It was the first time Nicholas Cox had ever been on a plane, and Seiji was trying to strangle him. Or, at least, Seiji had grabbed Nicholas by the back of his collar while Nicholas was still walking. The flight attendants stared at Nicholas asphyxiating, wearing expressions of polite distress, but nobody stepped forward to save him.
“You’re going the wrong way,” Seiji’s voice said from behind his back.
“You could’ve just said that, Seiji,” protested Nicholas, once he could breathe again.
“I could have,” Seiji agreed with unruffled calm.
Nicholas had simply been turning right, following the flood of people in front of him. The line had broken down halfway through the long glass tunnel, and now it was all a rush. They were like swallows flying south. Except Seiji refused to be a swallow.
“I was going the way everyone else was going,” Nicholas pointed out.
“Yeah, but we’re in first class,” said Eugene. “Which is pretty cool. I’ve never been in first class before.”
Why did planes have classes? Seiji’s grip on Nicholas’s collar was tugging him to the left, but Nicholas took a swift, curious glance to the right before he followed along.
To the right was most of the plane, row upon row of people.
“Oh, those guys don’t have enough room,” Nicholas murmured in concern.
“That’s business class, bro,” said Eugene. “Look deeper.”
Farther back it was worse than the city buses at rush hour. People were packed in on top of one another like cans in the grocery store.
“People pay for this?”
“Yeah, the current system leaves a lot to be desired, but you’re holding up the line, and that’s not likely to help,” Harvard said in a kind but firm tone. “Move, Cox.”
Nicholas let Seiji pull him into first class. In first class, the seats were so big they looked like beds set in fancy plastic thrones. In first class, there were curtains with tiny fringes.
“Wow, this is nice,” Nicholas said, slightly distressed. “I could’ve gone to sit in the, um, third class.”
“They don’t call it third class,” Bobby told him. “It’s first, business, and coach, so the people in coach don’t feel any worse about being in coach.”
Nicholas raised his eyebrows. “Well, that’s not how numbers work. That’s like saying one, cauliflower, bicycle.”
“My father calls coach cattle class,” Aiden drawled.
He was standing beside Harvard and was apparently angry at the world, as usual these days. Nicholas noticed that Aiden looked exhausted. He could sympathize: He’d been so excited about traveling that he didn’t get any sleep last night. Maybe Aiden had been up all night packing!
“You can’t sit in coach,” Seiji told Nicholas. “You can’t compromise your mobility and embarrass me during your matches at Camp Menton. People know we train together.”
Nicholas hadn’t considered that before, that what he did reflected on Seiji as well as on Coach Williams and Kings Row. He wanted to do well even more now. He wanted to make them all proud.
They filtered to their plastic throne seats. In a stroke of luck, Nicholas was assigned to sit beside Seiji. Dante and Bobby were behind them. Eugene had to sit with Coach. The assistant coach was farther back and seemed disappointed to be separated from them.
Eugene seemed stoked. That made sense, since Coach was pretty awesome. Coach had already sat down and taken out a stack of magazines: Home and Saber, National Saber, the Saber Evening Post, and Saber Living.
They weren’t supposed to disturb Coach during the flight. Coach had been very firm on this subject. Nicholas wondered if it would disturb her a lot if he asked quietly to borrow one of her magazines.
He leaned across the aisle. “Coach, can I—”
Coach held up her magazine so that Nicholas could see the back. At home in Kings Row, Coach had many sayings that were forbidden, all posted on the wall of the gym. Boys were forbidden to say that épées were better than sabers, or despairingly claim “We lost because of me.” If anyone said forbidden phrases, they were punished by having to do suicide runs. On the back of her magazine, Coach had taped a note that read, COACH, CAN I TALK TO YOU DURING THE FLIGHT?
Realistically, Coach couldn’t make him do suicide runs on a plane. Could she?
Coach’s dark eyes met Nicholas’s over her magazine. Nicholas subsided back into his plane throne.
“Great choice, Cox,” said Coach Williams, and returned to the Saber Evening Post.
Aiden had also been lucky with his seat assignment and was supposed to sit with the captain. But since Aiden was a disaster, ungrateful for the good things the world provided him with, he was standing in the aisle, making complaints in a lazy voice that Nicholas had heard one of Aiden’s fans call languid. To Nicholas, languid just seemed like a fancy word for lazy.
