Flight #116 Is Down Read Online Free

Mommy and Daddy when they met Teddie at the airport. Betsey! beamed at Teddie, glared at Darienne, and moved on.
    A baby several rows behind Darienne began whining: revving its little lung motors and changing gears into a high-pitched shriek. Darienne closed her eyes. Was the whole flight going to be like this? What had happened to the olden days, when only civilized people could afford to fly? Why couldn’t people with screaming babies take the bus?
    Darienne pulled out a paperback she had just bought in the airport book shop, the newest by her favorite author: a fat book she could trust to be packed with sex, scandal, and slime. Four pages along, she realized this was not the newest title; it was the oldest, reissued; she had read this stupid book years before. They had ripped her off, putting it on the shelf as if it were new.
    I’m stuck on a late plane next to a wimpy little kid. I’m surrounded by fat old people who won’t share their magazines, babies that scream, rude hostesses, and I’ve already read the book I brought on board.
    Darienne baked in her own hostility. The plane was an oven, cooking her; she was a custard, she would set, and become solid resentment.
    Saturday: 5:25 P.M.
    Carly hung onto the armrests as the plane took off, lifting safely into the sky. When the plane lurched, she knew they were going to crash. Prayer expanded in her brain like an egg broken in a skillet, and then the plane evened out.
    Nothing was wrong.
    Nobody else so much as twitched.
    She gave a silly little giggle, and her seat partner, a pleasant-looking businessman older than her parents, smiled understandingly without actually looking at her. He had a laptop computer on which he was busily working. Carly thought it was pretty clever that he could be friendly without using syllables or eye contact.
    It would be nice, thought Carly, if there were an incredibly handsome young man on this plane. The boy would develop a crush on her and be so in love that by the end of the flight he would come home with her, stay with her forever, meet her family, woo her. She loved that word “woo.” So nineteenth century. So courteous.
    Carly studied the passengers. Babies, kids, families, business people, and a few of those weirdos you saw only when traveling: people with impossible clothes, crazy eyes, or peculiarly shaped bodies.
    No cute guys.
    What else was new?
    The plane tilted. She had a momentary view of dwindling parking lots and housetops, and then there was only sky, which was blue and thin.
    Carly had the obligatory worries about plane crashes. She considered the odds (one in two million; she’d looked it up.)
    Plane-crash worry was unique. You couldn’t do anything. It wasn’t like the past, about which Carly had said to herself a million times, If I’d done this, if I’d said this, if I’d been a better person, if, if, if …
    No, if the plane crashed, it was Their Fault. Carly didn’t have to say, Listen, I’m sorry, I know I should have done ten hundred things differently.
    Carly much preferred problems that were somebody else’s fault. That way she could shake her head and sigh, the way she did for acid rain and inner-city warfare, but she didn’t actually have to see where she’d gone wrong and wonder if she’d ever go right again.
    I’m going home, Carly’s heart sang, very country and western, with twangs and tunes, I’m going home, to say I’m sorry.
    You haven’t said you’re sorry yet, she reminded herself. They might not care how sorry you are. They might not even meet the plane.
    She shivered slightly. She imagined the airport. Would Shirl be there? Would Mom and Dad? Would they hold out their arms? When she said I’m sorry, would they whisper, It doesn’t matter, we love you?
    Or would she stand in the terminal, surrounded by chairs bolted to the floor, while travelers broke around her like tide over a sandbar, and be alone? Would she have to take a bus to the house? What if they didn’t let her