As soon as there was a little bit of breathing room between us and the rest of the women—Vickie, Gennifer, and two others I hadn’t officially met yet—I asked Izzy, “What’s the deal?”
She glanced up and judged the distance between us and the others, who had gone back to their boisterous tittering. “I don’t much like Vickie,” she confessed.
“I picked up on the tension, but I’ve never done an escape room before.” There was a lot about Williamsburg I still hadn’t experienced. At the beginning of summer, three months seemed like a lifetime, but once I got here, I realized that it wasn’t nearly enough time to take advantage of everything New York had to offer. Already, half of that time had flown by and I hadn’t even seen a play on Broadway yet.
“We could do one anytime, just you and me.”
“I already checked. They’re expensive.” Maybe to a New Yorker it wasn’t much, but to me, on waitress wages? Anything that cost more than a Happy Meal was a stretch. “I should have checked with you first, but . . .” I let my voice trail off.
“You’re right,” she said with a nod and a bright grin. “I mean, it would be silly to pass up a free escape room, wouldn’t it? Plus, you’ll like Gennifer. She’s a trip. We used to get into so much trouble back in school.”
“That I can imagine.” Izzy was a free spirit, to say the least. It wasn’t hard to envision her as a child, running around Staten Island, breaking all the rules.
“Come on, then,” she said. I’d gotten better at walking fast since coming to Brooklyn, but with my shorter legs, I don’t think I’d ever be able to keep up with a native New Yorker on a mission. “Hurry it up or they’ll start without us.”
2
Dizzy Izzy @IsabelleWilliamsburg ∙ July 12
what did @odessawaiting drag me into this time? how can i escape an escape? #escape #puzzles #williamsburg
We arrived at a building that, like most of Williamsburg, had once been an industrial warehouse. The sign over the door said, “Verrazzano-Narrows Escape!” Real punny. And also ironic considering the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge was the only direct route from Brooklyn to Staten Island without getting wet, and half of our party was from Staten Island originally.
After checking in at the front desk, a sleepy-looking guy gave each of us a clipboard with a stack of release forms to sign, a list of the dos and don’ts, and a coupon for 10 percent off our next exciting escape room experience.
Their words, not mine.
Before I could sit down, Gennifer came over. She reminded me of Izzy—friendly and cheerful—but with half her energy. “I’m so sorry, I already forgot your name.”
“Odessa Dean,” I said, offering my hand.
“What’d she say her name was?” Vickie asked in a stage whisper to the woman closest to her.
“Who knows?” the woman replied. “I can’t hardly understand a word she says.”
I liked to think my backwoods Louisiana accent, thick and lazy as the stifling bayou, had improved in the last few weeks. I sounded less like a southern-fried unicorn—as Izzy had once labeled me—these days, but sometimes when I spoke, people still got a confused look on their face. I reminded myself to slow down and enunciate, as I repeated my name. Personally, I didn’t think I had an accent, but every time I opened my mouth, New Yorkers stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language. If they thought I was bad, they should hear my cousins or some of my customers back home at the Crawdad Shack. Now they had accents so thick sometimes even I couldn’t understand them.
Gennifer indicated a woman who was several years older than anyone else in the group, if the gray streaks around her temples and the elaborate necklace of purple glass baubles were any indication. The necklace reminded me of the fake grapes that adorned my grandmother’s living room coffee table. Her clothes were neatly pressed, but her outfit—a short red jacket-like blouse with big black buttons and an even bigger black collar paired with straight-legged black pants—looked like something that came out of the professional section of a catalog in the nineties, or my mother’s closet. “This is Marlie. She works with Vickie.”
Her face twitched as if she’d been holding a fake smile too long. That was a sensation I was intimately familiar with, as my job required me to be bright and friendly at all times, even when I wasn’t feeling it. It was exhausting sometimes. Marlie and I nodded at each other before Gennifer continued. “And this is Amanda, never Mandy. She and Vickie went to NYU together.”
