I’d planned my getaway perfectly. I’d convinced my parents that Lua, Dustin, and I were road-tripping to Universal Studios for the weekend, and I’d begged Lua to cover for me even though I wouldn’t tell her where I was going. She’d reluctantly agreed after extracting a promise that I’d explain everything when I returned.
I’d paid for the plane ticket using a prepaid credit card and found a place to crash using HouseStay to avoid having to deal with a front-desk clerk who might question my age. I’d even downloaded Seattle public transportation apps and devised an efficient search pattern that would have allowed me to best utilize my time.
But despite my planning, my plane was flying away without me, and my parents were definitely going to ground me, probably forever.
My life’s pathetic theme song repeated in my head. You failed. You failed. You’re a loser and you failed. Dada da doo dee.
Lua could’ve written better lyrics, but the beat didn’t suck.
Officer Banegas loomed over me. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll wait for your parents in the security office.”
“Can I watch my plane take off at least?” I asked. “Please?”
“Whatever, Oswald.”
“Ozzie,” I said. “Only people who hate me call me Oswald.”
“Fine,” Banegas said, annoyed or bored or wishing he’d called in sick. Then he smirked and added, “Oswald.”
I walked to the window. My breath fogged the glass as the last feeble rays of the day lit the sky to the west with the colors of orange-and-pink swirled sorbet. I tracked my plane as it turned at the end of the runway. The wing flaps extended. I’d always wondered at their purpose, but never enough to bother looking it up. I considered asking Deputy Banegas, but he struck me as the type who’d cheated his way through college and had only joined the police force because he thought carrying a gun would be cool, then had been disappointed to discover the job consisted mostly of filling out paperwork and offered depressingly few opportunities to actually shoot people.
“How’d my parents find me?”
“Hell if I know,” Officer Banegas said.
“Oh.”
My plane’s twin engines roared. I couldn’t hear them inside the terminal, but I imagined their growl as the blades spun madly, faster and faster, struggling to reach critical speed before the road ended. I imagined myself still buckled into my seat, gripping the armrests, trying to ignore my seatmate’s fragrance offensive and banal chatter.
The front wheels lifted as the nose pitched up. The air pressure over the top of the wings decreased, allowing my plane to defy gravity. It soared into the sky while I remained rooted to the earth.
Deputy Banegas tapped my shoulder. “Come on, kid.”
“Sure.” I retrieved my backpack and followed Banegas. We’d reached the lone shop in the center of the terminal when the shouting began. People ran to the windows. I ran to the windows.
Banegas yelled after me, cussing and huffing. I ignored him.
I pressed my face to the glass, crowded on both sides by travelers and airport personnel, and watched my plane tumble from the sky and crash into Southern Boulevard on the far side of the fence separating the runway from the road.
I didn’t think about the individuals who died—the perfume bomber, the frat-bro date rapist, the passengers who’d watched Officer Banegas perp-walk me off the plane—only that they burned beautifully.
Then the floor shook; the windows rattled.
Someone screamed, breaking the held-breath paralysis that felt like it had stretched across infinite days though had lasted but the length of a frantic heartbeat.
Officer Banegas’s radio squawked. He stood to my right, his arms limp, his eyes wide, watching the nightmare through the glass like it was a TV screen rather than a window.
“Holy shit,” he said.
Panic spread like a plague. Rumple-suited businessmen with phones permanently attached to their ears, weary parents and hyper children, heartsick halves of couples desperate to reunite with their missed loved ones, usually ornery ticket agents, and every spectrum of humanity between. None were immune. They screamed and huddled under rows of seats and ran and cried, their actions ineffectual. Their tears inadequate to douse my plane’s beautiful fire.
I didn’t cry.
Not me.
I laughed.
And laughed and laughed and laughed.
It took two paramedics and a shot of something “for my nerves” to dam my laughter, but far more effort to finally quench the flames.
14,575,000,000 LY
DR. TAYLOR DAWSON REMINDED ME OF Beaker from The Muppet Show—all lanky with wild red hair and bulbous, paranoid eyes. How the hell was I supposed to take a man who looked like a Muppet seriously? Meep meep, motherfucker.
“Do you know why you’re here, Ozzie?” Dr. Dawson sat in a spacious flannel chair with a legal pad balanced on his knee. He was the first of my many therapists to favor paper over a touch-screen tablet.
The therapists my parents forced me to see always wanted to know why I thought I was there. Sometimes I claimed my parents had too much money and an overwhelming sense of suburban guilt. Other times I said it was because my brother had freaked out when I’d boarded my windows and taped cardboard over the air vents to keep government spies from spraying me with poison. I most enjoyed informing them they were nothing but the next name on a list; an alphabetical convenience. Everyone deserved to understand their place in the universe, including two-hundred-dollar-per-hour psychologists with tacky, generic paintings hanging on their walls.
Which is exactly what I told him. “You were the next name on the list of psychologists approved by my parents’ insurance. After Conklin, but before Dewey.”
Dr. Dawson scribbled a note on his pad. “I see you have a healthy sense of humor.”
“I don’t find this funny,” I said. “I’m missing work to waste my time talking to you.”
“You believe this session a waste of time?”
“Of course.”
“Why?”
I cleared my throat. “This is a waste of time because we’re going to spend the next”—I checked the time on my phone—“twenty-nine minutes discussing my parents and my brother and possibly the crash of Flight 1184, because everyone seems to want to know about that, after which I’ll tell my parents you’re a quack or that you leered at me or wore cologne that gave me a headache, and they’ll schedule an appointment with the next doctor on the list, who will ask me the same stupid questions as you, and to whom I’ll give the same stupid answers.”
Dr. Dawson’s face remained impassively goofy. “Therapy only works if you participate.”
“Is that so?”
“It is,” Dawson said.
I raised my hands over my head. “Then let’s make with the healing, Doc.”
Dr. Dawson wrote another note. Dear Diary, patient is combative and entirely too chatty. I recommend intensive electroshock treatments and a full frontal lobotomy.
“Why don’t we start with your parents?” he said.
“Fantastic.”
“Do you get along with them?”
“Meh . . . ,” I said. “The real problem is they don’t get along with each other. Which is why they’re getting a divorce.”
Dr. Dawson nodded along. “Does that upset you?”
“Why should it? I’m leaving for college after graduation—probably—and Renny’s shipping out for basic training in a month.”