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don’t sit next to me, please don’t sit next to me.” But God giveth and He taketh away.
    I look up and find the snowboard punker looming over my row in the aisle. He folds himself into the seat next to mine. I see that he’s even younger than I thought, now that we are face-to-face.
    “Sorry, I don’t fit very well,” he apologizes after stepping on my bag and elbowing me on his way down into his seat.
    “No worries,” I say so quietly I don’t think he hears me.
    I turn away, fingering the netting on the back of the seat in front of me.
    The captain comes on shortly after and asks flight attendants to take their seats. I take a deep breath. My dream, my plan is coming true. Some minor bumps and a little anxiety, but I’m on the runway. I smile to myself and look sideways to make sure skate-punk guy didn’t see me.
    The plane taxis to the runway, stops, and then does a one-eighty. It slowly picks up speed again, and then the engines roar to life. The g-force pulls me back into my seat and we zip down the runway. I turn to the window and mumble a prayer to God to watch over my flight. It’s instinct, and even as I say it, I know how ridiculous I am. I’m about to hit my own switch and I’m praying for a safe takeoff.
    Whenever I fly, I say the same prayer. I call to the dead before me: my father, my grandfather and grandmother, a cousin I only knew one summer who has since died of an infection in his gallbladder, and my English teacher, Miss Lathrop, who had a seizure and choked on a ham sandwich. She died alone in her apartment. It is my private parade of dead angels, and I ask them to carry the wings of the plane, to take me home. I guess I’m asking them to carry me far enough along so I can take my life. Miss Lathrop would have said, “How ironic.” I always wonder what she was thinking just before she died.
    The plane skips up and then bends steeply to the left. We hold the trajectory for about ten to fifteen minutes, and then we level off.
    “Paul Hart, Cambridge, Mass.,” my neighbor says, extending his hand. He has a muted New England accent and is trim with strong, wiry muscles in his forearms. I accept his hand automatically, but frowning, and withdraw mine almost immediately. His hands are big and rough with calluses.
    “They used to be softer.”
    “What?”
    “My hands. I hadn’t realized how calloused they got until right now.” He nods at my soft, pale hands. “I guess you weren’t here for the climbing.”
    I glare at him. He stares back, and we just kind of gaze at each other in a very awkward way. There’s an insult or an assumption in what he just said. I have no idea whether he meant to be rude or if he’s sort of an idiot, but I feel my eyes welling up, so I look down.
    “Everything okay?” he asks.
    “I didn’t mean anything,” he assures me, “just an observation.”
    I look up, having regained my composure. He has thick brown hair and his face is cherubic except for the dark stubble that sandpapers his chin. I can hear the relentless beating of some punk band that probably nobody but he and his snowboard buddies know tinning out from his unplugged earplugs. Annoyingly, he’s still wearing his sunglasses.
    “I saw you say a prayer there,” he says, withdrawing a bit as he organizes himself in his seat. His voice sounds like gravel. He’s probably a smoker. “I hope you have wings; it looks like there’s a huge storm coming.”
    He laughs a little at his own joke and removes his sunglasses. Baby blues, no surprise—all the jerks have them. I wonder if everything that comes out of his mouth is annoying or if I would find anything anyone did annoying at this moment. I decide it is probably just Paul Hart.
    “Yes. God is dead and all that,” I say a little more abruptly than I intended.
    “What?” he says. “I don’t understand.”
    I realize I was having a conversation in my head that was about three responses ahead of Paul’s innocuous quip. I tend to do