Unaccompanied Minor (6 page)

But that’s different from this situation—this back-and-forth cross-country custody—
this
was abusive, or at the very least negligent. The last thing this custodial schedule did was “put my welfare at a precedent,” which is a legal phrase I kept coming across when I hacked into my mother’s e-mail account and read all the court documents her attorney had sent her. It was used in reference to the life decisions my mother and Ash had made, and whether those decisions placed me at a priority. I thought it was ironic, because I felt this custodial schedule put my welfare nowhere near anyone’s precedent. For example, I’ve sat next to perverts who watch porn on their iPads all flight, Pentecostal religious freaks who outlined my damnation for hours on end, a drunk who befouled himself in his sleep, petty thieves who tried to steal my neck pillow and my
MacGyver
DVDs, one man who I swear had hepatitis, a woman who breastfed her eight-year-old,
Corey
freakin’
Feldman
, and right now I was sitting less than three feet away from a handcuffed criminal, and even closer to a loaded gun.

“What about school?” Officer Ned asked. “I have half a mind to report you for truancy.”

“I study at an online academy.”

“So you’re homeschooled?”

“No, it’s part of the Atlanta public school system, I just do everything online. I only have to log in for a few hours a week as long as I complete all my assignments.” The next one due, I told him, was a thousand-word composition on the five people I admire the most. “Isn’t that corny?” I asked. He did not answer.

I’d recently read in a discarded
Atlanta Business Chronicle
that the Atlanta online school option arose as a response to the fact that the state of Georgia stands about five spots below slug farts when it comes to education in our country, while at the same time becoming one of the fastest growing business markets. So when an influx of professionals moved to Atlanta, they didn’t want to enroll their kids in the existing schools that regularly failed the mandated competency requirements, so
boom!
, instant online academy. Problem solved for everybody but kids like me, because now parents were totally unobligated to maintain a stable location; now they could just divorce and move anywhere, willy-nilly, placing all the onus on the kid to be flexible. Case in point: Ash and Elizabeth Manning. I was paraphrasing and surmising, and I admit I was jaded about this subject, so maybe my experience wasn’t universal.

“Wow,” Officer Ned said, backing away from me a bit.
I really need to work on my social skills
, I thought. It’s not a good sign when someone instinctively inches closer to a known criminal after you go off on a little rant.

“So what about you?” I chirped. Perkiness was new to me, but I did my best.

“Typical story,” he sulked, sipping his water.

“Did you ever kill anybody?”

“Not today,” he said dryly. “Yet.”

“Har har,” I said, watching him put the plastic cup to his lips. I could have sworn he did it to conceal a smile beginning to curl at his lips.
My ploy is working
, I thought,
I’m charming
.

“My name is April,” I told him. “What’s yours?”

“Officer Edward Rockwell,” he said, placing emphasis on the word “officer.” After a pregnant pause he added, “But you can call me Officer Ned.”

“Awesome,” I said. “So, really, Officer Ned, seriously, did you ever kill anyone? And what caliber is the gun you’re packing? And do you wanna see how I can escape from handcuffs?”

“Please,” he said, rubbing his temples, “be quiet.”

Then the captain announced our final approach. The passengers were told to put their seatbacks forward and tray tables upright to prepare for landing, and the flight attendants made their way down the aisle to point out bags that needed to be stowed. Officer Ned stood to put his carry-on in the compartment above him, and his prisoner, who’d been sleeping open-mouthed and fogging up the cabin with his halitosis hoosegow breath most of the flight, suddenly popped up and claimed to be in dire need of a toilet. I guess it was understandable, since he’d been boxed in for five hours.

“Seriously, man,” he pleaded, “my gut is percolating like a pressure cooker. If you don’t let me go now, it’s not gonna be pretty.”

Truthfully, I was hoping Officer Ned would let him go to the lav, because he had a complexion the color of concrete and looked to be experiencing drug withdrawals. In the flight attendant manual there’s a section on this in the chapter on first aid, and I was worried this guy would start spewing out of every orifice like a busted beer keg. Officer Ned must have had the same thought, because he stepped aside and let the prisoner, still handcuffed, run to the rear of the plane just as the wheels touched the tarmac.

The flight attendant in the rear jumpseat looked really put out for having to unstrap himself and stand in order to fold up his seat so the prisoner could open the door of the lavatory. Rather than reassume his jumpseat, the flight attendant moved into the pocket galley a few rows up and closed the curtain so he could finish texting in peace. This left the flight attendant at midcabin to admonish everyone else to stay seated, because often when one person jumps up on taxi everyone else takes it as a cue to follow suit.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the plane is still on an active taxi,” she announced. “Please stay seated until the aircraft has come to a complete stop and the captain has turned off the fasten-seatbelt sign.” Once she finished her announcement she immediately re-engrossed herself in the tabloid opened on her lap, a total violation of federal regulations, by the way.

I kept my eyes expectantly on Officer Ned.

“What?” he finally asked.

“You know there’s a tailcone exit on this plane, don’t you?” I said.

“Really? Well, I doubt my prisoner can open it,” he chuckled.

“It tells you how to open it right here in the safety card,” I told him. I pulled the card out of my seat pocket and unfolded it. “Right here,” I pointed. “And there’s no flight attendant manning the back of the plane right now.”

When I say Officer Ned moved in a flash, I am not exaggerating. It was like,
whoosh!
, and he was halfway to the back just as the prisoner opened the aft door, which the flight attendant had already disarmed—another
total
FAA violation, seeing as how the plane had not come to a complete stop yet. Because of this the tailcone did not drop and deploy the slide, as it would have if it was armed like it should have been. What happened instead was worse.

