Perfect Fifths Read Online Free Page B

there taking a piss."
    Natty still assumes this must be the setup for a practical joke, though he's hard-pressed to come up with a reason why Marcus would joke about this, about her, of all subjects. "Oh, come on. You expect me to believe that? Try harder..."
    "She was standing right there, where you are right now," says Marcus, first pointing at the floor under Natty's flip-flops before lifting his finger to gesture across the concourse. "She's over there, in black."
    Natty looks to Gate C-88. There is a female who, from behind, at a distance of about a hundred yards, vaguely fits the physical description of the girl he met once over three years ago. "Are you sure it's her?"
    "I talked to her, Natty," Marcus replies. "We talked."
    Just then the girl in question twitches a glance over her shoulder, and Natty must concede: Yes, it's definitely her.
    "Oh, fuck," Natty groans.
    "Indeed."
    "So," Natty says. "What did she have to say for herself?"
    An apprehensive smile brings relief to his afflicted face. Marcus removes his thin wire-rimmed glasses, cautiously rubs the lenses with an untucked shirttail, then puts them back on again. He surrenders a sad laugh. Then, finally, answers.
    "Not enough."
    e ght
    I made it!" Jessica repeats triumphantly, thrusting her boarding pass at Sylvia. "The plane is still here!"
    Sylvia barely glances at the document. "Yes, ma'am," she says. "But we have completed the final boarding of this aircraft. The jetway door is closed."
    Jessica doesn't know what's more troubling: that the jetway door is closed? Or that she looks old enough to qualify for "ma'am" status? Either way, she has to stay Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    on Sylvia's good side if she has any hope of getting on the plane and staying out of the airport detention center for problem passengers.
    "But the plane is right there," Jessica says, desperation creeping into her voice despite her best efforts to keep calm. "And I've got my boarding pass."
    Sylvia is no-nonsense. When she shakes her head, her sprayed blond flip moves as a single unit; not one of the hundreds of thousands of individual hairs has the
    audacity to stray. "We have completed the final boarding of this aircraft. The jetway door is closed." Her tone is like an automated recording, unchanged from the first time she said it.
    "But I'm just one person—"
    In that moment of weakness and doubt, Jessica half swivels her head. It's an almost unconscious impulse, too quick to register anything or anyone behind her.
    "Once the jetway door is closed, it stays closed." Sylvia claps her hands together to illustrate her point.
    Her nails sparkle with the same opalescence as her lips, both painted an infantilizing pink that coordinates with her powder-blue Clear Sky uniform only in the sense that they are hues best left to gender-specific bibs and diaper bags. "It would be against TSA regulations to allow any passenger to board this aircraft," she briskly insists, her smile tightening with every word. "We always advise our passengers to provide adequate time to—"
    "I did provide adequate time! I was held up at security by a stark-raving madwoman trying to smuggle
    ..."
    Sylvia's smile is frozen and synthetic, like a plastic-flavored Popsicle; she is clearly bracing herself for the tirade of passenger complaints against the incompetent
    Transportation Security Administration, the inconvenient Newark Liberty International Airport, the inhospitality of Clear Sky airlines, the indignities of air travel in general, none of which she can solve herself. But Jessica stops midsentence, distracted by a blurry movement in her peripheral vision. It's the plane, of course, taxing away from the gate and toward the runway. It's her flight, Clear Sky Flight 1884 with nonstop service to St. Thomas, the one she can't miss. And it's leaving without her.
    Was Marcus coming or going? she wonders again. And this time, when she turns her head, it's