Layoverland

by Gabby Noone

  Sadie.

  I look over at the analog alarm clock sitting on the bedside table. It’s 6:50 a.m.

  “Beatrice is still sleeping!” I yell toward the door. “You can leave a message for her though.”

  “Okay!” she replies cheerily. “Well, tell Beatrice if she doesn’t get her butt out of bed, Sadie will come in there and take it out for her, because her entire future is riding on training Beatrice to replace her on the Memory Experience team, and if she doesn’t, there will be literal Hell to pay.”

  I get up and trudge over to the door. Slowly.

  “I’m up,” I say, opening it halfway. “Just give me a few minutes.”

  “Good morning, Bea,” Sadie says, pushing herself fully through the door before I can stop her. “I brought a special welcome gift for you.”

  She plops a heavy white garment bag in my arms.

  “Please don’t tell me this is what I think it is,” I groan.

  Sadie just smiles maniacally at me.

  When I unzip the bag, my worst fear is confirmed: there are seven identical orange dresses, like I’m staring into the closet of a cartoon character.

  “How? I didn’t get measured.”

  “Oh, well, they’re standard-issue, not custom-made. There’s really no reason Todd has to measure every single person. He just likes the near-human contact.”

  I cringe, although I’m not sure if it’s at the ugly dresses or the thought of Todd or both.

  “I only wear black and black-adjacent colors,” I explain.

  “What’s black-adjacent?”

  “It’s like when you buy a shirt thinking it’s black, but then take it home and hold it up to the light and realize it’s just a super-dark purple.”

  “Well, here we consider orange a neutral! Oh, and don’t forget your accessories,” Sadie says, handing me a cardboard hatbox. “Get changed and I’ll meet you in the lobby for breakfast.”

  “Must we do everything together?”

  “Bea, you’re new here. You need me! Look, at least I’m not making you change right here in front of me. I’m learning how to give you space,” she says, backing away and out the door.

  I lock myself in the bathroom, which itself is so tiny that it barely fits me, like it’s meant for an airplane and not an airport hotel. I brush my teeth with the flimsy plastic travel toothbrush on the counter, and take a shower, even though I know it’s futile now. I hope the hot water will soothe me anyway, but, not surprising me in the least, it never even gets close to warm. And even when I stand directly under the showerhead, somehow my hair doesn’t get wet, refusing to let the water wash away its three-day-old grime.

  When I get out, I wrap myself in a towel and stare down at the uniform like we’re two cowboys in a shoot-out. But I’m way too hungry to put up a fight any longer, so I just slip it on.

  Inside the hatbox there’s a pair of low-heeled white patent pumps mysteriously in my exact size, white gloves, an orange pillbox hat, and a white train case. I put on the accessories and take another look at myself in the mirror, which is just slightly too short for me to see my full body in without awkwardly tilting backward.

  The contrast between my mascara-stained face and the cheery outfit is awful. It looks like I’m the lead singer of some kind of airplane-themed emo band. I fold up my fuzzy sweater and my least favorite pair of jeans and put them in a drawer underneath the TV, not knowing if I’ll ever wear them again.

  I DON’T SEE Sadie in the lobby, but I don’t make a great effort to look for her either. I take this miscommunication as a gift and make my way to the breakfast area alone. When I get there, I’m shocked to find that it’s all there. The pancakes. The bacon. The coffee. Except everything is encased in assorted shapes and flavors of Jell-O.

  The breakfast buffet looks like it’s straight out of a page from a cookbook you’d find at a yard sale and laugh at for a second but never expect anyone to actually cook from. There are three kinds of eggs, scrambled, boiled, and even fried, all suspended in clear gel. The coffee isn’t steaming, but cold and cut into cubes to be chewed rather than sipped. Mini blueberry muffins sit inside an elaborately shaped blue mold atop a cake pedestal. All of the food looks like it’s trapped behind glass, begging to escape. The only thing that actually looks comfortable with itself inside of Jell-O is the fruit salad, but even so, I don’t trust it.

