Chapter 2
Zelda
Okay, so, things weren't great. But they would be. I just knew it.
Airports were wild and crazy on an average day but forgetting my purse at the bottom of the X-ray machine's conveyor belt and accidentally triggering a terminal-wide lockdown on account of my unintentionally suspicious bag was more than the routine wild and crazy.
What could I say? I got discombobulated with shoving my things back into my backpack while also jamming my feet into shoes.
Just like I'd told the grumpy government agents who pointed an excessive number of guns at me in the women's restroom, if I was going to bomb an airport, I would've done it with something spiffier than a beat-up crossbody bag.
The most dangerous thing I had in there was a half-eaten bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich but they didn't want to hear that.
Apparently, hypothesizing about airport bombings was ill-advised.
If they'd asked my opinion, I would've told them it was also ill-advised to sneak up on someone while they used a public toilet.
Yes, sure, I hadn't heard them on account of the podcast blasting through my headphones but wasn't a team of twelve agents a bit much when it came to apprehending one occasionally absentminded woman?
It wasn't like I was going to portkey through the plumbing.
I'd hoped for a smoother getaway from Denver. As a matter of course, I always hoped for smooth exits. Graceful like a swan. Hell, I was fine with graceful like migratory geese. Whatever it was that got me the fuck out of here without breaking anything—else.
But shutting down an airport didn't count. That was what I was telling myself. It was a temporary thing and then—lickety-split—back in business.
As I shuffled down the jetway with the rest of the passengers, I mentally picked up the morning's dramas, set them on fire, and sent them out to sea.
I couldn't imagine Viking funerals were the norm as far as coping mechanisms went but it worked for me.
There was nothing I could do about tripping the terrorist alarm and there was no reason for me to dedicate brain cells to that unfortunate series of events now that it was over.
No brain cells dedicated but you can bet I kept my fingers curled around my purse's strap where it bisected my breasts. It was one thing to toss up my hands in the face of tiny catastrophes of my own creation and proclaim, "This is how I am!"
It was one thing and I'd stuck with that one thing for ages.
I did mean ages because this was the way my brain worked and why the hell should I override my brain for the sake of anyone else's preferences? But it was another thing for all of my me-ishness to hit me in the face like a lemon meringue pie.
That was how it was. A pie to the face without the punch line.
I wasn't fun or cute or fascinating or unique or charming or any of the things I'd imagined myself to be. I didn't fit and I didn't fit in. Not here in Denver. Probably not anywhere.
I stared at my boarding pass as I stepped onto the airplane anyway.
Perhaps my me-ishness didn't fit here and it wouldn't fit anywhere but if I was meant to spend a lifetime gathering up my odds and ends and tucking myself into smaller, quieter, more acceptable shapes, I didn't want to do it while Denver and all its extremities watched.
The recycled oxygen and rhythmic slam of overhead compartments assaulted me as I moved down the aisle, each step an emotional mile from everything I'd left behind. When I spotted my seat, I realized I wasn't leaving. I was already gone.
And maybe—I wasn't sure, but maybe—I'd left a long, long time ago. My body might've been here in Denver but I'd let go months, perhaps even years ago. If I'd ever been holding on at all.
I dropped into my seat, hugged my backpack to my chest, rested my forehead on the bag's top handle.
Doing this felt good and right but that didn't cancel out the whispers of doubt in my mind.
Save for a few couches offered for short-term crashing, I had no plans to speak of, no vision.
I had money but not girl living in one of the country's most expensive cities without a job money.
This is what you do, I heard in my head, a voice all too familiar and disparaging. You leap and then you look, and that's why your whole life goes to shit. You're a series of mistakes.
"No, I am not," I whispered. "I sent a million résumés last night and I have places to stay for a month. I looked. I looked."
"Excuse me? Excuse me, miss?"
Dammit. I was the miss. I was always the miss. Excuse me, miss, your skirt is tucked into your underwear and Excuse me, miss, you left your headlights on and Excuse me, miss, your credit card was declined and Excuse me, miss, that's wet paint.
I lifted my head and found a man staring down at me, his expression pinched like an apricot past the point of freshness.
If he was an air marshal telling me I wasn't cleared for flight after the security checkpoint dramatics, I was going full Bridesmaids and making him carry me off this tin can. "Uh, yeah?"
To my surprise, the wilted apricot perked up.
"There was a mix-up and my wife and I were seated separately.
Would you be willing to take my seat? It's in the front, row five.
Business class." He gestured to the woman with a small child on her lap beside me, the one I hadn't noticed during my what am I doing with my life? spinout. "No teething kiddos up there."
Pushing to my feet, I replied, "You got it, my friend. Show me the way."
See, this was how I knew everything would work out.
I knew it because it always did. The universe had a way of smoothing out the wrinkles in good time and all I had to do was pay my karmic dues and wait for it.
And I'd waited. Now my karmic dues were giving me a free upgrade to the open bar in business class and I was taking that as a sign I was on my way to the places I needed to go—wherever they were.
