Page 11 of Blindsided
“Nature calls, cousin. Very insistently.” I glanced around for a bathroom sign.
Kat rolled her eyes so hard I worried they might get stuck. “Use the bathroom on the plane like a normal person!”
“Have you seen those tiny coffins they call airplane bathrooms? My claustrophobia—”
“Since when do you have claustrophobia?” Wren demanded.
“Since right now. It's a very sudden onset. Tragic, really.”
Declan looked ready to explode. “Get. On. The. Plane.”
Rory handed me a coffee cup. “Here, use this if you’re desperate.”
I looked at the empty cup. “That’s disgusting.” Then I tucked it into my jacket pocket anyway. “But practical. Thanks.”
The flight attendant was now making “hurry up” gestures that were becoming increasingly aggressive.
“If you all wouldn’t mind,” she called, “we’d like to depart sometime this century.”
We made a final dash for the gate, me trailing behind as I tried to fish my boarding pass out of my pocket while also keeping my flask from falling out. In the process, I somehow dropped my passport.
“Boarding pass and passport, sir,” the flight attendant said with the strained smile of someone imagining my violent death.
I patted my pockets frantically. “I just had them...”
Declan looked like he might actually tackle me to the ground when Rory stepped forward, producing my passport and boarding pass from his pocket.
“How did you—” I began.
“I took them when you were harassing the janitor,” Rory explained. “Figured you’d lose them.”
The flight attendant scanned our passes with the efficiency of someone who’d given up on humanity long ago.
“Enjoy your flight,” she said in a tone that clearly meant “I hope you all get diarrhea.”
As we filed down the jetway, Declan grabbed my shoulder. “When we land, you’re getting sober. Coldturkey.”
I grinned at him. “You know turkeys don’t actually get cold, right? That’s a misconception.”
“I will throw you out of this plane mid-Atlantic.”
“That’s fair.”
Behind us, Kat and Wren were giggling about something on Wren’s phone; both were suddenly in much better spirits now that we’d made the flight.
“What’s so funny?” I asked, trying to peek at the screen.
Wren quickly turned her phone away. “Nothing.”
“They posted our little cemetery adventure on Instagram,” Rory explained, looking over their shoulders. “Hashtagged ‘grave goals.’”
“You what?” Declan whipped around, nearly clotheslining a businessman trying to get past him.
“Relax,” Kat said, waving her hand dismissively. “We just took artistic shots of the cemetery at night. No context, no empty coffin pics. We’re not idiots.”
“Speak for yourself,” I said, stumbling into the plane and immediately banging my head on the overhead bin.
The flight attendant inside the plane looked at our disheveled group with thinly veiled horror. “Welcome aboard. Please find your seats quickly so we can depart.”
