“Jere,” Priya squeals, “you came!” Another jab of annoyance, this one mixed with jealousy, that Priya’s spent enough time with Finn and Jeremy to be on a nickname basis.
“Sorry we’re so late,” Finn says. “We got the bus back from Scranton after breakfast and presents with Jeremy’s family and there was traffic.”
“I lied and told you to get here an hour earlier than you needed to.” Priya rolls her eyes at him and Jeremy hiccups out a nervous laugh. Still awkward as ever, I see.
“Hannah, you remember Jeremy?” Priya asks in an attempt to break the ice.
Jeremy scrapes his blond mop away from his forehead and smiles at the sidewalk instead of at me. Finn stares me down, and I want to blurt out a million apologies and beg for his forgiveness, but it doesn’t feel like the time or place. Not with Jeremy here. I wonder what Finn told him about why we’re not speaking. Not the truth. I can’t imagine they’d be together if Finn told him I made out with the man he’s in love with and he lost his mind over it.
I’m saved from figuring out the correct thing to say when a black Escalade pulls up to the curb, depositing Theo onto the sidewalk. “I thought I’d at least beat Finn here!” Theo slings an arm around Finn’s shoulder.
The knot in my stomach pulls even tighter. It seems there were no repercussions for Theo over last Christmas’s debacle; the two of them appear tight as ever.
“So will you tell us what we’re doing?” I ask now that the whole group is here.
Priya bounces on her toes as she looks around the circle, milking the big reveal. “It’s a Christmas-themed escape room,” she says finally.
A chorus of groans travels around the circle.
“What?” she asks, like she doesn’t see anything wrong with locking this group in a room for ninety minutes. She’s either completely clueless or an evil genius. From the challenging look she flashes my way, I’m leaning toward evil genius. “It got a write-up in New York magazine in October,” she explains. “It’s been sold out for months. Do you know the strings I had to pull to get these tickets? We’re doing it.” Her tone leaves no room for argument.
“Are there teams?” Finn asks as he inches closer to Jeremy.
“No. Why would there be teams? The whole point is to spend Christmas together.” Definitely an evil genius. At least we’ll have an activity to focus on.
Fifteen minutes later, Brian, a man with a pitifully sparse goatee in a Zelda T-shirt who introduced himself as our “puzzle master” without a hint of irony, leads us to our red-and-green prison.
Our room, one of three on the premises according to the plastic sign on the front desk, is themed “Seventies Grandma Christmas.” The room is the size of my and Priya’s apartment, meaning small. It looks like Brian hit up the estate sale of a tacky Long Island grandma and dumped all his loot in here, the former offices of a now-defunct startup. In one corner is a floral couch with a crocheted red-and-green afghan draped over the top, and in another is an artificial silver Christmas tree decorated to the max with its lights set to blink. I can already feel a headache building behind my eyes.
It even smells like an old lady in here, something cloying and floral with mildewy undertones, like maybe the previous owners’ perfume soaked into the couch over the years and their scents merged, or worse, they died on this couch.
“You have ninety minutes,” Brian explains, “but if for any reason you need to leave, I have a camera feed set up to the front desk. So just wave and let me know. I have to say that for insurance purposes, but you’re not gonna want to leave. This room is sick! It’s our hardest room. Built it myself.”
I cough to cover a laugh, embarrassed for his earnest excitement about this hideous room. Across the room, I catch Finn smirking, too.
You’d think being locked in a room with someone you’re not speaking to would be plenty of motivation to race to find clues and get out, but as soon as Brian takes his leave, Finn begins monologuing to the room at large about his Christmas Eve with Jeremy’s family in Pennsylvania even though no one asked. He does a solid five minutes on the eggnog alone. As he delivers his soliloquy, a blotchy rash climbs the side of Jeremy’s neck, creeping higher with every passing minute. I guess I’m not the only one attuned to the tense vibe in here.
I roam the room running my hands over the walls, each covered with a different wrapping paper motif, with the dim hope I might stumble on a hidden latch that will open the door and end our misery.
The only person who shows any enthusiasm or aptitude for the escape room is Theo, who’s taking this way too seriously. “I found a map of the North Pole, but it’s ripped.” He holds up a page that looks like it’s torn out of a kids’ coloring book. “I think I need a decoder? Or maybe there are more pieces somewhere in the room. Look for map pages!” he urges us with the seriousness of a man coaching his wife through labor.
“I found a key!” Priya exclaims. “It was in the Christmas tree like an ornament.” She proffers a massive old-fashioned key that looks like it would unlock a crumbling stone mansion in the Scottish Highlands.
“Does it open the front door?” Finn asks under his breath. “Maybe we can leave?”
A sardonic chuckle escapes me before I can catch myself. I wish it were that easy.
Then my fingers skim over a button on the wall that’s been wrapping-papered over and is invisible to the naked eye. I press it and a creepy-looking Santa pops out of an imposing grandfather clock across the room shouting, “Ho! Ho! Ho!”
“Holy shit, that thing scared the crap out of me,” I say. Even though I’m the one who pressed the button, my heart races. “Is he a clue? How do we make him stop?”
The answer is . . . we don’t. The deranged Santa cuckoo clock is a fresh layer of hell here in Brian’s torture chamber. Three minutes later, Santa pops out of the clock and yells, “Ho! Ho! Ho!,” and once again I jump out of my skin. “Fuck, he got me again. Is he going to keep doing this? Can someone stop him? Or maim him?”
“Priya, give me that key you found. Does it fit in the clock?” Finn asks. This is the closest we’ve gotten to speaking since we arrived.
Finn tries the key in the front compartment of the clock even though it’s comically too large to fit. “Ho! Ho! Ho!” Santa pops out and bellows directly into Finn’s face like he’s aware he has the upper hand.
“We have to make that thing stop. I can’t take another”—he looks at the countdown clock above the door—“hour and twenty minutes of this!”
How have we only been in here for ten minutes?
“Does this go with your map, Theo?” Jeremy squeaks, holding up another kids’ coloring book page between his thumb and pointer finger like it’s a delicate artifact that must be handled with care, as opposed to the likely reality that it was purchased in a ten-pack on Amazon.
“Fantastic work!” Theo says, and does a fist pump above his head. The two of them hover over the desk trying to piece the two pages together or see if one decodes the other.
“Jeremy is really good at puzzles,” Finn announces to the room. “He does the Times crossword every morning.” It’s unclear if Finn is bragging about Jeremy for my benefit or Theo’s. If we were on better terms, I’d tell him that David does the crossword every morning, too.