Read Unaccompanied Minor for Free Online

routes, because airline employees have their patterns, and I’m good at discerning patterns.
    For example, Tyreese Washington is my favorite gate agent out of ATL, because he’s a short man with a big personality. When he makes announcements over the PA he sounds like a carnival barker. When it was time to issue my seat assignment, he’d wink at me and announce, “Step right up, beautiful little lady.” I started bringing him coffee from the employee cafeteria (“Three creams, no sugar—you’re all the sweetness I need”), and sometimes he let me sit by the dot matrix printer behind the gate so I could pull the departure report when it emerged, and twice he even let me deliver the departure report to the coordinator at the end of the jetway.
    Out of LAX I liked Jalyce Johnson, because she’d often given me a ride to Ash’s place after noticing I’d been abandoned at the gate. If I were flying unaccompanied-minor as a revenue passenger, the airline would have dispatched an agent to be at my side until my parent or guardian arrived. But because I am the progeny of WorldAir’s own personnel—which, again, means I fly free (or “nonrevenue”)—the airline is absolved of that responsibility… or, more accurately, that responsibility gets transferred to the minor nonrevenue’s employee parents, and the airline stays out of it.
    The first time Jalyce gave me a ride was when she saw me walking down Sepulveda Boulevard and pulled over. She had even remembered my name from the passenger manifest, and I remembered her because of her hair, which was ice-white and cut in a mod pixie style. She also wore oversized tortoiseshell eyeglasses. The look really worked for her. “Get in. This is no place for a young lady to be walking around alone,” she admonished me. “Right over there is where the Hillside Stranglers nabbed one of their victims.” She pointed to the bus stop where I had actually been headed. “Do you know who the Hillside Stranglers were?”
    “Who doesn’t?” I said as I buckled my seatbelt. As a kid, watching true-crime television was considered mother-daughter bonding time. The Hillside Stranglers were an uncle and nephew team of exceptionally foul-hearted serial killers who prowled the Los Angeles area during the seventies, torturing their victims, sometimes for days at a time, and then brazenly dumping their desecrated bodies in open areas like hillsides and roadsides. Their method of operation was to descend on a girl, show her a fake police badge and demand she come with them to their car. Almost all their victims complied without question. “The Hillside Stranglers,” I went on, “are the reason why, if ever a man shows me a police badge and says I have to leave with him, I’m supposed to kick him in the crotch and run away.”
    “Who told you that?”
    “My mom.”
    “Your mom is a smart lady.”
    “We see that differently.”
    Jalyce let that pass and asked me where I was headed. I told her and she whistled softly. “Manhattan Beach,” she said. “Your dad a pilot?”
    “He’s not my real dad, and yes, he’s a pilot,” I explained, adding a run-down of my crazy custodial situation.
    “You mean he’s not even related to you and he won legal custody?” she asked. “How does that happen? Did your mom show up with hypodermic needles hanging out of her arms or something?”
    “No, that’s just it, she’s a great mom, if you subtract the fact that she married a controlling borderline sociopath,” I answered. I had yet to hack into my mother’s e-mail and read all the court documents, so like everyone else I assumed she must have done something terrible to deserve losing me. “Beats me what happened.”
    “Was there a guardian ad litem assigned to your case?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. What’s a guardian ad litem?”
    And that is how I learned about GALs. Jalyce had a large layman’s knowledge about the intricacies of family law because her “baby daddy”