Layoverland

by Gabby Noone

  “Sorry,” he mumbles, rubbing his eyes.

  “I have briefly considered it, though. That this is some kind of Area 51 thing. Like, what would happen if we walked all the way to the end of the tarmac outside? What would we see?”

  “Right! The end of the universe? Or just, like, a chain-link fence separating us from some random highway?”

  “Really makes you think.”

  “We should find out for ourselves,” Caleb says, a sudden purpose in his voice. “I’m going outside.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Bea, I promised you we would go on an adventure. This is the adventure.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “What?” he asks, gently mocking. “Are you scared?”

  I narrow my eyes.

  “Of course I’m not scared.”

  “Okay, so then why don’t you abuse your special agent privileges and take us out onto the tarmac?”

  20

  Todd is still manning the departures gate, although he’s now half asleep.

  “Good evening, Todd,” I say.

  He jolts awake.

  “What do you want?” he asks, wiping drool from the corner of his mouth.

  “My assignment, Caleb—you met him earlier, remember? He just had a major breakthrough. I don’t know what it was, but something triggered his memory at lunch.”

  I turn and glare at Caleb. He begins nodding rapidly and unconvincingly.

  “Yeah! You know, they say scent is very powerful when it comes to conjuring memories. Lunch was very, um, pungent.”

  “Were you eating together?” Todd presses.

  “Y—” Caleb begins.

  “No,” I interject. “I mean, at separate tables, but we were eating in the food court at the same time. That’s how Caleb here found me so easily. He asked if we could go out to the hangar ASAP. I hope that’s okay?”

  “Look, Beatrice,” he says. “I don’t let agents go out to the hangar for more than one session a day.”

  Todd pauses and quickly glances to his left and right.

  “But you’re a friend of Sadie’s,” he says, lowering his voice, “and I happen to know there is a free hangar right now because one of the other agents wrapped up early. Plus, conversion rates are really lagging these days and if I don’t get more people moving out of the airport, the big guns are gonna come in and put the pressure on me.

  “So,” he says, sliding me a pair of keys. “Here. But just this once.”

  The corners of my mouth slowly turn up into a smile.

  ONCE WE’RE OUTSIDE, I walk toward the fleet of golf carts.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Caleb says. “We are doing this the old-fashioned way. We will walk to the end of the universe. Or whatever it turns out to be.”

  “But my feet are tired from all that aimless walking we already did!” I protest. “And I’m being forced against my will to wear these stupid shoes.”

  I stare down at my white patent-leather pumps and pine for the Converse high-tops I was wearing when I arrived.

  “Do you need me to carry you on my back?” Caleb gripes.

  “Uh, no,” I say quickly, although the idea of him picking me up in his arms is not the grossest. This unfortunately seems to be the recurring theme with Caleb. The idea of him is consistently . . . not the grossest. So I force myself to remember: Driving under the influence. Blunt-force trauma. Internal bleeding. Gross is an understated way to even describe these things.

  I pull my shoes off and walk barefoot. The smooth, black asphalt feels surprisingly squishy under my toes, almost pleasant.

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  We walk toward the impossible-seeming horizon line in the distance, illuminated by overheard lights. The cold night air makes the tiny hairs on my arms stand up.

  “This will take forever,” I mutter.

  “I’ll race you?” Caleb asks, raising his eyebrows.

  “Mmm, no.”

  “Last one to the end of the universe is a rotten egg!” he exclaims, running off in his sandals.

  I keep walking at a normal pace, resisting the pull to follow him. Plus, I hate running. The magical endorphins that everyone claims come after physical activity are basically nonexistent in my brain.

  “I can smell you rotting from here,” he calls back, mock-waving his hand in front of his nose.

  “Whatever!”

  Suddenly I notice a glow on the ground next to me. I turn around and look. An air traffic control guy with one of those giant glow-stick things is coming toward us. Maybe it’s my fight-or-flight response kicking in, but I start running too.

  “Nice of you to join me,” Caleb says when I’m a foot behind him, panting and out of breath.

  “Company,” I say through pained breaths. “We’ve got . . . company. . . .”

  He glances over his shoulder at the air traffic control guy.

  “Ah,” he says, slowing down his pace to a walk. “I don’t want to get in trouble. We better head back.”

  “Are you kidding?” I say, speeding up. “We’re nowhere close to the end. We need to see what’s out there.”

  He hesitates while I begin to run past him.

  “Who’s the egg now?” I yell back.

  “Rotten egg,” he says, reluctantly beginning to run again.

  “Same difference!”

  And we’re off. We run on and on and on and on. Somehow, the asphalt beneath my feet begins to feel like it doesn’t exist. It’s like I’m flying. Maybe these mythical endorphins do exist; they were just lying dormant inside me.

  I think we might actually do it. We might actually make it to the end. The air traffic control guy is a distant memory. After a few minutes, our paces have evened out and Caleb and I jog side by side. If we were wearing actual exercise clothes, we’d look like one of those annoying couples who go for evening runs around the neighborhood together, flaunting that not only are they in love but they’re also physically fitter than you.

