Ask the Passengers (19 page)

I ask us:
Do you know who you’re dealing with?

NOT AT FOUR IN THE MORNING. Not
with my mother sitting in the kitchen waiting. Not with a fight between her and Dad first when Dad tells her the whole story about where he picked me up. And certainly not with Ellis being woken up on purpose to hear my “news.”

She says it so smarmily. “Sorry to wake you, but your sister has some important
news
and I think you need to hear it.”

I sit at the table and hear her say this upstairs at Ellis’s bedroom door.

Ellis clomps down the stairs behind Mom and sits in her chair in the kitchen, then flops her head down into her arms and tries to continue to sleep.

“Well?” Mom says. “We’re ready for you to tell us
the big news
!”

“I don’t have any big news.”

“Your father says you do,” she says.

“He didn’t even talk to me on the way home.”

“He knows where he picked you up,” she says. “Why don’t you start there?”

“I made a mistake. I went to a bar. I got caught. I’m sure it will be fun for you to watch me reap the consequences.” This answer makes Ellis look up. We make eye contact for a millisecond.

“You think this is fun for me?” Mom asks.

“No. Of course not. If this was fun, then you’d make sure to wake up the whole family and put me on some sort of mock trial at four in the morning.”

Just as Mom is about to tear into me for being a smart-ass, Ellis asks, “What the hell is this about?” She yawns. “You went to a bar? Why is that a big deal?”

“I know, right?” I say. “She takes you out drinking all the time, and you’re a year younger than me.”

“Yeah,” Ellis says before Mom yells over us both.

“But I don’t take her to homosexual bars!” she says. The way she says
homosexual
is…
not
standard FOTG issue at all.

“Who calls them that?” I ask.

“Who?”

“Who what?”

“Who’s them?”

I look at her. “I mean who calls bars for gay people
homosexual bars
?”

“I think the proper nomenclature is
gay club
, Mom,” Ellis says.

“Did you know about this?” Mom asks Ellis.

“She didn’t know about anything,” I say. “Only me, Kristina and Justin knew. And maybe a few of their friends.” I figure invoking Kristina might help me.

But it’s as if she didn’t hear it.

“So do you want to tell your family why you were at a
gay club
tonight, Astrid? And do you want to tell us how long you’ve been lying to us about where you are on Saturday nights? Because don’t think I won’t call Dana in the morning.”

“Who’s Dana?” Ellis asks as she shuffles across the kitchen and gets herself a glass of juice from the fridge.

“Jeff’s mom,” I say.

“Well?” Mom presses.

When Ellis gets back to the table, I sit forward. “Look. The last few weekends we went to this gay club in town. We did it because we heard we could get served there. No one cards you at the door. And like most normal high school kids who live in”—I look right at Mom when I say this—“small-town America, we are bored out of our minds sitting around this stupid little town and doing nothing. It’s our senior year. We figured we could find a way to have some fun. So yes. We went out. We had fun. We danced. I had one drink.”

Ellis cracks up.

“It’s not funny,” Mom says. Then she looks into Ellis’s eyes. “You knew about this, didn’t you?”

“She didn’t know. No one knew,” I say. “Anyway, if you’re
expecting some big news about how I’m some lesbian or whatever because I got busted at a gay club, then you’re fresh out of luck.”

I look over and see Frank S. sitting in the corner. He’s not smiling.

“So how come you didn’t go to one of a hundred normal bars to dance and drink, then?” Mom says. See that?
Normal bars.
As opposed to, you know,
homosexual bars
. I think we might have to revoke that FOTG badge, Mom.

“Because I didn’t,” I answer.

“You woke me up for this? On a weekend?” Ellis complains. “Jesus!” She gets up and slams her chair into the table and goes back upstairs.

Mom and Dad look at me. I look at the clock. It’s 4:03—exactly two minutes since the last time I looked at it. Dad looks tired. Guessing from his usual Saturday night routine, I’d bet that he only went to bed at one o’clock, after
Saturday Night Live
. He was probably a few notches over too stoned, and I most likely called him and woke him out of a near coma.

“I hope you’re happy,” she says. “This will ruin our reputation.”

“Oh,” I say. I thought we all knew that our bad reputation has been building in this town, birdhouse by birdhouse, but hey, I guess we can blame everything on me now. World hunger. War. Apocalypse. Mom’s unpopularity in a town her ancestors helped found.

“You can’t just think of yourself, you know. Think of Ellis.
She’s going to be a target now, too,” she says. “And do you know what this means?” She’s waving the ticket. She slaps it on the table.

“I think it means I have to go to court.”

“It means you’re going to lose your license for a few months,” Dad says. “And you’re going to have a record.”

Mom sighs. “How do you think that will look now that we’re about to choose a college?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I look at Frank. Still not smiling.

We sit in silence for a while.

“Can we go back to bed now?” Dad asks. “I’m sure Astrid will realize what this all means as it slowly bites her in the ass. Right now I just want to sleep.”

“No one is keeping you here, Gerry,” Mom says. “I guess I’ll go back to bed and try to sleep, too. I hope you had fun tonight, because you’re completely grounded with no car. And I’m sure once Jeff hears where you were, he’s going to break up with you, and I can’t say I blame him.”

I put my head down and hold back laughter.

Poor Claire.

On the picnic table everything is quiet.

All of the adrenaline from getting caught has clogged in my muscles, and I’m exhausted. Frank S. is still with me. He’s sitting on the bench by the back door.

I wave. “Hi, Frank.”

He waves back. “Hi, Astrid.” He still isn’t smiling. “Shame you had to lie.”

“I just didn’t think it was the right time,” I say.

He nods. “Is there ever a right time?”

I don’t like him right now, so I look back at the sky. There’s a plane making its way west, and I mentally put myself on it. Where would I be going on that little thing? Pittsburgh? Cleveland? Would it matter? Wouldn’t any of us catch a flight to
Anywherebuthere
right now?

I ask the passengers:
What does the airport look like at four o’clock in the morning? Did they even have coffee brewing? Was there toilet paper in the stalls?

And why don’t I feel ashamed right now? Is that a sign?

PASSENGER #1298

JANE TILBERTS, SEAT 2A

FLIGHT #9321

NEWARK TO CLEVELAND

MOM STANDS INSIDE MY ROOM
and annoyingly knocks on my door until I drag myself from REM dreams.

“You missed work!” she screeches. She’s a pterodactyl.

I look at my clock and I do the math. Eight
AM
minus five
AM
equals three. I’ve had about three hours of sleep. “I have off today,” I say. “Did that long shift yesterday, remember?”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“I did. Yesterday when I got home.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Well… I have off,” I say.

She clip-clops down the upstairs hall and slams the door to her office. After a few minutes, she turns on her stereo and I can’t sleep.

I get that ringing in my ears, the kind you get when all the blood rushes to the anger center in your brain. If this was reversed, she’d insist I have respect for the rest of the people in the house. It would rate at least an hour on the lecture scale.

Dad would have to sit there and nod every time she asked a rhetorical question. “Do you think we raised you to be rude?” Nod. “Are you ever going to grow up and think about other people?” Nod. “You know you’re never going to make any friends in college with this attitude, right?” Nod.

Ellis beats me to the shower. Mom turns up her stereo even louder with her horrible eighties music, and I give up on sleeping. I lie in bed and pick up Plato’s
Republic
and skim the Allegory of the Cave as I seethe.

I replace the words with my own words. Instead of it being a conversation between Socrates and Glaucon, I make it a conversation between Ellis and me. A fictional Ellis who talks to me—and not just when she needs something.