  But my stomach grumbles violently. I don’t have room to be picky. So I grab a plastic tray and fill it up, quietly accepting that my diet for the foreseeable future will mainly be defined as wobbly.

  The giant seating area looks like a hospital cafeteria, mostly full of people eating alone, but there are a few groups having lively conversations like they’re just in a normal restaurant with normal food, catching up with their normal friends. I feel a pang of anxiety like it’s the first day of school and I have no friends to sit with in my lunch period. But I steel myself and remember that I’m not here to make friends; I’m here to . . . well, I’m here to help everyone move on to Heaven?

  I take a seat at an empty two-person table near the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows and dig into my pathetic feast. I wolf down what I am about 50 percent sure is a cherry Danish, followed by what I am only 10 percent sure are hash browns.

  “Anyone sitting here?” a deep but friendly voice says as I proceed to scrape Jell-O off of a hard-boiled egg.

  I look up. It’s the boy in basketball shorts from my flight. I swallow hard and shake my head in response, but it’s not exactly an invitation for him to join me.

  “Mind if I join you?” he asks.

  Sigh.

  “Go ahead,” I say.

  He places his tray on the table. It’s full of pancakes suspended in a brown gel that I hope tastes like maple syrup.

  “I’m Caleb,” he says. “Caleb Smith.”

  “Bea . . . Fox,” I say, unclear why we’re exchanging last names.

  “You were on my flight, weren’t you?”

  “Oh. I don’t know.” I shrug, knowing full well I saw him on my plane. “Did you come in yesterday morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess I was then.”

  I feign disinterest in him by continuing to pick apart my egg with laser-sharp focus.

  “This place is weird, huh?” he prods, poking at his pancakes with a fork.

  “Yeah. Weird is definitely one way to put it.”

  “I mean, airports are liminal spaces to begin with, but this is literally a liminal space between life and death, right? It all just feels too on the nose.”

  I drop my fork and knife and look up, still avoiding eye contact with him.

  “You know what I mean by ‘liminal spaces’?” he asks, but doesn’t pause to let me answer. “Airports, rest stops, waiting rooms—places that feel like they don’t really exist because they’re just passageways to the things we’re actually heading toward. When you’re in them, reality feels altered because they weren’t designed for people to spend extended amounts of time in and—”

  “Yeah,” I say, putting my fingers up for him to stop talking. “I know what they are. I read that really long Tumblr post about liminal spaces too. Okay, Mr. Neil deGrasse Tyson? Over here trying to explain the universe to me . . .”

  I spear a cube of coffee with my fork and dramatically swallow it, only to then cough it back up because it’s gross. I’d assumed it’d be sweet, like actual Jell-O, but somehow it really just tastes like cold, burnt black coffee.

  “But I agree,” I say, humbled by the awful taste. “This whole thing is a little too on the nose.”

  He grins at me.

  “Like a minute ago,” I continue, “I earnestly thought to myself, What’s the deal with airline food? like I’m some kind of bad stand-up comic. This place is making me think exclusively in clichés.

  “I mean, look,” I say, hold
ing up a long slab of Jell-O enveloping a once-crispy piece of bacon. “The food is literally suspended in time, just like we are.”

  Caleb chuckles and, reluctantly, so do I. While I’m at it, I properly look at his face for the first time.

  It’s a nice face. His eyes look red around the rims and have bags underneath like he hasn’t slept a wink, but the eyes themselves are brown with golden flecks. He has olive skin and thick eyebrows and wavy brown hair that’s short on the sides but floppy in the front so that one small tendril hangs above his forehead just . . . so. I didn’t even know boys had haircuts like this in real life.

  But the longer I stare, there’s something that bothers me about his face. And it’s not his slightly uneven chin that juts out a little in an admittedly cute way while he smiles. It’s that it’s the kind of face I don’t trust. The kind of face that is only nice to me when it wants a favor, like the faces of the boys at school who only acknowledged my existence when I was at work because they thought it would get them a free caramel macchiato.

