Page 2 of The Christmas Yes List

Points Earned:

I pause and think through the number of bizarre requests I made over the course of the flight. Write a modest “6.”

Six!

Over halfway to victory!

I focus on that one word, success, as I exhale. Overhead, the pilot announces imminent landing, and I slip the notebook back into my backpack. My stomach is one giant clenched knot as the pilot concludes his message with best wishes for a merry Christmas and happy New Year.

Fred still hasn’t returned to his seat as the plane bounces to a bumpy landing (despite the attendant’s small-fisted, door-pounding protests), and I can’t help feeling personally responsible as I visualize him bouncing around the bathroom, glasses flying, shiny bald head pink as it bangs against mirror and walls, ruing the day he told himself, Why not just . . . fly?

The man would rather face a potential head injury than come back to me.

Still, a win is a win, and partly to focus on the positive, partly due to the humiliation that threatens to burst any second if I don’t explain myself to somebody, I pull out my phone the second I step off the plane and dial up Genie.

Or rather, I go to dial up Genie when the phone rings with an incoming call. From Genie.

“You’re here,” she says, or rather announces. “You’re here at last.” Her words are delivered with the dramatic flair befitting a woman whose long-lost husband has finally reached land. Or a wounded backpacker who’s been awaiting a rescue helicopter to carry them off an Icelandic mountaintop. Or an astronaut who has been stranded one hundred days in space and is now about to be saved.

“How did you know?” I say with the start of a smile. Leave it to the childhood bestie to make my humiliation nausea vanish in a record three seconds. If there’s one person I can call for a guaranteed confidence boost, it’s Genie.

“It’s the twenty-first century. I’ve been tracking your flight.”

“How?”

“With an app,” she says, like Duh.

Well sure. Download an app.

“Aren’t you at work?” I say.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Aren’t you a second-grade teacher?”

“Yeah. So?”

I laugh as I take the escalator toward the luggage pickup. “Tell me something. Are twenty eight-year-olds sitting at desks when they’re supposed to be learning, watching you talk on your phone right now?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I have you on speaker and we watched your flight on the projector screen the past hour. Math, Chloe. All of life is learning. Say hi to Chloe, everybody, and tell her how many miles she flew.”

I grin as a chorus of small voices comes through the speaker with an elongated “Helllloooo, Chloe, you went two thousand seven hundred and sixteen miles,” which I further learn from the bunch equates to 40 hours of driving, 977 hours of walking, or 7 hours of air travel.

Genie takes me off speaker as she tells the class, “Now gather round your genius classmate Adam as he works out the flight emission levels on his paper,” and I proceed to tell her about my first successful rejection.

She cackles like we’re the eight-year-olds instead of her students.

“You’re kidding me,” she says. “I can’t believe you did that.”

“Desperate times. Desperate measures.”

“Yes, but you.”

“I know,” I agree.

“Never in a million years would I have believed it.”

“I daresay a trillion.”