The Chaos of Standing Still

by Jessica Brody

  I can tell Simon is fighting off the eye roll of the century. He somehow manages to keep his composure as he asks me, “Is this true? Are you traveling with Troy Benson?”

  The boy’s eyes narrow in a disconcerting mix of supplication and warning.

  I don’t want to get involved. This is exactly the kind of awkward encounter that I tend to avoid. And yet, there’s something in the boy’s eyes—the same misery I saw back at the gate that I see every time I look in the mirror. And before I know it, I hear myself saying, “Yes. He’s with me.”

  And I instantly regret it. I know nothing about this kid. Or the airline’s policies. What if they ask to see my ID? What if they want some sort of proof that we’re related? What if I get in trouble?

  Troy’s pink cheeks deflate like two balloons. He wheels on Simon. “See! So now, shoo! Skedaddle. Scram. Go back to being pointless.”

  Simon looks like he’s going to clock this kid in the face, but he also looks completely relieved to have the opportunity to ditch him.

  Whether or not he actually believes this little charade becomes irrelevant when he turns to me and says, “He’s your responsibility now. Just make sure he gets on his flight.” Then he spins on his heels and stalks away.

  The boy—Troy Benson—sighs dramatically and rips the cord from his neck. “Thank you. You saved my life.” He dumps the paper sign ceremoniously into a nearby trash can. “Metaphorically speaking, of course. Do you know how humiliating that was? Having to be chaperoned to and from the lavatory?”

  I smile politely. “I can imagine.”

  “Such imbeciles!” he rants, still riled up from the incident. “I have a college degree from Stanford. I’m currently getting my master’s at Harvard. And I was walking around with an ‘Unaccompanied Minor’ sign around my neck. And it was misspelled!”

  I blink in surprise at him. “You’re getting your master’s? How old are you?”

  He hooks his thumbs cockily into the straps of his backpack. “Fourteen.”

  “Fourteen?” I spit back. I could have sworn he was ten.

  The cocky expression on his face vanishes. “Well, don’t sound so flabbergasted about it.”

  I school my face. “Sorry. I just—”

  “Okay, so technically I’m still thirteen. I turn fourteen next week.” His bitter scowl is back. “But those idiots at the airlines have some inane policy that you can’t travel by yourself unless you’re fourteen. I mean, seriously. It’s six days, people!” He’s yelling now, shouting into the crowd, as if they’re all to blame for the inane airline policy. I cringe and take a small step away from him. “Sorry,” he offers. “I can get a little agitated. You should see me in class when we discuss condensed matter.”

  My head is swimming. “So you’re some kind of child genius?”

  “We prefer the term ‘prodigy.’ ‘Genius’ was tainted when those morons at the Apple Store started using it. Ooh! Look at me! I can do a hard reset on your phone! I’m a genius!” His voice gets all high and squeaky. Then it cracks. He clears his throat, looking embarrassed. “Anyway. Thanks for your help. I’m off to observe the second law of thermodynamics as proven in an isolated airport environment.”

  I squint, hoping it will make this boy less confusing. It doesn’t. “The what?”

  “The second law of thermodynamics,” Troy repeats, then motions to the masses of people swarming around us, as if this simple gesture will help clarify the garble coming out of his mouth. “The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time?”

  I shake my head, still not following.

  Troy sighs. My ignorance is obviously a complete inconvenience to him. “Basically, it says that any system, if left unattended or isolated, will eventually result in entropy. Or chaos.” He makes a sweeping gesture with his hands. “Take this airport, for example. We’re all trapped here in this snowstorm—hence, isolated—with nowhere to go and left to the whim of the worthless blockheads running the place. And what do you get?” He points to the food court where the zoo animals are still fighting for control of the limited resources. “Chaos.”

  I follow the direction of his finger, my gaze lingering a beat too long on two parents trying to distract one screaming child while keeping the other from running away in a fit of giggles.

  When I turn back around, Troy is gone. Panicked, I scan the busy shopping rotunda, finally spotting his dark hair bobbing up and down as he makes his way through the crowd. I run to catch up to him. “Wait!” I say. “You can’t just leave. I’m kind of responsible for you now. Simon says.”

