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Holly cracked her head open,” and I couldn’t believe they still blamed me for that.
    Later I fell in love with a boy three years ahead of me in high school. He had eyes like wide horizons, and my breath would quicken the second I saw his face. God, did I adore him, with my heart hung out there like a freshly caught fish, all exposed to the air and gasping.
    This boy was an adventurist, though, and he was only sticking around, he said, until he’d earned enough money to move to Australia, where he planned to spend the rest of his life surfing and bussing tables at a seaside diner. Though I heard him I always figured things would work out anyway. Maybe he would take me with him or maybe he wouldn’t go, after all.
    He used to take me to the beach in San Clemente so we could surf next to the nuclear-power plant, where the waves were supposed to be really awesome. I never did catch on, though. Surfing has got to be the hardest sport known to man. To this day I don’t understand the appeal of bobbing around in big waves with a bunch of wooden torpedoes darting at your skull. So I would sit on the beach and watch, and when he came in from the ocean I would cling to him like locks of his own hair.
    He would always tell me about Australia, how the waves were bigger than buildings and people still lived off the land like pioneers. He had visions of himself sleeping in a mud hut off the highway, which ran along the beach, and in the mornings he would roll up his meager belongings, stash them behind a tree, and surf until it was time to clock in at the diner, where they wouldn’t mind that he showed up for work soaking wet every day.
    They were big dreams, but not big enough for me to fit in there anywhere. He dumped me after driving me home from one of those San Clemente excursions. I remember when he extricated himself from me, crying and stuck to him like I was. “How can you do this to me?” I blobbered. He shrugged and said, “I told you I was moving.”
    I’d heard him, too, but I figured he wouldn’t throw the brick with me standing there. He did, though, and looking back I’m amazed at how many times in my life I let myself get hit in the head with that same brick. I wonder how many more times it will happen before I finally get out of the way.

In-Flight Communication
    M Y GERMAN TUTOR TELLS me I speak her language like a Turkish construction worker, so when I misconjugate a pronoun she slaps the coffee table with her hand and shouts, “You are a Turkey!” Regardless of her opinion, though, I’m still a foreign-language interpreter for the airline where I work. So on the plane I’m known as the “speaker” flight attendant. I don’t mind because it makes me feel important and I get to boss people around.
    For instance, just the other day, a man refused to properly stow his carry-on bag. You know, it’s very important to make sure everything’s in its place before we back away from the gate. It’s not okay to put your boombox on your lap or your baby in the overhead bin. No. Everything has to be just right before we can announce to the captain that the cabin is secure and we can get going. That’s the important part, isn’t it? To get going .
    But this flight wasn’t going anywhere. We couldn’t leave until this man seated in the back of the plane secured his carry-on luggage. Some of the other flight attendants thought he was acting suspiciously because he seemed so reluctant to surrender his baggage. So I was summoned. I was the “language interpreter” after all, and therefore automatically dispatched to deal with stuff like this.
    Upon first glance I thought right away I’d have trouble communicating with this particular passenger. He might have been Middle Eastern, or maybe Italian, neither of which is a region where I know the language. His body was wedged in his coach-class seat like a big ball of softened cheese, and a spiky-haired mole the size of a sea urchin grew out of his ear. He was