Layoverland

by Gabby Noone

  “I know, Sadie. As you might recall, I was putting on lipstick right before my stroke and . . . well, I’m sure I’ve told you this story before,” she answers, her voice strained, and her tight smile threatening to crack her face in half.

  “Oh, of course! How could I forget?” Sadie says, rolling her eyes at herself. “Well, thanks again! Have a great day!

  “Tacky bitch,” she whispers to me as we walk away.

  The hotel has four elevators in the lobby, but two have pieces of paper with Out of Order scribbled on them taped to the doors.

  We wait for what feels like an hour but is probably more like seven minutes until the metal doors of one creak open with the same level of effort as a dead body trying to escape from a coffin. Sadie and I and about fifteen other people squeeze inside the elevator and it feels exactly how I imagine a coffin to feel, except less accommodating. I stick my hand through a maze of other people’s body parts and press 3. The elevator moves up and up about an inch at a time until it stops at the third floor with a thud that makes my heart jump.

  “Third floor?” an old lady wearing an oxygen tube with no tank attached says to another old lady. “Has somebody never heard of the stairs?”

  “It’s her first day,” Sadie explains apologetically, following behind me.

  The women gasp as their heads turn toward us.

  “So young!”

  “Yeah, I was robbed of my adulthood, so the least you can do is let me take the elevator in peace,” I say, pushing my way out.

  The doors clatter shut behind me and Sadie and it’s completely silent. Only now that it’s gone do I notice the absence of the constant, undecipherable noise of a bunch of people all talking at once that filters through the rest of the airport. It’s just me and Sadie in the carpeted hallway with dark walls that feel at once claustrophobic and never-ending.

  A plastic sign stuck to the wall instructs me that rooms 300–349 are to my left, 350–399 to my right.

  “Um, I’m gonna go then,” I say to Sadie, gesturing down the hall.

  “Sure,” she replies.

  But as I walk, she continues right behind me.

  “Sadie,” I say when I get to my room, about to turn the key. “I don’t know how to say this politely, but can you just leave me the hell alone now?”

  All I would like to do is lie down face-first on a bed by myself and pretend nothing that’s happening is really happening.

  “All right,” she says, hands up in surrender and an amused smile on her face. “You know, you’re doing great. Aside from the vomiting and the crying and the cursing and the screaming . . . I’d say you’re taking this all in like a pro.”

  “All I’ve done today is vomit and cry and curse and scream.”

  “Hey, that’s still four things!” she says, counting them out on her fingers. “Most people don’t get that many things done in a day.”

  “If you tell anyone you saw me crying today, I swear I will—”

  “You’ll what? Kill me? Ha!”

  “Goodbye,” I grumble.

  “If you need anything, I’m upstairs in room 689. I’ll be back bright and early to pick you up tomorrow so we can grab some breakfast before your very first day of work!”

  “Oh, I’m so totally looking forward to it,” I deadpan, opening the door and then slamming it shut in her face.

  4

  “What is that?” I said to Emmy as she placed a lidded mason jar full of green goop in my car’s cup holder.

  “Green smoothie,” she said, zipping up her backpack.

  “Since when do you drink green smoothies?”

  Junk food had always been a sacred pastime Emmy and I shared. Totino’s Pepperoni Pizza Rolls. Boxes of Kraft Easy Mac eaten together over the stove. Ben & Jerry’s eaten out of the pint. The generic versions of these items when they weren’t on sale. Fistfuls of off-brand cheese balls that came by the plastic tub, regardless of whether or not the name brand ones were on sale, because we thought they actually tasted better. Few things made me as happy in life as the Friday nights when Emmy would shrug off her homework and binge-watch TV with me while we chowed down on our perfectly optimized snack assortment.

  “I drink them sometimes. I’m just usually already digesting all of its nutrients by the time you wake up,” she said. “You know, green smoothies help you focus and give you sustained energy until lunchtime.”

  “Did Skyler tell you that?”

