8.
We were airborne in minutes, streaking across the sky and going “feet wet” over the Pacific Ocean. The flight attendant was kind enough to bring me an apple juice (I nicely avoided the alcohol; two months sober and counting) and I settled in, tempted to sleep my way through the flight, or at least as much of it as I could.
Unfortunately … there was a big obstacle in the way to that.
“… And he says to me—can you believe this—he says to me,” Kat was talking, non-stop, “‘I’d love to take you out sometime if we can find some mutual overlap in our schedules.’” She just stared at me, like she’d thumped down two big stones filled with Commandments or something, I dunno. After a few seconds of my silence, she asked, “Can you believe that?”
I paused the apple juice halfway to my lips. Damn. I’d been just about to drink it to postpone answering, but now I was caught midway there. Should have meta-speeded it to my lips. Although that would have the unfortunate effect of tossing all the juice directly into my face. On the other hand, it’d have given me a primo excuse to go to the bathroom and get the hell out of here without answering.
“I … cannot believe that,” I said, hoping that was the right answer. “How could some pretty boy Los Angeleno douchecanoe actor possibly hit you with that … uhm … terribly weak come-on?” I didn’t feel that really needed the question mark at the end. A better question, in my experience, would have been, “How could he not?”
“Exactly!” Kat thrust a finger at me. “Guys in LA just do not know shit about how to play outside of Tinder or whatever. I’m right in front of your face, dude. You can’t swipe left here, you have to actually talk to me.” And she made a motion waving at herself in a concentric circle. “I hate to sound old, but flirting is becoming a lost art outside of the internet or text messages. It’s like all these young guys are afraid to talk to a girl IRL.”
“That’s amazing,” I said very neutrally, though what I was thinking inside was, This is the greatest news I’ve ever heard in my life! I didn’t like being hit on in person, and since I lacked an email account or other internet methods of contact, this sounded like nothing but wonderful to my misanthropic ears. Not that I’d been hit on a crazy disproportionate amount or anything, but I’d had enough weirdos mack on me with no game or in bizarrely inappropriate ways that I didn’t feel I was losing much if in-person flirting was going the way of the dodo.
“It’s terrible,” she said, pulling out her phone and firing up the screen. “Sign of our times, you know?”
I stared at her staring at her phone screen, then took a very small sip of apple juice. “You don’t say.”
She glanced up at me. “I just—I hate to say it, because it’s so stupid but—’I can’t even,’ you know? It fits, in this case.”
I started to say, “You’re really becoming an old lady, Kat,” but it seemed so wrong to crap on her, especially since she’d dropped everything and chartered a private plane on her own dime to come to Oregon to pick me up. I shut my mouth on that one, and especially tamped down on the desire to say something snarky like, “I can’t believe people are becoming unable to communicate with others except via those annoyingly ubiquitous phones cemented to their hands!” Mainly because again, as a social outsider who didn’t really want to talk most of the time, this was all benefit to me.
“So, what’s the deal with this current crisis?” Kat asked, apparently satisfied that whatever was going on in her phone was of less interest than whatever problem I’d brought her—at least for the moment. “I had to tell your brother ‘pass’ on a ripe assignment he wanted to hand me and Veronika, would have been good fodder for a TV episode built around it, I think—but you know, whatever. Fate of the world. Totally more important.”
Harry guffawed from his seat, and I avoided rolling my eyes at him, though Kat shot him a strange look. “Also, why are you hanging around with this geebo?” she asked.
“Ouch,” Harry said, not looking back at Kat. “Coming from you, that carries an especially stinging sting.”
“So weird,” Kat stage whispered, pointing a thumb at him, as though he couldn’t hear her with perfect clarity.
“He’s my—” And I tried to find a word that encompassed what Harry had become to me. “Uhm. He’s my … bitch?”
“I saw that answer coming … and I couldn’t avoid it,” Harry said, talking to the bulkhead, not even turning to face us. “Still. Ouch.”
“Well, you kind of are,” I said, shrugging, a little apologetic. “He’s like halfway between my bitch and my boytoy.”
“That’s kinda messed up,” Kat said, really trying to get her head around it, confusion peppering her fine features. “Sweetly messed up, maybe?”
“He’s really nice,” I said, “and good to me.”
“And … not so creepy as when he’s around me?” Kat asked, brow all tightly pinched in question.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Harry muttered.
“I don’t think he’s that creepy around you,” I said, “but no, safe to say, he’s totally fine.”
“Really?” Kat asked. “Because he sets off my weirdness detector like nobody else. Total heebie jeebies.”
“A polite person might keep that observation for later, when you’re in a private conversation,” Harry said, still talking to the bulkhead. “But you keep blazing your own crazy trail, Klementina.”
“Ugh, stop calling me that,” Kat said.
“Sorry,” Harry said, “not sorry. That’s how the kids say it nowadays, right?” He looked at me with this.
I shrugged. “I think?”
“If you’re so old that you don’t know,” Kat said, sweetness gone, mean girl replacing her, “you shouldn’t be trying to pull it off.”
“Says the woman who has celebrated a centennial and doesn’t even pretend to acknowledge it,” Harry lobbed back.
“Hey guys, can we not—” I started to say.
“Okay, weirdo, that’s it,” Kat said, unsnapping her seatbelt and rising to her feet. “I’ve tried to be polite—”
Harry looked around dramatically. “When? Did I miss it?”
“—but I’m just going to say it: your creepy old man, ‘I know you, little girl’ act is so thin it makes a girl who hasn’t had a carb since age five look thick by comparison.”
Harry shrugged, still not looking at Kat. “Just because you don’t remember me doesn’t mean I have to pretend I never knew you.”
“Ugh, everywhere I go I have to deal with this bullshit,” Kat said, as angry as I’d ever seen her. “From Scott until he grew up and got over it, from Janus—and now this bizarre frigging guy who looks like an aging eighties action star reject—”
I had my eyes closed when she stopped talking. The hum of the plane engines had suddenly disappeared, and so abruptly I knew something was wrong. I opened my eyes and blinked; Kat’s mouth was open, her finger frozen in midair.
Harry, for his part, had turned his head and was looking toward the cockpit, where the flight attendant was paused in the middle of bringing us a tray of drinks. His eyes were closed, too, and though he was turned away from Kat so she couldn’t see, there was no mistaking the look on his face.
Pain. He was taking what she said to heart, and it was … hurting him.
I tried to swallow my dismay at this turn of events, because the stoppage of time was probably more important than the thin thread of jealousy that suddenly burned in my stomach like excess bile, but … it was there. I moved past him, and tried to ignore it.
“Uhh, guys?” I asked the cabin, since no one in it could actually hear me at the moment.
Nothing.
No movement.
No sound.
Nothing.
After the first hour, I started to worry.
By the end of the second … trapped in an airplane with unmoving people somewhere over the Pacific Ocean …
I started to panic.