Page 7 of All the way home

Zach

So.

Heart thundering, head whirling, Zach stands stock-still. His bag is gone. Another notification pops up on his cracked phone screen: Voicemail (1).

What’s he supposed to do? What is anyone supposed to do when their bag disappears from right next to them? He can’t quite get his tongue around the word stolen, but it rattles against his rib cage with every heartbeat.

Maybe he can talk to one of the TSA agents.

Zach steels himself.

He can do this. Just in the last year, he graduated high school—even walked across the stage in front of five hundred people without tripping—bargained for a promotion at his last job, and moved halfway across the country by himself without even a single near-death experience. Navigating this day and talking to a stranger shouldn’t be the thing that sends him over the edge.

And yet.

With one hand on his backpack strap, Zach walks back to the security line, nausea rising. He attempts to flag down an agent, arm raised. “Excuse me, I—”

Nobody turns.

“Excuse me,” Zach tries again.

The security line is snaking longer and longer behind the X-ray machines as more and more passengers spill through. A harried woman with a baby drops an armload of bags and shoes to the floor right next to the belt, backing up the line further to the dismay of the hundred bedraggled people winding through the rapidly filling lobby. Her daughter—seven, maybe eight—scrambles to help, knocking over a carry-on. The blond security agent sighs as the woman’s baby starts crying in a high-pitched timbre that competes with the sopranos in the Vienna Boys’ Choir currently being piped through the speakers in an unsuccessful attempt to mask the chaos.

No one hears Zach, and everyone is too busy, or some combination of both. Nobody gives him a second look.

He bites his lip, frustration rising.

After he’s been standing there for at least five minutes, he gives up, wandering until he finds an information desk. The attendant behind the computer is on the phone and doesn’t spare him a second glance, so Zach waits quietly for him to be done, nausea forming a tight acidic pinch in his gut.

The attendant finishes that call, and then a second, and finally turns his way. “Yes?”

Zach manages not to choke when he says, “I think someone stole my bag.”

Zero sympathy, of course. The attendant barely looks at him as he slides a sheet of paper across the desk. “If your luggage has identifying information on it, we’ll be able to mail it to you if we locate it, but you have to fill out a form.”

Grateful for Tove’s paranoia about luggage tags, Zach fills out the form.

Even after he hands back the paperwork and there’s technically nothing else he can do, he feels off-balance. His Christmas presents for the family are all in that suitcase, and even though it’s not about the gift, Zach, it’s about the love, the thought of going home empty-handed makes him helplessly sad.

Zach checks the gate number on his ticket, double-checks with the screens on the wall, then wanders toward C 50–­79 until he finds Gate C53.

There isn’t an empty seat, so Zach stands, leaning against the wall and wishing he could melt into it.

What else could possibly go wrong today?

Then he stares at Seth’s voicemail notification. Some small, masochistic part of himself urges him to open it and listen, but after a moment, he decides that’s the devil talking and pockets his phone.

He’s not letting Seth get back in his head. Not after he’s worked so hard to keep him out.

A flash of teal in his peripheral vision snags his attention.

Peacoat Boy. He’s at Gate C53 too, several rows over. Beside him, Mount Royal leans against Green Fleece and listens intently as Peacoat Boy gestures out the window.

Of course they’re all here. Of course they’re on the same flight. But then, he thinks, he seems to be paying penance for something today, so this is just in keeping with the general theme of disaster that he has going on.

Zach lets his backpack fall to the ground and lifts his hand to massage the knot in his neck that never really goes away. His hair is drying, finally, and he slouches against the wall and rams his fist into his pocket for his headphones.

But his fingers scrape the seam at the bottom and come back with nothing.