Unaccompanied Minor Read Online Free Page B

working the gate that day was, in an understatement, suspicious. And two, the 757 was the last flight leaving for Detroit that night, and the Detroit crew lounge is where I know I can still use my mother’s badge for access. In Atlanta, for some reason, when I swiped her badge through the security reader and entered her passcode, the door just beeped menacingly and remained locked. It’s a good thing everyone’s all complacent again and no one ever pays attention to door alarms at airports anymore. They all just assumed it tripped by mistake. So all I had to do was smile and take two steps backward into the crowd and out of suspicion.
    That doesn’t mean I was
unable
to get into the Atlanta employee lounge, it just means it was not as easy. Like I had to sit in the elevator on the A Concourse until somebody from the employee lounge summoned it from underneath. That way I could ride it down there without having to swipe my mother’s badge, and just disembark as though I belonged there. Funny, though, I really did feel like I belonged there.
    Again, in Detroit, my mother’s badge still worked. And why wouldn’t it? She may have been in the nut house, but she was still employed by WorldAir.
    The lost-and-found room in the Detroit crew lounge is like a walk-in closet, packed with old suitcases and discarded uniform pieces, but they’re still clothes, and flight attendants come in all sizes. I’m a size 4 and some of those pants were too small even for me, while others were big enough to be used as hammocks. That’s when Flo busted me, when I was swapping out my old clothes for some new ones.
    “C’mon, start talking,” she prompted me.
    “I ran away,” I whispered.
    “I gathered that,” she said, giving me a hug as, finally, the tears came. Even though her head hardly made it to my elbows, her hugs were still pretty powerful. She locked the door behind her and lit a cigarette that she was not at all supposed to be smoking. Then it occurred to me that the Detroit lost-and-found room was her secret cigarette place. Flo had secret cigarette places in practically every airport that existed, not to mention the airplanes. When it comes to smoking on airplanes she was like a MacGyver all on her own. She kept shower caps in her carry-on bag to slip on the overhead smoke detectors in the 767 lavatories, for one, and she’d blow the smoke right into the sink drain, which has double the suction of a vacuum hose.
    I told her what I felt I could without endangering her. Flo is as suspicious of authority and bureaucracy as I am, so thankfully she didn’t ask me to turn myself in as a runaway. She knew I’d be better off living in the air than I was at Ash’s place. Instead, she made me promise to book myself solely on her flights and stick by her side as much as possible, and when it was not possible, to stay in the employee lounges while keeping in constant contact with her.
    “I promise,” I told her.
    “And this is just for now, kid,” she said, extinguishing her cigarette under the toe of her high-heeled black pump, “until we figure something out.”
    Flo has been working on airplanes since ’67, and she used to say she’d retire when her age matched the year she was hired, but that happened this year and now she’s all, “I’m never leaving, kid, not until they pry the peanuts from my cold, dead fingers.”
    I can still feel my heart snap in half after watching her surrender herself to the hijackers. They made her come up from the lower galley of the plane by threatening to kill another passenger unless she gave herself up. I begged her not to do it—especially considering the person they were threatening to kill.
    “No matter what we think of him,” Flo said, “he doesn’t deserve to die at the hands of those animals.”
    “Oh, Flo,” I cried. “We see that differently.”



CHAPTER 1
    It’s been exactly a year to the day—today is my fifteenth birthday, by the way, and I like my cake chocolate