Takeoffs and Landings(6)

But there was something exhilarating about zooming along the runway, faster, faster, faster. . . . Lori felt herself straining forward, wanting to leave the ground behind. Maybe there was something wrong, and they’d never take off. The engine did sound terrible. But then there was a bump, and the concrete of the runway fell away. Lori heard the wheels of the plane being folded up into the plane’s belly, beneath them. It made Lori giddy to think of not needing wheels to move fast. Hey! Look at me! I’m flying!

In seconds, they were higher than the roof of the airport. Trees, houses, highways—everything receded beneath them. Nothing looked the same from the air. Lori stared at a blue kidney bean-shaped spot on the ground until it was out of sight, and only then did she realize that it had been someone’s backyard swimming pool.

“Great, huh?” Mom said beside her.

Lori turned her gaze back to her magazine.

“It’s okay.”

Mom didn’t say anything else, and Lori let herself look out the window again after a few minutes. They were in the clouds now. Lori remembered the question that she’d imagined Emma asking: Do the clouds really look like cotton balls? And they did. It was amazing. The clouds looked just like the cotton batting that her great-grandmother rolled out for quilting.

Lori wanted to tell someone about that idea, but if her choices were just Mom and Chuck, she’d take a pass. Mom would say something like, Didn’t I tell you you’d like this? That would ruin everything.

Lori glanced quickly over at Chuck in his aisle seat. Maybe he’d tell Mom what she wanted to hear: how incredible this flight was, how wonderful she was to share it with them. But Chuck had his head back and his eyes shut. His face was pale, making the scattering of pimples stand out more than ever. Pathetic.

Nothing new there.

Lori groaned soundlessly. Two weeks of nobody but Mom and Chuck. How would she survive?





Chuck was going to throw up.

He kept his eyes closed—did he honestly believe that what he couldn’t see couldn’t hurt him? But not being able to see just let him focus more on his stomach. He felt like the five pancakes he’d eaten had expanded, grown arms and legs, declared war on one another. He felt a retch pushing its way up his throat, and he swallowed hard.

Was this how he’d spend his last moments of life? It figured.

They were taking off. He could tell, the way the plane lurched forward. Some force pushed him back against his seat, like on an amusement park ride. He fought back the urge to gag.

Not being able to see was too horrible. He opened his eyes a crack and saw Mom staring at the seat ahead of her, Lori reading a magazine. Like she didn’t care. Gram always did say Lori had a cast-iron stomach and nerves of steel.

Chuck had nerves as wobbly as cooked spaghetti. And a stomach as sensitive as—as—

Jell-O, he thought. And then he began retching. As the plane leveled off, meaning maybe they weren’t going to die—not this time, anyway—the five pancakes in his stomach began a takeoff of their own.





Lori couldn’t believe it. Right there, two seats away, Chuck was starting to puke. Lori didn’t know what to do. And instead of helping at all, Mom was just digging around in a pocket on the seat-back in front of her. No, wait—she was pulling out some bag.

Did people throw up on planes so often that the airlines gave everyone bags, just in case?

That made flying a lot less appealing, in Lori’s mind.

Mom hadn’t been fast enough. Someone across the aisle had already thrust a bag at Chuck. But Chuck, being Chuck, didn’t see it or didn’t know what to do with it. Mom had to shake the bag open, put it right under his mouth, tell him it was there.

Lori couldn’t watch, she was so grossed out. And embarrassed. And mad. Didn’t anyone but her remember? Back when Chuck was little, he got carsick all the time. What was Mom thinking, taking him on a plane? What was Chuck thinking, agreeing to go?

Chuck, the eternal fountain of vomit, seemed to be done for now. Mom turned toward Lori.

“Are you all right, Lori?” she asked. “You don’t feel queasy, do you?”

“I’m fine,” Lori replied. She was trying so hard to keep the anger out of her voice that her words came out flat and dull, like she didn’t care about anything. She turned a page in her magazine, and the anger hit her again full force. Why didn’t Mom remember? Chuck had a delicate stomach; Lori never threw up. Don’t you know us at all? Lori wanted to scream at her mother. Instead, she found herself saying, “You should have known. Take Chuck up, of course he’s going to upchuck.”

Lori wanted the words to come out like a joke, laughing everything off: Ha-ha. Isn’t it hilarious being around Mr. Gross? But the anger had snuck back into Lori’s voice. She sounded nasty, nasty, nasty. If Lori had said something like that at home, Gram would have told her off, sent her to her room, given her some extra chore—trimming an entire fencerow, weeding the whole garden.