Greatest

5: threatening the world with high astounding terms

After ensuring my brothers won't miss me when I'm gone and won't be able to watch the Lion King without PTSD flashbacks, I and Shane and Jonesy make our way to the airport. A limo takes us there. The men have their bags and I mine, so we're all quite encumbered shuffling our way into Dulles.
Now, after all this fan fare about secret agents and all that, it's admittedly sobering if not refreshing to make my way through a packed terminal with just my two agents. Security sweeps and the like have been done and Dulles security has been notified, but at the end of the day first children are no different than anybody else. State dollars aren't going to pay for a private air craft unless it's a state sponsored event, which of course going to school is not. From the moment I left the white house grounds, I'm just an ordinary citizen, with two not at all ordinary body guards. I have to stand in line to check my bags, and make it through airport security just like any other commuter. My agents are armed, so they present LEO passes to TSA. I for my part am left to strip down like usual, with only three knives carefully k-taped to my chest underneath a loose t-shirt. Normal security procedures should detect those and would, but I have ways around that that I'm not about to divulge here. It's irrelevant to the plot and generally illegal. So we're skipping it. You don't need to know how to do it. Suffice to say I got a few knives through.
Then we're just waiting at our gate for the flight. I have only my backpack as a carry on. It has my tablet for entertainment purposes and that's about all I'll need. Shane and Jonesy are equally unencumbered, with only their phones and in Shane's case a book for company. It's going to be a long flight, five hours.
We are in first class, the last row of it, with Shane next to me and Jonesy in front of me. It's far from our first flight together and we settle in routinely. I plug in my headphones and try to shift backward in the seat, the men stay alert as everyone gets on the plane, but they seemingly relax a little as they close the cabin doors. Everyone will have already been vetted not just to get on the airplane, but also because I'm aboard.
Most people don't look twice at me, though I get a couple of stares. First children are in the press now and then, but at the end of the day I'm just a scrawny teenage boy with a growing out crew cut and cystic acne, wearing a faded Harvard t-shirt (I did an internship thing there last summer), a black zip up hoodie, stiff blue jeans, and worn but expensive running cloud running shoes. There's a cut on my head from hitting the tub the other day, and there's a distinctive long white scar on my right cheek. It's faded now, year old, but at certain angles you can see it. There's a fresh scrape on my left cheekbone from morning run, and most of my lower right jaw and neck is black and blue from knife practice the other day. The rest of me isn't much better. But at the end of the day I look like a teenager who lost a fight. Which I am. Losing anyway.
Either way, I and my companions, though in my mind we stick out like sore thumbs, are really rather inconspicuous. The men are dressed in jeans and stiff button ups and jackets that conceal their guns. Of course at second glance they look like the human version of hyenas, but at first they appear to be ordinary business men commuting.
I'm cuing up my usual getting on a plane music, (Leaving On a Jet Plane, Fly me to the Moon, Learn to Fly, yes thank you I am very smart thank you for noticing, yes I can listen to these three songs for five hours for aesthetic reasons). The men remain mostly alert, but once everyone is settled they appear to settle as well, Jonesy is staring at a phone same as me, Shane looking at his book.
Since we're in first class the flight attendants check on us a few times. The one doesn't seem to know who I am at first and seems to be a bit concerned about a sullen looking teenager, but the other two quickly tell the first then they're overly polite to us. I smile and thank them for the water and towels and such.
I should make a note here, I don't go into too much detail about being famous because I don't think I'm famous just like, a large and select portion of people kind of recognize me but not in a cool way, kind of like in a one hit wonder kind of way. Like they know who I am as a person, but not like anything beyond that nor do they super care. Since I look like the personification of a dead sewer rat, I'm not popular with the youth crowd though there's a small following. I think I've been approached a few times by people namely when I'm doing something like the internship at Harvard or the like, where people are curious and might as questions about me or my family.
When my dad first got into power, and then every so often, magazines and websites will do articles on us. Our mother permits official photos of us once a year other than like, holidays where we are seen, though we are not to do any official interviews. That said, I've done some unofficial interviews in that if I'm helping with a charity or something I talk about what that is, or when I was walking the dog (don't ask I don't want to cry) I told the reporters her name and all that. And of course we fly commercially and go to school and the like. So it's not like people don't know who we are or don't meet us.
Long and short of it is, we're known for being friendly and polite enough. We participate in charity things with our mother, and when we are in public we politely smile, wave, and nod, ever the showmen. If we are put on the spot by reporters we're polite in declining to answer. And though our schoolmates and teachers have to sign NDAs, the odd flight attendant doesn't. Our agents just politely ask them to avoid disclosing we were there till well after we are gone, so sometimes they'll post about meeting us and it's usually positive. Our father's cultivating a good public image powerpoint didn't go to waste.
So I make polite small talk with the flight attendants, learning their names and such, before going back to zoning out and writing in this and staring at the books I downloaded on my phone.
The plane is cleared for take off and we are taxing down the runway. It's exciting, far from my first trip but getting really close my last. I'm actually looking forward to the long flight in the quiet of the air.
And that's when my head splits open with a raging fire.
