Flight (8 page)

Now, instead of spending the three weeks of
break flying over the skies of Manhattan until she could fly no
more and had to come home, Prissi Langue had a goal, a mystery, to
keep her going. Her father might be dull, but the intrigued teener
was sure Joshua Fflowers and the Secret of the Lost Path was
not.

So Long

On the Monday afternoon after her
conversation with Dr. Smarkzy, Prissi was in the Double D trying to
write a history paper. Even though it was early in the afternoon,
the young winger was tired and antsy. Break would begin at noon on
the following day. Now that she had something to do over break,
Prissi was ready to go. Unfortunately, before that could happen,
she had a lot of work to finish up.

Prissi began the afternoon sitting on one of
a bank of Skrenes the Dutton Datarium provided trying to draw
parallels between present-day Ecoists and the centuries’ old
Jainist religious sect. Her intention was to suggest that Ecoism
was more a religious sect than a political party. She sat at the
machine for almost an hour watching her whispered words get
transcribed onto the Skrene as jumbled words, illogical sentences
and incomprehensible paragraphs. Finally, unable to take another
minute, she bounded off her perch. As she hurried to the bathroom,
she resurrected a litany that occasionally accompanied her paper
writing: She was stupid, a sham. A dorquette. A brain dead
techinept…and…as she slammed her way past the door and looked into
the mirror….and a fertile field for unnatural growths…and…and she
should shave her head rather than let her toxic hair
spread…and….

Her fury at her incoherence and her imperfect
looks elided into sensual pleasure when she finally had the
brainstorm not to return to her perch, but instead to dig in her
kanga-pak for her special pen. She collected her stuff and found a
spot in the reading area that had a view of the pond. She dropped
her wings over the arms and slid her butt deep into the butter
smooth russet-colored leather of an ancient high-legged club perch.
Within seconds after changing perches and idea recorders, Prissi’s
thoughts were flowing so fast that the tool she held in her hand
for recording those thoughts could barely keep up. The ancient
golden fountain pen had been given to her by a retired diplomat in
Bujumbura on her tenth birthday. Even as it hurried across the
paper, the pen was losing ground to her spate of thoughts. That
feeling, of thoughts spilling out faster than the ink could record
them, was glorious to someone whose writing usually was laborious.
Finally, there came a break in Prissi’s stream of ideas. The
self-satisfied teener took advantage of that synaptical
short-circuit to glance out the windows at the rippling waters of
the pond and look up at a bowl of puffy popcorn-like clouds,
iridescent above and dark gray beneath, being blown across the
sky.

Forty minutes later, when Prissi paused a
second time, the clouds looked like inquisitive sheep.

After an hour and a half of dedicated work,
and with nine pages of words and ideas that made sense to her,
Prissi redacted her earlier view of herself. Even if she was a
techinept, she had lots of friends who were techadepts. She got
along with them fine even if she wasn’t one—maybe that was from
growing up in Africa, where a whole night of uninterrupted
electricity was cause for celebration. As Prissi flipped through
what she had written, she reassured herself that most of the
world’s great literature and, for that matter, the foundation of
most of the sciences, had been created with pen and paper, quill
and vellum.

As she often did with words that drew her,
Prissi said the word, “vellum,” aloud. She imagined what a piece of
that old invention must feel like between one’s fingers. Just the
name suggested how smooth and sensuous it must be. What fun it
would be to draw a pen nib across a piece of vellum. Voluptuous
vellum.

Prissi mused about being in an alchemist’s
laboratory, literally burning the midnight oil, mixing philters
with phlogiston and recording the results on velvety, voluptuous
vellum. When Prissi next looked up from her reverie, an angry wind
had pushed the sheep into a tightly huddled frightened herd. She
shifted from her history paper to a set of bio-stat problems, but
despite the urgency of getting the homework done, Prissi kept
finding herself looking out the large windows to see if the
predicted snow had begun to fall. The Ice Age Cometh. Prissi forced
her head down. A few minutes later, when, despite her best efforts,
it popped up again, Prissi noticed a pair of state hawks circling
over campus. Besides wondering what might cause the police to be on
campus, Prissi also felt jealous. Flying through the snow was a
rare treat. Something mysterious, something attractive. Ugh. She
forced her eyes back down to her work. The eyes remained where they
were supposed to be, but the mind continued to wander—although
there were scores of teenerz from some of the world’s wealthiest
families, security at Dutton was mostly handled by the campus
officers. Only a handful of students were considered so attractive
a target that their parents hired private security firms. When the
hawks from the Connecticut State Police became involved it usually
wasn’t because of a danger to a student, but, instead, because of
some incredibly stupid prank by a student—usually a lower-mid
trying to make his reputation, or a senior losing his.

