Unaccompanied Minor (13 page)

“She looks nice,” I added.

“We definitely see that differently,” Malcolm said. “But it’s kinda cool I get to finish my homework while watching the planes take off.”

Malcolm was referring to our school. I had already mostly completed the online assignments, so I helped him with his. “I have to pick two more people I admire in order to finish my composition,” he grumbled, “it might take a few years.” I laughed and told him I
totally
sympathized. Then his mother came stumbling over.

“Malcolm, darling, who’s this?” she asked, swaying as she stood. She repeatedly tried to light her cigarette but failed hilariously until finally one of the lounge attendants came to her rescue and lit it for her.

“She’s my friend,” Malcolm said, his head down.

I stood and presented her with my hand. “Hello, Ms. Colgate. So nice to meet you. I’m April Manning.”

She ignored my hand and redirected her gaze to Malcolm. “I asked you who she is.”

“She’s my friend,” he repeated.

Ms. Colgate took a long draw on her cigarette, inhaling deeply, then blew out the smoke like a makeup-encrusted dragon. “You don’t have friends,” she slurred, then turned unsteadily on the heel of her weaponized ballet flats and lurched back to the bar.

“Lovely lady,” I chirped, practicing my perkiness.

“Right,” Malcolm said, then he took my hand. “Come with me,” he directed, picking up Captain Beefheart, who grunted adorably like a little sea lion. Malcolm led me to the welcome counter and instructed the agent there to put me in the system as his guest.

“We’ll need to have your parent authorize this,” the agent told him.

“Fine,” said Malcolm. “That’s my mother over there.” He pointed toward the bar. “I recall you’ve had the pleasure of speaking to her today on a few occasions already. My ears have almost stopped ringing from that. Let’s just call her over here to talk to you again, shall we?”

The agent went pale. “Why, uh, of course we can update your account without having to bother your mother, sir. Let’s just make sure I have all your young friend’s information in our records here….”

And right there I became a Flight Club member. I tell you it’s been a lifesaver, literally. WorldAir has Flight Club lounges in airports all over the globe, but for my purposes, the clubs in the hub airports like Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles have been practical domiciles for me lately. I can shower, sleep, and drink all the free sodas I want while waiting for my next flight.

Sometimes I can sneak Flo in with me. The only thing is that she has to be out of her uniform. But she is happy to temporarily slip into her layover clothes for the chance at a free bar before takeoff.

“This certainly takes the bite out of clocking in,” she’ll joke, belting back a shot of vodka, otherwise known as an “abbreviated Bloody Mary” in Flo’s dictionary of cocktail terms.

Until recently I’d been at a loss as to why she hadn’t been flagged for a Breathalyzer test following one of her flights, but then I found out one of her ex-husbands is in charge of the facility contracted to administer the (supposedly) random Breathalyzing of airline personnel, and, well, I don’t have to say anything further about that. Just suffice it for me to repeat that all four of Flo’s known ex-husbands remain devoted to her. Drug tests, though, are a different matter, which is why she pegged me to supply clean urine samples should that need ever arise. Thank God it never has.

Anyway, regarding the WorldAir Flight Clubs, the snack buffets and espresso machines alone kept me alive over the last few months. If not for this development I doubt I could have lasted as long on the run as I have.

But back to Malcolm’s mom and how she made me think of the lady in the hypoxia-awareness video. When I saw her with him at the departure gate later, she acted as though everything was hunky-dory, like she’d never seen me before, like she’d never stumbled around and insulted her lovely son as though her brain was being starved of oxygen. She simply handed Malcolm off to the gate agent like he was nothing but a breathing relay baton, then ambled off as though anything in the world was more important than the boy she’d just left behind.

Plus, her lipstick was all askew.

Kowalski:

Kid, c’mon. Get to the part where you break every aviation law in the book.

April Manning:

I am, believe me. But I was told to be as detailed as possible. See? I’m just trying to cooperate.

Kowalski:

All right. Resume.

April Manning:

Like I said, I try not to judge. But because of Malcolm’s aversion to drinkers, I always tried to keep his interactions with Flo to a minimum, because Flo, it turned out, had a very low tolerance for people who have low tolerances for drinkers. Whether Flo herself was an actual alcoholic or not was still up for debate, as far as I was concerned. I looked up the list of symptoms on the Internet and they seemed pretty sweeping, in my opinion.

