Five Total Strangers

by Natalie D. Richards

  Also by Natalie D. Richards

  Six Months Later

  Gone Too Far

  My Secret to Tell

  One Was Lost

  We All Fall Down

  What You Hide

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2020 by Natalie D. Richards

  Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Kerri Resnick

  Cover images © Egle Kasparaviciute/EyeEm/Getty; schankz/Shutterstock

  Internal design by Danielle McNaughton/Sourcebooks

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  To my fellow travelers,

  explorers of water and deserts

  and everything in between.

  Chapter One

  The cabin lights flicker on and I blink awake, neck stiff and mouth tacky. An overhead bin rattles. Turbulence. I yawn and one of my earbuds slips out just as we drop through an air pocket, the airplane settling with a jolt. Scattered gasps and snatches of panicked conversation rise in the cabin.

  The intercom crackles. “Folks, we’re about twenty miles outside of Newark. As you might have noticed, the weather has intensified, so it’s going to be a bumpy descent.”

  My seatmate, Harper, shifts impatiently. “Cue the hysteria.”

  I laugh because it’s true. Infrequent flyers always get twitchy when pilots start tossing around words like turbulence, bumpy, or weather. Across from us, a woman with dark eyes and thin lips tightens her seat belt to the point of obvious discomfort. I imagine painting this scene. I’d focus on her face, blurring out the rest. The mix of fear and energy in her eyes tells the story.

  The woman catches me staring and gives a pointed glance at the loose seat belt across my hips. I ignore her and lean closer to the window to see better. Unlike Seat Belt Sally, I’m not worried about a little choppy air. Unless the plane is plummeting to earth on fire, there’s no point in getting worked up.

  We can bounce all the way down as far as I’m concerned. I just need to get home to my mom.

  Without meaning to, I picture my aunt’s hand in mine, thin and waxy and bruised with old IV sites. This is not the memory I’d choose. Aunt Phoebe and I had great memories. Making homemade fudge. Trying on scarves. Playing together with her paints and color wheels. All these beautiful pieces of my aunt are smudged and watery, but those days from a year ago, the last ones we spent together—they come at me in high definition.

  The smell of disinfectant and medicine. The squeak of my shoes on the hospital floor. My mother’s soft, hiccupping sobs. If I let myself think about it too much, it’s like I’m still there.

  But it’s worse for Mom. Phoebe was my aunt, but she was my mother’s twin. It’s like losing one of my lungs, she once told me. I don’t think I’ll ever breathe right again.

  A clatter brings me back to the present. In the front of the plane cabin, the flight attendants make their way down the aisle, collecting trash and securing seat-back tables. A passenger is arguing with them. I can’t hear what he’s asking, but the flight attendant is firm. No, you can’t access the overheads. Sir, I can’t allow that, it’s unsafe.

  I zip my own bag shut as the attendants move on, pleasant and professional even as the cabin bumps and creaks. Beside me, Harper applies lipstick. With the way this plane is jiggling, I don’t know how she’s not shoving it up her nose, but she coats it on with utter precision. It’s like a magic trick.

  I shift in my ratty jeans, feeling sloppy beside her crisp white shirt and wool pencil skirt. Harper’s been talking about her college, so she can’t be much older than me, but she’s sophisticated in a way I doubt I’ll ever be.

  The plane drops again, enough to make my stomach flip. The wings catch air with a thunk. My teeth clack together, and a flight attendant stumbles in the aisle. Someone begins to cry. I take a deep breath and close my eyes. I guess they weren’t kidding about it being bumpy.

  The intercom warbles again. “Flight attendants, please take your seats.”

  Harper tucks her long dark hair behind her ear. “Great, now I’m stuck holding my cup.”

  The plane thumps and shimmies its way down through the clouds. It’s a hard go. My teeth clack together. Bags bounce up against the undersides of seats. I spend enough time in the air to know it’s probably fine, but I still check the window. Just get down out of the clouds already.

  In front of me, that woman is still crying, but I don’t blame her now. Almost everyone looks nervous. Well, everyone except Harper.

  “How long is your layover?” she asks, tucking her lipstick into its cap without spilling a drop of whatever’s left of her Diet Coke.

  “Forty-five minutes,” I say as the plane dips right and then rises. “Tight.”

  “It won’t matter in this mess. We’ll all be delayed.” Then she grins. “So, did you think any more about our conversation?”