“Sir, I have to ask you to sit down,” said a flight attendant, who looked a bit dazed by Aiden in the way most people did, as if Aiden’s face were the equivalent of a two-by-four that struck heads with great force. “It’s in the regulations.”
Aiden winked. “I have to ask.…Do rules really apply to the handsome?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure they do,” said Harvard, when the flight attendant failed to reply.
“If you recline both chairs and bring down the armrests, you can lower a small pod over yourself and sleep in a luxurious pod bed,” the flight attendant offered helpfully. She demonstrated, bringing down Harvard’s armrest to create a larger space.
Aiden flushed as though suddenly startled, but with no other spots available, he had no choice but to sit next to Harvard. He gingerly lowered himself into his seat, keeping his eyes focused straight ahead.
Nicholas looked around to share this Aiden-related weirdness with Seiji, but Seiji had produced a book from his bag. On the cover was a woman in hijab, holding a fencing foil balanced lightly against her shoulder. Seiji was already some way into the book and had an air that suggested there would be dire consequences if he was disturbed.
Deciding to disturb Seiji later, Nicholas craned his neck to see Bobby and Dante immersed in a conversation that was mostly Bobby talking and Dante giving nonverbal cues.
Harvard and Aiden seemed to have settled down.
Nicholas turned back to Seiji and tried to get a look at his book. Seiji shot him an annoyed glance, so Nicholas elbowed him. Then the plane, which had been zooming down the runway, jolted into the air and seemed to leave Nicholas’s stomach on the runway behind him. Nicholas flailed, yelped, and hid his face in Seiji’s shoulder. It was a sudden and shocking feeling, after sixteen years spent on the ground.
Seiji made a sharp irritated noise, then a relenting but still irritated sound, and patted Nicholas awkwardly on the shoulder once.
“Let go of my shirt, Nicholas,” he said. Nicholas found Seiji’s icy annoyance comforting in its familiarity.
Nicholas kept hold of Seiji’s shirt. The plane could lurch again at any moment. He only detached when the flight attendants came by with what was apparently just the first round of free food. They were offered tiny sandwiches and fancy flavored sparkling water in glasses with stems. Nicholas and Eugene had a conversation with the nice flight attendant about what was in the sandwiches and why they were so tiny.
“You eating your tiny sandwiches?” Nicholas asked Eugene.
“Yeah. Don’t mess with my protein intake,” said Eugene, as stern as Eugene ever got.
Nicholas sighed, accepting his fate, and tried again to peek at the book Seiji was reading. Seiji held it farther away from Nicholas without taking his eyes off the page.
“What’s the book about?”
“The life and fencing experiences of Ibtihaj Muhammad. She was a bronze medalist in the 2016 summer Olympics,” Seiji told him. “She’s one of my personal heroes and role models. You can read the book after I’m done.”
But what was Nicholas supposed to do now? He read the in-flight magazine, which told him more about the plane. Also about many whiskeys and colognes, but Nicholas didn’t really care about those. He looked up fencing documentaries on the search function on the screen in front of him and got a documentary about building a fence between America and Mexico. No thanks! The only actual fencing documentary was one Coach had already made them all watch six times. Nicholas felt the in-flight entertainment didn’t understand how to entertain him.
“The flight attendant said if we recline both our chairs and bring down the armrests, we can lower a small pod over ourselves and sleep in our small pod bed,” Nicholas told Seiji. “Want to be in a small pod?”
Seiji turned a page of his fencing book without even glancing up. “I don’t.”
Nicholas felt a lurch of unease, though that might have been the plane swooping some more. This was all so strange to him, and so obviously nothing new to Seiji.
“Are you still startled by the plane?” Seiji asked.
Nicholas shrugged.
“You can read the book with me,” offered Seiji. “But don’t ask me to turn a page before I’m ready. You know I like to take my time and make mental notes.”
“Totally.” Nicholas leaned in against Seiji’s shoulder. After a few minutes of interesting reading, he asked, “When do you think you might be done with this page?”
Seiji rolled his eyes, then said, “I’m not eating all my sandwiches.”
Nicholas cheered up. He could get used to new situations, like he’d grown to love his school. He was starting to like the plane already. The Kings Row team was going on an amazing adventure. France would be great.