Switched Read Online Free Page B

air-conditioning. No windows. I was in a small closed room, and I was sweating buckets. It’s not the journey; it’s the destination , I reminded myself, and even though I was in Mallorca, the airport was not my destination.
    They finished with my belongings, closed up my suitcases, and instructed me to place them on a large cart. I followed them out to the passport checkpoint line, which was now empty except for the three of us. The man stamped my passport and gave me a huge smile.
    “¡Bienvenido a Mallorca!” he announced happily.
    “Gracias,” I replied in one of the five Spanish words I knew.
    I wheeled my luggage out to the main part of the airport. Kiosks and restaurants were closing up for the night. It was almost midnight, and the airport was very quiet. I realized with a good dose of panic that the places to change money were closed, and I had only forty American dollars with me. I also remembered that my credit card had been declined in Germany.
    Here’s the thing about traveling: There are travelers who go on cruises or to all-inclusive resorts, who bathe in the lap of luxury while being coddled by attentive staff. Then there are the backpacking adventurer travelers who go bungee jumping in Ecuador and eat fried grasshoppers in Beijing.
    Because the only traveling I had ever done was my eighth grade trip to Washington D.C., Disney World in Orlando, and my senior trip to the Bahamas, I wasn’t really any kind of a traveler. But standing there in a mostly-closed airport late at night on an island I had never visited in a country I’d never been to where I didn’t speak the language and without a working credit card and no local currency, I longed for the Carnival Cruise Line. Longed for it like a retired lady in Boca, armed with a fifty-percent-off senior discount.
    “Buffets,” I mumbled, standing outside in the taxi line. I was the only one there and with no taxi to be found. “They have midnight buffets on the Carnival Cruise Line,” I said to myself.
    A perfect tear rolled down my face. I thought of Bora Bora and the luxury bungalow on the water that Jackson had reserved for our honeymoon.
    “If I were on my honeymoon, I would have a man, and he would carry the luggage and worry about the money, and nobody would call me a terrorist and feel up my boobs if I didn’t want them to.”  My voice wobbled into the silence of the taxi area.
    Then a miracle happened.
    A man in a tiny van drove up and yelled something in Spanish at me through his open windows.
    “I don’t speak Spanish!” I yelled back, as if his ability to speak another language made him hard of hearing.
    “Do you need help?” he asked me in perfect English. “Do you need a car?”
    It was the first time a man had ever asked me what I needed. Men often told me what they could give me, but they never wondered if I wanted it. My hero who cared about my needs came in the form of a seventyish, rail-thin Spaniard with a thick head of gray hair, dressed in an orange tank top and cutoffs and who drove an ancient, white Renault mini-truck that was dented along its right side.
    My needs. I needed so much. The list was miles long. But help and a car were a good start.
    “Yes!” I yelled. “I need help and a car!”
    I handed him the scrap of paper with the address scribbled on it. He nodded. “Far away,” he said, pointing away from the airport as if the house was flying somewhere east of the island over the Mediterranean.
    I took out my two twenties and waved them at him. He cocked his head to the side like he was weighing the forty dollars against the pain in the ass it was to be a Good Samaritan. He finally nodded, coming out on the side of cash.
    He pointed at the trunk, and I hauled my luggage into the back. I took a seat next to my hero in the front, handing over the last of my money. My stomach growled, and I hoped the home exchange people had left me something in their kitchen.
    We drove off into the pitch-black night. We were