  Normally, I avoid ch
itchat on airplanes at all costs, but before we even took off, Harper pointed out my silver cuff bracelet, a gift from my dad two Christmases ago. She recognized the jewelry maker by sight, which brought us to the conversation of metalworking, then modern art, and then painting. There’s no stopping me when I get started on all that.

  “I dozed off somewhere over Oklahoma, I think,” I say.

  She laughs. “Hopefully this blizzard will convince you a transfer to CalArts is a good idea.”

  “Transfer?”

  “Yes. Look, even if you didn’t have the grades for it before, you said you’re pulling a 4.0 now. And you’re talented. I’ve seen your work.”

  “Well, on my phone.”

  “I’ve seen enough. You have a focus in your paintings that’s uncommon.”

  Focus is what Phoebe saw in my work, too. She said I knew how to use color to draw a viewer’s eye to the heart of each painting. That’s how she convinced me to take the money she offered and to transfer permanently to my super selective and pricey art school that is across the country from Mom. I’d gotten accepted as a junior, but I came home early when Phoebe got sick, and I had no intention of going back. Especially with the hefty tuition hike that would affect my senior year.

  Phoebe wasn’t having that. One of the last conversations we had was her trying to convince me to make the move permanent. She’d pressed a check into my hand and held my wrist tight in her thin fingers. Told me she wanted me to go back, and more than that, she wanted me to go senior year, too.

  Your work has heart, Mira. You have to follow that. It matters.

  I don’t know if that’s true, but I wasn’t about to argue with my dying aunt.

  “Anyway,” Harper says, bringing my attention back to the present. “No one is going to care that you’re at a community college once they see your work.”

  Community college?

  I think over our earlier conversation. I showed her photos of my most recent student exhibit. And I admitted I was a little disappointed in my painting instructor. I’m not sure why she thought I was in community college, but a transfer to any college isn’t possible. Because I’m still in high school.

  I think about clarifying things, but why bother? If a random stranger on a plane wants to see me as a college freshman instead of a sick-to-death-of-high-school senior, who cares?

  “I’ll think about it,” I say.

  “You should,” she says. “You can text me if you want me to talk to my friend Jude.”

  The plane dips hard left, a wing catching a downdraft. The crying woman screams, but Harper just sighs and asks me for my phone number so she can text me, still balancing her cup precariously in her left hand. I’m a far cry from a fearful flyer, but this girl is unflappable.

  The plane settles into a hard shudder, and now lots of people are making noise. Harper huffs, muttering, “Honestly, if we’re going to crash, let’s do it so we can all be done with the theatrics.”

  I clutch my armrests, but grin.

  Dear, God, if you can hear me, please let me grow up to be like Harper.

  “Anyway, Jude graduates next year,” she says. “Music history, which is such a trust fund major, but he’s had great opportunities. You said you’re not loving Everglen—Wait, it was Everglen, right?”

  I nod—that’s the name of my high school. It feels a little weird, letting her continue on this line.

  “You probably just need something more robust. You’d love CalArts. Everybody there does.”

  “Wait, you don’t go there?”

  “No, I’m an international relations major at Pomona.”

  I smirk. “Sounds like a light load.”

  She sighs. “It would be if I weren’t also majoring in Asian Studies.”

  The plane lists hard to the right, then pops up and left. Others are crying now, and truthfully, I can’t remember a worse descent in my long history of flying. But Harper is still chattering on with a distant look in her eye.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she muses. “I could drop it to a minor, but I like a challenge.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  She goes on and on, chirping about majors and internships, without a single glance at the window. It’s like she’s absolutely certain the plane will land without incident because she has things to do and places to be.

  And she’s right.

  We touch down with a squeak of tires and a smattering of applause. Something in my stomach unclenches so I can take a full breath. Guess I wasn’t quite as relaxed as I thought. The flight attendant crackles over the intercom while people throughout the cabin gather bags and laugh in relief. As we’re deplaning, I open my phone and check my messages. Six of them. Zari, Dad, and three from Mom.

  I pull up Mom’s messages first, focusing on the last one.

  Mom: Text when you land. Working, but weather has me worried.

  I frown and run my thumb over the screen, imagining Mom obsessively checking the weather on her phone. Maybe I’m exaggerating. She wasn’t always like this, but after I moved… Well, after Phoebe, really. Everything was different after Phoebe.

  “Boyfriend?” Harper guesses.

  I shake my head. “Mom texts. The weather. You know.”

