On the airplane, I try hard not to dig my fingers into my thighs or cry, though my blood is thundering. The young woman next to me struggles with her seat belt.
“Oh, hey,” the girl says. “It’s okay. First time? Gum. You need gum. Me, I fortify with Xanax. You want some gum?” She digs through an enormous chocolate-brown leather purse.
I shake my head at the square of gum she offers. She kicks off her sandals and wiggles her toes, pulls her hair back into an elastic, and sighs. “Talking helps. Gets your mind off things. Where you headed?”
“New York.” Casper said to talk, so I will talk. “I’ve never been there before.”
“Oh, you’ll love it! It’s totally cool. What are you doing there?”
I swallow. She has an open, hopeful face, full of freckles. “I’m going to work for an artist. As his assistant. I’m an artist, too.” It doesn’t sound so bad, saying that last part out loud.
Her eyes widen. “For reals? Sweet. I was out visiting my dad for a few days.” She makes a choking motion at her throat. “Gah. Parents. They’re so lame, right?”
Her fingers are slim, with colorful rings. Her dress is filmy and clingy and the straps slide down her creamy shoulders. The tangles of earbuds wrap around her neck and on her lap is a shiny-looking phone that buzzes and jingles and flashes. She’s well fed. She’s well loved. She can say her parents are lame because they are not. Wherever she goes, she will always be able to return to them.
Maybe in New York, I’ll buy a postcard for my mother. Maybe I’ll manage to write something on it, something short. Maybe I’ll buy a stamp. Maybe I’ll even send an email to Casper, only this time I’ll call her Bethany. We’ll see.
I don’t have a tender kit anymore. I’m walking into life unprepared for the first time in a long time.
A fleshy boy across the aisle leans toward the girl, tilting his phone. “Check it, Shelley. Look at all these hits.”
She laughs, angling the screen to me. “We went to this really great show last night. Check out this dude.”
There he is on YouTube, surrounded by Tiger Dean and all the Tucson bands, whacking his guitar, that big grin on his face, wailing away at “You’re the One That I Want.” “Oh my God, he’s so hot,” Shelley breathes. “That was the funnest song.” She turns to the fleshy boy. “Nick, what was that other song, that super-sad one? I totally cried, didn’t you?”
Nick stops fiddling with his laptop. “ ‘You Were Blue,’ or something like that,” he says. The lyrics ping through my head, just like they did last night as Blue and I walked home: We were lost in a storm / The clouds gathered ahead / You were crying to me / All the pain in your heart / I tried to give you / Sad girl / All the love I had left / But when push comes to shove / I’m as empty as the rest.
I clamp my hands together because they’re trembling. The call comes out over the speaker. Shelley and Nick begin shutting down phones, computers, sliding them away.
Tears form behind my eyes as the plane begins to move down the runway, faster, faster. I reach down into my backpack, straining against the seat belt.
Hands shaking, I take out two pieces of paper. One is the note Riley pressed into my hand at the concert. I unfold it slowly.
Charlotte—I do remember, and I did. I do. Take care of yourself.
He has signed his name.
Irwin David Baxter
—
I’m laughing and crying at the same time. The plane is tilted backward, my head forced against the seat. We’re seated far in the back and the sound is deafening; our part of the plane wobbles and bucks. Heads have turned in my direction. I don’t care.
I’m not sorrysorrysorrysorrysorry.
Shelley is looking at the note and back at my face. She folds the paper back up and presses it into one of my hands, takes the other in two of hers. She holds that hand very tight. Briefly, I feel Shelley suck in her breath, and then the light rub of her finger over my bare arm.
“I had a friend in high school who did this stuff,” she whispers. She lowers her head conspiratorially.
“Just breathe,” she whispers. “It’s only scary for a minute. Then we’ll be up in the air and everything will be fine. Once we’re up, we’re up, and there ain’t nothing we can do, you know? You gotta give in. The hardest part is getting there.”
I think of Louisa and her notebooks, her skin, all her stories, my skin, Blue, Ellis, all of us. I am layers upon layers of story and memory. Shelley is still whispering, her words soft in my ear. In my other hand is the other note, the one Mikey gave me at the concert, the one that says:
Eleanor Vanderhaar, 209 Ridge Creek Drive, Amethyst House, Sandpoint, Idaho.
Blue said we have to choose who we want to be, not let the situation choose us.
Momentous, Felix said.
I’m choosing my next momentous.
I close my eyes and begin the letter that I know I will write on my first night not in Paris, or London, or Iceland, but in New York, surrounded by lights and noise and life and the unknown.
Dear Ellis, I have something really fucking angelic to tell you.