  I turn and look up at Caleb. He winks at me and begins to speed up again.

  “You can’t just wink at me and get away with it!” I yell after him.

  But it’s pointless. Because next thing I know, Caleb is gone. Not just ran-ahead-of-me gone. Gone as in his whole body has completely vanished into the ether.

  21

  “Emmy!” I called, out of breath as I approached her and Skyler’s table in the cafeteria. “Something so weird just happened in Walsh’s class.”

  “What?” she asked, turning to look at me.

  Skyler crossed his arms and gave me the stink eye.

  “Oh,” I said. “Was I interrupting something?”

  “No,” Emmy said as Skyler nodded.

  Things seemed tense between them lately and I had no idea why. I hoped it was just that Emmy was waking up to the fact that Skyler was a total try-hard.

  Emmy and I had the same lunch period because she was a genius who was placed in a senior-level physics class that only fit into her schedule if she had lunch with us juniors instead of the sophomores. It was the same case for Skyler, but I wouldn’t classify him as a genius. They had become close and started going out last year, when they were the only freshman in the junior-level biology class. Even though they were nerds, they had lots of friends, but none of them were juniors. I knew lots of juniors, but none of them were my friends. This meant the three of us all sat together.

  “So you know that girl Taylor Fields? My enemy?”

  “Of course,” Emmy said. “One of your three thousand enemies.”

  “Well, she was going off about how abortion is bad and then was like . . .”

  Emmy kept her eyes intently on me as Skyler ignored me and pulled two sandwiches for them out of a reusable plastic container. My stomach audibly grumbled at the sight of them even though I kne
w they were probably filled with something gross, like roasted cauliflower.

  “Ugh, hold on. I’ll tell you after I buy food. I wonder why I’m so hungry.”

  “Probably because your breakfast ended up down the front of some thug’s shirt,” Skyler mumbled.

  “Don’t use the word thug, Skyler,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “What? Dominic is white. It’s not offensive.”

  “Well, it’s objectively offensive for you as a white person also to use the word thug.”

  At this point, Emmy would typically interject and tell us to stop arguing, but when I looked at her, I realized she was staring at her phone, her face frozen in a horrified expression.

  “What is it, Emmy?” I asked.

  It was like she didn’t hear me.

  “Em?”

  Her phone dropped out of her hands, landing with a thwack on the linoleum floor.

  “You okay, babe?” Skyler asked, leaning over to pick it up.

  Ugh, he called her babe! Another thing I couldn’t stand.

  Emmy shook her head and pushed Skyler’s arm away so he couldn’t reach the phone. Tears pooled at the corners of her eyes.

  “Emmy, seriously, what’s wrong?” I pressed.

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Nothing.”

  “This doesn’t seem like nothing,” I said.

  Skyler and I looked at each other with more than just our usual hostility for a moment. If Emmy was upset, it had to be either my or Skyler’s fault.

  “Is this because Bea made you late to school today?” he asked, putting an arm around her, but still looking at me. “I think it’d be a good idea if, from now on, you got a ride with me.”

  Emmy just ignored him. At that moment, his phone lit up where it sat on the table next to his lunch. He quickly glanced at it, then, noticing something that must’ve sparked his interest, picked it up and gave it his full attention.

  “Emmy, what am I . . . looking . . . at?” he said, squinting at his screen.

  “I . . . I’m sorry . . . I . . . have to get out of here,” Emmy said through panicked breaths. She leaned over to pick up her phone, then, before I knew it, was sprinting away, leaving behind her backpack and a pile of textbooks.

  “What happened?” I asked, turning to Skyler. “Did you do something?”

  “No, I . . .”

  I thought of Taylor’s weird comment from earlier, “Tell your sister that she shouldn’t have ignored me on her way in.” I wasn’t sure how all of this connected, but before Skyler could even finish his sentence, I was running after Emmy.

  22

  “Caleb?” I cry out as I come to a halt, panting and clutching my aching sides.

  I stand up straight again and spin my body around, trying to look for him. This has to be some kind of practical joke. There is nothing and no one around except the glowing airport about a half mile behind us.

  “This isn’t funny,” I say, and as the words come out of my mouth I realize who I’ve become: the girl in every horror movie who says “This isn’t funny” as she realizes she’s definitely about to die because she decided to go along with a plan made up by some stupid guy.

  I should probably be happy that the person who killed me just got sucked up into thin air, but instead my heart pounds of out my chest and my body breaks out into a cold sweat.

  “Caleb?” I say, louder this time even though I know it’s pointless.

  I inch forward, afraid that if I take a step too far, I’ll end up wherever he is.

  In the blink of an eye, I’m no longer outside in the cold dark night. I look to my right. Caleb is staring at me, mouth gaping, eyes wide. I jump away from him.

  My heartbeat slows as I take in my surroundings. There are fluorescent lights beaming above my head, rows and rows of benches, an unappealing scent that reminds me of overcooked broccoli in the air—I’m back in the waiting area of the airport.

  “What . . . was that?” I say, still clutching my chest.

  “I don’t know,” Caleb says, voice shaky.