  He chuckles at the pun. “Simon also says, ‘Touch your nose!’ ‘Touch your ears!’ ‘Touch your head!’ ” Then he walks off again. I jog to keep pace with him. He stops and faces me. “Look. You’re nice and all, but I’m kind of on a mission here.”

  “A mission?” I ask dubiously.

  “No offense, but you wouldn’t understand.”

  “I—” I stammer, unsure how to respond to that. I’ve never had my intelligence blatantly insulted by an almost-fourteen-year-old before. “I—” I repeat lamely.

  “Yeah, you keep thinking about that. I’ll catch ya later. Thanks for helping spring me from the pokey.”

  Then once again, he’s off, disappearing into the chaos. And I’m left too dumbfounded to follow.

  Lottie and I would often spend the night in the tree house. Half the time it was because she was drunk and didn’t want her parents to know, the other half it was because she just didn’t want to go inside. I never understood this. Her house was gorgeous. It had everything you could ever want in a house. And yet, every so often, Lottie would just refuse to go in.

  The morning after my birthday party, I woke up with the sun. Lottie was still passed out on her sleeping bag. I didn’t want to wake her, so I quietly reached for the sketch pad I kept in the tree house, flipped to the first blank page, and started to draw.

  I wasn’t picky about my subjects. I drew whatever I felt I could do justice to. Whatever I could realistically bring to life. That morning it was the view from the window. Lottie’s stunning Mediterranean-style garden lit up by the sun.

  “It looks like a photograph,” Lottie said, startling me. I hadn’t realized she was awake. I also hadn’t realized how long I’d been drawing.

  This happened a lot. I would often get lost in my sketches. Minutes and hours would disappear right into the page, blending in with the shadows and smooth lines.

  “Thanks,” I said, putting the finishing touches on the big leaf maple that stood in the center of the garden, next to the gazebo. The real tree outside was already scorched with the fiery shades of fall, but I never drew in color. I preferred the simplicity of my black sketch pen. It turned everything into black and white. Right and wrong. Truth and lie.

  It uncomplicated a complicated world.

  “How do you do it?” Lottie asked, sitting cross-legged beside me so she could peer over my shoulder. “How do you make it look it so real?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I guess I just draw what I see.”

  She leaned back on her hands, quietly pensive for a moment. Then she mumbled, “You’re lucky, then.”

  My pen came to a stop as I turned to look at her. Even with the hangover that I knew was swirling around her like a storm cloud, she still glowed. “Lucky how?”

  She turned and glanced out the same window I’d been staring out for I don’t know how long. At the same beautiful house surrounded by the same beautiful garden. I watched two lines appear between her eyebrows—a barely visible crack in her otherwise flawless façade.

  Then she sighed and said, “That the world looks real to you.”

  I have to take the train to get to the B gates. It reminds me of a much cleaner version of the BART. And much emptier. I’m the only person in my car. I imagine during a normal airport day, these trains are packed full with passengers arriving, departing, connecting, but today is not a normal day. No one needs to
get anywhere within the airport. Everyone’s waiting upstairs to leave the airport.

  I disembark onto another deserted platform and ride the escalator up. The B terminal is even worse than the A terminal. There are so many people, I can barely see the other side of the shopping rotunda.

  It’s clear, from my limited view, that this is the nicer terminal. Every airport has one. An updated, fancy terminal that all the money goes into. The restaurant selections here are better. The shopping is more diverse. Even the modern art sculpture in the center of the rotunda is more impressive.

  According to the signs, gate B89 is all the way at the end of the terminal. I feel like I’m walking for miles. I must be halfway to Kansas by now. I glance out the nearest window just to make sure the storm is still out there, and I haven’t walked clear into another climate.

  It would be faster if I just took the moving walkways, but I think I’ve proven I can’t be trusted on those.

  I hit a literal dead end at gate B60 and, for a moment, wonder if I’ve been going the wrong way this entire time. Then I notice a narrow corridor leading off to the right, like a back alley. Do airports have bad neighborhoods? Because I feel like I’m walking over to the wrong side of the tracks.

