How They Met, and Other Stories(20)
Author: David Levithan

“Well…” she answers.

And I can’t take it anymore. She just looks at me, no help at all.

But, then again, all I’m doing is looking at her. A silent standstill.

A time for something. On her lip, there’s a little drop of blood.

I kiss her anyway. At this particular moment,

there’s just no question about it.

THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO MEET ON AIRPLANES

This was ten years ago. I was a junior in boarding school, heading back to campus the Monday after Thanksgiving. After three rounds of leftovers, I was ready to return to the dorm, to our well-honed methodology of procrastination, to that last gasp of late-night madness before exams settled in and Christmas came.

I had planned my flight down to the last minute: I’d finish the book I was reading, proof a paper I had due, and sneak in a forty-five-minute nap before touching down in Boston. I had my headphones to protect me from screeching children and talkative adults. I had five sharpened pencils in the front pocket of my bag. I was ready to go.

I usually liked to sit in row seventeen, because seventeen was my lucky number. This time, however, I was seated in row fourteen. I decided not to take this as a bad omen. I was not a person who normally believed in omens. Only luck.

I am always early to airports, and thus I always board when my row is first called. The overhead compartment gaped for my hand luggage. I fed all the seat pocket detritus into its maw—the shallow magazines, the safety instructions, the plastic-wrapped blanket, and the paper-clad pillow. I would keep only what was essential: my headphones, A Room with a View, my research paper, and three of the sharpened pencils.

As the plane filled up, I began to get hopeful; the seat next to mine was still empty, leaving me with plenty of legroom. I took up my book and started to read. I lost track of where I was, and was brought back by a tap on my shoulder. She might have said excuse me—I didn’t hear. I looked up into the aisle. And there she was.

She was my type of pretty. Short black messabout hair, falling wherever it wanted. She was wearing a red sweater that somehow brought out that green of her eyes. She had a nice smile. I recognized this in the second before I tried to stand, even though my seat belt was already on. I continued to notice this as I unbuckled the seat belt, as she slid past me. Once she sat down and started going through the bag on her lap, I said hello.

I had never talked to a stranger on a plane before, nothing above the cursory regards. This was because I am in general an antisocial person, and because I’d never been seated next to anyone even remotely desirable. Instead I had an unerring ability to be partnered with the overweight business traveler who brought no reading material, or the father whose poor wife was across the aisle, forced to manage the demands of their children. Never anyone my own age, traveling alone. Never anyone who was my type of pretty.

She said hello back to me and scavenged deeper into her bag. I could feel my courage wavering. I tried to think of something profoundly interesting and not at all stalkeresque to say, but nothing came. I am a very strong believer in personal space, and I didn’t want it to seem like I was storming hers. I was about to retreat to my headphones when she finally found what she was looking for—a copy of A Room with a View. The same edition as my own.

I’d always had (and still do) two rules for myself: If I were ever to pass a busker on the street who was playing the same song that was on my headphones, I would give away all the money in my wallet. And if I were ever to be riding the T and spy someone reading the same book as me, I would strike up a conversation. Again, not seeing it as an omen, but as luck.

I figured the rules of the T applied to air travel as well. Of course, I’d never actually planned what I was going to say to the person who was reading the same book as me—my thoughts had never gotten that far. So I was entirely unprepared when I looked over to her and said, “It looks like we’re reading the same book.”

I took mine off my lap. She looked at it, then looked at hers. She could have easily dismissed it as a little coincidence, a minor disturbance. But instead she looked back up at me and said, “Wow. Neat.” Not at all sarcastic. No—she got the subtle wonder of the situation.

I knew right then that we were going to get along.

Her name was Rory. I introduced myself as Roger. She had been visiting her father for Thanksgiving, and was now going back to her mother’s house in Newton, where she went to high school. We were both aiming to be English majors when we went to college, and neither one of us was reading Forster for school.

I think one of the highest compliments you can give a person is that when you are talking to her, you are not thinking about the fact that you are talking to her. That is, your thoughts and words all exist on a single, engaged level. You are being yourself because you aren’t bothering to think about who you should be. It is like when you talk in a dream.

She spied my AP English research paper in the seat pocket. I ended up proofing her Virginia Woolf while she marked up my Wilfred Owen with one of her own (yes) sharpened pencils. We talked about our Thanksgivings, which really meant talking about our families in all their fragments and fissions. We began to see signs everywhere—in the fact that we’d both ordered the vegetarian meal even though neither of us was strictly vegetarian, in the fact that we were both wearing contact lenses, in the fact that we both had cousins named Jessie who were our favorites.

We talked through the in-flight movie. We talked in such a way that the flight attendants assumed we knew each other. We talked so much that we started to feel like we did know each other, as if every shared story could create an actual shared past.

Then the turbulence hit. I am an easy flier; I cannot tell you why, no more than I can tell you why I am afraid to climb down ladders. (Not up, just down.) From the moment the seat-belt light came back on, it was clear that Rory was not an easy flier. She clutched at her armrest, changed her breathing. She apologized to me and made fun of her paranoia. But I could tell that it was fear—a pure and genuine fear, the kind that rebukes rationality no matter how pleasantly or clinically the rationality is offered.

“My doctor gave me drugs, but I think I’m even more afraid of them,” she told me. “He said to throw a blanket over my head and pretend I wasn’t really on a plane. That was very helpful.”

I took out her copy of my book. She was about twenty pages ahead of me, but that didn’t matter. I freed her blanket from its plastic protection and threw it over both of our heads. Then, by the trail of light along my arm, I read to her. We walked around Florence as the characters courted disapproval. After a particularly sudden dip, Rory grabbed my hand without asking, and I let her without mentioning it. I kept reading, turning the pages with my one free hand as all our air turned to breath and the light of the world came in through a scrim of blue cotton. When the plane steadied off, I put the book down for a moment. Rory leaned into my shoulder with her eyes closed and a half smile on her lips. Gently, she found the right angle, the comfortable inclination. I let the book drop. I let us sleep. Two strangers under a blanket, in between two versions of home.