Bottle to Throttle - Chapter 1

This is the first chapter of my rom-com-mystery novella featuring Margaret. It has not been reviewed by an editor, so all mistakes are mine. The title isn't my final choice, I just needed something there so I could stop thinking about it and "Margaret McCallum Goes to Rome" didn't quite scratch the itch 😬 Your feedback is appreciated!

"Margaret McCallum, please report to the duty desk, you have an assignment."

Nothing in flight attendant training prepares you for hearing your name over the lounge intercom: your body reacts before your brain does. The brain is still going wait, was that—while the body has already made several executive decisions, including but not limited to an involuntary butt clench of such force and commitment that I briefly levitated off the flight attendant lounge chair. I grabbed my Baggalini tote, my roller bag, and what remained of my dignity, and I scurried — there is no other word for it, I scurried like a woman in a period drama who has just received scandalous news — across the crew lounge at JFK toward whatever fate had decided to do with my birthday.

And I would love to tell you what happened next, after I popped up cheerfully at that duty desk. I would. It's a great story. It involves visiting a new country on my birthday, a handsome man with unfairly good glasses game, and the single most consequential nap of my adult life.

But I cannot tell a story in a straight line when there is backstory available. This is a documented medical condition. My friends have attempted to stage interventions. They haven’t worked. So before we get to the pre-flight briefing for this international trip and what happened next, we have to go all the way back to 1998, to Charlotte, North Carolina, and to the crime scene where this whole life began: a dating website called Love@AOL.

Yes. That was a real thing. I'll wait while the elder millennials nod solemnly and everyone else googles it. And before you say it, yes, I know. It’s crazy how I did not get snatched up and go missing. Those early internet days were wild. 

In 1998 I was seventeen years old and restless in a way I did not have language for yet. I want to be clear that nothing was wrong, exactly. Charlotte was fine. My life was fine. But "fine" sat on me like a wool sweater in August, and I had this itchy, low-grade conviction — the kind you can't defend out loud but can't shake either — that my actual life, the real one, the one with my name on it, was happening somewhere else. Somewhere with taller buildings and louder nights and strangers who didn't know my mother. I wasn't running from anything. I was sniffing around for an exit the way some dogs check every fence line, not because the yard is bad but because a fence is a fence.

So naturally, like any teenage girl with internet access and a surplus of audacity, I lied about my age and made a dating profile. 

Totally reasonable behavior. Writing this in retrospect has me screaming to the group chat asking how I’m not a featured disappearance of the week on a Lifetime documentary. Gold star decision-making, truly. You will notice, as we go along, that this is something of a signature move for me — deciding a thing should be true and then simply proceeding as if it were — and I want you to remember it, because it is going to matter a great deal later, in Rome, in a hotel room, at approximately four in the afternoon. But wait, we're not there yet.

My Love@AOL profile itself was a masterwork of fiction. I said I was eighteen. I said I was "mature for my age," which — an eighteen-year-old claiming to be mature for her age, incredible, no notes, truly airtight cover. Not at all likely to be targeted by men with nefarious goals. I used a photo where I looked worldly, by which I mean I was wearing dark lipstick from the Eckerd drugstore and standing in front of a wall. And then I sat back in the glow of the family computer, listening to the modem scream its little dial-up scream like it was also alarmed by my choices, and waited for my real life to write back.

Mostly, it didn't. Mostly what wrote back were men whose entire personality was a car, and one guy who opened with a poem about my eyes that he had clearly sent to eleven other women, possibly with the eye color left as a fill-in-the-blank.

But two people from that weird little corner of the early internet got permanently stuck to my life, the way a burr gets stuck to a sock. This story only needs one of them.

His name was Jonah.

Jonah's profile said he was into computers, which in 1998 was not the flex it would later become. This was before tech guys were rich. This was when being "into computers" meant your bedroom sounded like a wind tunnel and you had opinions about operating systems that no one asked for. His messages were funny in a dry, sideways manner that made me sit up a little, and he never once mentioned his car, which by the standards of Love@AOL made him practically a duke from the romance novels I read to fall asleep. 

We agreed to meet at Rock Bottom Brewery in downtown Charlotte, because nothing says "two people being honest about their identities" like a chain brewpub. At least it wasn’t a remote location, let’s give me some credit! I couldn't tell you now which version of my fake self I brought to that meeting — what age I was claiming, what level of sophistication I was performing. The details have been lost to time and self-preservation. What I can tell you is what happened at the fountain.

There was a fountain near the restaurant, one of those decorative civic numbers, all burbling optimism. It probably had a plaque and a meaningful backstory. We were walking past it, mid-conversation, with Jonah stepping up playfully on the edge of this fountain. He said something — I genuinely cannot remember what, some smug, sideways, correct thing, the kind of remark that is only annoying because it is accurate — and a decision was made. I say "a decision was made," passive voice, because I maintain to this day that my hands acted independently of my mental governance.

I pushed him in.

Fully in. Decorative water, decorative coins, decorative Jonah. He stood there, ankle deep, jeans soaked, flip flops sopping. Arms in the international position for “what the hap is fuckening here?” 

