I wake up with a jolt. I’m in a pitch-dark room with no windows. My head pounds heavy and slow. Like a heartbeat. Like a prison guard’s boots slamming against cinder-block floors. Like horror movie music. I lay in paralyzed silence for a moment. Like I’m procrastinating facing the dark reality that I’ve likely been kidnapped and am being held hostage in a lightless basement where I’ll stay until I die. Unless, of course, I get serendipitously rescued after six months. I envision the Safe Return™ to my family making national news. I see the headline: Adult Kidnapping Victim, Zara Barrie, Tearfully Reunites With Family. And suddenly I’m the face of adult kidnapping. It’s not what I had in mind for my life but I’ve always wanted to be the face of something, so I lean into it. I *finally* have a platform people will take seriously. When I candidly wrote about being sexually assaulted by a male bartender after slugging back more Sauvignon Blanc than my body could handle in a London pub—an editor at a top-tier publishing house rejected my book proposal because she was looking for “more serious stories about what women are up against.” I dare that editor to reject me after my stint as a missing person. I feel a fleeting moment of glee: I’m finally going to fulfill my dream of being an Oprah “SuperSoul” speaker. Right as I’m prepping for my first appearance on the Howard Stern Show—
Savannah’s voice booms into my ears: “There’s no way you’re making that flight, Z.” Her voice is the fog horn that alarms me back to earth.
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The clouds break and a slew of images from the drunken night before downpour over my brain: The strip mall full of gay bars and asshole-bleaching spas. The Bacardi diet cokes in their little plastic cups with their sad little limes with their limp little over-squeezed carcasses floating at the top, like dead bodies in the East River. Savannah stumbling toward me clutching a skinny margarita like it’s a trophy. A stout lesbian looking at me intently, silver keys clipped to her belt loop, rendered shiny in the moon glow. I remember the stout lesbian’s name: Sue. I hear myself slur,“see you first thing in the morning for our heartbreak pre-flight fireball shots!” I hear the THUD of my body clumsily hitting the backseat of our uber. I hear Savannah sheepishly meow: "Let’s get one more." I hear myself whinge about having to get up early for the airport. I see us both, wobbly and bleary-eyed, at a different bar in a different part of town sucking back mojitos (plot twist) with a boy who is pretty like a Shetland pony and has the same rich auburn hair color you find on Clairol boxes when you're trolling the drugstore aisles at 2 AM on the verge of a mental breakdown. I hear Savannah stage whisper: “If I was forced to fuck a dude, gun-to-head, he’d be the kind I’d fuck.” I hear myself squeal in delight like a teen girl who’s just made varsity cheer. I see us all—Savannah, me, the pretty ginger femme boy—clinking glasses splashing sticky liquid all over the place—as wolfpacks of sun-kissed homosexuals hoof around us.
So no, I’m not being held hostage in a basement. I’m in my best friend, Savannah Katz’s bedroom in south Florida. I guess being the face of adult kidnapping is just not in the stars for me. That's okay. I’ll find another way to garner the success I deserve.
“Shit,” I grumble, pulling the sheets over my head.
“It’s okay, Z.” Savannah yawns, stretching her arms luxuriously, like a cat adopted into wealth. “There’s a flight that leaves right after your flight. It’s not season here. They probably won’t even charge you a fee to change your ticket.”
“I’m Jewish,” I say cryptically, as if it’s a great reveal, as if she, the stockkeeper of Jewish New York Lesbians isn’t privy to the fact that I too am a chosen person. “Jews don’t miss—”
“Flights,” she cuts me off. She knows. Jewish girls do many things: We wear uggs in the summer. We go to therapy every single week, even when broke. We call our mothers daily, even when we know they’re going to make us feel like shit. We still wear our Juicy Couture tracksuits on the airplane, even though it's no longer 2004. But you know what we *never* do? Miss flights.
Disappointment floods me. I’ve not only let *myself* down by missing a flight but I've let the *Hebrew* people at large down, as well. My ancestors. I imagine my great, great grandfather Abraham Baranoff, shaking his head in the afterlife, tenderly staring into a worn copy of the old testament, solemnly whispering, “I made it through Ellis Island and you can’t even make your flight on time?”
