“I’m going to do something even better for you––I’m going to let you figure it out for yourself.”
An eerie silence takes over the room. I haven’t been home since I left for college eight years ago. Dad and Nan come out to LA every other year, so it hasn’t been an issue.
I’ve been dreading this day, even though I knew it was coming. Except I wanted to return the hero, hoisting trophies above my head. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Instead, I have to drag my sorry ass home unemployed and broke. This is not how I saw my life going.
“Fine. But I get to borrow your cold weather wardrobe,” I mutter, resigned to the abject humiliation I’m bound to face. Jackie has a killer wardrobe. If I’m going to get dragged in real life, I’d like to do it in style.
“One coat,” my sister, the master negotiator, counters.
“The Ralph Lauren Navajo coat.”
“Get real. No, absolutely not that one.”
“We’ll see.”
Chapter 3
“Did I get you with my elbow?” says the guy seated to my right in the aisle seat. Yes, he did as a matter of fact, for the third time as he adjusted his noise canceling headphones.
“That’s okay,” I answer, shrinking even more into my middle seat.
Let me tell you what hell looks like. In fact, let me tell you what hell looks, smells, and sounds like. Hell is the second to last row on a late flight from O’Hare to Albany sitting next to an oversized overweight giant who smells like a combination of sautéed onions, feet, and low rent booze, who breathes so loudly it almost drowns out the engines roaring next to my head, and not being able to recline and read because an angry six-year-old keeps kicking the back of my seat while he screams, “I want grilled cheese!”
The flight from hell lasts six and half hours due to two connecting stops. Six and a half hours of my life that I would like to permanently scrub from my memory. In general, I’m a good sport about stuff like this. As a journalist, roughing it is part of the job description. No, I haven’t exactly skipped through the war-torn streets of Idlib yet, but I’ve slept in my junker in pursuit of a story on more than a few occasions. And I’ve ventured into places that most people with a modicum of self-preservation would never step foot into.
That said, heading back to Lake Placid for an undetermined amount of time has me raw to the bone and feeling not at all forgiving of my liberties being infringed.
It’s not like my loathing of my hometown is baseless. I have my reasons. Lake Placid is trapped in a time warp for me. Everything about it triggers all the awful feelings that I’ve worked hard to leave behind. Which is why I don’t allow myself to think about it for more than a nanosecond. When I left for college, that part of my life died, and I’d like for it to stay that way.
Almost on cue, the number one reason for all my problems appears on the small TV screen embedded in the seat before me. God has a sick sense of humor.
CNN is on and the volume is off, but Dr. Zelda Anderson is flapping her lips and smiling at Chris Cuomo like she’s planning to eat him alive. And that’s not hyperbole; the woman is a super-predator. My mother is one of those celebrity therapist that writes books and makes TV appearances. I’m pretty sure she’s never had any legit patients that she’s cared for because that would require the ability to empathize. No, Zelda is content with spouting words of wisdom she doesn’t live by and getting her hair and makeup done.
I can’t press the button fast enough, and heave a sigh of relief when the screen goes dark.
The plane ride from hell ends around 10 pm with a bumpy landing and a kick to the back of my seat hard enough to displace the last vertebra of my spine. This happens second from me standing and screaming, “Will somebody get this child a fucking grilled cheese!”
The bone-jarring landing is followed up by a foot race to the car rental counters when we’re informed by loudspeaker that all connecting flights are canceled due to the mother-of-all-storms gathering along the East coast. With two large and overstuffed suitcases dragging behind me, running fast is a relative term.
When I finally get there, I’m the umpteenth person in line. I pull out my phone while I wait and check my Twitter feed. 1,038 new alerts to my tweet, which I refuse to delete out of principal.
Most of them are suggesting I do things to the orifices of my body that would end my life. One threatens to doxx me. For those of you unfamiliar with this practice, it means to post personal information like an address of where you live and work online for public consumption, quite possibly putting someone in harm’s way.