  I was never a big fan of my sister’s boyfriend just by virtue of him being the boy my little sister dated. But I tolerated Skyler because he made Emmy happy. And Emmy was the only person whose happiness I cared about. Still, everything Skyler said and did and wore fell under my scrutiny. I didn’t like how he analyzed every joke I made aloud after I made it, as if I myself had no idea why it was funny to begin with. I didn’t like the way he corrected me for using the word aesthetic incorrectly even when I was just informally pointing to something, like a picture of a pastel-colored geode I saw on Instagram, and proclaiming it “my new aesthetic.” I didn’t like the way he consciously pushed his thick glasses up his nose when he was making a point, like he wasn’t an actual nerd but just playing the role of one in a movie.

  At this point, what I didn’t like most of all was that he was convincing my sister to become vegan. It wasn’t that I was personally against veganism like some annoying guy whose entire counterargument against it is “But bacon though!” It was just that somehow Emmy’s decision felt symbolic, like the beginning of a major change in our relationship.

  “No, Skyler did not tell me that!” Emmy protested, twisting off the lid of the jar. “I learned it on my own. He drinks them for breakfast because I introduced them to him. You can have some if you want. It’s got kale and banana and peanut butter. I know it’s green, but you can barely even taste the kale!”

  She dangled the open jar in front of the steering wheel. I grimaced and shook my head.

  “I’m good,” I said, looking my own breakfast: a can of Diet Coke and a bacon, egg, and cheese Hot Pocket stuck in its paper sleeve, both nudged into my cup holder.

  “You know . . .” she started to say, eyeing my meal, but then stopped and bit her lip.

  “What? I know my breakfast is trash, okay? You don’t have to tell me.”

  “No, it’s not that,” Emmy said, staring out the window like the strip mall we were driving past suddenly had deep significance to her. “It’s nothing.”

  “Tell meeee,” I begged.

  “Okay,” she said, turning to look at me. “You were really hard on Monica back there.”

  “Oh,” I say, taken aback. “She took my pants against my will! Of course I was hard on her.”

  “Well, that and the Diet Coke thing. I mean, you drink it too. Why snap at her like that?”

  “It’s not about the Diet Coke itself. Obviously, I couldn’t care less if Monica also wants to fill her body with carbonated cancer juice. It’s about the principle. It’s representative of her whole phony lifestyle. Acting like she has this picture-perfect, latte-art-loving life when she doesn’t,” I said, slamming on the brakes as we approached a red light. “Can you reach into my backpack and get my makeup bag?”

  Emmy moved her hand behind my seat, but paused.

  “Not if it means you’re going to do your eyeliner while you drive. If I’m going to be late to school, I would at least like to make it there in one piece.”

  “I swear, I will get you there on time and with all your limbs.”

  “You know, Bea, you’re so pretty,” she said in a singsong voice. “You don’t need a smidge of makeup!”

  “Oh really?” I asked. “Well, I’m just gonna put on some lip balm.”

  “Then why don’t I just get your lip balm out of the bag so you don’t have to dig through—”

  “Emmy,” I said, staring straight ahead
.

  Wordlessly, she placed the makeup bag on my lap. The light turned green and I kept driving.

  “I know Monica is corny,” Emmy continued. “But I don’t think she’s as awful as you make her out to be sometimes.”

  “She acts like we’re her evil stepdaughters. You know she can’t wait for us to graduate and move out so she can finally have her dream family. She wants to pretend we don’t exist. That’s why she told Dad it was a good idea to fix up this piece of junk for me,” I said, banging my hand on the plastic steering wheel. “So she doesn’t have to drive me around. The one actual nice thing she’s done for me.”

  “You don’t think she told Dad to surprise you with a car because she just . . . cares? And, like, gets that you want a little independence?”

  “No!” I said, grimacing at Emmy. “Since when are you Monica’s biggest fan? Did I miss something?”

  “No!” she blurted back to me, weirdly defensive. “You didn’t.”

