Falling Slowly

Pt.3|Ch.15

I'd run out of time, and saying goodbye would probably hurt worse anyway.

My dad had returned his rental car that morning, so we had to get to the airport via taxi.

The driver helped my dad put my suitcase in the trunk while I climbed into the backseat and buckled my seatbelt.

Dad sat up front by the driver.

I tried to stop myself from looking back at the house as we drove away, but it felt like I was tied to one end of a rope, the other side tied to either the house or the people in the house.

The latter option was more likely than the former.

Guilt washed over me while I sat there, waiting for the yellow car to stop at its destination.

I was running away, and I hadn't even told him when I was leaving.

They'd probably notice my absence in three hours or so, when they got back from the show. And I'd be back in two or three, maybe four days anyway.

It wasn't like I'd be gone forever. Yet, at least.

"Here you are." The driver pulled the cab to a stop and got out to retrieve our suitcases.

I'd been in an airport once before, when we were picking Aiden up, but I'd never made it past the black tape dividers with the men and women wearing light blue gloves.

Security was a strange concept to me. Although the idea did make sense, I just couldn't understand how the tall, thin, grey rectangles were able to detect metal.

Unfortunately, we spent the rest of the time that we had trying to find our terminal and board the plane, meaning that I wasn't able to study my surroundings any more.

My suspicions from a few days prior had been correct: the long, narrow tunnel did, in fact, lead to the plane.

The interior of the airplane itself was pretty much what I'd expected it to be, but the designs on the chairs' fabric coverings were something I hadn't thought of before.

This specific plane's chairs were dark blue and decorated with different colored triangles.

The plane was already full of people when we got there, so there weren't too many seats to choose from. The only ones we could find were near the back—one by the window, and one on the aisle a row or two behind it.

"Do you have a preference?" Dad asked me. "I can take the window seat if you'd rather sit on the aisle."

I shook my head rapidly. "I want to sit by the window."

He obliged, and I was granted the honor of sitting with a view of the plane's wing on my left, and two complete strangers on my right.

Once all the passengers had boarded, a lady in a blue dress came out and demonstrated how the seatbelts worked while a man's voice over an intercom explained it verbally.

I seemed to be the only one paying attention to her tutorial, but then again, I had never seen seatbelts like these ones before.

The lady also showed us how to use the life jackets and oxygen masks, but the man on the intercom said that it was unlikely that we'd have to use either one of those.

After all the safety regulations had been reviewed, and we were all reminded that it was a felony to tamper with smoke detectors, the plane started moving.

It drove around for a minute or two, pulling away from the tunnel we'd walked down to get on, and began making its way down a kind of runway.

Suddenly, the engines made a very loud noise, and the plane started speeding up.