  “So,” Caleb says as my smile fades and I look back down at my tray. “You’re one of the agents who gets people through to Heaven?”

  My face falls further.

  “How do you know that?” I mumble.

  “Because your, um, dress says so.” He points to the small embroidered text on the left side of my chest that reads Beatrice and then, in smaller text below it, Memory Experience, which I only notice right now.

  “Oh,” I say, looking down. I’m basically wearing a neon sign announcing my job. “Right.”

  “Which, might I add, looks great!” he says. “Orange really suits you.”

  “Oh, screw you,” I blurt out, knowing I’ll think of a better comeback than “Oh, screw you” in approximately three hours.

  Caleb laughs again. It’s a really nice laugh. Ugh. I just want to shove a disgusting gelatinous pancake into his mouth and make him stop.

  “Um, but seriously, is there anything I could do to, you know,” he says, lowering his voice so only I can hear. “Get my number called sooner?”

  And there it is.

  “Are you propositioning me?” I say loudly enough for the other tables to hear. “So you can move on to Heaven ahead of everyone else who is waiting ever so patiently?”

  “No, I’m just—”

  “‘Just’? Just what? What do you even have to offer me in exchange for doing something like that? We don’t have money here. We don’t have anything except these useless meat sacks that, I guess, carry our souls around,” I say, gesturing to our bodies. “What are you gonna do? Offer me your useless meat sack?”

  Words . . . they are . . . just coming out of my mouth today.

  “I don’t know! Maybe.” He shrugs.

  “Ew,” I say, grimacing.

  “Wait, no!” he exclaims. “That’s not what I meant. That was gross. Sorry, but honestly, who says meat sack? You set me up.”

  “Look, my point is,” I say, setting my hands down on the table matter-of-factly, “it seems the one good quality about this place is that everyone is treated equally. Everyone has to wait around for a mind-numbingly long amount of time and no one gets a special pass. Maybe your male privilege got you ahead on Earth, but it’s not going to get you ahead here!”

  “Okay, okay,” he says, looking around self-consciously. “I wasn’t trying to bribe you. I was just, you know, making polite conversation . . . asking for a favor from a friend.”

  “A friend?” I ask. I turn my head around, pretending to look for someone. “Your friend is around? Do they work here too? I must’ve missed them.”

  He plops his fork down.

  “Ohhh. You meant me?” I ask sarcastically. “Well, Caleb Smith, I don’t know what it was like where you flew in from, but where I flew in from, partaking in half of one terrible meal together does not make us friends.”

  “Yet!” he says, his eyes widening and staring up into my own. I look away quickly, feeling myself blush again even though I am a sworn non-blusher, skilled at making my body resist any impulses that could betray my emotions.

  “Anyway,” I say. “Even if you did bribe me, it’s not within my power to pick who gets called. The numbers are randomly generated. It’s all part of the great equalization.”

  “Well, that’s too bad. I was all ready to bribe you,” he says, wiggling his eyebrows just slightly.

  “All right, that’s it!” I say, pushing my chair back. “Actually, I’ll make sure your number never gets called. Have fun eating wet slop and wearing socks with sandals for the rest of eternity.”

  He looks under the table at his feet.

  “Hey, how’d you know I’m wearing—”

  “I saw you getting off the plane,” I say.

  His jaw goes slack.

  “So you did notice me on the plane,” he says.

  “No, I just noticed your shoes. Not you.”

  I stand and pick up my tray. As I do it, my spoon falls off and onto the floor, under the table. When I reach down to grab it, I notice a passport lying near Caleb’s foot. Quickly, without thinking too much about why I’m doing it, I grab the passport along with my spoon and place them both back onto my tray, underneath a napkin.

  “Beatrice!” I hear a familiar voice call. I decide to stay low to the ground. “Beatrice Faaaahx!”

  “I think someone’s looking for you,” Caleb says, eyeing me under the table.