  The corridor opens into a smaller extension terminal. Less crowded. Brighter. Definitely a well kept secret.

  The burger place Muppet Guy was talking about is called New Belgium Hub. There’s a menu just outside of the seating area, and I’m pleased to see that it does, in fact, have a veggie burger, among many other selections.

  “Hey! Ocean! Danny Ocean!” I hear the familiar voice and look up to see Muppet Guy standing at the back of the line, waiting to place his order at the counter.

  I blow out a breath—here goes nothing—and sidle up to him.

  “You came,” he states the obvious and, admittedly, I get a tiny surge of delight watching those perfect teeth flash as he smiles. Only because they’re so damn straight. They should be in a museum or something.

  “I came,” I restate the obvious, feeling incredibly stupid.

  I don’t talk to guys. Lottie always did the talking. I just did the standing around and nodding. But I have a feeling that tactic won’t work so well here.

  “I was hungry,” I add.

  There’s that chuckle again. “I’ll try not to take offense by that.”

  My face warms. “It wasn’t . . . I mean, I wasn’t . . .”

  “Relax. I’m kidding.” And then he touches me. It’s the simplest, most innocent of touches. On my arm. A graze. It’s nothing.

  It’s nothing.

  “So,” he says, changing the subject. “How long have you been a vegetarian?”

  Eleven months, thirty days, and eighteen hours.

  I swallow. “About a year.”

  He nods. “That’s cool. I was a vegetarian for about a week.”

  “Only a week?”

  He runs his fingers through his hair. “Yeah, it was really just to piss off my parents. They took me to some expensive steak restaurant to celebrate this big career accomplishment, and I told them I was a vegetarian.”

  “Did it work?” I ask, genuinely interested.

  “Better than expected. My dad was all sorts of ticked off. He accused me of lying to purposefully try to spoil their big day. So, to prove him wrong, I had to keep the act up. But it only lasted for a week. I was so freaking hungry all the time.”

  I let out a small laugh, surprised by how it sounds coming out of my mouth. Like a foreign language. Like a Martian language.

  Sell yourself.

  That’s all I’m doing. I’m going door-to-door selling normalcy like a sweaty bald guy selling vacuums.

  This one comes with the giggling girl attachment. For all your hard-to-reach places.

  “What about you?” he asks. “Why are you a vegetarian? Health reasons? Animal rights? To piss off your parents?”

  “Personal reasons,” I reply vaguely, hoping this will suffice and he won’t expect me to elaborate.

  No such luck.

  “Let me guess,” he says, tapping his chin. “You had a pet cow as a kid?”

  I shake my head. “No.”

  “You were a cow in a previous life.”

  Despite myself, I laugh again. “No.”

  “Your best friend died from mad cow disease?”

  I fall quiet and stare at the floor, forcing myself to take deep breaths.

  Oh God. This was a huge mistake.

  How am I supposed to have a conversation with this person—with any person—when every single topic is a land mine? At the time I made the decision to come here, all I could think about was the food, the promise of a brief reprieve from the anarchy of the shopping rotunda. I didn’t consider the fact that I was about to have a meal with a stranger. Someone who would ultimately ask me questions. Someone who would expect answers longer than two words.

  Thankfully, just then, the customer ahead of us finishes ordering, and we find ourselves face-to-face with the girl running the cash register. I’ve never been so happy to see another human being in all my life.

  I can feel Muppet Guy looking at me. I keep my gaze trained on the menu posted behind the cashier’s head and try to pass off my silence as indecisiveness.

  “Do you know what you want?” he asks, and I hear the tinge of confusion in his voice. He’s trying to figure out what he did wrong. He’s trying to ascertain if I really did have a best friend who died from mad cow disease.

  “Um . . .” I stammer, frowning at the menu.

  “Ooh! Ooh! BINGO!” the girl cashier yells, startling me out of my deliberation process.

  Confused, I glance behind me, then back at her. “Excuse me?”

  She turns to a large, plump young man in a white chef’s jacket who’s filling up a cup from the soda fountain behind her. “Bingo! I win!”