  She laughs softly. “And I mom-talked all the way here with that transfer advice.”

  I snort. “Trust me. You and my mother are polar opposites.”

  Which is probably why I immediately liked Harper so much. Or at the least, why I want to be like her. Harper is like Aunt Phoebe with a style upgrade and a world-class travel log. My mom, by contrast, is quiet and cautious, a post-surgery nurse who’s afraid of infections and airplanes. And, for most of the last year, almost everything else.

  Maybe she wouldn’t be so afraid if I’d stayed.

  No. I can’t keep doing this. She wanted me to go. She wrote the check from Phoebe for half of my senior year, for Pete’s sake. And Dad jumped in to pay the rest, thrilled to have me on his side of the country a little longer. We all agreed this was best for me.

  But was it best for her?

  I step off the gangway into the airport and take a sharp breath. Every seat in sight is filled, phone cords strung from endless outlets, suitcases stacked in every corner. The walls are cluttered, too—lined with shopping bags and strollers and rumpled-looking travelers half-asleep or holding phones.

  Something nudges my right arm. I turn to see Harper push past me, leather duffel rolling tidily beside her.

  “Aren’t you going to talk to the desk?” I ask, nodding at the airline counter, where the entire population of Pennsylvania appears to be gathered.

  “Spending Christmas Eve in an airport hotel? No thanks. I’m getting a car.”

  I laugh a little, because I’m pretty sure she’s not old enough to get a car. And I doubt there will be cars available. Outside, I see the barest wisps of flurries. I’m going to go out on a limb and say canceling our flight isn’t necessary. Heck, delaying our flight seems over the top. Harper marches on, all steely determination and clicking patent leather pumps.

  She pauses, turning back to me. “You should come. If you want. I can drop you in Pittsburgh.”

  Yeah. I’m pretty sure optimism can only take you so far. I smile and shake my head. “I should probably take my chances in line. I’ve got to figure out what I’m doing.”

  “Well…” Harper pauses like she might argue, and then shakes her head. “Text me about CalArts. And best of luck getting home!”

  She heads down the escalator, followed by a broad-shouldered guy with dark hair and a family with three young children. Near me, several airport staff members are moving folding cots into the hallway. One of them is watching over the work, a walkie-talkie to her ear. The TVs overhead look similarly ominous, one weather forecast displaying the word Blizzurricane in shimmering type.

&nb
sp; My heart sinks. I don’t need to talk to anyone to know what’s happening here. Weary travelers. Tangles of charging cables. Passengers sleeping under suit coats. Cots being moved into the waiting areas. I spot the Arrivals and Departures sign on a nearby wall but I don’t bother getting close. There’s no point in checking for Pittsburgh or possible alternate flights. Every flight has the same status. Canceled.

  I can’t get home.

  The thought is a needle of panic to the base of my throat. It’s not possible. I have to get home. She needs me. She needs me to make her laugh and get her to watch trashy TV. I can distract her from the fact that Phoebe died on Christmas. But not if I’m not home.

  I start a dozen text messages that I delete just as fast. There’s no way to text her any of this. No careful framing is going to keep this news from reducing her to a nervous wreck.

  Finally, I give up and call my stepfather, Daniel. Daniel, a soft-spoken, steady accountant who is the antithesis of my compact, high-energy father in every way, answers on the second ring. Because he always answers on the second ring.

  “Mira,” he says after the slightest hesitation. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Well, Christmas Eve,” I say. “And it’s less than merry. I need you to help me break the news to Mom that I’m stuck at the airport. Like overnight stuck.”

  “You’re stuck at the airport? Do you need help?”

  “No, no, it’s just weather. It doesn’t even look that bad. I’m figuring it out, but I think I’m going to have to fly out tomorrow. I just need you to tell Mom because you know this is a hard day for her.”

  “I’m not sure…” He pauses awkwardly, like he’s distracted. I wonder if I caught him making the noodles. Noodles are his Christmas thing. We have them every year. I painted them once, giant yellow sheets of dough, rolled paper thin over the dining room table. The rolling pin was my focal point.

  Daniel coughs. “Maybe you should leave her a message. Have you texted her?”

  I cringe. He can’t be serious. “Uh, no, I don’t want her to hear about this at work. What if you have her call me when she gets home?”

  “Home?” This pause is different. He doesn’t move or sigh. When his voice comes back, it’s tight and sad. “Mira, I’m not living with your mother. Did she not mention this to you?”