Professor Klein pulls her blazer closed and adjusts her spider pin. Carol, who sits next to me, asks if that is a spider and requests for it to be removed from the blazer for the time being because of her fear of spiders. Professor Klein unpins the spider and lays it on the desk, then brushes her hands down her backside, flattening her skirt to sit. My eyes are on The Sound and the Fury, our assigned reading for the week. “Katy, what did you think of William Faulkner’s novel?” My face becomes warm and I imagine looking in my bathroom mirror and seeing the color on my cheeks looking as though they have contracted a contagious rash. Remembering all of Mike’s extensive rambling about the ending and Nancy’s ten-minute complaint about Faulkner switching point of views in each chapter, I say, “I enjoyed it.” I did enjoy it. In my mind Professor Klein listens as I tell her how much I enjoyed the first chapter and how the confusion took me on a maze because at first I thought the character was a child but finally realized it was a mentally retarded man, much later on and was so interested that I went back and read that chapter again. I imagine telling her how I felt like I was putting together a puzzle, not like the five piece wooden puzzle of a chimpanzee that I bought my niece, but like the 1,000 piece puzzles of a one colored castle that my deaf aunt used to do on her dining room table in her spare time. I look at the clock behind Professor Klein’s head and notice her notice my eyes rise to the clock, 8:50. I shut my moleskin journal that I call a notebook, shove my pen in the front pocket of my book bag and hail down a taxi on Broadway.  

On the way to JFK airport the driver tells me how he is from India and I tell him how I love Indian food and used to work at Tamarind on Twenty-second Street. He tells me how much better home cooked Indian food is as he mumbles something about picking me up when I return and gives me a business card that looks like it was made on his pot-head cousin’s computer and then crumbled up and then flattened between the pages of a Webster’s dictionary. My twenty-ounce bottle of Sprite Zero and a quarter vodka sizzles when I open it.

All nine out of ten times that I’ve flown I’ve had the warmth of alcohol in my body. For my first flight I was twenty-four and my first niece was born in West Palm Beach. Amanda, who is a year younger than I am, began flying at sixteen. She and I went to see our older sister and our first niece together in 2005. I put my head on Amanda’s shoulder pretending to be asleep so she would not notice the paleness of my face. Watching the buildings below I knew she felt the thumping of my heart as she looked at me and asked if I was okay. I made a sleepy moan, vaguely snapping my tongue twice and then remaining still.

At security I am “the chosen one” as the large and surprisingly smiley security guard puts it when she rubs what looked like a wet alcohol pad around my bag. I find gate B5. The closest place to sit at for the next hour is a sports bar. I ask for a Jack and Diet Coke more times than I can count and with my body on autopilot I somehow end up in Florida.

For the next two weeks in West Palm Beach, while my copy of The Sound and The Fury book sits in the darkness of my zipped backpack in New York, my days are spent on the floor of my niece’s room swinging Tiger from the Winnie the Pooh Changing Tree House, and reading Walter the Farting Dog seven times in a row. My nights are at my sister and her husband’s dining room table beside a Scrabble dictionary hoping for a “U” to accompany my “Q” or silently calculating how much it would cost to buy a hotel for my Park Avenue land on Monopoly night. Something about playing board games on a Saturday night makes Karen, Bill and I feel silly and reminisce about our elementary school years when Bill would hide his mother’s soup in a hollow hand-painted doll and Karen would inspect all of her belongings daily for mine and Amanda’s fingerprints. 

One evening in the middle of Scrabble, Bill checked on some commotion outside. When he came back in, he stood in front of Karen and I with his tank top crooked explaining how the sanitation skipped Miss Harrison next door’s paper recycling bin on Tuesday and about the lawnmower leaving her grass a quarter of an inch too long, and the pool cleaner showing up ten minutes later than scheduled. Bill then explained how she asked him to look at the imperfection on her brand new kitchen cabinets when removed the spot with three scrapes of his thumbnail. With my eyes on his crooked tank top, my shoulders faintly jumped with suppressed laughter. My sister asked “Was your nipple pointing at Miss Harrison the whole time you were talking to?’ I spit my milk out; a drop sneaking down my left nostril. I stopped laughing, then remembered and laughed again, then went to the bathroom where I sat on the closed toilet and laughed sporadically like the crazy lady who wears all white and wanders the streets in neighborhood. I attempted to walk back to the table but decided to go upstairs to end my laughter when each step away made me laugh harder. I found it difficult to get to the top but made it with wet sweatpants.

Melissa Cucu is currently an undergrad at NYU majoring in Creative Writing.  She is married and lives in Sunnyside, Queens where she was born and raised.