Amanda gave me a hard head-to-toe assessment, her sharp green eyes taking in the slightly frayed collar of my long, ribbed tank top that did an amazing job of flattering my curves, a flouncy purple, green, and blue tie-dyed homemade skirt, and my practical-but-ugly-as-sin orthopedic loafers. Don’t knock ’em until you’ve spent a double on your feet. “Nice to meet you,” she said.
“Vickie said something about celebrating?” I asked. “What’s the big occasion?”
“Vickie won the heckin’ good broker of the month prize at her office, for the twelfth month in a row, which makes her the best broker in New York City.”
“Earned, Gennifer,” Vickie corrected her. “Won makes it sound like I was the tenth caller or something.”
“Congratulations,” I said. Behind me, Izzy echoed the sentiment. She didn’t sound quite as enthusiastic as I did, but if Vickie noticed, she didn’t react.
“Ladies, I’m gonna need those forms,” the guy behind the desk called out.
Vickie handed him her clipboard. “I know you,” she said, staring at him.
“You rented me an apartment last year,” he said.
“That’s right! Park Slope?”
“Flatbush,” he corrected her.
“I knew it.” She turned her attention back to our little group. “See? That’s why I earned the real estate broker of the month prize every single month for a full year. It’s not about big sales, Marlie, it’s about consistent sales. Although, I made a killer commission off that Flatbush deal.”
Izzy rolled her eyes so hard I thought she might fall out of her chair. Beside her, I continued to skim the rules. We had sixty minutes to solve a series of increasingly difficult puzzles to get through each room. Seemed simple enough. I was good with puzzles, from jigsaws to crosswords.
After signing what frankly seemed like an obscene amount of waivers and returning the forms to the front desk, I shoved my messenger bag into a cubby on the wall. “Whatcha doing?” Izzy asked.
“It’s not like I’m gonna lug this with me. Our cornhole trophy alone weighs a ton.”
She pulled my bag out of the cubicle and slung it over her neck and one arm so it hung cross-body. “Anytime you see a sign that says management isn’t responsible for personal items left in lockers, it’s pretty much guaranteed that the second you turn your back, some creep is going through your purse.” She glared pointedly at the pimpled guy behind the front desk.
“Like I care about your cheapo drugstore makeup and half-chewed pack of gum,” he grumbled, tugging on the bow tie of his ill-fitting tux. I felt sorry for him. I didn’t always love my work uniform—neon green wasn’t flattering on anyone—but at least I didn’t have to wear a cheap tuxedo.
“See?” Izzy said.
“You can keep your bags if you want,” he said in the same tired tone, “but you have to turn off your phones.” He spun the monitor on his desk around so we could see the black-and-white image on the screen. “No cheating. I’ll be watching from here, and if I see anyone on their cell phones, you’re all banned for life.”
Izzy grinned. “I’m all out of data for the month, so joke’s on you, Sparky.”
He rotated the screen back toward himself and stood, his antiquated office chair letting out a protesting squeal. “If your paperwork is complete, stack your clipboards here and follow me.” We did as requested, following him in a single-file line through a swinging door down a bland
hallway with five numbered doors.
“Welcome to Verrazzano-Narrows Escape!, Williamsburg’s premier escape room experience,” he intoned, and I had to wonder how many times he’d repeated this speech. “In a minute, your exciting experience will begin.” He pointed at a digital clock over the door that flashed “60” in red numbers. I noticed that two of the other rooms were in various points of their own countdowns. “I’m Brandon Reaves, and I’ll be your Game Master for your attempt at Clueless. If you find yourself at an impasse, you can call out for hints, but each one’ll cost you ninety seconds off the game clock. Due to New York City health and safety regulations, I’m required to inform you that this door will remain unlocked at all times. You’re free to exit for any reason but doing so results in immediate disqualification for the entire team without a refund. I’ll see you in sixty minutes.”
