I lean over the conveyor belt, peering into the inky blackness of the x-ray machine. My heart rate is over a hundred, easy, my palms sweating. I can’t stop moving my toes inside the boots that I’ve already put back on and laced up again, and I’m pretty sure I’m sweating right through the anti-perspirant that swears it’s ‘prescription strength’ on the packaging.

I hate airports. Hate them.

Everyone says they hate airports, but for me, they’re a perfect vortex of all the things that turn from me a quiet-but-regular person into a seething ball of anxieties and insecurities.

Lugging a million pounds of luggage around while inevitably tripping over my own feet, because I’m wearing ten layers and an enormous scarf that my mom made me take, as if I didn’t prepare adequately for a summer in the arctic circle and a scarf is going to help? Check.

Standing in lines, the horrible feeling that I’m going to be late and miss something important hanging over my head, no matter how early I get there? Check.

No matter what, having to scramble to figure out which pocket my ID and boarding pass are in, because no matter how organized and calm I am ninety-five percent of the time, airports bring out the anxious, scatterbrained wreck in me? Check.

And worst of all, worse than everything else combined, the throbbing mass of people, all impatiently standing in line, wishing they were somewhere else, talking and laughing, glaring at me while I get my shoes off and pile things on a conveyor belt and try to find my gate and hold up lines while they radiate annoyance at my very existence?

Tons of people, just looking at me, watching me, waiting for me to get on with it?

Yeah, I hate airports.

I bend over the conveyor belt yet again, staring down the chute, trying to ignore the people chattering behind me even as I tell myself that everyone has their own problems, there’s no way on earth they’re talking about the weird, sweaty girl who seems like she’s losing her mind in the security check line.

What if they are? my stupid brain whispers.

You’re bending over in fleece-lined leggings, it’s totally possible that they can see your underpants and they’re laughing because today you wore the—

I straighten up, take a deep breath, and force myself to halt that line of thinking. Instead I focus on the bright blue carry-on luggage that’s just now coming out of the x-ray machine and onto the rollers.

One of the guys behind me steps forward, heaves it down, makes brief eye contact, and walks away.

He was behind me in the security line. I’m almost certain of it, though maybe he went on the other side of the metal detector when the lines split and we both went to separate tables—

“Whose is this?” a short, stout TSA agent shouts, holding up my black plastic carry-on in her latex-gloved hands.

Oh God. Oh God, they found something and now they’re going to think I’m a terrorist. What did I even have in there?

“Me,” I say, holding up one hand like I’m volunteering an answer in class.

“Step over here, please,” she says, nodding me toward a stainless-steel table at the end of the line.

I grab my laptop bag and enormous winter coat and follow her, nerves jangling, feeling like there’s a spotlight shining directly on me and everyone in this security line is tracking me with their eyes.

Even though I know they’re not. Even though my rational brain knows that humans think almost entirely about themselves and rarely care what anyone else is doing, I can feel their attention on my back, I swear.

The woman thumps the bag down on the table, unzipping it and thumping it open. I feel a surge of relief when I realize that I remembered not to put all my underpants and bras on top this time, for exactly this reason.

“Where are you heading?” she asks like a disinterested robot.

It’s a security question, my brain spits at me. Answer it right or you’re going to a small locked room for a couple of hours.

“Northern Canada on a research expedition,” I say, my voice coming out in a squeak. I push my glasses up with one finger against the side of the heavy black frames, a nervous habit.

She glances at me.

Don’t look like a terrorist, I think.

“A research expedition,” she says without a question mark.

I clear my throat.

“I’m connecting through Vancouver to Yellowknife, and then there’s a chartered plane from that airport that’ll be taking the whole team to this town called Inuvik, and then we spend the night there and take trucks the rest of the way to Tekkeit research station which is on the Arctic coast, you know, way up there, hahaha.”

It’s not a real laugh, it’s a nervous laugh. The security agent pretty much ignores it.

On top of my clothes is a huge tangle of cords, wires, plugs, chargers, and other electronic ephemera that I gathered this morning at my parents’ house and shoved last-minute into my carry-on. She grabs it with one gloved hand and deposits it onto the steel table, looking annoyed.

As she does, one loop of my laptop’s power cable catches the corner of the folder underneath it, and as she pulls the cords and wires out of the suitcase, the folder slides off the top.

It falls to the floor, contents scattering everywhere.

“Oh!” I exclaim. “Watch out, that’s all—”

I stop, mid-sentence, when I see what the folder actually contained, and I suddenly have a horrible, brief vision of grabbing it from my desk and jamming it into my suitcase.

It’s all 8.5 x 11, glossy, full-color pictures of musk oxen.