  “Pretend I’m not here,” I bark.

  He just nods, surprising me with his cooperation.

  “You!” Sadie yells, closer now. “What are you looking at?”

  “Me?” Caleb asks. “Nothing.”

  “No, down there.”

  “Uh, I don’t know, a, um . . .” he stammers, his inability to lie rendering his cooperation absolutely useless.

  “Hiya, Bea,” Sadie says, her face suddenly inches from mine. “I’ve been looking all over for you!”

  “Would you believe me if I said I got lost?” I ask, staring away from her and down at the minuscule bits of dried food stuck to the carpet instead.

  “No.”

  “Well, I got lost.”

  “We’re running late,” she says, motioning for me to get up. I clutch my tray and stand.

  “It was nice meeting you, Bea,” Caleb says.

  “It was . . . completely average meeting you,” I say, staring into his eyes.

  “Maybe I’ll see you around?” he asks, smiling and raising his perfectly imperfect eyebrows.

  “Hopefully not,” I answer.

  “Okay, enough with the chitchat! Let’s go,” Sadie says, pulling my arm.

  “Beatrice, were you flirting with that boy?” she asks me once we’re barely out of earshot of Caleb.

  “Ew. Of course not,” I say, looking back to make sure Caleb didn’t hear.

  “Good. I wouldn’t recommend getting close to people who are only just passing through because, before you know it . . . poof!” Sadie says, snapping her manicured fingers. “They’re gone.”

  “Sounds like you know from experience,” I say.

  “No!”

  I give her a sidelong glance.

  “Fine. Yes, I’ve had a few flings, but not in, like . . . a decade . . . ish. I’ve learned my lesson, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a row of trash cans and remember the dirty tray in my hands and the passport sitting on it that’s not mine.

  “I have to throw this out,” I say, turning toward the trash.

  “Of course,” Sadie says, following right behind me.

  I clear my throat, loudly.

  “What?” she asks.

  “I think I can manage to throw away my own trash without your help.”

  “Really? Because you got soooo lost before . . .”r />
  I roll my eyes.

  “Fine,” she says. “I’ll be right here. And I’ll be watching you.”

  The trash cans are like the ones McDonald’s uses that look like cabinets with little floppy doors you can dump your trash into without ever having to stare into the abyss of half-eaten McNuggets and fries. Except instead of having the words THANK YOU inscribed on the little door, it says YOU’RE WELCOME.

  I snatch the passport off my orange plastic tray, slide the remainder of my breakfast into the trash, and discreetly slip Caleb’s passport inside my stupid new train case.

  Should I have alerted him that his passport fell onto the ground and then given it back to him? Yes.

  Did I keep it because something inside me that I can’t explain desperately wants to know more about him but is too ashamed to ask? Also yes.

  Plus, having the passport gives me an excuse to talk to him again. An excuse that conveys “I’m just being a good person and returning a found object,” not “I find you interesting and maybe extremely attractive even though I typically find boys to be sexist, thumb-like creatures who are incapable of having thoughtful opinions.”

  “Bea?” Sadie calls, interrupting my thought spiral. “Forget something?”

  “Huh?” I say, in what I hope is a sweetly innocent tone. “Oh, that? I just . . .”

  “Your gloves,” she says, her face serious. “You’re not wearing your gloves. You need to be wearing your gloves. They are an essential part of your uniform.”

  “Right,” I say, rolling my eyes. I reach into my case and grab the white gloves, brushing against the passport and wondering how many hours it will be before I can take it back to my room and read exactly when, where, and how Caleb died.

  6

  My first day of work begins as I’ve always imagined most adult workdays begin: with a pointless meeting.

  “Todd!” Sadie says, knocking on the door of the same room she took me to the day before.

  “What’s the password?” he calls from behind the door.

  “Not this again,” I mutter.

  “Toddcanrunasevenminutemile,” Sadie sputters.

  “I changed it, remember?” Todd calls back, indignant. “For security reasons!”