I got up and followed right behind, because I did not want to miss this. When you open the tailcone exit of an MD-88 in the disarmed position, it enables you to lower the aft staircase, the one reserved for the ground crew so they can enter the plane from the back and begin cleaning the cabin before the passengers are even finished disembarking through the front door.

In this case, the prisoner, who had unlocked his handcuffs (not surprising, since there are hundreds of tutorials on YouTube showing you exactly how), was already at the end of the catwalk along the interior of the tailcone by the time Officer Ned dove through the back door and missed the man’s ankles by about a nano-inch. The other passengers had jumped up from their seats, thinking all the activity meant it was okay to start gathering their carry-ons and lumber toward the exit, oblivious to the fact that one, the plane was still moving, and two, anything was wrong. The flight attendant at midcabin, equally oblivious, kept repeating her PA admonishment for everyone to remain seated or she’d have to tell the captain to stop the plane on the tarmac, which would actually have been a good thing to do, but she never did it.

The attendant who should have been manning the aft door was still holed up in the side galley. He did not so much as peek through the curtain, not even when the fire started.

Because it turns out that when you drag a metal staircase along asphalt behind an airplane in the hot California sun, it causes sparks. And sparks cause fires. Luckily I’d grabbed the Halon extinguisher from the bracket behind the last seat on my way back there. I didn’t expect to use it to actually put out a fire, because a Halon extinguisher happens to be a great weapon in case you need to throw it at the head of an escaping car thief, but then the sparks ignited the brake pad on one of the landing gears, and, well, there was nothing for it but to pull the pin on the extinguisher and begin spraying it in a fan formation as the flight attendant manual instructs.

Before the smoke obstructed my view, I saw Officer Ned overtake his prisoner right as he was about to reach the chain-link fence along the runway. It was a pretty impressive sight, considering the head start the thief had on him. But Officer Ned has legs like rockets, he really does. I’m glad he’s one of my few friends.

Regarding the fire, all I had to do was pull the inflation handle of the escape slide. Once it deployed and came in contact with the fire, which hadn’t grown that big (it takes ninety seconds for a fire to grow out of control), the slide popped and the ensuing burst of air extinguished the flames. I snuffed any residual flames with the extinguisher. By then we’d reached the gate and the jetway was already in place. Later Flo told me that the pilots never even knew anything went wrong other than the incessant beeping on their flight panel indicating an open aft door, which they ignored, and the flight attendants remained oblivious as well, until all the passengers had disembarked and they noticed a charred tailcone exit at the back of the plane.

The tower did notice the commotion, though—it would have been hard for them not to—and so had dispatched a swarm of emergency personnel. FAA officials and airport security had started to descend upon the jetway, along with airline representatives clutching in-flight incident forms for people to fill out, but I slipped by them unnoticed.

I’m just an unaccompanied minor. What do I know.

Ash’s place is a dismally furnished one-bedroom condo where he expected me to sleep on patio cushions he put on the floor of his laundry room. It’s located in Manhattan Beach, a neighborhood near LAX that is super popular with newly divorced airline pilots. They move there thinking they’re part of this hip-surfer-bikini community, when really it’s mostly middle-aged divorced old crust buckets like Ash all trying to suck the youth out of the sand or something. It’s pretty pathetic, and I hate it.

Ash’s girlfriend Kathy doesn’t even live in Manhattan Beach. She lives in Carlsbad, which is about two hours south of LAX and one of the reasons Ash is never home. Lately I’d spent entire custodial periods at his place without laying eyes on him, which was fine with me. He would usually call his landline, though, to make sure I’d arrived. Because if I hadn’t it meant my mother hadn’t followed the judge’s order, and he could drag her back into court again. Ash had a maddening advantage over my mother considering his girlfriend was an attorney and every bit as empty-hearted as he was.

But what made it all the more maddening was that it was clear Ash didn’t want me around. I’m not surmising here; he told me so all the time.

“Can you get lost? Kathy’s coming over and she doesn’t like you lurking around,” he’d say as he stood in front of the mirror in the foyer, running his fingers through his thinning hair to distribute the mousse evenly. I didn’t get why women found him attractive. I mean, sure, he had the blond hair and blue eyes and he was kind of tall and he’d held up okay physically for being forty-nine, but he was vain and mean and there was that black, sucking sinkhole in his chest where his heart should be. Personally I wondered how his romantic prospects got around that.

“Move it!” he hissed at me.

“My absolute pleasure,
Dad
,” I hissed back. At this point I’d usually grab my things and catch the bus to the airport to sneak into the employee lounge to eat the free snacks they sometimes put out for the crew. All I had to do to get past security was list myself on a flight, print the boarding voucher and stand next to a big family in the security line so the TSA agent would assume I was with them. As long as I stayed in the concourses on the other side of security, I never had to show my passport again. I could literally fly all over the country without going through another checkpoint.

That’s why checked baggage has been such a downside since I’ve been disappeared for the past three weeks. Baggage claim is outside the security checkpoint. To retrieve a bag would have meant leaving the concourse and then re-entering through security. I rarely chanced it. About six weeks ago when I was just a part-time runaway, before I disappeared, I was in a hurry and tried to simply go through security on my own without piggybacking on a big family. I’d done it a few times before without incident; I showed them my passport and they must have just assumed I was over eighteen. But that day I got popped by a TSA agent who, judging from her appearance, I could have sworn would have been a complete cakewalk.

“Young lady, where is your escort?” she asked me sternly. I knew I was in trouble the second she called me “young lady.” She wore her hair in a mass of long cornrows supplemented by hot-pink extensions all bunched up and sprouting from the top of her head like an erupting volcano. She eyed me levelly over the top of purple-and-red-framed reading glasses.