Random Acts of Fantasy (8 page)

They went on vacations to Disney World and some island called St. Martin, and sometimes they called it something like “Martin-eek,” which I guess is French for “island in the Caribbean where rich Ohioans brag about going.”

A few of my friends visited grandmas and grandpas far flung from us, and flew to do it, but most of my people took buses, drove cars, and hitchhiked.

Nothin’ wrong with hitchhiking.

But this plane shit? Oh my God. The airport was huge, loud, and overcrowded, and those TSA agents looked at us like their fingers were just itching to do a full-body cavity search and turn into deep-sea-diving digits.

Some voice announced a flight delay to Jamaica and then repeated it in two different languages. A baby in line behind the serpentine queue that stretched out behind us began to cry so hard it gagged, and now this Michigan jackhole was giving me shit while Joe shot me looks that said I was a no-good hick from Hoopieville who needed to just shut up.

This was not how my island getaway was supposed to start.

“Eden” my ass.

Joe was suddenly next in line, while a short, squat woman with long brown hair tucked under a uniform hat waved me over to her. My palms were wet and I could feel sweat beads forming under my arms and—yes—under my breasts. When you have to wear a bra with letters that head into the middle of the alphabet, all kinds of things collect under them. It’s like the Bermuda Triangle of body parts. I could probably tuck a chihuahua in there and still have room for Kanye West’s ego.

The woman had the cold look of someone so thoroughly disgusted with human nature that nothing anyone did mattered; we were all doomed to disappoint. Her eyes flitted between my driver’s license and my plane ticket, then she handed me my papers and pointed to the scanner thing.

And that was when I panicked.

I had forgotten Josie’s advice. Now, Josie had flown plenty of times, and was an old pro at it, so when I confessed my airline virginity she just jumped in and gave me friendly advice, like “Don’t joke about bombs” and “No—seriously, Darla, don’t you make a single fucking joke about a bomb” and “So help me motherfucking God, if I have to come bail you out of federal prison and explain that shit to Aunt Cathy because you couldn’t shut down the short circuit between your funny bone and your mouth, I will make you sponge bathe my mother when she is too old to care for herself.”

Helpful advice like that.

But in addition, she gave me another bit of advice: don’t wear an underwire bra. She said I could set off the metal detectors or something.

To say that Josie is…
under-endowed
…is an understatement. It’s more like if you took two raisins and pinned them in place with those little cocktail toothpicks with pink curlies at the end, you might approximate—why the fuck am I talking about cocktail toothpicks in relation to my aunt’s boobies?

Because it’s better than pissing my pants in front of this scanner machine at Logan. I’m
that
scared.

Joe looked at me from the other side of the scanner and held his hands out like I was a toddler about to take its first steps. Trevor was behind me, his attention split between the TSA agent’s questions and my own, increasingly obvious, dilemma.

And me?

I was frozen in place with the words
Don’t say bomb! Don’t say bomb! Don’t say bomb!
screaming in my head like a crack addict with a butt plug attached to a jackhammer.

“Darla?” Joe called out in that fake-quiet shout where you are trying to get
someone’s
attention but not
everyone’s
attention.

My big old wide eyes met his and my heart slapped away against my stomach. I was, in a word, dying.

Just…dying.

The room swelled to ten times its real size, and people began to speak through gallons of Karo syrup. My shoes grew and my knees began to shake.

Don’t say bomb!

You’re wearing an underwire!

Trevor’s hands felt like searing-hot fire irons on my arms. “Honey? Darla? You are green.” He nudged me forward, three steps or so, to the scanner.

Amy was next. “Darla?” I couldn’t say nothin’. Couldn’t even croak out the word
bomb
.

Not that I should!

She went through the scanner real slow, looking back at me repeatedly, and then when she was done shot me a thumbs-up.

What was I supposed to say?
Yay you, Amy, for doing that because I can’t. I am dying, and fuck your thumb, you overly cheery chipmunk who got an iPhone caught in your twat.
 

I get mean when I’m terrified, if you haven’t noticed.

A new TSA agent waved me and Trevor over. Joe was talking to Amy in a super-controlled way, both of them talking out the sides of their mouths and sounding like they were Stephen Hawking. It made them both look lawyerly and mature, and I wanted to annihilate them with a flamethrower for having the audacity to be okay while I wasn’t.

’Cause I was dying.

“You’re ice cold, too,” Trevor said in a voice of such compassion I would have wept if more than three brain cells were working.

But all three of them rattling around in my head were devoted to making sure I didn’t say
bomb!
 

Finally, the TSA agent, a balding man who was built like my Uncle Mike but who had the cynical scowl of of a big-budget action movie villain, called out to me and Trevor.

“You need to proceed,” he said with a sneer, like it was so easy, like I could just take a step forward.

Trevor even kicked the backs of my heels a bit, as if I were Colin Mochrie or Brad Sherwood in an improv skit gone maniacally wrong, but all it did was injure my achilles heel and make me want to punch him.

“Do something,” he hissed, no longer compassionate now that his tender ass was in jeopardy of being made sweet, sweet love to by an un-lubricated silicone glove covering the hand of a government worker who made $17 an hour.

So I did. As Trevor went up to that big,
Star Trek
-like beast of a machine, I reached my hands behind my back and unhooked my bra.

That’s right.

My bra.

Don’t ask me why, but the part of my mind that wasn’t screaming
Don’t say bomb!
was telling me
Take off the underwire
. My left hand snaked under my right shirtsleeve and slipped that arm out of the bra, then ditto with the left, the long string of bra coming out, unfastened, through my left sleeve.

