The SSC

My heart was broken and I needed an egg. Partly because I’d run out, but mostly because I needed something to break so that, for once, I could be the one doing the breaking.

Just like a good man, an egg wouldn’t be an easy thing to secure. Neither would a unit. At least not for me it would. To procure a unit, I’d have to brave the labyrinth, a place I didn’t have the confidence to venture out into without Quinn by my side. Despite his many flaws, most of which the way he made me feel small, incapable, like a child, only one without protection, he was big and could easily push his way past the mobs. All I had to do was trail behind, entrapping whatever units or animals we needed in our big metal cage.

Most importantly, Quinn was a member of the labyrinth's SSC. To me it felt like a cult. He’d earned elite status over the years — by which means, don't ask me — and was eventually awarded a laminated badge with his stupid little smug headshot on it. It was his main source of pride, really. The only good thing I could say about him if anyone asked. It made surviving the labyrinth a little easier, distinguishing its members from the regular, anguished masses that fought their way through the labyrinth every evening. You felt special. Important. Like in that moment, as you flashed your badge and embarked on the harrowing journey of survival through the carefully constructed labyrinth, you had proved anyone who’d ever devalued you wrong. If the overseers knew you were with the SSC or, in my case, with someone who was with the SSC, they addressed you by name and, every now and then, showered you with free units like offerings to a god or a goddess.

I hadn’t eaten anything except for my fingernails in three and a half days. I had no appetite but also no food. Quinn had taken more than his share of snacks, furniture, animals, and essential units, leaving me nothing but dust, a stray Q-tip, and dead skin cells not visible to the naked eye carpeting our — my — now rug-less apartment, like part of him was still there, even though I couldn’t see him.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what did it for me, but after three and a half days of hyperventilating under wrinkled bedsheets, chewing off the last of my fingernails, and debating whether to message Quinn, whose number I’d unfortunately memorized by accident after deleting it and then reentering it into my phone oh so many times, something in my chest started to burn. Not a bad burn but that good burn you get when you know you’re onto something. That feeling after heartbreak once the cracks start to heal and you regain that first ounce of certainty in yourself that says, this isn’t who I am. Like ambition mixed with rage mixed with glitter mixed with vengeance. I decided to take a hot shower, comb the knots out of my hair, though the ones in my stomach remained, and brave the labyrinth to find the units I needed without Quinn.

-

The first thing that always struck me about the labyrinth were the cameras. They were everywhere. People often cheated their way through the labyrinth, pushing their way to the front trying to get the best units before the timer ran out. Only the ones with the right number of essential units survived. Eventually the overseers needed a way to ensure that those who’d successfully navigated the labyrinth and collected enough units and the right number of points before the clock ran out had done so fair and square.

Speaking of squares, my head was a square. Quinn told me so once. Many times actually.

My face streamed live across surveillance monitors at every turn. Seeing myself up there, I couldn’t help but feel like I was doing something wrong, even though I had no intention of cheating and even though I was no longer a beneficiary of the SSC.

The camera had a way of making my face look more square than it actually was. Maybe this square head of mine was why Quinn wrote me off as no good in the first place.

I tried my best not to look at the monitors, but the overseers had been installing more and more as cheating rates kept rising. What used to be the occasional commoner hiding a unit under their hole-ridden coat had turned into more than one desperate person forcing their way through the labyrinth, using intimidation to make it out alive with much more than a single unit, some units more valuable than others.

I felt insecure seeing my face on screen. The tape lagged, so whenever I clutched my empty metal cage I'd eventually capture a chicken with or reached to grab a unit, it’d freeze, and then two seconds later, show the whole thing all over again, like I was reliving my past moment by moment, over and over again on loop. Like my current demise had been adapted into a sitcom about some pathetic twenty-three year old woman who was too scared of the world to go out and secure a unit by herself. I could hear an imaginary laugh-track playing over the surveillance.

The artificial sun buzzed overhead like a hatch of flies in the middle of August, despite the fact that we were neck-deep in the most hostile part of December, the worst time of the year to enter the labyrinth. So far I’d only secured three units — a small red one, a defective blue one, and a heavy pink one, each worth between five and ten points.

When it came down to it, there wasn’t one right way to get through the labyrinth. There were many right ways to do it and get to the end with enough units and a clear conscience. Once you bypassed the pleasure traps, you could get to the units you actually needed. The overseers liked to set out these different kinds of pleasure traps, essentially pitfalls for temptation, to trip up the weak ones and lure them into selecting the wrong units. Most people fell for them, and I thought I would too, especially at this point in my life when I needed dopamine the most.

Go to the back, I told myself. Go to the back, Sarah, and aim for the bottom. That was where you'd find the units you needed to live but didn't necessarily want. I looked ahead, doing my best to avoid glancing up at my grainy square head. I squeezed myself through any gap I could find in the dense crowd. Those small pockets of breathing room were my only hope for getting where I needed to go.

I knew to stick to the outskirts. The center of the labyrinth had the most traps and most people fared better navigating the labyrinth backward, starting at the farthest point instead of the nearest one. The hot breath of strangers crept down my sweater. A striped pleasure trap caught my eye. I sucked in my breath and held in my stomach like a beauty queen, not just to avoid the spread of viral disease so common at the labyrinth but also to make myself small enough to squeeze through the crowd. I inhaled and inhaled. I inhaled so much that, physically, I became as small and inconsequential as Quinn had made me feel.