  The man turns and studies me, hand on hip, mouth twisting to the side. “Hmm. I don’t know. She doesn’t look mopey enough.”

  The cashier lets out a huff and gestures theatrically to me. “Are you serious? Look at her! She’s the poster child for mopey. She’s the eighth dwarf, Dopey’s long-lost cousin . . . Mopey!”

  “Uh,” I falter, glancing down to make sure I hadn’t accidentally spilled something on the front of my shirt. “What are you talking about?”

  The cashier turns back to me. She looks to be about my age, tall and slender with rich, toffee-colored skin and a dark brown bob. Her eyes are heavily lined with inky black makeup, and she has a diamond stud in her nose.

  “Sorry,” she says with a tilt of her head. “We get bored sometimes. We make up games. It helps pass the time. Today we’re playing Stranded Passenger Bingo.”

  Muppet Guy takes a step closer to the counter, suddenly intrigued. “What’s Stranded Passenger Bingo?”

  The girl lights up at his interest. “Oh! It’s so much fun. We create bingo cards for each other with different types of passengers that we have to find. If you get five in a row, you call ‘Bingo!’ and you win.”

  “I still need a Couple on the Verge of a Breakup,” the guy at the soda fountain says. “So if you see one, be sure to let me know, mkay?”

  Cashier Girl nods to me. “You were my top left corner.”

  “Me?” I say, feeling the walls of the restaurant closing in. “Me specifically?”

  She laughs. “No. Not you, specifically. That would be creepy. See, Jimmy back there”—she jerks her thumb over her shoulder at the guy who’s placing a plastic lid on his cup—“he put Mopey Girl on my card.” She pulls a folded up piece of paper out of her apron pocket and smoothes it out on the counter. It’s a grid made up of twenty-five boxes. Inside each one, someone has scribbled things like, Gay and Doesn’t Know It, Dresses Like It’s Still 1995, and Unhealthily Obsessed with Hair Gel.

  Several of the boxes have large X’s scratched through them. Then, in the top left corner, where the cashier’s long, black-painted fingernail is tapping, are the words “Mopey Gir
l.”

  “I’m not mopey,” I say dryly.

  Muppet Guy laughs beside me. “You’re a little mopey. But that’s okay. I like mopey. I seek out mopey. It’s kind of my thing.”

  I’m not sure who I’m currently more infuriated with. This random girl who just insulted me, or the guy standing next to me, who agreed with her assessment.

  “Sorry,” Jimmy says, punching a straw into the top of the drink he just filled and taking a sip. “I created the card. I get final veto power. She’s not mopey enough.”

  I don’t like this spotlight on my face. I don’t like all of these strangers assessing me and my level of mopiness like students huddled around a microscope. I can’t even handle when Dr. Judy stares at me for more than five seconds.

  I consider screaming at all of them. I consider yelling something dramatic like, “You know what? You can’t walk around labeling people you know nothing about!” and then storming off to find something else to eat. I consider reacting.

  But when I open my mouth, all that comes out is, “I’ll have the veggie burger, please.”

  Cashier Girl snatches up the bingo card and stuffs it back into her apron pocket. “You’re mad. I’m sorry. That was totally inappropriate. I shouldn’t have shown you that. It’s just that you two looked cool, and, let’s face it, you’re like the only people here who are our age, and I’ve been in a foul mood today—”

  “She’s in a foul mood every day,” Jimmy says, passing behind her with his drink.

  “Get back into the kitchen and make some burgers!” she growls.

  He winks at her and disappears behind a door.

  “I’m in an especially foul mood today,” she clarifies. “You see, I was supposed to go to this killer New Year’s Eve party in like”—she squints at the cash register screen—“five hours, but it doesn’t look like anyone is getting out of here tonight, so—”

  “That’s not true,” I blurt before I even realize what I’m doing. “My flight is leaving at 7:41 p.m. The board said.” The desperation tastes salty in my mouth.

  “Um.” Cashier Girl gives me a blank stare. “I can’t even dig my car out of the parking lot. You think they’re going to be able to get a 737 off the ground in this shit?”