He tugged on an absurdly crowded key ring that was suspended from his belt by a retractable cord and flipped through a jangle of keys until he came to a large, shiny one and inserted it into the lock of Door Three. He unlocked the door and pulled it open, revealing a black-painted room without any visible illumination. We squeezed in, one by one, with barely enough room to stand. “Good luck!” he called, and closed the door with a heavy thud.
I took a deep breath, trying to adjust to the darkness. It was a good thing I wasn’t claustrophobic, but even so, I felt panic welling up from the pit of my stomach.
“There should be an opening here somewhere,” someone said. I couldn’t place the voice other than to know it wasn’t Izzy’s. “Everyone check around you for a switch or a knob.”
I felt the wall behind me and it was solid. There was no sign of the doorknob that the Game Master had unlocked, just a vast smooth surface. I knelt and ran my hand along the baseboard and then flinched as someone stepped on my hand. “Ow! Watch it!” I said, snatching my hand back.
“Sorry,” a disembodied voice said.
“Hey, check it out,” someone else said, and there was a click as the tiny confined space flooded with light. “Let there be light,” Gennifer said.
The side wall was now illuminated, covered in nine squares, each with one to twenty dots on them. Each block of dots glowed a different color. We all stared at the illuminated dots. Well, most of us stared. Amanda pulled out her phone and posed for an extreme-angle selfie.
“What now?” Vickie asked.
“Maybe we should just start trying them,” Amanda suggested. She pressed the middle square, the thirteen. The button buzzed, the dots all flashed three times, and then the middle square turned dark. “Okay, not that one.” She tried the top-right button. It buzzed. The dots all flashed twice, and then it went dark.
“Wait a second,” I said. “I think we only have one more chance. Look. The squares look like dice, right?”
“Except there’s no such thing as dice that goes up to twenty,” Vickie replied in a superior tone.
“Unless it’s a twenty-sided die,” I said.
“A what?” Vickie asked.
“Never mind,” I replied. Tabletop games were making a comeback. Games my parents used to play in the basement, like Dungeons & Dragons, were now trending in a big way. I was surprised that Vickie hadn’t gotten on board—no pun intended—yet. Then again, Williamsburg was ahead of the curve. Maybe the D&D revival hadn’t made it to Manhattan yet. “We’re in Room Three, right?”
“Right,” Vickie said. “But there’s no three up there.”
“True.” I’d noticed that, too. “But on dice, four is on the other side of the three, right? There is a four. We should push that one.”
“Are you sure?” Vickie asked. “You said we only have one more shot at it.”
Izzy pushed the square with four dots. “She’s sure,” she said. While I was pleased with her faith in me, I wasn’t so certain. What if I’d guessed wrong and the game was over before it even began? Then a bell chimed. There was a click as the far wall swung open to reveal another room. “Told ya!”
We surged forward, everyone eager to pour out of the tiny foyer. Or maybe that was just me. We spilled into a room decorated like a private library, complete with high shelves on the walls lined with books. There was a sliding ladder mounted to the wall like I wished we had back at Untapped Books & Café. I didn’t work the bookstore side often, but when I did, I spent more time lugging a stepladder around than I did checking out customers.
The room was lit with electric candles. Comfy-looking leather armchairs were strategically placed in front of faux windows. At the far end of the room was a sturdy oak desk stacked high with dusty old books and scattered papers with illegible notes scrawled across them. I plucked a book off the nearest shelf and ran my hand down the cheap imitation leather cover that was glued to a solid block of balsa wood instead of being bound to actual pages.
“What next?” Vickie asked.
“Game Master, can we have a hint?” Marlie asked loudly. In response, a disembodied voice came over the speaker and said, “Find the secret passage to advance.”
“Well, that was helpful,” Izzy said, passing by me as she plucked books off the shelf at random. Like the one I’d examined, they were all fake.