But the universe didn't smooth out those wrinkles with an iron. The universe smoothed much in the way retreating glaciers smoothed the Finger Lakes into existence—by dragging massive boulders over the earth and carving up the mantle as it went.
Slow and a bit violent.
And now, this universe had smoothed my path by getting me out of Denver, onto this flight, into business class, and…an arm's length away from a man who was muttering "Hard pass" as he scrolled through—
Oh my god, that was my résumé.
There was a boom in my brain, an explosion that'd waited decades to detonate, and I dropped my backpack into the wide expanse of legroom in front of the vacant seat. "Hard pass, huh?"
This was going to be fast and violent.
"Tell me, friend," I started, gesturing toward his screen, "what's the problem here?"
Instead of responding or—oh, I didn't know, blinking—he stared at me with the type of secondhand shame I'd encountered my entire life.
As if he was mortified on my behalf but he couldn't begin to summarize the reasons why.
They never knew why they were so damn embarrassed for me and that was because they were embarrassed with me.
The shame, the mortification—it was always about them.
It was how I made them feel, not how I, myself, was feeling.
And yes, of course, there were moments in my life that lived in the shame box.
Others in mortification. A great handful in embarrassment.
But I wasn't sitting here and beating myself up over it.
Not long ago, I'd had a twenty-one-gun salute pointed at me in a public bathroom because I'd spaced out. That was some kind of embarrassment.
But this wasn't that. It was a quick, dam-bursting break from the old normal.
"No, really," I continued. "What's the problem?
Why is it a—what did you call it? A hard pass?
" I forced a snicker. Snickering didn't come naturally to me, probably because I didn't dedicate much time to condescending to others or mocking people.
But this guy? The one in the trousers pressed within an inch of their fancy-fiber-loving life?
The one with the artfully tousled golden brown hair and the eyebrow arched as if speaking words was too great a request for him?
He did more than enough condescending. He could take some coming back in his direction.
"It sounds like you're dealing with a kidney stone, not scanning a résumé. "
He bobbed his head, his gaze locked on the stripe of blue hair tucked behind my ear. The stripe I'd been told was childish. "Okay."
"No, no, friend. I asked you a question." I tipped my head toward his screen, the one with Zelda Besh screaming across the top line. "What's the disqualifier here?"
"I'm sorry but," he started, his infuriatingly beautiful hazel eyes crinkling as he spoke, "what are we talking about?"
I leaned back, crossed my legs, folded my arms over my chest. Stared at him for a beat. "That's my résumé."
"That's not possible." He laughed, but it sounded like a sticky grocery cart wheel. He glowered between me and his screen. "That's…that's just not possible."
"I'm not sure why you're saying that," I replied. "I know what my résumé looks like. I know I sent gobs and gobs of them last night and this morning. When you think about the odds, it's not so impossible."
Another sticky-wheel laugh from Mr. Fancy Pants. "Tell me about the odds, uh"—he glimpsed back at the document on his screen—"Zelda."
He said my name the way most people did at first. Zellllllda. As if it wasn't a name so much as a curiosity. If I had a dollar for every time someone asked if it was my real name, I wouldn't be praying my friends didn't mind me squatting in their apartments for more than a few weeks.
"All right, well, this is a flight to Boston," I started, waving both hands at the cabin around us, "and I'd estimate one-quarter to one-third of the passengers live in or around Boston.
Given the early morning flight time and day of the week, half of these folks are business travelers.
" I shot a pointed stare at the trousers-and-dress-shirts dudes across the aisle, the ones with their Bose headphones around their neck and slim laptops on their tray tables.
"Even by the most conservative estimates, that means twelve percent of the passengers are Boston-based business travelers. Are you with me so far?"
He blinked but I could tell he wasn't happy about it. Either the blinking or my reasoning. Could've been both. "I'm with you."
I shifted, leaning out into the aisle for a second.
"On the low end, it looks like there are two hundred and twenty seats filled, meaning a little more than twenty-seven of them are businesspeople going home to Boston.
Even if we eliminate ninety percent of those twenty-seven on the basis of whatever, the probability of one of those remaining twenty-three having the résumé I blasted all over internet job sites and to all of my friends between Newington and New York is greater than zero. "
He stared at me for a long moment. Long enough for one of the flight attendants to march down the aisle, snapping overhead compartments shut as she went, and make her way back to the front.
Stared and stared and stared as if he was trying to determine whether I was playing an enormous joke on him or this was a complete hallucination because there was no way in hell I was real.
I knew this because I got that question about as frequently as the one about my name—Are you for real?
The pilot came over the speaker, drawling on about flight times and headwinds and the current weather at Logan International. The flight attendants yanked the doors shut and briskly paced the aisle. The plane pushed back from the gate with a jerk, and still, he stared at me.
If he could've done it without blinking, I was certain he would've.
The flight attendant stopped at our row and gifted my seatmate with a stern stare. "It's time to stow your tray table and power down all electronic devices, sir."
I smiled up at her while Mr. Fancy Pants complied with the request.
When we were alone again, he lifted his paper coffee cup to his lips and gulped the liquid down, never once breaking his gaze. Then, "How did you do that?"