Ask the Passengers

3

ASTRID JONES SENDS HER LOVE. FROM A PICNIC TABLE.

I MADE THIS PICNIC TABLE with Dad the summer before junior year. I was sick of making birdhouses. Seriously. How many birdhouses can two people make before they run out of things to say? Before they run out of space to put them? Our backyard was an ode to nesting and flight—part bird zoo and part art exhibit.

They’d say: It’s very unique.

Dad had the whole summer off on account of his temporary unemployment, and Mom was staying with friends back in New York City to do some well-paid consulting for a month. Ellis was at summer sports camp for a week, and it was just Dad and me. Dad hadn’t discovered pot yet. He was a late bloomer, I guess.

So we built the table and moved it to the back patio, and even though Mom hates eating outside, she lets us do it about twice a summer just to be normal small-town people, the way she wants us to be.

The rest of the time, the table just sits here with nothing to do. So I lie on it and I look at the sky. I see shapes in the clouds by day and shooting stars by night. And I send love to the passengers inside the airplanes. It makes me happy. Anyone looking on might think I was smoking Dad’s pot, I bet. Lying here, grinning.

But it feels good to love a thing and not expect anything back. It feels good to not get an argument or any pushiness or any rumors or any bullshit. It’s love without strings. It’s ideal.

Tonight I spot a small jet and I concentrate on it and I stare at it and smile. Its very existence proves Zeno of Elea wrong. If motion was impossible, there would be no such things as airplanes. Or departure times. Or arrival times. I send my love up in a stream of steady light and in my head I think: I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

PASSENGER #4657

HEIDI KLEIN, SEAT 17A FLIGHT #879

NASHVILLE TO PHILADELPHIA

I stare at him because I can’t believe he just said that.

“What?” he asks.

“Did you really just say that?” It’s rhetorical, that question. I know what he said.

“What?” he says again, this time smiling that smile at me because he knows I can’t resist it. This is how he convinced me to let him move into our apartment. He said he’d rather sleep on the couch and pitch in rent than stay in that shitty dorm room with his dorky roommate. Then he smiled just like this.

“I’m fighting with you over how you can’t cook anything and how I have to come home from chem lab to a stinky apartment and no dinner and you tell me this now?”

“Yep.”

“You love me?”

“Uh-huh.”

I can’t help but smile back at him. “We only met two months ago.”

“So?”

“So you can’t love me,” I say.

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t know the real me, right?”

“We’ve lived together for two months, Heidi. You make great coffee. You’re always late for work. You use moisturizer in your hair as mousse. I’ve washed your underwear.”

“Still doesn’t get you out of making dinner once in a while,” I say.

“But I still love you.”

I still can’t believe he’s saying this. “Why’d you choose to tell me this now?”

“I don’t know. I guess it just came out.”

“After two months,” I say.

“After two months,” he says.

I want to say so many things. I might even want to say… it. But instead, my head fills with signature Heidi Klein snark-and-logic combo. You can’t love me. I don’t have a soul, so I don’t believe in soul mates. We’re nineteen. Next thing you’ll be asking me to marry you. Seriously, did you forget to take some meds this morning?

He looks misty. The way my mother was when I left to go to college in September. I hated all that misty crap. Maybe I’m codependent and I’ve replaced my mother with Ron. Oh, God. Maybe I need all that misty crap. Shit.

“Can we save this for later?”

He smiles again. His dimples pop. “Let me out,” he says. “I need to take a leak.”

I get up and let him out and plop down in the window seat for a while. Clear skies—I can nearly make out the landscape below, but it’s still blurry. And then something crazy hits me and I say, “I love you, too,” without any reason to. It’s like I’m not in control of my mouth or something.

And on the one hand, I’m glad Ron wasn’t here to hear it, but on the other hand, I hope he gets back soon. I miss him already.

4

CLAIRE NEVER QUITS.

HUMANITIES CLASS IS a little like a shield I can put on every morning that will protect me from people like Aimee Hall and her pack of gossiping, tennis racquet–hugging compulsive hair-straighteners.

The room is filled with kids who either own Albert Camus T-shirts or read Kafka for fun on weekends. Okay—there are a few people here who just do it because it looks good on their college applications. But no matter what group you fit into, in humanities class you can speak your mind and Ms. Steck will listen. At the moment, we’re debating how I can’t accept that Zeno got away with questioning motion.

Every time we’ve talked about his “motion is impossible” theory, I do the same thing. I stand up. I swing my arms around. I say, “Motion is possible. Check it out!” Today is no different.

“Back it up with an argument,” Ms. Steck says.

I swing my arms more wildly and pretend to tap-dance in place. “Motion is totally possible! Hello!”

“That’s not an argument,” she says.

“I think it is. Imagine the argument was Astrid has two arms, but I had only one, and my right arm was a stump, and I could show it to you right here in your face. Wouldn’t that be proof enough to move on to the next argument? Wouldn’t the stump be argument enough to prove that Astrid had only one arm?” I ask. “So me standing here moving is proof that Zeno was wrong and silly and just wasting our time. Motion is possible, and everyone in this room knows it.”

Ms. Steck just looks at me.

I add, “Maybe saying motion is impossible was his way of getting out of doing chores. Maybe it got him laid or something. But it’s totally ridiculous. Look!” I swing my arms even more wildly.

Two kids—Zeno lovers—in the back row keep trying to explain to me. “That’s the point!” one says. The other nods. “To argue things out to the most absurd!”

Ms. Steck reminds me of the arrow—one of Zeno’s arguments. The idea is that an arrow shot at a target has to move through time, but since time is made of tiny moments, the arrow, in each tiny moment, is at rest and not moving.