Okay, it doesn't really. It just feels like that. And it comes on so fast I nearly scream in pain, clutching my head and bending over, rocking trying to get rid of it but it shoots through my skull and with fiery fingers down my back.
"What is it?" Jonesy just heard me cry out. For the sake of description, I'm going to assume most everyone in first class looks our way. I don't know that that happened because white lights were flashing in front of my eyes, but I'm going to bet people were staring.
"Is it your head?" Shane asks, taking my water before I spill it and moving in his seat, "Where are your pills?"
"Backpack—front pocket," I say, between gritted teeth, tears leaking down my face.
"What jar?" He asks. I put all my pills in nondescript jars and destroyed the original container. Because I'm dramatic they're in little mason jars with sweet little black ribbons on them.
"Red lid, two, blue lid three," I hold out a hand.
"One at a time?" He asks.
"No just give them to me—jesus," I sob, as he takes my hand from my head to carefully curl the pills into my palm.
"I'm going to hand you water, all right?"
"Okay."
"Is there anything I can get?" The flight attendant is here oh good.
"Ice, and coke, yeah? Sip the coke that'll help," Jonesy says.
I can't respond. I'm rocking back and forth sobbing in pain. I want to be dead. I realize I will be soon and then the pain will stop theoretically. But then everything will be over and I don't want it to be over.
"Here," Shane is holding ice to my neck as I gasp and pant in pain, "Deep breaths, oxygen will stop the pain. Let those pills get in you."
I'm not ready to go.
But if I had a gun I'd shoot myself.
I ripped out my headphones but the music is still playing, tinny and faint, as I rock.
"Is there anything else I can have her get you?" Jonsey asks.
"No, I'm sorry," I moan.
After about twenty minutes the meds kick in. Interesting thing, when I'm saying meds I mean very powerful steroids and opiods. Oh yeah. That's the sort of shit they give you when you're on the way out and it doesn't matter if you're addicted or not. I have to go see the doctor every few weeks and only get a few dozen but yeah, I'm like, moderately less souped up than if I'd just done a line of cocaine.
So suffice to say these meds do the trick but I neither feel awesome nor am I anything like coherent.
I don't know if you've ever been in horrendous crippling pain before, reader, but once you're out of it, there's this giddy sense of euphoria. You feel like you can fly. You're just completely and deliriously happy to be out of pain you couldn't be happier than if someone gave you a million dollars. There's such relief you're walking on air.
It's like that when you're out of pain normally, let alone after taking what I just did to get out of pain.
Once I am out of pain I'm just curled up in a fetal position, afraid to move and put myself back in pain, head pressed nearly against Shane's shoulder as I count the lines in his coat and breath. Breathing without pain is good. Alien goop infecting your brain is not good.
Shane is satisfyingly calm, just occasionally offering me water or a blanket. He collects a meal service for me which I know for a fact I'm not going to be able to eat. Jonesy turns around to check on me a few times but is quiet.
About halfway through the flight I'm drugged out of coherence but I'm accepting soft drinks which the flight attendants are at this point plying me with.
"Migraine, I'm fine," I assure them.
"Oh that's awful, my sister has those," one of them says kindly.
I nod forcing a smile.
Jonesy and Shane mostly direct traffic away from me, though, collecting things from the attendants and offering me whatever they think might help. They probably think I'm still in pain, but at this point I'm entirely high.
A couple of little kids come up to look at me nearly to get evicted by the flight attendants, but I wave a hand.
"I saw you in this magazine," a little boy is holding up a magazine yeah okay I was in. Fencing thing, my team did well so there was a bit about me being a first child as well.
I nod, again I'm really high right now, "Do you fence?"
He nods.
"Good for you," I smile again, "Don't tell anyone you saw me, all right?"
Then the flight attendants do usher him away.
"I'm not supposed to say I have migraines, not supposed to say it in public," I tell Shane, very nearly going to sleep on his shoulder.
Jonesy grunts something to the effect that he thinks it's stupid.
"Yeah well this once, eh? Don't worry about it, try to sleep," Shane encourages.
I do not sleep, I just lie there not being in pain for several more hours.
Finally, finally we land. I'm at least better and coming down from the meds, so I can appreciate the hustle of our arriving airport, which is much smaller than Dulles though no less crowded.
Upon disembarking, Jonesy and Shane discover that I'm not at all sober at the moment.
"What were those meds?" Shane grabs my arm to stop me from falling over.
"Mine, private medical information, mine," I snarl, shaking his arm off and nearly falling down. "I can stand." I say those fateful words as I fall over.
"Are you nauseated?" Jonesy asks, reasonably.
"Nope, fine, I'm just fine, perfectly fine don't be concerned, gentlemen."
They remain concerned.
We get our bags and then go find a cab. The fresh air does me good, as does the usual joy of packing all three of us and our bags into the cabs. The men are only coming for a couple of weeks, as opposed to a semester, so they have less than me, but still. They may leave some personal items over that they don't care to lug back and forth.
The cab has to wind us through the mountains to Rose and Swan, which sits it seems nearly above the clouds. I'm feeling better and the opioids are fading in my system and I'm feeling more with it and less euphoric. I feel like Shane knows what I took was a hell of a lot more like heroin than aspirin, but he doesn't comment further, which is good, because right now I don't have any good answers.