1
IT’S THE FIRST day of July in what will certainly be the most dreadful summer of my life. Day one of my month long confinement, to be spent in a neighborhood called Ocean Park, in a town called Santa Monica.
Mom says she visited tourist websites that claim this place is safe and walkable, filled with cute shops and cafés. But looking at the map, it’s surrounded by crime-ridden Los Angeles on three sides and the shark-infested Pacific Ocean on the other.
The airplane hasn’t even landed yet, and already this is the worst trip I’ve ever been on. To begin with, Mom and I had to wake up at the crack of dawn to catch the plane. Waking up early is bad enough during the school year, but it’s just plain cruel in summer.
Because Mom wants me to start living more dangerously, instead of sitting in first class we’re in coach, where the seats are narrow. I’m squeezed between Mom, who has the window seat, and an old man whose bony head is rolled up against my shoulder.
I nudge Mom with my elbow, and she looks up from the airline magazine she’s been absorbed in.
“I think he’s dead,” I whisper urgently, gesturing with a nod to the old man on my shoulder.
Mom leans forward, looking past me to the cadaver I’m referring to, then smiles and goes back to her reading.
“Mom!” I whisper emphatically. “He hasn’t even twitched for three states!”
I glance again at the old man, who cheerfully introduced himself as Walter before passing away shortly after takeoff. Now the only movement from him is his wispy hair blowing in the breeze of the overhead air circulators.
I’m a little on edge, because I’m not a fan of flying. I’m not a fan of falling to my death from thirty-five thousand feet, which I’m fairly sure is going to happen in spite of the soothing tones of the pilot’s voice. He comes on the intercom every few minutes and tells us everything is fine, but he’s probably freaking out up there in the cockpit. He isn’t allowed to come on the speaker and scream that the plane is going down.
I suffer from a variety of crippling fears, but Mom refuses to acknowledge or respect them. She insists they aren’t real, that I’m making them up, just because she took me to five different psychologists and they all agreed with her. They all said I’m pretending to be afraid of things that according to them cannot actually harm me, because I don’t want to think about something that has harmed me already. Namely my dad leaving Mom and me to run away with a fashion model. And even though Dad’s leaving stinks and even though I hate him because of it, my fears are definitely real. I bet if I were paying the psychologists instead of my mom, they’d agree with me instead.
My most urgent fear up here at thirty-five thousand feet is the fear of gravity. Thanks to Sir Isaac Newton it’s one of my worst fears, because pretty much everything wants to be closer to the center of the earth than it already is. Especially this airplane. It’s just how gravity works.
Of course the flight attendants explained what we’re supposed to do when this plane crashes. They went over it in great detail before we even took off. It’s insane to talk about what to do when we fall from the sky, and then leave the ground anyway, and I’m the only person on the whole plane who paid attention to what the flight attendants were saying.
I’m also the only person who carefully studied the safety guide showing how to operate the oxygen masks, and where the emergency exits are. The cartoon people in the safety illustrations look like they’re having a great time sliding off the wing on the inflatable yellow slide. Like they’ll wanna climb back onto the wing for another turn. But none of the people on this plane look like the cartoon people in the safety guide, and none of the people sitting around me took the time to learn how to open the door or inflate the slide. If anyone gets off this plane alive, it’ll be thanks to me, a twelve-year-old girl.
Finally the seat-belt light overhead lights up, and the ding thing goes ding, indicating it’s time to die. But all the other passengers are oblivious. They still want to finish enjoying their continental breakfasts and coffees and cocktails before the flight attendants take their cups and napkins. I guess they might as well enjoy their last meal.
Below us is a blindingly bright mass of clouds reflecting the light of the sun. It’s all happy up here above, and the clouds look cushiony soft below, but it’s an illusion. We’ll drop like a stone through the water vapor.
Now we sink into the clouds and we can’t see a thing. Nor can the pilot. We could hit a building or a wind turbine or another plane, or overshoot the runway and land in the ocean and be eaten by sharks. I clench my hands on the armrests and look at Mom, who gazes contentedly at an advertisement for a wax museum in the touristy airline magazine. The wax figures gaze contentedly back at her.
Suddenly we’re below the clouds and the ground is close, a golf course and a freeway and then apartments and hotels, and parked airplanes, and a runway, which rudely greets the tires of our airplane with a horrendous scuffing noise.
Well. If one must obey the laws of gravity, I suppose the runway is the best place to do it.
I practically jump out of my seat when Walter, the dead guy, suddenly raises his head and turns to me. “Are we here already?”
I nod, reaching for the shoulder he used as a pillow for half a continent. I try to rub some feeling back into it.
The only downside to landing—instead of crashing or plunging into the sea—is the silent, smug satisfaction of my mom, who isn’t afraid of any of these things. It’s a victory for her that we didn’t crash. She smiles pleasantly as she returns the in-flight magazine into the seat-back pocket. In spite of being an emergency-room doctor and having to witness all the things that can go wrong every day at her job—which she tells me about in horrifying detail on the few occasions I see her—she’s blind to the dangers that surround us. It’s like her brain was completely used up in medical school, so there’s nothing left to tell her what she should be afraid of.
We plod down the weird little hallway that takes us from our plane to the airport. We wait at the carousel for our luggage. Then we head to the curb. The outside air is cool and breezy, and you can feel the ocean on it. But we are at an airport, not a beach, so cars and buses and taxis stream past. Finally an airport bus pulls up in front of us.
“This is us,” Mom says.
“Aren’t we taking a Lyft?”
She hauls her suitcases onto the little bus, and motions for me to follow.
“I’ve got it all planned out. We’re taking this bus to the LAX City Bus Terminal, then the Santa Monica city bus to the neighborhood we’re staying in.”
“Why?” I practically trip on my bags as I drag them aboard.
“Because this is how people travel.”
“I don’t want to travel like people.” The bus starts moving and I almost fall down. “I like traveling like we used to.”
Mom smiles at a bearded guy whose face is inches from hers. He looks bored.
“Well, this trip is going to give you some new experiences.” She grips the overhead bar. “I grew up riding buses.”
The airport bus takes forever, stopping at all the airport terminals and then a parking lot, and finally dumps us at the LAX City Bus Terminal. Next we jump on a big blue bus that’s actually called the Big Blue Bus, where I sit next to smelly pickpockets, lepers, and lunatics while crushed beneath my suitcases. After several nauseating miles we finally get off on a sketchy corner, and lug our luggage on a sidewalk up a steep hill for a few grueling blocks. At last, Mom turns around from the top of the hill, a big smile on her face.