A few minutes later we reach the Make-A-Moment station. Rufus stops and takes a picture of the entrance and its blue banner hanging above the door: No-Risk Thrills! He uploads it to Instagram in full color. “Look.” He hands me his phone. It’s open to the comments on his previous picture. “People are asking why I’m awake so early.”
There are a couple comments from Aimee, begging him to pick up his phone. “What happened with Aimee?”
He shakes his head. “I’m done with her. Her boy is the reason Malcolm and Tagoe are in jail for something I did, and she’s still dating him. She’s not loyal.”
“It’s not because of any feelings you have for her?”
“No,” Rufus says. He chains his bike to a parking meter.
It doesn’t matter if he’s telling the truth or not.
I drop it and we head inside.
I didn’t expect this place to look like a travel agency. The wall behind the counter is half sunset orange, half midnight blue, and there are framed photos of people doing different activities, like rock climbing and surfing. It’s easy on the eyes, I guess. Behind the counter is a young black woman in her twenties writing in a notebook that she puts away once she sees us. She’s in a yellow polo shirt and her name tag reads “Deirdre.” I’ve seen this name before, maybe in a fantasy novel.
“Welcome to Make-A-Moment,” Deirdre says, not too cheery, not too distant. The right amount of solemn. She doesn’t even ask us if we’re Deckers. She slides a binder toward us. “There’s currently a half-hour wait for the hot air balloon rides and swimming with sharks.”
“Who the hell . . . ?” Rufus turns to me, then back to Deirdre. “Is swimming with sharks something people really feel like they’re missing out on?”
“It’s a popular attraction,” Deirdre says. “Wouldn’t you swim with sharks if you knew they couldn’t bite you?”
Rufus sucks his teeth. “I don’t mess with big bodies of water like that.”
Deirdre nods as if she understands all of Rufus’s history. “No prob. I’m here if you have any questions.”
Rufus and I take a seat and flip through the binder. In addition to hot air balloon rides and swimming with sharks, the station offers skydiving, racecar driving, a parkour course, zip-lining, horseback riding, BASE jumping, white-water rafting, hang gliding, ice/rock climbing, downhill mountain biking, windsurfing, and tons more. I wonder if this business will ever expand to fictional thrills, like running away from dragons, fighting a Cyclops, and magic carpet rides.
We won’t be around to know.
I shake it off. “You want to try mountain biking?” I ask. He loves biking and there’s no water involved.
“Nah. I wanna do something new. How do you feel about skydiving?”
“Dangerous,” I say. “But tell my story if this goes south.” I wouldn’t be surprised if I managed to die in a place that promises risk-free thrills.
“You got it.”
Deirdre gives us a six-page-long waiver, which isn’t uncommon for businesses serving Deckers, but it’s also definitely not uncommon that we skim the form, because it’s not as if we’re going to be around to sue them if something does go wrong. There are so many freak accidents that can happen at any point. Every new minute we’re alive is a miracle.
Rufus’s signature is messy. I can make out only the first two letters before the remaining letters get lost in curves that look like a sales chart for a business that is rising and failing regularly. “Okay. I’ve signed away my right to bitch if I die.”
Deirdre doesn’t laugh. We pay two hundred and forty dollars each, the kind of price you can get away with charging people whose savings accounts would go to waste otherwise. “Follow me.”
The long hallway reminds me of the storage center where Dad worked, except inside the lockers there weren’t happy screams and laughter. At least none that I ever heard of. （Kidding.） These rooms are like karaoke rooms except some are twice, even three times as big. I peek in each window as we go down the hall, zigzagging like a pinball, finding Deckers with goggles in every room. Some are sitting inside racecars that are shaking, but not speeding down the racetracks. One Decker is “rock climbing” while an employee in the room texts away. A couple are kissing in a hot air balloon that is hovering six feet, but not in the sky. A crying man without goggles is holding the back of a laughing girl on top of a horse, and I can’t tell which one of them is the Decker, or if it’s both, but it makes me so sad that I stop looking into the rooms.