Page 76 of 10 Rings I Hate About You
Glamma had a piece of something in her palm before he’d even arrived. So much for no snacks as a threat.
I looked at her in disbelief. “Are you feeding him?”
“Positive reinforcement,” she said cheerfully.
“For what behavior? He just landed on Gerald.”
“He got off Gerald,” she said. “Eventually.”
Behind me, Delaney wasn’t even trying to hide her laughter.
I needed to lie down.
Not on a yoga mat. In a dark room. With blackout curtains, a white noise machine, absolutely no goats, and ideally no people, either, for somewhere between several days and the unforeseeable future, while I conducted a thorough post-mortem on every decision I’d made in the last seventy-two hours that had led me to this specific moment in time.
Someone’s phone went off—a notification, not a call, but loud—and out of the corner of my eye, the two cats had resumed their study of the yoga mats.
I was cataloging. Noting everything that was wrong or a problem, and I couldn’t stop myself. It’s just what I did when overwhelmed or overstimulated.
What if Gerald had an injury and needed follow-up care?
Note for future sessions—chairs against the wall create a launchpad. They need to be removed. If Chaos continued attending with me, I’d have to research goat-proof furniture if that even existed, or not having any in the room at all.
The ratio of animals to mats was currently suboptimal. The ratio of animals to humans was also suboptimal. The ratioof everything to my current sensory threshold was critically, functionally, suboptimal.
We needed six more weeks of planning. Eight realistically. A pilot session with one animal and two participants in a controlled environment before scaling. A risk assessment. A contingency protocol for when a goat became airborne.
How were we going to make this work?
Drew and Ellie arrived next with four more people I had never met, which was saying something with how small Ruby River was.
I did a count.
Eighteen humans. Twelve mats. Thirteen animals, if you counted Chaos, which I did because ignoring him had not worked as a strategy.
“Why are there this many people?” I asked.
Ellie looked at me. “Glamma texted us to come and bring friends.”
One of the volunteers in the back raised his hand. “I saw the sign.”
“There was a sign,” I said. Not a question.
Delaney turned to my sister with a raised eyebrow.
Grace beamed. “Glamma and I put them up an hour ago. Community engagement activated.”
“This is not engagement.” I kept my voice even. Professional even. “This is eighteen people and thirteen animals in a room that was designed for twelve.”
This was a statistical nightmare.
Delaney inhaled. I watched her recalibrate, reorganize, and square her shoulders. “It’s fine,” she said brightly, in the tone of someone who had decided to make it fine through sheer force of will alone. “I have extra mats.”
Despite the fact that I’d been spiraling minutes before the sound of her voice, the confidence in her tone eased my nerves enough that my thoughts stopped circling.
And that in itself was saying something.
That, in itself, saida lot.