I glanced at the wall. There were hundreds of books. Hundreds of hundreds, maybe. “It would take all day to check them all,” I said. “We need to be methodical.”
Ignoring the shelves, I moved over to the desk. Hanging on the wall behind it, on one of the few spaces not covered by shelves of fake books, was a picture of an old-fashioned whaling ship being tossed about by dark waves as the deckhands leaned over the edge, spears at the ready as they concentrated on an enormous shadowy shape under the water’s surface.
“ ’Scuse me.” Gennifer slid between me and the desk, and dropped to her knees. She craned her neck to see under the desk. “Last time I did one of these escape rooms, all the important clues were underneath furniture or in hard-to-reach spots. There was even one room where I had to crawl into a coffin and close the lid for the answer to appear.” She shuddered. “Def not worth it.”
I grinned as I hopped over her outstretched legs. Despite Gennifer’s more tailored style, I could see similarities to Izzy in her attitude and speech patterns. Izzy often talked the same way she texted. Once I’d caught her saying “El oh el” instead of actually laughing. “Anything?” I asked.
“Nope.” She jumped up and brushed off her pants. They looked expensive, with their clean lines and utter lack of wrinkles. But I’d be willing to bet my right ear they didn’t have pockets. Sure, it took effort to make my own clothes, but they had a flattering fit for my body shape, were unique, and always had pockets. Go me!
Unaware that I was mentally retailoring her outfit—for starters, I would take out the side seam and replace it with a wide triangle piece of cloth in a funky pattern, maybe something in a nice wide plaid, to achieve a flowy effect that would be more comfortable and flattering—Gennifer had brushed past me and was now trying to remove the enormous painting from the wall. “A hand?” she asked, and I happily obliged.
“It’s not budging,” I said, tugging on the corners. “I don’t think we’re supposed to move it.”
“Nonsense,” Gennifer said. “Everything in here is a potential clue. Some of ’em just take a little more work than others. You see a screwdriver or something lying around?”
“Nope, but I’ll keep an eye out for one,” I said. I admired her initiative. If she was this focused outside of escape rooms, she could do anything she set her sights on. At the same time, I was a little awed by her. Gennifer seemed to know exactly what she was doing, and I had no idea.
“Everything is a clue,” I muttered to myself, repeating Gennifer’s advice. I looked up at the enormous painting of the boat hunting the whale. “Look for a copy of Moby-Dick,” I hollered at Izzy, who was still examining all the books on the walls one by one, as I began to rifle through the d
esk.
“Game Master, where is Moby-Dick?” Marlie called out.
The pimply guy’s voice replied immediately, “In the water, right where Ishmael left him.”
“Marlie, stop it!” Gennifer said, annoyance making her voice sharp. “Those ‘hints’ aren’t ever going to be helpful, and every time you ask, he takes more time off the clock.”
“I was just tryin’ to . . .”
Before she could finish, Izzy called out, “Found it!” I turned to see her reach into a ten-gallon fish tank—complete with colored pebbles, a tiny castle, and pink plastic plants, but without water or, thankfully, fish—and pull out an oversized copy of Moby-Dick. “What now?”
“Open it, obviously,” Vickie suggested. As far as I could tell, it was her first contribution. It was her celebration, so I assumed she’d wanted to do an escape room. For someone who had set the day’s agenda, she didn’t seem all that invested in the outcome.
Izzy opened the book. “It’s just a book.” She turned it around so we could all see. Even from halfway across the room, I recognized the familiar opening lines of the classic, due to the large-print font.
“If there’s nothing hidden inside, maybe it’s not about what’s in the book and all about where you found it,” Gennifer suggested. She hurried over and dug around with both hands. The colorful rocks at the bottom of the aquarium and the decorations were glued into place.
“Or maybe the fact that it’s out of place is the clue,” I suggested. “Izzy, while you were searching, did you find any open spots on the shelves?”
No Memes of Escape Page 2
