text: You scissors your fingers across Rick's outstretched hand just to emphasize your win. Rick looks pained, and not just from losing at Rock, Paper, Scissors: He really thinks his passageway is the right one to take. He glances at Ben again, and again, Ben shrugs. He's the type of guy who learned a long time ago just to go with the flow, that winning battles against those closest to you always gives you an empty kind of victory.
  
  There's a lot at stake in this moment: your ability to get out of the cave, not to mention the strength of your friendships with these guys. What happens next in part depends on what's happened in the past, how you've been to each other up till this moment. Remember when Rick asked you to help him work on his car exhaust? What did you tell him?
  > No. You rather play Super Mario Bros.
  There's a reason you're the alpha male in this group, after all. You know you're right about the passageway. Rick's one of those guys who always has music or some other distracting noise playing in his head, so he never notices details, like the way the stone in the passageway you came down has long yellow veins running through it. The other passages all look blue instead. You explain this to Rick and Ben, and they can't argue with your logic. The three of you split a cache of candy bars that you thought to bring along, and then you crawl and crawl, several times resisting Rick's insistence that you've chosen wrong and should head back down the other way. It takes a couple hours, but the three of you crawl to safety.
  
  The sun is setting when you exit the mouth of the cave. You can see it glinting off the St. Louis Arch on the other side of the Mississippi.
  
  Rick is uncharacteristically quiet as you head back to Ben's house. He seems distant, less like his jokester self. As you let him out at his junker, you nod your head in the direction of it. "Hey, maybe I can swing by and give you a little help with your exhaust system tomorrow after all," you say.
  
  Rick stares off, at his car sitting there at the curb in front of Ben's house. "Nah, that's OK," he says. "I'll manage."
  
  The three of you part ways, and you head home. As you round the cornfields this time, you see in your mind's eye a long cord stretching out between you and Rick, and you see that cord snap, the two of you drifting apart in space.