  We stand next to a concrete beam in the far corner of the room. No one sitting around or passing by has seemed to notice us materialize. Todd is still half asleep in his chair.

  “I thought you’d totally vanished into the ether!” I say, putting my hands to my temples.

  “I know! Me too!” he says, his eyes wide. “Maybe this means that if you try to escape the airport, you just get shot back inside using some sort of . . . wormhole?”

  “So it’s physically impossible to leave on your own?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Caleb purses his lips thoughtfully, then breaks out into a smile that dissolves into a laugh. It’s contagious.

  “That was amazing, though!”

  “I know,” I say, laughing too.

  “See, when I promised an adventure, I wasn’t lying.”

  “It appears you weren’t,” I admit. “But you would never have gotten out there without my help.”

  “We should try it again!”

  “No way,” I say, shaking my head once, remembering the Disciplinary Council. The surveillance cameras. The surveillance cameras! When did I become this stupid?

  “C’mon! Just one more time,” he says, grazing my arm with the back of his knuckles. “Are you scared?”

  His touch makes my arm feel like it’s on fire, in the best way possible. But so what? I need to remember where I am and who I’m with and why I should extract myself from this situation immediately.

  “No,” I say, pushing his hand away a little too forcefully, throwing a wet blanket on any bit of camaraderie between us. “That’s enough adventure for me.”

  Caleb pulls his hand back and crosses his arms. He studies my face.

  “Sorry. Yeah. I guess it’s late. Maybe we can try again tomorrow. Or some other night.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” I say. “We still have a lot of work to do.”

  THE NEXT DAY in the hangar, I worry that the mood feels too much like a classroom the day after you’ve run into your teacher out in the real world.

  You see them at Walmart, a basket full of deodorant and laundry detergent and toilet paper, proof that their bodies betray them on a daily basis just as much as yours does. Or even worse, you see them letting loose with friends, getting buzzed from two and a half sangrias when you’re just trying to enjoy your mediocre meal at a local fast-casual restaurant.

  Except, in this case, I’m the teacher and Caleb is the student. I don’t want him to humanize me. I don’t want him to know too much.

  Or do I?

  Would telling him about my life make it all the more crushing when he eventually realizes he’s the one who ended it?

  He looks too comfortable strapped into his chair with the helmet on his head.

  Maybe this familiarity can be a good thing. If he really trusts me, he’ll reveal the worst depths of his mind to me.

  “Did you have a girlfriend?” I blurt out, firing up the Memstractor 3000.

  “I don’t really get why that’s a relevant question,” he says with a nervous laugh.

  “Everything is a relevant question here.”

  Caleb blows air out of his mouth and rolls his eyes.

  “No,” he says quietly.

  “What’s that?” I say, supporting my ear with my hand.

  “The answer is no, I didn’t have a girlfriend. I’ve never had a girlfriend,” he mumbles.

  “But not for lack of trying? Is that the vibe I’m getting?”

  Caleb rolls his eyes, but then surrenders himself to a memory.

  We’re in a school cafeteria, standing near the pizza and chicken nuggets as they endure slow, painful deaths under heat lamps.

  He stands in line for food and
is about to grab a chicken patty sandwich wrapped in paper, but then a girl with long, glittery fingernails cuts in front of him and beats him to it.

  “Hey!” Caleb protests.

  “Snooze, you lose, Caleb,” the girl says, smiling at him. He turns and looks at her. She has pink hair cut into a symmetrical bob. Her hair and makeup are truly on point, like how I wish I looked if I weren’t currently doomed to wearing smudged mascara for the next million years.

  “Just kidding. You know I’m a vegetarian anyway,” she says, plopping the sandwich onto his tray.

  “Ha ha, Laura,” he says. “So, library after school?”

  “Sure, I mean, I would rather we just go to my house and watch Bob Ross on Netflix,” she says, tugging on his arm, dare I say . . . flirtatiously?

  “We can’t. We have to finish editing each other’s early decision applications,” Caleb insists.

  “Ugh! We can make time to watch him paint at least one majestic mountain landscape. He’s so soothing. We deserve a break. Watching Bob Ross is, like, self-care, okay? In this increasingly high-pressure, late-capitalist society, it’s important to take time for yourself.”

  “I don’t have time for myself,” Caleb deadpans.

  “Fine.”

  “You said you’d give me feedback on my essay by now, Laura.”

  For a brief second, she gives him a disappointed look.

  “I only ask,” he adds, “because you know I think you’re the only person around here who will honestly tell me if my essay is nonsense, even though I definitely think what you just said about Bob Ross is nonsense.”

  “All right. Library,” she says, smirking. “But you’re buying me McNuggets after.”

  “Those aren’t vegetarian. . . .”

  “So? Yes, I’m a vegetarian. Yes, I eat McNuggets. We do exist,” she chants, backing out of the lunch line and waving goodbye.

  “What were you thinking?” I yell at Present Caleb. “Laura is hot and clearly so much cooler than you—”

  “You think I don’t realize that now?” he mutters, glaring at me.

  “I mean, I can’t even believe you guys were friends, to be honest . . .” I continue.