A bored woman cal s out rows for boarding, first in French and then in English. I decide to play nice and put away my book. “Where are we sitting?”
He inspects his boarding pass. “Forty-five G. Stil have your passport?”
I feel my coat once more. “Got it.”
“Good.” And then his hand is inside my pocket. My heart spazzes, but he doesn’t notice. He pul s out my passport and flicks it open.
WAIT. WHY DOES HE HAVE MY PASSPORT?
His eyebrows shoot up. I try to snatch it back, but he holds it out of my reach. “Why are your eyes crossed?” He laughs. “Have you had some kind of
ocular surgery I don’t know about?”
“Give it back!” Another grab and miss, and I change tactics and lunge for his coat instead. I snag his passport.
“NO!”
I open it up, and it’s . . . baby St. Clair. “Dude. How old is this picture?”
He slings my passport at me and snatches his back. “I was in middle school.”
Before I can reply, our section is announced. We hold our passports against our chests and enter the line.The bored flight attendant slides his ticket
through a machine that rips it, and he moves forward. I hand mine over. “Zis iz boarding rows forty through fifty. Plizz sit until I cal your row.” She hands back my ticket, and her lacquered nails click against the paper.
“What? I’m in forty-five—”
But I’m not. There, printed in bold ink, is my row. Twenty-three. I forgot we wouldn’t be sitting together, which is dumb, because it’s not like we made our reservations together. It’s a coincidence we’re on the same flight. St. Clair waits for me down the walkway. I shrug helplessly and hold up the boarding
pass. “Row twenty-three.”
His expression is surprised. He forgot, too.
Someone growls at me in French. A businessman with immaculate black hair is trying to hand his ticket to the flight attendant. I mutter my apologies
and step aside. St. Clair’s shoulders sag. He waves goodbye and disappears around the corner.
Why can’t we sit together? What’s the point of seat reservations, anyway? The bored woman cal s my section next, and I think terrible thoughts about
her as she slides my ticket through her machine. At least I have a window seat. The middle and aisle are occupied with more businessmen. I’m reaching
for my book again—it’s going to be a long flight—when a polite English accent speaks to the man beside me.
“Pardon me, but I wonder if you wouldn’t mind switching seats.You see, that’s my girlfriend there, and she’s pregnant. And since she gets a bit ill on airplanes, I thought she might need someone to hold back her hair when . . . well . . .” St. Clair holds up the courtesy barf bag and shakes it around.The paper crinkles dramatical y.
The man sprints off the seat as my face flames. His pregnant girlfriend?
“Thank you. I was in for ty-five G.” He slides into the vacated chair and waits for the man to disappear before speaking again. The guy on his other side stares at us in horror, but St. Clair doesn’t care. “They had me next to some horrible couple in matching Hawaiian shirts.There’s no reason to suffer this flight alone when we can suffer it together.”
“That’s flattering, thanks.” But I laugh, and he looks pleased—until takeoff, when he claws the armrest and turns a color disturbingly similar to key lime pie. I distract him with a story about the time I broke my arm playing Peter Pan. It turned out there was more to flying than thinking happy thoughts and jumping out a window. St. Clair relaxes once we’re above the clouds.
Time passes quickly for an eight-hour flight.
We don’t talk about what waits on the other side of the ocean. Not his mother. Not Toph. Instead, we browse SkyMall. We play the if-you-had-to-buy-one-thing-off-each-page game. He laughs when I choose the hot-dog toaster, and I tease him about the fogless shower mirror and the world’s largest
crossword puzzle.
“At least they’re practical,” he says.