Prissi was sprawled in her reclining perch
feeling good, except for the occasional late afternoon stomach
growl when Nasty Nancy, whom she had been trying to avoid since
their ride back from the Bissell dedication, came rushing up.

“Did you hear? Your NQB is gone?”

Prissi’s stomach rolled over, but not from
hunger. “Joe’s gone?”

“Like smoke. Like youth. Like love. Like a
Friday night peetsa.”

Although Prissi prided herself on her
cynicism, she immediately felt angry at Nasty Nancy’s cavalier
words. Her roomie’s large head, made larger by its penumbra of
combed out, frizzy, red hair, bobbed back and forth with
excitement. Her little black soutane button eyes sparked.

Controlling herself, Prissi asked, “What do
they think happened?”

“The ‘they’ who are supposed to do the
thinking in, and for, this hallowed institution probably aren’t
thinking. What they’re probably doing is emitting excuses as fast,
big and stinking as pigs’ farts and dishonoring our sacred honor
code by conjuring up a thousand ex post facto gigs for your missing
swain to show he has been a bad seed, a bad apple and a Bader
Meinhof ne’er do well.”

Since Prissi was used to missing half of
Nancy’s allusions, she sniggered because she knew she should, then,
felt badly that she had given in to Nancy’s cruelty.

“No one knows anything?”

The serious tone of Prissi’s question caused
Nasty Nancy to tack away from her intended course. She looked at
her friend’s concerned face for a long pause, considering what it
might mean, before responding.

“Supposedly, he ate breakfast and that was
the last time he was seen. Since it happened on a day without
classes, when he wouldn’t be missed for awhile, it looks like it
was planned. The mystery is whose plan. His…dash for freedom, or….”
Nancy paused and tried to wriggle her eyebrows, an action which
conveyed more the look of someone with Tourette’s Syndrome than the
portentousness she was aiming for. “…something more malign. Why
someone from a family that rich and with so many enemies didn’t
have private guards is hard to fathom.”

“He told me he had to fight his parents about
that. He didn’t want guards. He just wanted to be normal.”

“Then he should have done something about
that sun-seeking nose of his and, of course, the trillions.”

Rather than chance an argument, Prissi
brushed Nancy off by insisting that she needed to finish her
problem set. Nancy spun around. With her halo of red hair, blunt
shape and butt swaying walk, Nancy reminded Prissi of a sea anemone
in a tidal pool as she churned her way out of the room.

Once Nancy was gone, Prissi allowed herself
to be overwhelmed with guilt.

Since that evening three days before when she
had shared her dining hall table with him, Prissi had had three
conversations with Joe. Two of those, one late and the other later
on Saturday night after she had returned from the Bissell
dedication, had been short, angry and awkward. Joe had been iced
that Prissi had gone to Bissell. He saw it as both a betrayal of
their friendship and an act of sycophancy. Their third
conversation, held the following day, had lasted for more than two
hours and had been very different.

That chance conversation happened because
Prissi Langue had secrets other than eating candy in bathroom
stalls and filching shampoo. She also adored what she herself
called CRNs—cheesey romance novels.

Prissi had been wandering around the
antiseptic little village of Waterville on a Sunday afternoon a few
weeks after she first had arrived at Dutton. It had been a typical
New England early autumn day—80 degrees, windy, the grapy smell of
kudzu perfuming the air. Even though she loved the school, loved
her teachers and loved the challenge of what went on in the
classrooms and labs, Prissi frequently was intimidated by much of
went on outside the classroom. On that particular afternoon,
instead of sitting in her room working through why she felt
inferior to her classmates, or couldn’t easily make friends, it had
been easier to run down the hill to the village.

She had lazed along Waterville’s narrow
canted sidewalks window shopping its small shops, coveting clothes
that she knew never would look good on her, and admiring jewelry
she couldn’t afford. She drank an iced pom and wolfed a
ridiculously small piece of chocolate mousse cake. She was on her
way back to campus, dawdling to draw out her return, when she
noticed the small, square-shouldered Waterville Library.