In order to deal with the drunk slumped onto the seat that belonged to the large Hawaiian lady, the imposter Brighton McPherson was summoned from the mid galley to help. It was necessary to get the Hawaiian lady situated so that the others standing in the aisle behind her could get to their seats.

“Again, ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot announced over the PA, “we are ready to push back from the jetway just as soon as everyone is seated.”

I bet the pilots were motivated to get a move on because WorldAir had just ranked fourth before last in this year’s
Condé Naste Traveler
list of on-time airlines, and to actually leave early for once was probably a juicy prospect to them. But before they could close the boarding door to the aircraft, they had to make sure all passengers were seated. The incident with the drunk guy was ticking away their head start.

The imposter had made his way aft very reluctantly, if you ask me, which I found curious, because Flo always said the favorite aspect of any flight attendant’s job was to throw drunks off the plane. It’s ironic, I know. It’s like they don’t want anyone having more fun than they can.

Finally the Hawaiian lady was just directed to take a different seat, as a number were open, and when she moved out of the aisle I was able to get a look at the passengers in the aisle behind her, and—
Jesus God Christ on the Cross
, I panicked—there stood Ash Manning and his murdering little lizard of a girlfriend.

I ducked my head below the seat in front of me. I was pretty certain they hadn’t seen me. I pretended to smooch Captain Beefheart so Malcolm wouldn’t think I was nuts, but he didn’t fall for it.

“What’re you doing?” he whispered.

“That’s my stepfather in the aisle up there by the drunk dude, with his girlfriend the Crypt Keeper,” I whispered back.

“Whoa!” he exclaimed. “Are you kidding me? I know that woman. She was my guardian ad litem!”

“Serious?”

“As a cyanide pill!”

No wonder his GAL seemed every bit as revolting as mine. They were the same person. “What are they doing?” I asked. “Are they seated yet?”

“No, they’re coming this way,” said Malcolm, who’d been well (but not thoroughly) briefed on my feelings about these two. “Keep your head down.”

“Aren’t you afraid she’ll recognize you?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? She saw me
once
. In her report to the judge, she described me as wall-eyed and mildly retarded!”

So I did as Malcolm said, and the two of them passed us by, circled via the cross aisle at the back of the cabin and walked up the other side all the way to first class. I ventured a peek as they walked by, and noticed that Ash carried Kathy’s giant purse for her. I rolled my eyes. There must not have been enough overhead space in first class, I surmised, which was why they had to bring their bags to the coach cabin.

I considered running off the plane in a mad dash, but then I calmed myself with the knowledge that the front of the plane rarely knew what was happening at the back. One time Flo made it all the way to her layover hotel in Frankfurt before she found out that a man had died of a heart attack in the forward cabin on her flight over.

“I was in the back, separated by three hundred passengers,” she justified. “Though I did wonder why it took so long for all the passengers to disembark,” she added, chuckling through the smoke of her perpetual menthol.

“Coast is clear,” said Malcolm, and nudged me. “You can sit up now.”

I breathed a sigh of relief and straightened myself in my seat, just in time to make eye contact with Officer Ned. “Oh,
dang
,” I gasped.

“What? What is it?” Malcolm asked.

So this was how I missed seeing two last-minute passengers board the plane. The drunk guy, the large Hawaiian lady, my stepfather, and his evil insect of a girlfriend—all of this created a perfect storm, if you will, to dampen my “situational awareness,” which the handbook instructed us to sharpen.

Good situational awareness would be like how, when we board a plane, we’re supposed to count the rows to the nearest exit (done), assess escape avenues (done), identify the location and viability of the emergency equipment (done), ascertain the presence of probable imposter flight attendants (done), avoid any proximity whatsoever to known killers in magenta lipstick carrying Louis Vuitton bags, their lapdog boyfriends and/or former stepfathers, as well as any grumpy LEOs who were already half onto me (dang, dang, and
dang
!).

