Page 9 of Every Step She Takes
Babies are crying. The captain makes another announcement, and the flight crew hurries to strap themselves into the jump seats. Everyone around me looks worried, even Window Seat, whose dark eyebrows have jumped into her hairline. The old lady across the aisle has put away her knitting and now clutches purple rosary beads, mouthing a prayer.
The TV screens go black, and I finally yank off my free headphones. The full sound of panic hits me. An alarm is going off. The captain’s voice crackles in and out as we convulse again.
Doesn’t it always seem to go that as soon as you try to figure out your life, your plane plummets into the Arctic Circle? And on my fucking birthday.
I’m going to die before I have the chance to find the right words.
I’m going to die without knowing who I really am.
I’m going to die without anyone else knowing me, either.
“I think I might be a lesbian!” I shout into the chaos. The confession isn’t meant for anyone but me, my last chance to test the words on my tongue, to see how they feel before I die.
If anyone does hear me over the din of our imminent deaths, they don’t react.
Except Window Seat.
Her rough fingers clutch tighter to mine, and my eyes shift from the blank screen to her worried face. I forgot we’re holding hands.
They say your entire life flashes before your eyes in the moments preceding your death, but I don’t have much of a life, so instead of a Greatest Hits slideshow featuring every Saturday night I spent working in the store, my pre-death ticker-tape parade is of this stranger’s face.
It’s a long, narrow face, offset by a Cupid’s bow mouth. A dastardly widow’s peak. Blue hair, fading to brown and bleach-white around the temples, that’s cut into some kind of stylish mullet. A nose ring. A constellation of tattooed stars beneath her left ear, tracing down her long neck. There are probably more tattoos lurking just below the fabric of her gray shirt.
She doesn’t pluck her eyebrows, she’s not wearing any makeup, and she desperately needs some ChapStick, but she’s still beautiful. Or handsome, maybe? A strong jaw and a chin dimple, and that ineffable feeling that she’s someone important to me, somehow.
Time unfreezes. Window Seat is still staring at me as the plane shakes like a pinball in the arcade of the gods. “I think I might be a lesbian,” I say again, meaning for Window Seat to hear it this time. Because apparently I don’t give a shit about having the perfect words when I’m about to die.
Window Seat gives my hand a squeeze. “Cool,” she says.
Cool?
Some combination of the wine and the dying makes me keep talking. “I-I don’t know for sure if I’m really a lesbian. I went on seventeen first dates with men, and I didn’t feel a damn thing for any of them, and for the first time it seemed so obvious that the problem isn’t with the men at all.”
“Are you sure?” she asks as the plane heaves. “Men are usually the problem.”
“The problem isme.I-I’m not attracted to them.”
“That doesn’t sound like a problem.”
I shake my head and keep trying to make this stranger understand. “I’ve been forcing myself to date men my entire life, andI’ve always hated it, but I never slowed down long enough to wonderwhy. I… I never let myself wonder if…” My voice trembles. “I didn’t want to question it.”
Window Seat doesn’t have a snarky response for that one.
“But if I’m gay, shouldn’t I already know that about myself? I mean, I’m thirty-five-years-old today!”
“Oh. Happy birthday!” She grins at me like we’re not on the 787 equivalent of theHindenburg.
“Wouldn’t I know by now?”
“The messages we receive from society and our families can be very powerful, and the current political climate makes coming out more fraught for a lot of people,” she says, perfectly reasonable. At the next patch of turbulence, an overhead storage bin flies open and a woman behind us screams.
I scream louder. “But my family wouldn’t give a shit! I grew up in Seattle, and my sister is bisexual, and I have gay aunts!”
But as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I’m thinking about our senior trip to California, when my friend Rachel wasn’t allowed to go to San Francisco because that’s where the gay people lived. I’m thinking about my friends who were afraid they’d have to share a dorm room with a lesbian and vowed to change in the bathroom stalls every day if it came to that. And the tears come even harder. I turn back to this stranger. “I would know if I were gay. Right?”
Window Seat stares at me with soft brown eyes. They remind me of polished dark walnut. “Would you?”
“It doesn’t even matter now! It’s too late!”
