The Flight Attendant

by Chris Bohjalian

But that person didn’t exist in the morning. Most of the time, that person didn’t exist sober.

but they also dialed up the energy, didn’t they? Maybe they did. But in her lucid moments the next morning, she wondered if in fact they just sucked the energy from the room.

There Cassie went to shake the lawyer’s hand. Instead Ani hugged her, and inside Cassie wanted to cry with gratitude.

he was wearing khaki cargo shorts. In Cassie’s opinion, that eliminated instantly any chance at all that he might be mistaken for an actor.

You were weirdly pissed off because they had nothing by Taylor Swift.

Once when Paula was sober she’d ruminated that one of them was destined to die via “death by misadventure.” Apparently that was what coroners wrote on death certificates when people died doing something monumentally stupid, usually while drunk.

“Remember that person you wanted to be? There’s still time.” She wanted to believe that; she wanted to believe it almost desperately. She wanted to be different from what she was—to be anything but what she was. But every day that grew less and less likely. Life, it seemed to her in the back of the cab, was nothing but a narrowing of opportunities. It was a funnel.