A distant set of catcalls from people in the security line reached my ears as blood pounded through me, my eyes now finding a gawking Joe, Trevor giving me a WTF look, and Amy shooting me that chipmunky thumbs-up.

My legs decided to work again, and I got one of those bins and threw my bra in it, nipples free and rubbing against the thin cotton of my shirt, poking out hard and ready for a fight. Most people think you go into one of two states when you’re scared: fight or flight.

But there’s a third. It’s
freeze
. Fight, flight, or freeze—and I’d frozen, all right. So had my nipples, because going around in a thin cotton t-shirt in mid-December in Boston would make any nipples stand at attention. The girls were tight.

“Does that bra have a bomb in it?” Mr. Asshole Wolverine whispered to his wife, one scanner over, and then I watched three TSA agents to whisk him away, his wife pleading after them, saying, “Harold, I told you not to say
bomb
!”

And then I was being beamed up to Planet Starlac as the second lieutenant in the
Star Trek
mission for this episode. Light flashed before my eyes and I saw my skin dissolve into the molecules in motion, neutrons and electrons floating fast in patterns of solid matter and then an amorphous, twisted realignment of the essence of Darla.

Okay. Not really. The scanner did its job, some bureaucrat got to see a blobby image of my blobby nakedness and deem me not unfit for plane travel, and then they made me turn around and let me out to get my bra and stuff.

It was sure as hell easier than I thought, and less invasive than having my locker searched back in high school during one of those “random” drug searches the principal was always organizing, until he was arrested for being the ringleader of a massive pill operation that stretched from Detroit to Miami.

Joe gave me the hairy eyeball.

“You took your bra off in
public
? Why?”

If I opened my mouth I knew I would scream
Don’t say bomb!
so I just shook my head, gathered my things, and marched through the first door my half-blind eyes saw.

To find a Wolverine getting a rectal exam.

Okay, that didn’t happen either, but it would have been a weird kind of coincidence, huh?

Instead, I walked into the men’s room. Just saw a few peens and a lot of guys with really bad aim. A rough hand pinched hard into a spot beneath my shoulder, and finally I found my voice.

“Ow! That hurts!”

“Get out of the men’s room,” Joe said through gritted teeth. Fuming. He was fuming, and all I could think was:

Don’t say bomb!

Trevor

My shoe came untied and I’d bent down to fix it when a very warm, friendly palm settled on one ass cheek and squeezed.

Because I was facing the men’s room Darla had mistakenly stumbled into and had seen Joe rush in after her, ice water ran through me at the touch. That wasn’t Darla’s hand. No woman had touched me like that since Darla, and it made me deeply uncomfortable.

On its own, the discomfort was odd, because being handled by women had been part of my life for enough years that it shouldn’t feel so alien. The implications of finding a strange woman’s touch chilling, and not thrilling, would have to be processed and dissected later. While it was fine to look at other women, it absolutely was not fine to touch when I’d promised Darla that we were monogamous.

Trinogamous? Is that even a word? Whatever Darla, Joe, and I were, it was just we three.

So who the fuck was grabbing my ass in public?

“Trevor!” squealed a familiar voice. An unpleasantly familiar voice. A
what the fuck is she doing here?
kind of voice.

“Suzy?” Arms went around my neck, which was awkward because she was half standing, half squatting and I was still bent down, hands on my shoelaces. A mouthful of light brown hair that tasted like coconut and chemicals assaulted me.

Joe’s ex.

Joe’s rabid, stalker ex.

The awkward “hug” ended when I stood abruptly, spitting hair out of my mouth and using my hands to draw a zone around me. A No Suzy Bergen Zone. Because Suzy was, well…

You know the saying “Don’t dip your dick in crazy?”

Joe hadn’t heard that one before he slept with Suzy, unfortunately. The wide, over-eager brown eyes that met mine with the full force of a woman who stumbles across an opportunity denied her through three court orders, made my gut ache.

Suzy was all those chicks in those crazy bromance comedies who are over-the-top insane rolled into one tight package. With a heaping dose of borderline personality disorder and a voice that made fingernails on a chalkboard sound like Beethoven.

She was hot. I had to give Joe that. And he’d met her during Intro to Sociology his sophomore year, her little model’s body all his slobbering cock could notice for the first year or so they dated.

(My cock slobbered here and there for her, though it never dipped a toe in the Crazy Suzy love pool.)

“Trevor! What on earth are you doing here?”

“Flying.” Sticking to simple, short sentences was best with Crazy Suzy, because she wasn’t going to let you get a word in edgewise, and because she didn’t listen anyhow.

Ever.

“Haha, silly!” she squealed, hitting me across my abs with some kind of passport wallet thing. Her voice shot up into an octave only dogs and NSA agents could hear, the squeal making my jaw clench. “Of course you’re flying. You wouldn’t be at the airport if you weren’t!” Furtive glances all around me, and then she asked, “Is Joey with you?”

Just then, Joe and Darla emerged from the men’s room, his arm around her shoulders, the two heads huddled together in a conspirators’ talk. It made me smile, and that was my mistake.

Suzy turned around, her face aglow with expectation and promise, like a big-game hunter who’s spotted an injured elephant.

And then her expression morphed into that of an Orc. An Orc with perfectly applied makeup and a lovely, shimmery tan from a bottle.

A tanned Orc with laser eyes that could kill Darla on sight.

Joe’s head was still bent over as Darla giggled, the two walking toward us in that loopy way you walk when you’re entwined in another person, feet not quite in sync, hips jutting and jarring each other. It’s fun when you’re the one with your arm around your woman, her soft side boob catching your rib and making you hard.