Page 5 of Every Step She Takes
“Free headphones?” a flight attendant asks, shoving a basket in our direction. I’m grateful for the interruption as we both take a pair. When Window Seat opens her mouth again, introversion triumphs, and I jab the AirPod back in place. I point to my ear and mouth sorry .
Then I close my eyes and wait for the Xanax to save me.
The wine is free on international flights.
I learn this when the attendant pushing the drink cart takes one look at my face and asks if I’d like a mini bottle of the generic red in an overtly pitying tone.
He passes me two with a wink before getting Window Seat her ginger ale, probably because he’s caught me crying during an episode of Property Brothers: Forever Home on my seat-back screen.
The Xanax has failed me. We’re only two hours into a ten-hour flight, and I’m such a mess of anxiety that another flight attendant comes by to give me a third bottle of red after I polish off the first two.
And it’s as I’m crying into my wine that it happens.
The airplane seems to hiccup in the stratosphere.
For a second, I think I’m more drunk than I realize.
The plane trembles a second time. My right hand reaches for the armrest at the same time Window Seat does. Our fingers brush as a shot of Drew’s face freezes on my personal TV with the words PA ANNOUNCEMENT bannered across the screen.
“Uh, hello there, folks,” says the American pilot. “Looks like we’re experiencing some unexpected turbulence, so I’m gonna go ahead and turn on the fasten seat belt sign and ask—”
The rest of the announcement is drowned out by the intense jolt that rattles the overhead bins.
And holy shit. This is going to end in a Yellowjackets situation. I squeeze the armrest tighter and realize I’m actually squeezing Window Seat’s calloused hand. I’m too panicked to care, and I cling to her as the plane rattles.
This is just anxiety-brain running away with reality , I tell myself. We’re not going to crash .
The plane rollicks, and the red wine in my stomach rollicks along with it, and for a fleeting moment, my stomach exists in zero-G, floating up toward my rib cage like it did when I first saw Window Seat’s face, before my whole body seems to slam back into my seat, with more force driving me downward.
Babies are crying. The captain makes another announcement, and the flight crew hurries to strap themselves into the jump seats.
Everyone around me looks worried, even Window Seat, whose dark eyebrows have jumped into her hairline.
The old lady across the aisle has put away her knitting and now clutches purple rosary beads, mouthing a prayer.
The TV screens go black, and I finally yank off my free headphones. The full sound of panic hits me. An alarm is going off. The captain’s voice crackles in and out as we convulse again.
Doesn’t it always seem to go that as soon as you try to figure out your life, your plane plummets into the Arctic Circle? And on my fucking birthday.
I’m going to die before I have the chance to find the right words.
I’m going to die without knowing who I really am.
I’m going to die without anyone else knowing me, either.
“I think I might be a lesbian!” I shout into the chaos. The confession isn’t meant for anyone but me, my last chance to test the words on my tongue, to see how they feel before I die.
If anyone does hear me over the din of our imminent deaths, they don’t react.
Except Window Seat.
Her rough fingers clutch tighter to mine, and my eyes shift from the blank screen to her worried face. I forgot we’re holding hands.
They say your entire life flashes before your eyes in the moments preceding your death, but I don’t have much of a life, so instead of a Greatest Hits slideshow featuring every Saturday night I spent working in the store, my pre-death ticker-tape parade is of this stranger’s face.
It’s a long, narrow face, offset by a Cupid’s bow mouth.
A dastardly widow’s peak. Blue hair, fading to brown and bleach-white around the temples, that’s cut into some kind of stylish mullet.
A nose ring. A constellation of tattooed stars beneath her left ear, tracing down her long neck.
There are probably more tattoos lurking just below the fabric of her gray shirt.
She doesn’t pluck her eyebrows, she’s not wearing any makeup, and she desperately needs some ChapStick, but she’s still beautiful. Or handsome, maybe? A strong jaw and a chin dimple, and that ineffable feeling that she’s someone important to me, somehow.
Time unfreezes. Window Seat is still staring at me as the plane shakes like a pinball in the arcade of the gods. “I think I might be a lesbian,” I say again, meaning for Window Seat to hear it this time. Because apparently I don’t give a shit about having the perfect words when I’m about to die.
Window Seat gives my hand a squeeze. “Cool,” she says.
Cool?
Some combination of the wine and the dying makes me keep talking. “I-I don’t know for sure if I’m really a lesbian. I went on seventeen first dates with men, and I didn’t feel a damn thing for any of them, and for the first time it seemed so obvious that the problem isn’t with the men at all.”
“Are you sure?” she asks as the plane heaves. “Men are usually the problem.”
“The problem is me. I-I’m not attracted to them.”
“That doesn’t sound like a problem.”
I shake my head and keep trying to make this stranger understand. “I’ve been forcing myself to date men my entire life, and I’ve always hated it, but I never slowed down long enough to wonder why . I… I never let myself wonder if…” My voice trembles. “I didn’t want to question it.”
Window Seat doesn’t have a snarky response for that one.
“But if I’m gay, shouldn’t I already know that about myself? I mean, I’m thirty-five-years-old today!”
“Oh. Happy birthday!” She grins at me like we’re not on the 787 equivalent of the Hindenburg .
“Wouldn’t I know by now?”
“The messages we receive from society and our families can be very powerful, and the current political climate makes coming out more fraught for a lot of people,” she says, perfectly reasonable. At the next patch of turbulence, an overhead storage bin flies open and a woman behind us screams.
I scream louder. “But my family wouldn’t give a shit! I grew up in Seattle, and my sister is bisexual, and I have gay aunts!”
But as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I’m thinking about our senior trip to California, when my friend Rachel wasn’t allowed to go to San Francisco because that’s where the gay people lived.
I’m thinking about my friends who were afraid they’d have to share a dorm room with a lesbian and vowed to change in the bathroom stalls every day if it came to that.
And the tears come even harder. I turn back to this stranger. “I would know if I were gay. Right?”
Window Seat stares at me with soft brown eyes. They remind me of polished dark walnut. “Would you?”
“It doesn’t even matter now! It’s too late!”
“Too late for what?”
“For everything! I’m too old, too inexperienced! I’m going to die a virgin !”
Window Seat’s eyebrows spike all the way up to her widow’s peak. “Well, you know, virginity is just a construct of the patriarchy and—”
I blow a raspberry, and she laughs. Laughs! On this, the eve of our demise.
“It’s not funny! I’ve never had sex!” I blurt and quickly cover my face with my free hand.
Window Seat somehow remains eerily calm. “It’s super common for queer people to miss out on certain adolescent experiences, or to experience them later in life. Our timelines are different than our hetero peers, and many queer people experience a second adolescence when—”
I shake my head again. “I’m too late. It’s too late.”
“It’s never too late to start living as your authentic self,” says this beautifully handsome stranger.
“It is if we’re all dead!”
Something brushes my shoulder. I wonder if it’s falling luggage—preferably something heavy to knock me unconscious for this last part—but when I turn around, I see the flight attendant who snuck me the extra wine staring down at me with the distinct mark of secondhand embarrassment etched into his features.
“Miss, I need you to lower your voice,” he whispers.
“You’re upsetting the other passengers.”
And that’s when I notice the plane is no longer shaking. That it maybe hasn’t been shaking for a while now.
A different flight attendant is carefully readjusting the luggage from the open bin, and on the screen in front of me, Drew and Jonathan are fake-bickering again as they install a support beam.
Several things become clear all at once:
The plane isn’t going to crash.
No one is going to die.
Except maybe me. From mortification.
Because I just came out to the Beautiful/Handsome stranger who is still holding my hand.