Say You'll Remember Me(15)

He dragged himself off his stool and wandered out from behind the desk at a snail’s pace. Samantha turned to me with her back against the counter and smiled. “Have you ever done one before?”

“Never. You?”

“No.”

She looked around the prize desk. “God, do you remember winning these things when you were a kid?”

I came up next to her and looked into the glass case that was the countertop. It was full of cheap prizes that cost way too many tickets from the games.

My parents never took me to places like this as a kid. Dad said it was a waste of money. The only time I got to go was if one of the guys was having a birthday party.

There were rubber bouncy balls and Ring Pops, fake tattoos and mood rings and noisemakers.

I forgot how much I loved this part. This place wasn’t my idea of a fun adult night on the town—until now. But I did really love it as a kid.

“I always wanted to get enough tickets to get the lava lamp,” she said, nodding at the big prizes on display on the wall.

“Me too. You could just buy it somewhere else,” I said. “Get it for a fraction of the cost.”

“It’s not the same if you get it somewhere else. It just hits different from the prize counter.”

She was right. It did.

“How many tickets do we have?” she asked.

I pulled them out of my pockets and set them on the counter. She did the same. We had a decent amount. “Let’s feed them into the counting machine and see how much it is,” I said.

When we got the paper with the total, we reconvened.

“What do you want to do?” I asked. We didn’t have enough for the lava lamp, but we could get a stuffed animal, or a board game if she wanted to go bigger.

“Let’s get a bunch of the smaller ones,” she said. “That way we can split them.”

The employee came back looking bored. “The guy who does the escape room went home already, but I can let you in I guess.”

“Great!” she said. “And we want to pick a few prizes.”

We loaded up on random trinkets and candy, and I put it all in my pockets. Then we followed the employee to the escape rooms.

“We’ve got three rooms,” he said. “There’s like a basement escape one and an office thing and an alien spaceship—”

“The spaceship!” she said.

The kid nodded to some lockers. “You have to lock up your stuff. You can’t take your phones or your smartwatches.”

We put our phones and her purse in a locker. Then he took us to the room and we stood outside the door.

He pulled out a laminated piece of paper and read off it in a monotone voice. “‘You’re on a lonely country road and a beam of light encloses your car and you wake up in the belly of an alien vessel. The spaceship has crashed in the woods and the aliens are outside repairing it. They’ll get it fixed soon and take you to Mars and probe you. You have one hour to escape the ship before takeoff.’” He swung open the door and we peered in.

The room was decorated like the hull of a spaceship. I had to admit, it wasn’t half bad. There was a control panel full of knobs and levers. They had a wall of specimens behind plexiglass, a fake human head in a jar, small plastic rodent-sized alien creatures in leafy terrariums. The only thing not in theme was a large digital timer on the wall and a disco ball hanging from the ceiling.

“Good luck on your mission,” the kid said. Then he shut the door behind us, the lights turned off, a black light came on, and the wall timer started.

“Ready?” she asked.

We split up and started poking around. “Call out anything you find,” she said, opening drawers under the control panel. “A screwdriver!” She held it up.

“There’s a clipboard with hieroglyphics on it,” I said.

“Ooooh, I bet it’s a key.” She looked around the room. “Look! There’s one of the symbols on the wall.”

A little dog-shaped hieroglyphic was next to a box with the letter P on it.

“So that one means P,” she said. “Let’s look for more.”

We scoured the room and deciphered the clipboard code. Then we moved on and solved a series of puzzles that opened a locked cabinet with a safe in it. Samantha found a riddle on the underside of the captain’s chair. A song with a famous phone number. “867-5309.” We tried it on the safe and got it open. It had a missing lever for the control panel that opened a secret door in the wall. We went through the door and found a trunk with more clues.

She was good at this. We both were. I think normally these rooms were done with a group, but we were killing it just the two of us.

We solved the room at fifty-six minutes. When we pulled the final lever up, the digital clock froze, and the disco ball kicked on from the ceiling, spinning and flashing us in prisms while “Come On Eileen” played at full blast.

She bounced into my arms, jumping up and down, and we both cracked up. This whole thing was so cheesy, but I loved it. I wanted to come back and do the other two rooms.

She looked up at me, her hands on my chest. “That was so fun! You are brilliant! The way you figured out how that air lock had to turn—”

“How did you know to look in the wires under the fuselage?”

“I just figured if the door wasn’t bolted shut…” She shrugged.