Unaccompanied Minor Read Online Free Page A
Author: Hollis Gillespie
cooperating.
Which is saying something, because I have major trust issues, except for with people like my friend Flo, who is my ex aunt-in-law. I still don’t know exactly how we are related—it’s like twice removed by marriage and then even further removed by divorce—but the fact is that Flo has been around my mother and me for all our lives. She called both of us “Kid,” probably because she had no kids of her own, so she treated my mother and me like we were her facsimiles thereof. Still, the only reason I trusted her is because she figured out what I was up to two weeks ago and didn’t tell anyone. She said she’d never seen anything like it in all her years of flying, which, of course, got her to reminiscing.
“Those were the days to fly, kid,” she’d say. “You could smoke and drink Bloody Marys in the galley all day and never have to worry about being Breathalyzed at the end of your shift.”
Flo still smokes and drinks Bloody Marys in the galley all day, so I don’t know why she was nostalgic about that particular thing. It was the reason she always bid to fly the old Lockheed 1011s, because the galley is located under the cabin in a whole separate area where passengers are not even allowed. She could spend the whole flight down there doing anything she wanted, and she didn’t have to answer to anyone—not the passengers, pilots, or even other flight attendants. All she had to do was prepare the carts and send them up in the tiny little elevators, and I usually did that for her. It was part of our deal. That and I was supposed to provide her clean urine samples in case she ever got popped to report for a drug test. So I tried to book myself on as many flights with Flo as I could, because she knew my mother and she knew my situation. Like I said, it did not take her long before she figured out what I was up to after she discovered me in the lost-and-found room of the Detroit employee lounge.
“Kid!” she said, sounding happy and surprised. “What the hell are you doing here?”
She was standing in the doorway with the light coming from behind her, and it illuminated her giant white bun, which made it look like her head was on fire. If you knew Flo, you’d realize why that image is appropriate. As tiny as she is, Flo is never hard to miss. She’s a sixty-seven-year-old flight attendant with a white bun on her head as big as a bicycle seat. That bun is the whole reason she ever got hired, she told me, because back in the sixties you had to be at least five-foot-two to be a stewardess, and Flo is technically only five feet and a half-inch tall. The bun, though, put her up over the line, and they didn’t start getting really strict about these requirements until the 1980s. I know all the airline history. Just ask me.
“Where’s your Rollaboard, kid?” she asked in response to my shocked silence. “Because it looks like you could use a change of clothes.”
“It got gate-checked in Los Angeles,” I told her.
“You should know better.”
I did know better. In fact, I have a whole list of reasons why it’s a bad idea to carry luggage at all. Here are the top four:
Luggage can obstruct the exit in the event of a plane crash
Luggage slows you down between gates during stopovers
Luggage can contain a bunch of severed heads (like the abandoned bag of cadaver heads found at O’Hare recently)
Even carry-on luggage can be forcibly checked at the door of the plane, never to be seen again
That fourth thing actually happened to me two and a half weeks ago. But to be fair, I should not have booked myself on a Boeing 757, which is a single-aisle jet and therefore has only half the overhead stowage space. A Boeing 757 is now the second worst jet on my list of worst jets to fly nonrevenue. The first on the list is a DC-9, of course, because it’s over fifty years old and smells like feet.
But I had hopped the 757 for two reasons: One, I couldn’t take the flight to Atlanta because the agent
Which is saying something, because I have major trust issues, except for with people like my friend Flo, who is my ex aunt-in-law. I still don’t know exactly how we are related—it’s like twice removed by marriage and then even further removed by divorce—but the fact is that Flo has been around my mother and me for all our lives. She called both of us “Kid,” probably because she had no kids of her own, so she treated my mother and me like we were her facsimiles thereof. Still, the only reason I trusted her is because she figured out what I was up to two weeks ago and didn’t tell anyone. She said she’d never seen anything like it in all her years of flying, which, of course, got her to reminiscing.
“Those were the days to fly, kid,” she’d say. “You could smoke and drink Bloody Marys in the galley all day and never have to worry about being Breathalyzed at the end of your shift.”
Flo still smokes and drinks Bloody Marys in the galley all day, so I don’t know why she was nostalgic about that particular thing. It was the reason she always bid to fly the old Lockheed 1011s, because the galley is located under the cabin in a whole separate area where passengers are not even allowed. She could spend the whole flight down there doing anything she wanted, and she didn’t have to answer to anyone—not the passengers, pilots, or even other flight attendants. All she had to do was prepare the carts and send them up in the tiny little elevators, and I usually did that for her. It was part of our deal. That and I was supposed to provide her clean urine samples in case she ever got popped to report for a drug test. So I tried to book myself on as many flights with Flo as I could, because she knew my mother and she knew my situation. Like I said, it did not take her long before she figured out what I was up to after she discovered me in the lost-and-found room of the Detroit employee lounge.
“Kid!” she said, sounding happy and surprised. “What the hell are you doing here?”
She was standing in the doorway with the light coming from behind her, and it illuminated her giant white bun, which made it look like her head was on fire. If you knew Flo, you’d realize why that image is appropriate. As tiny as she is, Flo is never hard to miss. She’s a sixty-seven-year-old flight attendant with a white bun on her head as big as a bicycle seat. That bun is the whole reason she ever got hired, she told me, because back in the sixties you had to be at least five-foot-two to be a stewardess, and Flo is technically only five feet and a half-inch tall. The bun, though, put her up over the line, and they didn’t start getting really strict about these requirements until the 1980s. I know all the airline history. Just ask me.
“Where’s your Rollaboard, kid?” she asked in response to my shocked silence. “Because it looks like you could use a change of clothes.”
“It got gate-checked in Los Angeles,” I told her.
“You should know better.”
I did know better. In fact, I have a whole list of reasons why it’s a bad idea to carry luggage at all. Here are the top four:
Luggage can obstruct the exit in the event of a plane crash
Luggage slows you down between gates during stopovers
Luggage can contain a bunch of severed heads (like the abandoned bag of cadaver heads found at O’Hare recently)
Even carry-on luggage can be forcibly checked at the door of the plane, never to be seen again
That fourth thing actually happened to me two and a half weeks ago. But to be fair, I should not have booked myself on a Boeing 757, which is a single-aisle jet and therefore has only half the overhead stowage space. A Boeing 757 is now the second worst jet on my list of worst jets to fly nonrevenue. The first on the list is a DC-9, of course, because it’s over fifty years old and smells like feet.
But I had hopped the 757 for two reasons: One, I couldn’t take the flight to Atlanta because the agent
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