Many Exits Does One Date Need?
Mia had been threatening to organize a double date since approximately the moment the rulebook photo leaked, and she finally got her opportunity when Founders Amusement Park — closed for repairs since a Tilt-A-Whirl incident nobody at school liked to discuss in detail — reopened for a single trial day to test its refurbished rides before the official relaunch.
"It's fate," Mia announced, waving four free tickets she'd apparently won through a radio call-in contest that involved correctly identifying a jingle from 2003. "Free admission, a boy I'm definitely not going to tell you I like yet, and a chance for the two of you to have one normal date that doesn't involve abandoned buildings or evidence."
I had, for the occasion, prepared an itinerary. Ride wait times, cross-referenced against the park's posted capacity limits; a budget split evenly across food, games, and what I labeled, only slightly ironically, emergency contingency funds; and a return-time buffer that accounted for both traffic and the statistically higher probability of something going wrong whenever Iris Vale was involved in planning anything.
Iris looked over my itinerary in the parking lot, nodded once in what I initially mistook for approval, and then asked, with total sincerity, whether the roller coaster's listed weight capacity accounted for the additional mass of a crow riding in someone's jacket.
"Pickle isn't coming to the amusement park, Iris."
"Pickle is already at the amusement park," she said, and pointed. Forty feet away, perched on the arch of the entrance gate like he owned franchise rights to the place, Pickle surveyed the crowd with the proprietary interest of a landlord inspecting new tenants.
I decided, as a matter of self-preservation, not to ask how he'd gotten there before us.
The morning went, against all odds, remarkably well. Iris won me a stuffed rabbit at the ring toss by identifying, out loud, exactly which rings the carnival worker had subtly weighted to bounce off the bottles — a piece of insider knowledge she refused to explain the origin of, though I had my suspicions given the general trajectory of her skill set. Theo — Mia's date, a quiet, meticulous boy from my calculus class who I hadn't realized Mia had been talking to for weeks — turned out to share my exact taste for over-planning, and the two of us spent a genuinely happy twenty minutes comparing notes on optimal ride-order sequencing while Mia and Iris rolled their eyes at us in unison from a bench.
It was, for the first time since the stage collapsed on top of us, an entirely normal afternoon. I remember thinking, somewhere around the funnel cake stand, that this — this exact ordinary thing, sharing fried dough with a girl who terrified strangers by existing — might be the version of dating Iris Vale I could actually get used to.
Then we reached the mirror maze, and Iris disappeared.
Not dramatically. One second she was beside me, examining her reflection in a panel with the specific squint of someone checking a mirror's structural integrity rather than her own appearance; the next, a group of tourists shuffled between us, and by the time they cleared, she was simply gone, the maze's warped reflections making it impossible to tell which direction she'd actually gone in.
I want it on the record that I did not panic gracefully. I called her name twice, got my own distorted reflection shouting back at me from four different angles, and spent a solid ninety seconds walking directly into a mirror I was one hundred percent certain was a doorway.
I found her, eventually, in the maze's back corner, near an emergency exit propped open with a folding chair — and she was not alone. A boy I recognized vaguely from the junior class, someone named Dax who ran the "confessions" side of Northbridge After Bell's anonymous board, stood pressed against the exit's frame, and Iris stood close in front of him, voice low and even in a way that made the hair on my arms rise before I'd even processed what I was looking at.
"—paid you two hundred dollars," Iris was saying, "to post specifically that photo, with specifically that caption. I want to know who."
Dax's eyes flicked past her, found me, and went wide with something like relief, like I was rescue arriving rather than a second problem.
I did not, in that moment, think about the rulebook. I did not think about de-escalation, or careful phrasing, or any of the twelve numbered rules I'd printed and laminated with such confidence a week earlier. I thought about the fact that the girl I was — fake-dating, real-dating, I genuinely could not have told you which by that point — had a cornered underclassman backed against an emergency exit in a dim, mirror-warped hallway, and every worst rumor I'd ever half-believed about her came roaring back all at once.
"Iris." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. "What are you doing?"
She turned, and something in her face shuttered instantly at my tone — not guilt, exactly, more like she'd been braced for exactly this reaction the whole time and was almost relieved to finally get it over with. "Finding out who's behind this. What's it look like."
"It looks like you cornering a sophomore in a dark hallway."
"He's not scared of me, he's scared of getting caught—"
"I'm a little scared of you," Dax offered, unhelpfully, from behind her.