  “Yeah, I know I didn’t, because I don’t miss anything in your life. I don’t miss any time you talk about Skyler in your sleep. I don’t miss a single fart—”

  “Bea!”

  “What? I’m not blaming you. This is all because Monica forced us to bunk together so that her ugly spawn can have his own room.”

  “Grayson is our brother, Bea!”

  “Half brother. You know that time he spit up in my boots? I swear he made eye contact with me while he did it.”

  “You always say that,” Emmy said, cracking a smile even though she was clearly trying not to.

  We came to another stoplight. In one rapid motion, I unzipped my makeup bag, pulled out my eyeliner, and flipped down the sun visor mirror. The light turned green and I put my foot to the pedal while drawing on a wing.

  “Bea. Please,” Emmy moaned, staring up at the car ceiling.

  “I have my eyes on the road! It’s fine.”

  “I just think that maybe you should consider how this is all maybe weird for Monica too. She annoys you, but I’m sure she gets annoyed that she inherited two teenage girls, including one who has the cranky attitude of an old lady, I might add, before she could even have kids of her own.”

  I squinted into the mirror as I moved on to my right eye.

  “Um, I have an amazing attitude! And she’s not responsible for me at all and I never asked her to be. If she didn’t want this, then maybe she shouldn’t have married Dad. In my opinion, me and you are honestly the best part of the deal. What else did she get out of it? A prematurely balding car mechanic for a husband? A house with one bathroom for five people? She should be grateful for us. We make her small life interesting. We give it some spice.”

  I capped my eyeliner shut with one hand and used the other to turn into the entrance of our high school.

  “Slow down!” Emmy said.

  “I’m just trying to get you to school on time! It’s Snow Ball, remember?”

  Our school parking lot was basically a public safety hazard. The school sat at the very top of a hill, and the parking lot fell behind it with each row of cars on an incline, meaning rear-end accidents between people pulling out of the lot at the end of the day were a weekly occurrence.

  There was a direct correlation between the quality of cars in the parking lot and the slope of the hill. The top of the hill was full of shiny Audis and hand-me-down Volvos driven by honor students who arrived early and had moms who I imagined made them homemade cinnamon buns and freshly squeezed orange juice every morning. The lower part of the hill was full of banged-up used cars driven by slackers who arrived late because they overslept, stopped at McDonald’s on the way, and/or were busy smoking weed in the woods next to the high school.

  When we arrived, there were only spots available in the very bottom row.

  I pulled into one, just narrowly avoiding the hatchback belonging to Dominic Reed, a repeat junior who tried hard to look like a young Eminem but really just looked like buzz-cut-era Justin Bieber, hanging out of the side of his car and sipping a Monster Energy drink. I never understood why slacker boys always drink those, harnessing all that artificial energy to do absolutely nothing.

  The two-minute warning bell rang through the parking lot. Emmy opened her door to get out before I’d managed to take the keys out of the ignition.

  “Good morning, baby girl,” Dominic said, blocking Emmy as she tried to get out of the car. She stared down at the ground, holding a textbook close to her chest, and slithered her way past him.

  “What?” he bellowed. “You and your tight ass can’t stop and say hello to me?”

  Emmy’s cheeks reddened. I grabbed all my stuff and got out of the car, kicking my door and slamming it hard.

  “What did you just say to her?” I barked. Dominic gave me an amused grin. Emmy just kept walking with her head down.

  “I swear to god,” he said into the window of his car where his buddy was smoking, “I stay the same age, but they keep getting younger.”

  “It’s ‘I get older, they stay the same age,’ you . . . idiot!” I screamed. “Trying to sexually harass us and you can’t even get the stupid movie quote right!”

  “Chiiiill. I was talking about your sister, not you,” he said, taking a swig of his Monster. “You look like a raggedy-ass witch.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, walking around the front of my car, closer to him.

  “Bea!” Emmy hissed through her teeth, about four feet ahead of me. “C’mon! Please don’t do this.”

  I didn’t take my eyes off Dominic.