Mating.

The preferred term is in full rut, meaning the camera caught these animals mid-penetration. Some of the males are bellowing, mouths open, and in one or two the photographer unfortunately managed to get a small glimpse of musk ox penis in there, just for fun, I guess.

Or to make this moment as spectacularly awful as possible.

The security officer doesn’t move for a long moment, just looks down at the pictures on the floor, eyebrows raised.

My entire body is suddenly so hot that I feel like I’ve been struck by lightning. I’m completely frozen in place, my muscles refusing to listen to me, tears welling in my eyes because now everyone is looking at me, horrified by my pictures, thinking that I’m some kind of weird pervert who carries these pictures onto planes so she can sneak into the bathroom and, I don’t know, get off in there thinking about two animals that look like shaggy ottomans having sex—

“I’m a biologist,” I finally manage to squeak out. “I’m going to the research station because I got a grant to study the effects of climate change on musk oxen mating patterns, because they’re considered particularly vulnerable to global warming and we need to study them and their populations to predict how the arctic region is going to be changing in the next fifty years or so, because you know the northwest passage is already open since all that sea ice has melted—”

I stop to breathe, but she’s already bent down to pick up the photos. I realize that my mouth is moving twenty times faster than my brain right now, so I just stop, gripping the edge of the steel table, trying to focus on the cool, hard, metallic sensation beneath my fingers.

“Sorry about that, sweetheart,” she says, standing as someone else hands her a small stack as well.

“It’s okay,” I whisper as she stuffs all the inappropriate pictures of musk oxen back into the folder, and everyone who turned to see what was happening goes back to whatever they were doing.

The security agent grabs one of my external hard drives, carefully separating it from the tangle of wires, sets it aside with a quick glance at my face.

“I see weirder every day,” she tells me, grabbing the other hard drive and doing the same thing. “I promise you I’ve seen plenty of things way worse than something you’d see at the zoo.”

I just nod. My face is on fire, and I still wish I could disappear, but I can feel the panic slowly fading away, the edge coming off.

At the very least, I don’t think I’m in danger of having a panic attack right here, right now, in the middle of this airport, so I just smile, thank her, take deep breaths and keep focusing on the way the steel table feels under my hands.

I move my fingers to a cooler part, concentrate on that. The woman finishes untangling all my electronics, pokes gingerly through the rest of my bag. Finally, she seems satisfied, and pushes the whole mess back at me.

“There you go, sugar,” she says, and I wonder where she’s from originally. “Have fun doing your research.”

See? You made it through security alive, and no one is even looking at you.

Mostly.

“Thanks,” I say, my heartbeat finally close to normal as I stuff my cords back into my bag.

The Solaris International Airport isn’t exactly huge. It’s not even exactly mid-sized, because it has seven gates and maybe twenty flights coming in and out per day, which goes up to thirty or thirty-five during ski season.

It’s only technically an international airport because one of the six cities you can fly to from my tiny northern Idaho hometown is Vancouver, British Columbia. If we weren’t so close to the Canadian border it would just be the Solaris Regional Airport.

As soon as I approach my gate, I know that something’s going wrong. Every other gate at this tiny airport has a few people in it, families taking their ski gear home after one last trip or business men heading to Seattle or Vancouver, but gate three is packed, the line winding all the way out into the hallway.

The flight’s delayed. Forty-five minutes, the screen over the counter says, so I ignore the knot in my stomach and the voice in my head that whispers you’re going to miss your connection in Vancouver and sit in the gate opposite mine, which has considerably fewer people.

And I wait. It’s an airport, my flight’s delayed, and I’m so wound up and anxious that I can’t concentrate on anything, so I just play stupid games on my phone and glance over at my gate every thirty seconds.

After half an hour, it changes.

My chest clenches, because now I’m definitely going to miss my connection to Yellowknife, and I don’t know how many flights there are daily from Vancouver to Yellowknife, but it can’t possibly be very many, because Yellowknife isn’t very big.

As I watch it, the screen disappears for a moment, then comes back:

I’m going to have to go talk to someone. A person. At the desk, and I’m going to have to wait in line and explain myself and hopefully not bring up mating musk oxen while the people behind me get annoyed at my very existence while I try my best to insist that yes, I really do need to be where I’m going, thanks.

There’s a reason I like musk oxen better than people. I like being out in the wilderness alone, no one else for miles and miles, and the animals don’t care if I watch them having sex and take notes.

I don’t think they even notice, to be honest.

