Before going on, I’d like to apologize to you for my little mini rant back there. Probably wasn’t one of my finest moments, I’ll be honest. But I’ve read some of the news articles involving the crash lately, and a lot of people are asking those kinds of questions.
If things were so bad in Detroit, why didn’t they just leave?
Why’d they hijack a flight with hundreds of innocent passengers on it when they could have just telephoned their state representative?
I’ve made myself a promise not to go off on another tirade. Suffice it to say that comments like these really get under my skin. If I were slightly less self-aware, I might even wonder if this was a case of Stockholm syndrome. If I’m sympathizing with the terrorists who nearly killed me for some twisted psychological reason or other.
But I’d been studying what was going on with Brown Elementary School over there in Detroit for months. I already knew which side of the aisle I was on.
Nearly losing my life to a couple desperate, deranged terrorists didn’t change that.
Not at all.
But I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself.
Kennedy’s the one who should tell you about the letter. She was the one who got it, but it completely confirmed every disgusting suspicion I had about that man in the Hawaiian shirt and the girl he was with.
Everything except for the trafficking angle, at least.
I didn’t see it happen, but Kennedy got up to use the bathroom. She had to go to the front of the plane because there just so happened to be a man planting a bomb in the lavatories in the back. Of course, none of us knew it at the time. We just thought he’d fallen on the wrong side of an argument with a taco truck on his drive to the airport.
I keep trying to remember what I was doing when that girl reached out to Kennedy for help. It’s not like I thought it was my duty to stare at my roommate as she walked all the way up the aisle just to use the bathroom on an airplane. Truth be told, I was probably wasting time on my phone. Or maybe touching up my makeup since we were now less than an hour away from Detroit, and I was still seriously considering taking a quick detour to go on a date with Math Babe.
I heard the man yell first. And I looked up and saw him shouting at Kennedy. The girl he was with, the teen I’d had my eye on, was terrified. I wouldn’t even say she screamed for help. It was more like a squeal. Like something you’d hear from a dying animal.
Everything’s a little fuzzy in my mind as I recall it. Maybe because it was so shocking. Or maybe because watching someone yell at your roommate and hearing a terrified teen screaming, “Help, I’ve been kidnapped,” isn’t as traumatizing as nearly dying in a fiery plane crash.
But there I go again getting ahead of myself.
The girl was screaming. Kennedy stood there dazed, not that I can blame her. I doubt I’d have had any sense to do anything different. A man in a suit jumped out of his seat in an instant. The air marshal. The hero coming to save the day.
The girl kept shouting, “He’s kidnapping me,” the air marshal got the Hawaiian shirt dude in handcuffs, and everyone lived happily and safely ever after.
I wish.
Because as it turned out, the main point of the whole scene was to get the air marshal to reveal himself. Couple quick moves — I don’t even remember them they were so fast — and the air marshal was knocked out. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt grabbed the officer’s gun, gave it to this other man who was in on the entire thing, and we were officially hostages.
There’s this type of therapy where you go back and relive traumatizing events, but you do it in this almost dreamlike state where you’re in control of the outcome. So you can go back and revisit the moment of terror and give it any ending you want. I haven’t been to any actual psychologist or anything, but I’ve tried this little technique on myself from time to time, and here’s my favorite out of all the happy ending scenarios I’ve come up with.
First of all, who comes to the rescue but Math Babe? (I’ve started to feel awful I’ve forgotten his name, so in my imagination I call him Raul.) Raul jumps out of his seat, halfway graded math papers flying everywhere. “Stop!” he shouts in a deep, husky voice. And then there’s this fairly exciting but totally one-sided scuffle, the end result of which is both hijackers knocked out and bloody. Passengers cheer. The air marshal wakes from his beauty sleep, his assailants are bound and tied, and we all land safely at the Detroit airport where Raul and I share extravagant tapas and wine.
End of story.
Pretty good one, isn’t it?
I was somewhat proud of it.
But of course, if that’s what really happened, I wouldn’t have become a Christian. Which leads me to a question I’ve been wrestling with for weeks. Did God cause our plane to get hijacked because he knew that experience is what it would take to wake me up and bring me to my senses? What about the people who died? What about that poor kidnapped girl?
The more I think about it, the more I hate the thought that God wanted the plane to crash just so my soul could be saved. I mean, I’m already dealing with enough survivor’s guilt as it is. I’m just going to leave it at I have absolutely no idea. Maybe I’ll ask Kennedy’s pastor or something. He seems to have all the answers, which is just fine because I’m still so brand new to this whole Christian thing and can’t be expected to know it all.
So then. We’ve covered the somewhat uneventful beginning of the flight. I’ve told you about Hawaiian Shirt and his partner beating up the air marshal and knocking him out. I’ve given you my thoughts on the politics that led up to the terrorist attack.
So now I guess it’s time to dive into all the details of what happened next.