arm cross. Emily untwisted the lid and chugged half the bottle. She handed it to David, who finished it off.
“Okay, thank you, finally,” the TSA agent said.
As she went through security, Emily couldn’t help feeling anxious again. She looked at the other people in the line. She felt a familiar whirring in her chest and flipping in her stomach. A redheaded man in a suit took off his wing tip shoes for security. She turned to David.
“He could kill all of us right now and it would be too late for anyone to stop him. Ugh, this is why I hate airports. Everyone is a suspect.” Maybe that was why the gorgeous women were there—to divert attention from all the terrorists in the security line. Genius.
“Everyone is a suspect in your world,” he said. “This is the woman who called the cops on the building’s handyman for ‘sitting around outside.’”
“First of all, I’m still not convinced Chan wasn’t up to something. And second of all, that guy in the line could kill us and nobody would be able to stop him before the first few casualties. And that’s assuming he’s carrying a gun and not a bomb. I can’t do this.”
“This guy isn’t carrying anything.”
“Oh, really? You’ve inspected his clothing and you know he doesn’t have a gun? You can’t just blindly trust everyone at an airport.”
“Emily, he isn’t even...”
“If you were going to say that he isn’t even Middle Eastern, that’s the point. They’re dropping in people we least suspect. And you know I call the cops on white people all the time, I make sure to do that. Remember the guy at the St. Patrick’s Day parade? I suspect everyone equally. This guy looks exactly like someone who doesn’t want people to think he’s a terrorist. Look, he isn’t even bringing a carry-on, just a backpack. Ready for jihad.”
“He’s probably going to New York for business.”
“Do you just think that nobody ever has a gun? That there aren’t at least a few terrorists on dry runs in this line? Did you think 9/11 was Photoshopped too? Please tell me you haven’t become one of those people in the YouTube comments section.”
“Actually, you’re one of those people. You honestly believe there are terrorists in this specific security line?”
She could tell he found this somewhat amusing. Her therapist called this “flaunting her pathology.” Sometimes her anxious rants were intentionally comedic, if only to break the tension. If she acted believably insane, it was a problem, but if she hammed it up so much that she could later claim to just be joking, that gave her an out. She knew David found her anxieties annoying, but in the moment she was too worried to care. She would deal with the embarrassing aftermath of being wrong after they landed. Better to be wrong about a terrorist attack and feel like an idiot, than to be right about it and dead. Life had to win every single day. Death only had to win once.
“All I’m saying is that there could be terrorists in this line,” she said. “It would be so easy to pull off. Just look at that guy.” She pointed to a young white hipster with a scruffy brown beard and a bowler hat, carrying a black violin case.
“Okay,” he said, lowering his voice. “I’ll play this game with you. If you were going to do it, how would you do it?”
“I don’t know, I’d have to call some terrorists to learn some options. But it’s easy. For one, last time I packed a full-size conditioner and they didn’t stop me.”
He squeezed her shoulders as they moved toward the body scan. “You really are nervous about this week, aren’t you?” he whispered in her ear. His one-day scruff tickled her neck and she smiled. The shoulder massage felt good. She wished she could stay in this moment forever, his face against hers, his hands on her shoulders. She would always feel safe then. Except in the event of an aneurism.
“Well, yeah, my mom is going to be a nightmare, but that’s not why I’m worried about the plane blowing up. Two different things, babe.”
“She’ll be fine. And don’t say ‘plane blowing up’ at an airport. Watch, you’ll be freaking out about terrorists and then you’ll be the one they arrest. It would be more typical of you to be detained for terror threats before your wedding day than to be killed by a terrorist before your wedding day.”
“Judging by how lax they are about checking that guy over there, they’re not going to pull me aside for saying that. They should, though. How do they know I’m not a terrorist? How would they notice a real terrorist if they don’t even notice a run-of-the-mill crazy person like me?” She forced herself to smile. Sometimes smiling made her feel better. Her fourth-grade teacher had told her that if she pretended to be happy, there was some chemical reaction in the brain that would trick her into being happy. She had believed it, and smiled like a lunatic whenever she was even mildly worried. Her teacher had probably said it to help her do better socially, but as a result she just looked like a grinning freak. She toned down the smiles in middle school when someone put a note in her locker with a picture of the Joker, but she still kept the habit into adulthood—just a watered-down version. David seemed to appreciate her periodic attempts to seem normal, and she often wanted to remind him that he should count himself lucky that his bride’s wedding anxieties weren’t about second thoughts and cold feet, but about bombs and Ebola. Fuck—Ebola bombs. Surely someone was planning that.
“You’ll be less crazy on the honeymoon, right?” he asked, wavering slightly as he said crazy since he meant it in an endearing way but was aware it sounded mean.
“I mean, I’ve always been crazy. I’ve known that since I was four. Thank you, Mom.”
“Your mom definitely didn’t call you crazy.”
“Well, of course not. She says I’m mentally ill and reminds everyone whenever she gets a chance because it makes her look like such a saint for putting up with me. And I can’t even argue with her, because then I look even crazier. This would all be so much easier if I could do my crafting. It always calms me down.”
She was one of the first Pinterest users and an avid crafter in her spare time. Her crafts ranged from no-sew pillowcases to embroidered handkerchiefs to the ominous and pointless “glitter balls” that she insisted she would use if she ever threw a snow-themed holiday party. She spent hours studying the Pinterest pages of her favorite crafting bloggers. The women always looked so pristine and perfect with their strawberry lipstick and winged eyeliner, their pure white kitchens bathed in natural summer light, their unused copper pots hanging from the ceilings. When they baked, they never got flour on the counter. When they crafted, they never got glue on their manicured hands. Who were these women? Emily’s crafts always got messy, and even when they were successful they were useless, like the glitter balls. David was nice enough not to bring it up, but she could sense his amusement every time he ran his fingers across the abandoned glitter balls still sitting on the kitchen counter.
Sometimes she worried that she was unbearable—disorganized, distracted and high-strung, leaving a trail of glitter behind her that nobody could clean up. But she knew so many women who were worse. Kathleen, her former friend from college, had cheated on her fiancé during her bachelorette party with a spray-tanned club promoter named TJ and hadn’t even felt bad about it because she said it was part of “finding herself.” One of her cousins repeatedly referred to her husband as “the Idiot” in her irritating Long Island accent, acting as if the nickname was witty and sassy instead of abusive. Emily could have been lazy, materialistic, demanding, emasculating, frumpy, unavailable
