A sad esophagus (that’s me) and a big-boned girl in a biology lab coat walk into Port Authority at 42nd Street and 8th Avenue in New York City. What happens next is anyone’s guess. There are police with bulletproof vests and semiautomatic guns. A lot of them. They are gathered by the doors. Just standing there. People still walk around, going to their buses, their subways, their loved ones.
I watch the police. I look at the guns.
I freeze, just like with the dogs at school.
Stanzi guides me down the corridor where our bus will come pick us up in twenty minutes.
I write Stanzi a note. Thank you. Sorry again for lying about seeing Gustav’s helicopter.
“It’s okay,” she says. “Not everyone can see it. No big deal.”
“Are you really going to go up in it?” I ask.
“Aren’t you scared?”
“Of what?” she asks.
I take a second to figure out what I’d be most afraid of. “Of it not being real?”
“If it’s not real,” Stanzi says, “then it’s less dangerous than if it is real.”
“True. But what if it’s real? Aren’t you afraid to crash?”
“No,” she says.
“How can you not be?”
“I have faith. In Gustav. In the helicopter. In… whatever it is that controls everything.”
“God?”
“Whatever.”
“Do you know where you’ll go?” I ask.
“No. And I don’t care. As long as there are no more drills. As long as it makes sense where we’re going. Gustav will know.”
Our bus arrives and the line moves forward. “Do you love him?” I ask.
Stanzi laughs. “This isn’t about love.”
“And it’s really there? The helicopter?” I ask. “You’re the only one who sees it. Lansdale lied. She can’t really see it on Fridays.”
“I know.”
“Do you think his dad sees it?”
“Seems so,” I say.
When the bus arrives, Stanzi and I sit next to each other.
She looks out the window, and the bus backs up and pulls out of Port Authority. As we drive toward the tunnel, she looks back at New York City. “So was Shane good? Was seeing him nice?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“How old is he?”
“Same. Seventeen.”
“Did you meet on Facebook?”
“I don’t do that anymore. Not since Irenic Brown,” I say, hoping she’ll figure it out. Or say something. For once.
“So?” That’s all she says.
“I met him on a self-help site.”
“Oh.”
She doesn’t ask what self-help site. She looks out the window after we emerge from the tunnel and she takes in the last view of the city from a distance before the only things to see are marshy NewJerseyscapes and endless highway.
I look at Stanzi and I see that she’s crying, so I ask if she’s okay.
“Yes.”
“Was it something I said?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
She turns to me. “Do you love Shane?”
“Yes, I think so,” I say.
“That makes me so happy I’m crying.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” she says. “It’s a good thing.”
“I believe, you know. In the helicopter. In the whole thing,” I say.
“I’m glad.”
“I hope you and Gustav can get out of here. You deserve better.”
“So do you.”
“You’re geniuses.”
“So are you,” she says.
Stanzi told me once that just because I get bad grades that doesn’t make me stupid. She was in my eighth-grade algebra class. She knows the teacher hated me. She knows that’s when I started hanging out with my other friends. She told me once that a high percentage of high school dropouts are the smart kids.
I take out my journal and I write in it. Stanzi probably thinks I’m writing about Shane, but I’m really writing about being smart and being stupid at the same time. Getting stoned before a chem final. Drinking gin in the bathroom during ninth-grade study hall. Letting my new friends write my name and number on guys’ bathroom stalls.
I never told Shane this, or anyone else, but maybe I deserved what happened to me. Maybe I had it coming since eighth grade. I gave up, so everyone else did, too.