I clutched the striped pleasure trap. It wouldn't do me any good, and it'd hurt my total score in the long run once the overseers tallied my points. I knew I'd officially been trapped once I felt the lure of its shiny finish, its crinkly, Christmas-present feel under my fingertips, pulling me in.

The artificial sunlight from overhead bounced off the glossy blue box, and Kiss from a Rose by Seal played on the speakers. It cut out when the overseers announced that only two hours remained — an ominous warning. It made everyone look up, as if they could see where the voice was coming from. Then Kiss from a Rose came back on, and they all went back to securing more units, tip-toeing around the pleasure traps planted at every turn. The overseers often played music at the labyrinth — probably to distract you from the fact that you were, well, at the labyrinth. It made the whole thing feel less like a sad struggle for survival and more like you were in heels, casually perusing the white-lit aisles of a department store for crap you didn’t need instead of the essential units you couldn't live without.

I wasn’t quite sure where in the labyrinth I was – whether I was close to the end or far from it. I’d known going into this that the chances of me getting lost at the labyrinth were high. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d navigated it without Quinn. I had to have been a little girl, hiding behind my mother’s skirt as she grabbed the best units or stuffed some ill-fated chicken into our rattling metal cage. I never knew how she did it. How she maneuvered and breezed through dense clouds of body odor, until we secured what we needed to survive. And yet, here I was, somehow doing it without her or Quinn or anyone but myself.

With only an hour or so left on the timer, I had to keep moving, grabbing the right units, even if I didn’t know which way was out. I became disoriented as cars packed full with animals and colorful units flew past me on their way to the finish line. While most people navigated the labyrinth on foot, some traveled in cars. It wasn’t prohibited, though it was a nuisance. I stuffed a chicken into my cage. When I took a step right, a child driving a red sedan nearly hit me. And that’s exactly why children shouldn’t be driving, I thought to myself. Parents at the labyrinth did anything to distract their children from its discomforts. Sometimes that meant putting them inside the big metal cage right next to the chicken they’d secured, because their bodies had grown too tired from carrying them, or letting them take a joy ride through the labyrinth, just to keep them from crying.

I took refuge in the most colorful part of the labyrinth, which I recognized back from my trips with Quinn. I think we kissed here once, long ago, among the vibrant orange, green, and purple units. In addition to the labyrinth’s artificial sunlight, there was sometimes artificial rain, specifically in this region where the most essential units were stored. I took a spherical purple unit as the artificial rain fell in paper-thin sheets, cold over my skin. It was like the overseers wanted the most essential units to be the hardest to get to. Only once you made it through random intervals of torrential downpour could you get to the units you actually needed to live.

I still needed a brown unit. But first I'd have to survive the tundra of forever units, yet another element of nature the overseers had brought into the labyrinth to make the game more difficult. My molars chattered and I hugged myself tight. A brown arrangement of units stood before me on the horizon, and when I got there, I dropped low to the ground like Quinn had always done. Everything about the labyrinth was counterintuitive in that way. The best units were at the bottom, close to the dirty floor where no one wanted to go. The worst ones were right in front of you. I army crawled my way forward past varying shades of brown. And then I found it — the best one, and like that, I wanted to cry. I wanted to laugh — laugh-cry like an emoji along with the imaginary laugh track heckling the consequences of my life as Break My Stride played on the speakers. Strangely, I felt the highest when I was at the lowest, crouching down on the cold, dirty floor, clutching that vital, brown unit with sore, bitten fingertips.

-

I never thought I’d make it to the end on my own. When I finally reached the part of the labyrinth that spits you out, where it narrowed into a single row of desks and my units would be tallied, I knew what I had to do.

“Not sure how I can help you,” said the overseer when my tally came out in the red zone. “Are you with the SSC?”

I wasn't good at looking overseers in the eye, or telling them what kind of day I'd had, but I looked this one in the eye. “Yes,” I said.

He gave me a once over. “You’re part of the SSC?”

“Yes,” I said again. "I am."

“Do you have your . . . ?” He motioned his hands in a square shape to mime a badge, or maybe the shape of my head.

“No,” I said. “But I have my phone number.”

Stoic, he tapped it into his number pad, then pressed enter with a sense of finality.

“Quinn?” he asked smiling now, this time with warm regard for my humanity, and I nodded.

-

When I walked back to my car, the little one who almost ran me over earlier played with the useless steering wheel as his mom unloaded their units from the red, car-shaped kiddie cart into her SUV.

I unloaded my own units — a red bag of milk chocolate chips, a pink sack of granulated sugar, a punctured blue bag of all-purpose enriched flour, and a brown carton of eggs I'd break when I got home — drain their sticky guts and turn into a chocolate cake to drown my sorrows in. I put the purple head of cabbage in the cooler of my trunk, along with the milk, unsalted butter, chicken breast, and other essentials. I tore open the wrapper on the giant candy cane my fractured heart hadn't been able to resist and sucked on it.

It was thirty percent off.

There was a pink sunset blanketing the parking lot as I left, and, for once, as my car stereo blared and a new sense of certainty in myself fell over me, I felt like a goddess, a conquerer, but most importantly, a valued, gold-tier member of the Super Savers Club.