Unaccompanied Minor by Hollis Gillespie Read Free Book Online

close-cropped and was probably in his early forties, which made his goatee kind of unfortunate. He had a space between his two front teeth that made him look more approachable that he probably liked. Plus he looked kind of weary, so maybe he could have been younger. I don’t know why I wanted to talk to him so much. Like I said, I have major trust issues. But I read in one of my mother’s books that it’s important to have a “support system” in place when you go through a crisis. And if you ask me I was going through a crisis right then. Suffice it to say that of the few friends I had, almost all of them were airline personnel. Malcolm was my only friend my age, but Malcolm wasn’t there that day. So I thought it would serve my purpose to create a new ally to “strengthen my support system,” like the book said to do.
    And maybe it was the weariness of his face that drew me to Officer Ned, because I related to that. Also, I knew I’d probably see him again. You don’t fly as much as I do without recognizing the potential for repeat run-ins. Patterns, remember? And since he was a LEO, I figured it would be best to get on his good side.
    The cuffed criminal next to him kept trying to order tequila from the beverage cart, and it was becoming an old joke. Officer Ned had a lot less tolerance for him than he did for me.
    “So what does week on/week off mean? You never told me,” he said to me after a while. The MD-88 had no onboard entertainment system, not even any music in the armrest; it was just a matter of time before he became desperate enough for distraction to talk to me.
    I turned to him eagerly, happy to begin cracking his hardened defenses, although I was
not
so eager to talk about my ridiculous parental situation. He struck me as someone who would require very little input to surmise that I was on the run. But it looked like he wasn’t really listening, anyway, so I decided to open up a little—give and take.
    “It means that I spend one week with one parent and the next week with the other, and so on and so on,” I answered.
    “All year long?” he asked incredulously. So he was listening after all.
    “Yeah, it’s not the best of situations,” I said.
    “And your parents live across the country from each other?” He was still incredulous. I was used to it. Non-airline people always get their cockles in a bundle about our lifestyles. Like my mother once flew me to Rome because we were out of Parmesan cheese. People act like this is child abuse or something. It’s not. It’s awesome.
    But that’s different from this situation—this back-and-forth cross-country custody—
this
was abusive, or at the very least negligent. The last thing this custodial schedule did was “put my welfare at a precedent,” which is a legal phrase I kept coming across when I hacked into my mother’s e-mail account and read all the court documents her attorney had sent her. It was used in reference to the life decisions my mother and Ash had made, and whether those decisions placed me at a priority. I thought it was ironic, because I felt this custodial schedule put my welfare nowhere near anyone’s precedent. For example, I’ve sat next to perverts who watch porn on their iPads all flight, Pentecostal religious freaks who outlined my damnation for hours on end, a drunk who befouled himself in his sleep, petty thieves who tried to steal my neck pillow and my
MacGyver
DVDs, one man who I swear had hepatitis, a woman who breastfed her eight-year-old,
Corey
freakin’
Feldman
, and right now I was sitting less than three feet away from a handcuffed criminal, and even closer to a loaded gun.
    “What about school?” Officer Ned asked. “I have half a mind to report you for truancy.”
    “I study at an online academy.”
    “So you’re homeschooled?”
    “No, it’s part of the Atlanta public school system, I just do everything online. I only have to log in for a few hours a week as long as I complete all my