At this point I figured it was time to finally come clean to Malcolm and tell him about my current status as a bona fide runaway. He knew enough from our many past conversations to understand what life for me was like as a nonrev unaccompanied minor, so I didn’t have to take twenty years to explain it.

“Won’t the airline figure it out?” was all he asked.

“Doubtful,” I answered.

It’s like when you run a red light, I explained. The police don’t sit in front of the red light, they sit behind it, and can only bust you after you’ve made the transgression. The WorldAir pass-travel department is like that policeman, if his job were not to sit right there on the other side of the traffic light, but to sit in a darkened room sifting through miles and miles and miles of surveillance footage looking for red-light runners, and only if he was directed to look for a specific one. In all it meant that maybe,
maybe
, years from now, my mother might get a note in her inbox that read, “What’s up with all the nonrev traveling during your family medical leave back in 2013?” or some such.

Seriously, there’s something to be said about red tape: it makes a great cloak.

“You can relax now,” Malcolm said. “Everything’s okay.”

“Really?” I asked, lifting my head. Officer Ned was two rows away, stomping toward us, his eyes boring down on me like beams of a red laser.

“
I thought you said everything was okay!
” I slugged Malcolm.

“It will be,” Malcolm assured, but his assurance really seemed empty right then. “Seriously, what can he do?”

I started to wonder the same thing—because to be truthful, a part of me was happy to see Officer Ned—when suddenly he was looming over my seat, snorting fire, every breath of which seemed to expand his air of intimidation. I shrank down and peered up at him, trying to seem simultaneously pathetic and innocent as I could.

“April! You, young lady,” Officer Ned boomed, his forefinger darting at me, “have some explaining to do. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I plan to find out. Don’t think for a second you’re walking off this plane without talking to me.”

“Officer, I—” Malcolm tried to interject. I was warmed by how he meant to defend me, but Malcolm wasn’t as versed as I was in the depth of unimportance given to anything an unaccompanied minor might have to say.

“Who are you?” Officer Ned bellowed at him, causing not just Malcolm but everyone a few rows surrounding us to cringe. “Scratch that. I don’t care. You, April,” he pointed at me sharply, “we have business. Do you hear me? Don’t you dare move during this flight.”

“
Ladies and gentlemen
,” the coordinating flight attendant admonished over the PA. “We are on an active taxi. Please take your seats, or I will have to instruct the pilot to stop the aircraft.” Since Officer Ned was the only passenger standing, it was obvious to whom the admonishment was directed.

Flo had finished her preflight duties and had come up to take her jumpseat opposite the little elevators that led to the lower galley. But before she did so, she noticed Officer Ned standing in the aisle. She made her way down the aisle toward us as she adjusted the straps to her apron.

“Hey, ’scuse me, Thor,” she said to Officer Ned (Flo called all tall, muscular men Thor), “but you have to get your butt in your seat or we can’t depart.”

“I’m a LEO,” Officer Ned tried to clarify. “I just need—”

“I don’t care if you’re the goddamn Prince of Persia,” Flo fumed. “Go back to your seat or I’ll tell the pilot to go back to the gate and yank your shapely ass off the plane. Do you get me?”

“I, uh….” Officer Ned’s air of intimidation seemed to pop like a party balloon. Flo, though half his size, had a way of sucking the fight out of people. I’d seen her do it many times. She called it “verbal judo,” but I don’t think there was any real method to it. She was just a worldly sixty-seven-year-old flight attendant who had seen everything, survived it, and didn’t scare easily.

“Go on, now,” Flo told him. “Sit!”

Officer Ned took a step back, flustered about what to do next. It was like he was being bitten to death by a butterfly.

“Ma’am, I….” he attempted.

“Scoot!” Flo shouted. Officer Ned jumped, turned on his heel, and hightailed it back to his seat to the soft applause of the passengers around us. Flo followed him up the aisle and reminded him to bring his seat back all the way upright. He tried once again to argue, seeing as how he was a hundred feet tall (six-foot-five, I know) and could hardly fit without angling his seat back, but Flo was having none of it, so he obediently complied.

“Wow,” Malcolm sighed. “That was something to see.”

“That’s my friend Flo. You’ve met her, remember?” I ventured. I wanted to go in baby steps with these two.