And here is the thing. Here is the moment my seventeen-year-old brain filed away without understanding what it was filing. He came out of that fountain — partially soaked, blinking, a small coin possibly relocated by the wake of his steps — and he did not yell. He did not sulk. He did not do the wounded-man thing where they make you spend forty-five minutes managing their feelings about a thing you did in four seconds. He stepped out of the fountain, pushed his curly blond hair off his droplet-speckled glasses, looked at me, and said, "Okay, so you're going to be a whole thing," in a tone of a man updating his files.

I have since developed a theory that you can learn everything you need to know about a person by observing how they behave immediately after being unexpectedly shoved into decorative water. It is a niche screening tool, I grant you. The sample size is small. But its predictive accuracy, in my experience, is flawless. A man who can be baptized against his will in front of a chain brewpub and come up chill is a man you should keep in your life.

So I kept him. Not romantically — let's clear that up right now, because I know how you people are, I know you're already writing fan fiction in your heads. No. Whatever spark was supposed to happen didn't, and what happened instead was better and much rarer: we looked at each other and some unspoken paperwork got signed. We're friends now. Deal with it. Twenty-seven years later the paperwork holds. We can go months, even years, without talking. But when we reconnect it’s like we were never apart. 

Over the years Jonah became a fixed point. Boyfriends (mine) and girlfriends (his) came and went, jobs came and went, and I moved and moved again, and through all of it there was Jonah, this random beloved thread running through the fabric of everything, showing up in my inbox with links I didn't understand and dry one-liners that made me cackle in inappropriate settings.

He went north eventually, to New Haven, Connecticut, for reasons involving computers that he explained to me at length and that I retained for exactly zero minutes. He got deeper into that world, the conferences and the forums and the gray-area hobbies, and he developed over time a very specific superpower that I need you to know about now, because it is going to hang over this entire story like a loaded gun on a mantel:

Jonah can find anything about anyone on the internet in four minutes.

I don't mean he's nosy. He's actually the least nosy person I know — he treats other people's information the way a bank teller treats money, professionally and without appetite. I mean that if you give him a first name, an employer, and a vague sense of a man's face, he will return to you, inside of four minutes, that man's full name, hometown, mortgage history, softball league, and a photo of him at a cousin's wedding in 2003 doing the Cha Cha Slide. He offered this service to me freely, over the years, whenever a new and potentially important man appeared on my horizon. "Want me to look him up?" he'd say. "Takes me four minutes."

Sometimes I said yes.

I want the record to reflect that sometimes, I said yes.

Now. About the manifesting.

I have believed things into being my whole life, and I need you to understand that I'm not talking about vision boards. This predates vision boards. This is a raw, unlicensed, artisanal form of delusion in which I decide, with my entire being, that something is going to happen — and then I stand there, expectantly, like a woman waiting for a bus that isn't on any schedule, and the maddening thing, the thing that has ruined me, is that the bus keeps coming.

I decided a stranger from the internet would be worth meeting, and the stranger became a lifelong friend with fountain-tested character. I decided, at seventeen, that my life was not going to stay in Charlotte, and — well. That's the part I have to tell you next, isn't it.

Because a year before that flight attendant lounge intercom said my name at JFK, I paid a psychic in a strip mall forty dollars, mostly as a joke, and she looked at my hands and said, "In a year, you will not recognize your life." And I laughed, because that is what you do, and then I drove home to my regular life in my regular city and forgot about it.

Reader, within the year: I had applied, on a whim I still cannot fully explain, to be a flight attendant for Delta Airlines. I had been flown to Atlanta for an interview with several hundred other hopeful people in navy blazers. That interview was only the second time I had ever taken a plane trip. From there I had been chosen, trained, tested, pinned, and shipped. I had a New York address, in Kew Gardens, Queens, in an apartment I shared with other new-hire flight attendants the way baby birds share a nest — briefly, loudly, and with a smudge of borrowed eyeliner. I had a uniform hanging on my bunk bed, a suitcase that never fully got unpacked, and a job where the fundamental unit of existence was: you don't know where you're going until they tell you.

Three months in. That's how new I was when this story happens. Three months is a very specific dose of experience. It's enough time to stop feeling like a newborn — I could arm a door, work a beverage cart in light turbulence, and say "buh-bye" four hundred times in a row without my soul leaving my body. But it is not enough time to understand the scale of the machine you've strapped yourself to, or to have been humbled by it yet. Three months is enough to have a couple of fun stories, a little confidence, and a completely intact set of delusions.

Which brings us, finally, almost, to my twenty-seventh birthday. To Times Square at midnight, to champagne in Starbucks cups, to a man from a fountain in 1998 standing next to me under a billion watts of light. To the duty desk, and briefing room K, and the word that came out of the In-Flight Manager's mouth like a gift with my name misspelled on the tag.

But my birthday actually starts the night before, with Jonah, and a bottle of champagne, and a misdemeanor we committed with great elegance.

I told you I can't tell a story in a straight line.

You were warned.