  “Well, you look like an illiterate motherfucker whose only reason for coming to school is to get off by staring at girls who are way too young for him.”

  Before I could think twice about it, I knocked the Monster can out of his hand using the Diet Coke can in my own, the two beverages pouring down his shirt as one disgusting cocktail. And then, just because I could, I squeezed the Hot Pocket I was holding toward him, its innards flying out like it was a miniature scrambled-egg-filled squirt gun.

  “Yo, what the hell?” he yelled, stepping back and shaking off the bits of egg like a wet dog. “Bro, I swear to god this bitch just got . . . Hot Pocket on me?”

  From inside the car, I heard a laugh, but then the door opened and Dominic’s way more muscular, way more tattooed counterpart was stumbling toward me.

  “Bea!” Emmy yelled, turning around and stopping in her tracks even though the final morning bell was ringing. “Run!”

  5

  The hotel room, which I guess is now technically my room, has the same ambiance as the lobby and hallway (i.e., zero ambiance), plus a super-low ceiling the exact texture of cottage cheese and two queen-size beds covered in peach-colored bedspreads. When I flop onto the first bed, it feels how you would imagine flopping face-first onto a mattress somebody had left out on the side of the road would feel. I get up and fall onto the second one, but it feels exactly the same except that it also makes a pronounced squeaking sound. Home sweet home.

  I roll over and notice a television. It’s the kind with antennas, which I’ve never actually seen in real life. On the bedside table between my two beds, there’s a remote the size of a graphing calculator. I pick it up and press the power button. The TV comes to life with a staticky clicking sound.

  Elevator music begins to hum out of the speakers and a weather report calendar floats on the screen. I scoot up to the edge of the bed to read it. The graphic only lists the days of the week, but not the exact date or month. It claims that the next week is going to be fifty-three degrees every day, mostly cloudy with a drizzle of rain. Weather that’s just bad enough to be a little annoying, but not totally awful. This place is nothing if not consistent in its mediocrity.

  As I stare into the TV, I realize the music playing from it sounds vaguely familiar. It’s a jazz cover of “Hey, Soul Sister” by Train—the song playing in the ca
r when I died. Without thinking, I jump to my feet on the bed and hold out the remote toward the TV like I’m wielding a sword.

  “This has got to be a sick joke,” I mutter, pushing a button to change the channel, but nothing happens. There is no other channel. I press the power button again and shut the whole thing off.

  Before I can do anything else, a wave of exhaustion, even deeper than the one earlier, rolls through my body. I always assumed jet lag was just some problem rich people invented as an excuse to hide being hungover, but in this moment, where the thought of even lifting one of my fingers sounds like the equivalent of bench-pressing a ton, I finally get it.

  I pass out horizontally on the worse of the two beds.

  I’M AWOKEN BY a noise that sounds like someone jackhammering through my door.

  For a second I forget where I am and everything that’s happened to me. I reach around for my phone, which I usually sleep with under my pillow even though my sister has sent me several news articles that claim it’s giving off radiation and slowly transforming my brain into a bowl of pea soup. My hand grasps the TV remote instead. I stare at it for a second as if it will provide me with an answer as to who I am and how I got here. When it doesn’t, I try the next best thing and hit its power button.

  The TV turns on. The song it plays is the same, as cursed to me as ever, and brings yesterday’s events trickling back into my head.

  Now instead of the weather, a stock footage montage of breakfast foods plays across the screen. A spinning plate of pancakes with thick maple syrup slowly being poured on top. Bacon sizzling on a griddle. A mug of coffee with steam rising up from the top. Text flashes across the bottom of the screen:

  FREE breakfast served 7 a.m.–9 a.m. every day outside the hotel lobby! “WHEN YOU’RE HERE, YOU’RE HERE!”

  My stomach makes an audible rumble. I realize that for the past day I’ve only been subsisting on fumes and desperately need to eat.

  The jackhammer noise continues.

  “Beatrice!” a voice calls. “Beatrice, are you up yet?”