“Never.” I watched Zac and Lisa as they discussed how the most you could do was put human hair or cut fingernails into a pancake. The idea made my stomach churn.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Jake had turned his head and looked at me. Dear Lord! Should I turn and look at him too. Should I . . . ?

Yes! my brain screamed at me again, much like it had last night. Okay . . . I’d officially lost my mind.

But the voice ignored the concerns over my sanity and whispered to me again, But do it casually . . . calm . . . casual . . . act cooooool . . .

But I didn’t.

After paying, we all walked into the gardens and I was immediately struck by how sprawling they were. The mountain itself seemed to rise up out of the garden, emerald rolling hills, carpets of flowers so luminous and pink, large aloes—geometric and spikey, and almost alien-looking. Trees that looked like they had been growing here for hundreds of years, their branches huge and tangled—prehistoric-looking, like gnarled dinosaur claws. As we walked in silence across the lawns, Lisa ran ahead of us at top speed, bouncing across the lawn as if her feet barely touched it. Zac looked at me and rolled his eyes.

“I hate running,” he huffed.

“I know. You don’t have to.”

“I won’t.” He released my hand and folded his arms tightly across his chest. He really does hate running, it makes his heart beat too fast, which makes him feel anxious. And also, he constantly worries about things like dehydration. We once watched a documentary about being stranded on an island, and the narrator had said that your first priority should be finding water, or else dehydration would set in. Ever since then, Zac has been preoccupied with getting enough fluids. He gets anxious if we don’t have his special blue water bottle on hand at all times.

Jake and I hadn’t spoken since entering the park. Instead we walked together at the same speed, our strides matching, in a silence that wasn’t uncomfortable at all. We were like this for about five minutes before Jake announced that we’d arrived at our destination, a wooden walkway with steel railings that wound into the thick undergrowth and disappeared behind a tree.

“This is called the Boomslang,” Jake said.

“Boomslang,” Zac quickly repeated. “Tree snake. Highly venomous snake with back fangs that mainly lives in the trees. Hemotoxic venom. You’ll bleed to death if it bites you.”

“I’m impressed,” Jake said.

“I know everything there is to know about snakes. Snakes and dinosaurs and the universe and remote controls and batteries and now I am going to know everything about Tutankhamun who was the king of Egypt when he was eight years and five months old.”