Although the rise of the net had made most
small libraries obsolete, a few, mostly those with hefty
endowments, remained open. Of those survivors, many were more
museums that repositories for accessible or pertinent knowledge. On
a whim, Prissi climbed the stairs. After spending an embarrassing
minute explaining to the tiny, bright blue eyed, balding woman
sitting on a high scarred wooden stool that she, Prissi Langue,
was, indeed, a Dutton student, she had accepted the
librarian/docent/guard’s declaratory judgment that, indeed, a
Dutton student in the Waterville library was a rarity. After
circling round the chipped green marble half-moon desk, which both
protected the past and, Prissi guessed, defended the old woman
against the present, the teener began to explore. Twisting her head
so that she could read the vertical titles and tentatively touching
a dulled rainbow of book spines, Prissi meandered through the
stacks.

In a dark corner on the second floor, next to
a door marked STAIRS, fitted into a corner in an L-shaped bookcase,
Prissi found the mother-lode. A fancy, but faded sign, declared
Romance. Prissi’s first reaction was a snort that reverberated
throughout the empty library, but, ten minutes later, she was
sighing and crying. The bookcase contained hundreds of books that
told the story of improbable women falling impossibly in love with
implausible men. And, while it was not always love at first sight
between the covers of the books, it had been love at first sight
for Prissi. She loved the women from the pre-winger era who had
enough flesh that it could quiver. She swooned over the men too
dumb to know that they shouldn’t be driving fast cars with
deleterious eco effects. She adored the fact that many of the
stories took place in a place long gone—a dry, bustling wealthy,
hyper-kinetic Manhattan, a romantic island filled with sex and sin.
Almost everything she read, she loved, but the books that she most
loved were those written in the 1950s when all the characters had
names like her own and her friends. She found story after story
where Jacks and Joes, Nancys and Marys, Pauls and Marks, Cathys
and, yes, twice, even Priscillas fell in deep, tortured, twisted,
weepy, wounded love.

That dusty corner of the Waterville Library
became Prissi’s haven. When she had free time or, even when she
didn’t, but needed a respite—from friends, teachers, or, most
often, her feelings—Prissi she would run down the hill to the
library for her CRN fix.

As Prissi slumped in her perch and watched
the celestial sheep crowd one another like a fox was about, she
thought of what had happened twenty-four hours before. After the
last False Paths lecture and her conversation with Dr. Smarkzy,
Prissi had run back to her room, changed clothes, and spent twenty
minutes flying lazy figure eights over Dutton’s golf course and
soccer fields before winging her way to the village. After checking
to see if anyone was watching before attempting a maneuver that
could result in losing her flight license, Prissi executed a doubly
foolish, given Saturdays’ shoulder injury, perfect one-knee
betrothal landing on the library’s cracked asphalt parking lot.
Prissi was smoothing her feathers when Joe Fflowers exploded out of
the library’s dismal, dinged metal and scratched glass entrance. He
started when he saw Prissi, stuttered, and stopped.

After several minutes of mis-meshed verbal
gears grinding through Saturday’s traitorous events, including a
stuttery apology by Prissi, the two teenerz finally found their
usual edgy comfortability. They talked and talked, as if they
hadn’t seen each other for ages…or, as if they expected that they
wouldn’t see each other again. Goals, god, games, and music. Love,
lust, loss, and movies. Family, fear, faith, failure, food…and the
future.

When it was time to go back to campus, Prissi
started to walk alongside Joe, but he held her shoulder and, then,
turned her so her back was against the shelves of romance novels.
He put one hand on her waist and the other just under Prissi’s
chin. Like always, like dozens of times before in empty classrooms,
by the pond, under a stairwell, hidden behind the rhododendrons
outside the Mu, the first kiss felt wonderful. Tingly. The second,
much longer, started as an area of wet warmth around her mouth but
then zipped around her body flipping on banks of switches like a
pilot readying a jet for takeoff. The third kiss involved low
growls and Prissi wasn’t sure who was making them. But, then the
tongue that had been around her mouth and in her mouth was in her
mouth and out and in again, so rapidly, so hungrily, and so
fiercely that Prissi had a vision of a rat in a popcorn bag. That
vision led to a snort, a push against Joe’s chest, and, suddenly,
wordlessly, he was gone.