Part 2

She wasn’t too happy about that bumbling flight attendant, to be sure. After he’d poured coffee on her hand while trying to offer her a moist towelette, he had panicked, swearing mildly in Swedish, and rushing to take charge. He had grabbed her thumb, shoved it into her mouth, screaming the whole time. After he rather manically realized his new error and removed her thumb from her mouth, he had taken it and begun shaking her whole arm with the sort of violence that would have, well, quite possibly wrenched her arm completely loose from her body. Her mother, in a bizarre mixture of shock and disinterest, had simply told her to clutch her ear,and, not knowing what else to do, she had complied. Her father, sitting a seat over, hadn’t even looked up from The Times. She felt a little violated.

And confused. As they were flying out of London, she couldn’t make any sense of the fact that both the entire flight crew spoke in Scandinavian languages. She settled back into her reading, every so often dipping her thumb into her 7-Up.