I pulled Iris out of the maze by the elbow — gently, I want to stress, gently, but firmly enough that there was no ambiguity about my intentions — and didn't let go until we were both standing in the flat, ordinary daylight of the midway, several rides' worth of distance between us and the mirror maze's tangled reflections.
"You can't just do that," I said. "You can't corner people and interrogate them and expect everyone to trust that you had a good reason. That's exactly the story people already believe about you."
"I wasn't going to hurt him."
"I know that. You know that. He might not have known that, standing against a wall with an exit blocked!" I ran a hand through my hair, aware I was raising my voice in the middle of a reopened amusement park, aware and unable to stop. "You can't keep deciding things on your own and just expecting me to trust the outcome. That's not — that's not how any of this works, Iris."
Iris went very quiet. She reached into her jacket, pulled out a single admission ticket — the extra one Mia had given her that morning, still folded in its original crease — and held it out to me without a word.
"What's this."
"I've had it since we walked in," she said, voice flat in the specific way I now recognized meant she was holding something down hard. "I didn't tell you I was going to ask him about the photo because I knew you'd want a plan first, and I didn't have a plan, I just had a hunch, and I didn't know how to ask you to trust a hunch."
I looked down at the ticket. Ordinary blue-and-yellow admission stub, printed with the park's logo — and, on the back, in small type meant for internal accounting, a transaction code stamped in faded ink.
FF-0472-NP.
"FF," I said slowly. "Festival Fund."
"NP," Iris said. "Nolan Price."
I stared at her. "You've had this since this morning."
"I found it in the ticket booth trash while you and Theo were doing your ride-sequencing thing. I wasn't hiding it to hide it. I just—" She stopped, jaw tight, and for once didn't have a flat, confident line ready to deploy. "I didn't want you to look at me the way you're looking at me right now. Like I did something wrong by finding it."
I felt something in my chest twist, uncomfortably, at the exact center of being right and being unfair at the same time. I had been angry about the maze, genuinely, reasonably angry — but some of what I'd said in that anger hadn't been about Dax at all. It had been about discovering, all over again, that Iris kept things from me not out of malice but out of some old, worn-in belief that telling me the truth first would cost her something she couldn't afford to lose.
"I'm not looking at you like you did something wrong," I said, quieter now. "I'm looking at you like I wish you'd let me carry some of this with you before it turned into a confrontation in a mirror maze."
We ended up, twenty minutes later, on the carousel — Mia and Theo two horses ahead, pointedly not looking back at us, giving us exactly the privacy neither of them would ever admit to arranging on purpose. Iris sat sideways on her painted horse, one boot braced against the pole, looking anywhere but at me.
"For the record," she said, eventually, over the tinny calliope music, "I wasn't trying to scare him. I don't actually know how to say things without it coming out like a threat. It's not — I don't choose that. It's just what comes out."
"I know."
"I'm working on it."
"I know that too." I reached over, carefully, and tucked the loose strand of purple-streaked hair back behind her ear, the same gesture she'd made to herself back in the old wing, and watched her go very still at the contact, the carousel horse rising and falling gently beneath us. "You could try telling me the hunch next time. Before the confrontation part."
"That defeats the purpose of a hunch."
"Iris."
"Fine." A small, reluctant almost-smile. "Being near you makes my nervous system a little less interested in kicking down doors. There. Was that romantic enough for the rulebook?"
I laughed — actually laughed, loud enough that Mia turned around two horses ahead just to see what she'd missed — and Iris turned a shade of red that had nothing to do with the flashing midway lights, immediately looking away toward the neon glow of the ride operator's booth like it had personally demanded her attention.
That night, back in my room, I laid the ticket flat on my desk beside the torn page from the old records room, the fragment of Nolan's signature lining up almost perfectly beside the transaction code stamped on the back. Two separate pieces of paper, found in two entirely different places, both circling the same name.
We had a thread now. A real one, not a rumor, not a symbol scratched under a table — an actual paper trail connecting Nolan Price to money that wasn't his.
I didn't yet know how far it went, or who else might be standing just out of frame, watching us follow it. But for the first time since the truss came down on top of us three weeks earlier, I fell asleep without running through contingency plans, thinking instead about a girl on a carousel horse, red-faced under neon light, telling me the truth for once instead of a confident lie.
End of Episode 4.