I go to the desk. I wait in line, behind a blonde ski bunny type who gets on her giant bejeweled cell phone and complains to everyone she can reach about how ridiculous this is and how completely absurd these delays are, she can see the radar on the weather app on her phone and the storm isn’t even to Vancouver yet, it’s way outside the city and there’s no way that it’ll interfere with the flight…

Finally, it’s my turn, and the woman behind the desk is one of those impossibly perky, friendly, vivacious types. She’s clearly already dealt with a ton of unpleasant people today, including Bedazzled Cell Phone in front of me, and she’s still got a genuinely pleased, happy smile on her face.

“Hi!” she says. “Where ya going?”

I don’t understand extroverts.

“Well, ultimately, I’m going to a scientific research station a few hundred miles from Inuvik, Canada, but right now I’m just trying to get to Vancouver so I can catch my transfer flight to Yellowknife, but I think I might already be too late?”

You’re over-explaining, I tell myself.

She blinks at me a few times, the smile still on her face, eyelashes brittle with mascara.

“Can I see your boarding pass?”

I hand it over. She scans it.

“This has you ending in Yellowknife,” she tells me, an adorable frown wrinkling her brow. “Are you sure—”

“That’s right, the flight after that is chartered so it’s not on the same boarding pass, so I guess I just need to get to Yellowknife and then the rest is my problem, right? Haha.”

She taps at the keyboard for a few moments, the cute frown still on her face.

“Yellowknife,” she says reflectively. “Gosh, that’s way out there. Not a lot of flights, huh?”

“I don’t have to route through Vancouver,” I offer, the panic starting to rise in my chest because that did not sound good. “I can go through, I don’t know, Calgary or something too, that’s fine.”

“I’m looking at those,” she says, leaning her chin on one hand, the other still tapping away.

Her eyes flick over the screen. I wait, more anxious with every passing second, because I just want this to work without all my plans falling down around my ears.

“I think I could route you through Minneapolis to Edmonton and to Yellowknife the day after tomorrow?” she finally says, still blinking at the screen. “This is kind of a doozy, but better late than never, right?”

No! my brain screams. The chartered flight for Inuvik with your colleagues and your equipment leaves tomorrow morning, if you get there after that then you’ll be left behind and you’ll either have to figure out how to get there yourself or you’ll be shit out of luck and stuck in Yellowknife and then you’ll owe the Bright Foundation all that money…

I pull myself together. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate airports and flying and everything about this?

A lot. I hate it a lot.

“Is there any possible way I could be in Yellowknife by tomorrow morning?” I ask, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “The research plane leaves then, and there aren’t other planes, and I really need to be on that one, otherwise I’m afraid I’ll be stuck there…”

I trail off as a door to the outside, behind the desk, opens and all the flight attendants currently re-booking flights for irritated customers turn their heads and look, like they’re expecting someone. The girl I’m talking to, in particular, clearly isn’t paying attention to me anymore, a little smile playing around her lips as she watches.

And watches.

Now I’m watching too, wondering what’s so great that’s coming through that door. Hopefully it’s a flight from here to Yellowknife, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion it’s not.

Nope.

It’s a guy in a bomber jacket, hands shoved in the pockets as he pushes the door open with his back, shouting something to someone on the other side, letting the cold air into the airport like he doesn’t give a crap about anyone.

I roll my eyes. People can be such dicks sometimes.

But just as I open my mouth to say hi, can you get back to doing your job, something about the guy catches my eye. I don’t know if it’s his messy brown hair or the way his shoulders hold the door open or his laugh or the way he seems so casual right now about being the center of attention.

Maybe it’s just the way he stands there, one foot on the ground, perching the bottom of the other against the door.

For the millionth time that day, my stomach starts to tighten and swirl, a familiar sensation if ever there was one.

Because this all reminds me of someone I used to know. Someone I haven’t seen in at least ten years.

Someone I’d rather not see again if I can help it.

The guy laughs. He shoves the door a little wider, tosses his head. Shouts something and then lets the door fall shut behind him, absorbing everyone’s gaze like he was born to do it and it’s no big deal at all.

I push my glasses up my face, wide-eyed, so nervous I’m nauseous.

I know who it is, and I wish I didn’t. I wish I were hallucinating. I wish I were having a nightmare.

Just keep walking, I pray. Don’t notice me, don’t look over here, just leave and go get a beer and burger and be a dick to your waitress or whatever it is douchebags do at an airport at eight-thirty in the morning…

I hold my breath, head down, peeking up through my hair.

He starts to walk away, and I let myself feel a tiny glimmer of hope that this near run-in will stay near.

Then, my flight attendant waves both hands in the air.

“Hey!” she shouts. “Wilder!”

He turns toward us, and I want to die.