Page 14 of The First Kind of Love
As we approach our first-class seats, Fulton and I find that there’s a teenage girl sitting across the aisle with her headphones on.
“Do you want the window or the aisle?” Fulton asks me.
When I gulp, a little bit of stomach acid splashes the back of my throat. “Aisle is fine.”
I’m about to try and lift my carry-on into the compartment above, but before I can even fully outstretch my arms, Fulton’salready depositing it for me. I mouth a gratefulthank youas I shimmy past him. I nudge my backpack into the alcove near my feet, trying to wipe the I’m-gonna-shit-my-pants expression off my face before Fulton suspects anything’s wrong.
Small spaces are a big no go. Small spaces in the air or underwater? NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS. We’re humans, okay? We were designed to walk onland. We shouldn’t be forty thousand feet off the ground. It’s not normal.
But my irrational fear of flying didn’t stem from watching too many fatal plane crash videos on the internet when I was a teenager. My difficulty with small spaces and a lack of control began all the way back in my childhood.
I had a good childhood. Pretty cookie-cutter. Well, I mean, everything was great except for the money side of things. My parents allotted a lot of their time to growing and honing our family-run business, so I didn’t get to spend nearly as much time with them as I wanted. They were always so busy, but I couldn’t fault them for it. We were a family of workaholics who thought “quality” time consisted of taking inventory together. Anyways, that’s not important. Whatisimportant is the wretched day of January twenty-ninth, aka, the day that changed everything.
Chinese New Year festivities were going on, as they typically did. My family and I always went over to my aunt’s house since she lived on acres of land. Even though I’m an only child, I have a boatload of cousins who all come around during the holidays. And what happens when you leave a flock of rabid children unsupervised for a day? False imprisonment, that’s what.
One of my knucklehead cousins—twice removed on my dad’s side—thought it would beoh-so-funnyto dare me to traverse my aunt’s dank (and most likely haunted) cellar. None of us were brave enough to venture into that subterranean hellhole. It was creepy, it was dark, it was ninety-five percent cobwebs, and our aunt forbade us from getting into her oldjunk down there. I didn’t want to step foot down those rickety stairs, but a dare was a dare, and I was too young to know any better.
The dare specifically stated that I was to bring back one of Aunt Linh’s porcelain garden gnomes, but little did I know that a stupid, baseless dare was going to result in a lifetime of trauma. Because the second I was scavenging wicker baskets and contracting hives from the dust, the door slammed shut behind me and the click of the lock permeated my little ears.
I screamed and banged and bargained for freedom, but nobody answered me. My cousins didn’t even stick around to snicker and tease me—they just straight up left me there. I had no way out. There were no windows. It was a compact space no larger than your average wine cellar. I don’t remember how long I was trapped there; all I remember is the way my eyes and throat burned after crying for thirty minutes straight. I convinced myself that I was going to die down there because nobody would ever look for me.
I was out of control.
It was the scariest moment of my entire life. After that, I vowed to myself that I’d never know what it feels like to be at the mercy of another person for as long as I lived. People aren’t always reliable. Exhibit A: Ace Jameson.
I like constants. Work is a constant for me. It’s predictable. I have a rigid schedule, and I stick to it no matter what. So just agreeing to go on this trip with Fulton was a shove into the goddamn deep end.
“Are you okay?” Fulton’s disembodied voice asks from beside me.
I nod, though the shakiness in my tone belies my painfully obvious discomfort. “Yeah, why?”
Everyone begins to settle into their seats around us, and the wane of commotion predicts a forecast of hyperventilating, possible tears, and definite nausea. My fingers curlabsentmindedly around the armrests, knuckles bleached, arms straining like there’s a fucking knife to my throat and one wrong move guarantees bloodshed.
Deep breaths, Shiloh. You got this. Everyone flies on an airplane. Babies fly, for crying out loud. You’re braver than a baby, right?
“Um, you just look a little pale,” he says, a frown etched onto his lips.
Trepidation curls in my belly, my heart seething more relentlessly than ocean waves during a thunderstorm. The overworked muscle knocks against my chest like water eroding an already-scarped cliff, eating away at the unsteady infrastructure as it crests under sporadic flash-bangs of lightning.
Pale?Great. Just what every girl wants to hear.
What’s that thing that motivational speakers swear by? Believing you’re confident so youbecomeconfident?
Picture your power pose, Shiloh. You’ve got this. If you can handle an almost-allergy-life-and-death situation, a toddler who knocked over a pistachio oat square display, and a rush order for two hundred cake pops when Hippie Fest was in town, you can handle anything.
Even though the plane isn’t moving, the way it judders beneath me imbues me with too much adrenaline that has nowhere to go, fizzing and shaking inside me like a carbonated geyser waiting to explode.
I brush him off with a brusque chuckle. “It’s probably just the lighting.”
“Right.” Fulton eyes me suspiciously, but he’s thankfully polite enough not to pry.
When he takes his seat next to me, the girl adjacent to us finally pops an earbud out, and a squeal assaults my ears, augmenting the headache that’s currently chiseling a hole into my skull amateur lobotomy-style.
“Oh my God. You’re Fulton Cazzarelli. You’re my favorite hockey player!” she gushes, an ear-to-ear beam on her face.
Fulton does a double take. “Me?”
“Duh! My friends and I areobsessedwith you. They’re never going to believe I mettheFulton Cazzarelli. Kalani is going to be so jealous.”
