"Please fasten your seatbelts. Cabin crew, please take your seats for landing."
The perky voice of the flight attendant enunciated through the intercom in perfect Arabic, drawing my attention away from the book on my tablet. I had gotten in some great reading time over the flight, with only about twenty percent of my romance novel left. The site that I watched my Turkish dramas on had been way too buggy on the plane's WiFi and I kept getting pop-ups with some woman with large boobs asking me if I wanted to play with her. Reading was the obvious second option to pass the time, and if you asked me, losing myself in a world where hope thrived and love conquered was the best distraction.
It reminded me of how I felt whenever I read about digs. Hope was what drove an archaeologist's work. Oftentimes, digs turned up nothing more than some broken pottery and animal bones, but the hope that something more would be discovered burned inside the chest of every scientist.
Dark waters stared back at me through the airplane window. Different hues of green mixed with tan completed the canvas—the canvas of my origins. A thrill of electricity buzzed through me, and my legs jittered restlessly, just itching to get me out of this plane so I could introduce myself to my motherland.
"An elbow nudged at my arm on the rest between the seats.
"Good morning, sunshine!" I hummed to my neighbor.
Angela grunted her response as she wiped sleep from the corners of her eyes. Her noise-canceling headphones hung around her neck, so I knew she could hear me. The change in cabin pressure had probably disturbed her highness's beauty rest. I had started to worry she'd slipped into a coma or something since she had been passed out for the past nine hours. It had been a long flight after our layover in New York, but sleeping for that long uninterrupted on an airplane with numerous blaring announcements from the flight crew had to have been a world record for anyone.
With her golden-blonde hair trapped in a messy bun on top of her head, Angela chugged water clumsily from a plastic bottle like she was a boxer who'd just endured eight rounds before a knockout.
Her current disheveled state was in no way a true indicator of the Angela Bowman who graced the halls of Stanford. In fact, when she wasn't traveling, she looked like a living, breathing Barbie doll. It was certainly not the stereotypical persona of an archaeologist, but she was smart as fuck and deserved her spot in the internship.
Where I had small boobs and unruly hair, Angela had been blessed with ample curves and the smoothest hair I had ever seen. She turned heads wherever she went and was well aware of it, wearing only designer labels and accessories that were perfectly coordinated. That was why I had found it so amusing to see her show up to the airport before our flight in a velour tracksuit with a faded "juicy" stamped on her ass. I hadn't even known people still owned such hideous athleisure wear. Was a juicy Couture even in business anymore?
My own college sweatshirt and jeans were comfortable yet unassuming enough for me.
Angela was a true Southern belle. Born and raised in Georgia, she hailed from a well-to-do family. Just going to get gas in her Porsche convertible qualified as a social event in her eyes; she wouldn't be caught dead in a tracksuit even at the local Chevron.
But she hated flying. She had taken so many white tablets at the start of each leg of our trip that I was pretty sure the associated drug-information pamphlets had warnings about dosing at the levels that were currently coursing through Angela's body. That would explain why she was no longer digging her nails into my arms like she had at take-off, and probably also why she had slept so long. Her stiletto nails proved to be long enough to have drawn blood from my tender skin, which had luckily scabbed over by now.
I was just thankful she had actually shown up because I had bet against myself that she would ditch the internship to spend her summer yachting off the coast of St. John with some hot deckhand named Ryan.
Reaching into the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me, I extracted a can of room-temperature Diet Coke and passed it to my left. "I saved this for you."
"God bless you," Angela croaked as she reached for the can.
I winced as she opened the tab—the click of her nails and dramatic psssht of the aluminum tab releasing gas rang louder than expected since I had popped my drums to accommodate the increase in air pressure. Still, I watched happily as my friend slurped down her can of caffeine, grateful that she'd opted out of first class to sit with me in coach.
Our bodies jolted forward as the plane made contact with the runway, eliciting claps around the cabin.
"Oh, thank God!" Angela proclaimed in her sweet Southern accent like she was front row in church on a Sunday as she signaled the sign of the cross on her chest. She wasn't particularly religious, but her Christian upbringing conveniently surfaced at times of duress.
I packed away my tablet into the cross-body bag in front of my feet. "You're feeling awfully spiritual today, aren't ya?"
"What time is it?" she asked, looking at the sun beating through the cabin window.
I checked the time on the media screen in front of me. "About three p.m. local time."
"Fuck. Why do I feel like it's four in the morning?" Angela groaned, rubbing her hands over her face.
"It's probably because of all the Xanax you took, and the time difference—but more so the pills."
"Bitch, you're lucky I took that many, else you would have had to peel me off the emergency exit."
"Nah, I would have just pretended not to know you," I teased.
The plane rolled forward, finally stopping at the gate. The bing on the sound system was a welcome relief. I immediately stood up, even though our row was toward the back and it would be a while before we deplaned. The rush of blood to my numb legs felt foreign after sitting for so long.
Slowly, the line ahead of us filed out of the plane. I kept busy on my phone catching up on my missed messages and updating my location on social media, thanks to my international plan. A gentle shove to the shoulder from Angela signaled I was holding up the line, so I moved into the aisle with my shoulder bag, ready to grab my roller bag from the overhead compartment.
"What's wrong?" Angela asked with her Louis Vuitton roller bag next to her, busy drawing the handle up.
My eyes flashed from compartment to compartment, unable to locate my black bag with the polka dot ribbon tied to the handle. "My bag's not here."
"What do you mean, it's not here? Where did you put it?"
I pointed to the now empty compartment as the line of passengers anxious to deboard murmured behind us.
"Damn. Someone must have taken off with your bag?"
"What am I going to do? I didn't bring any checked luggage." How was I going to manage two months in a foreign country without any of my clothes or toiletries? The cross-body bag that I did have was only big enough to carry my tablet, cellphone, and wallet and I'd had to stuff my laptop into my bigger carry-on bag. I needed that laptop if I were going to do any sort of research during this internship.
"Don't worry about that. You can wear my clothes until your bag shows up, but you should probably report it to the flight attendant."
I rushed to the front of the cabin, where three of the hostesses who'd served our flight were smiling their farewells through perfectly glossed lips.
In my sub-par Arabic, I explained that my luggage was missing.
My grammar must have been shaky because one of the women opted to continue the conversation in English. "Miss, if you believe your baggage was stolen, you will need to file a complaint at baggage claim. If by chance the bag is found, then they can contact you."
"What am I supposed to do without my bag?! I'm here for two months on an excavation project! What will I wear? What if my mentor assigns an impromptu project? How will I look up the mummification procedure of the eighteenth dynasty?!" The words flew out a mile a minute, leaving the English-speaking attendant slightly dazed, which only wove me deeper into the web of frustration that I had spun.
"I'm sorry that I cannot help you any further." Her lips fixed into a stern smile as she eyed the line of people behind me, signaling that my time on the plane had officially expired.
"Come on, Kitty." Angela wrapped her hand around my wrist and led me along. "We'll talk to the agent at baggage claim and see what they can do. Hopefully, someone just took it by accident and they'll return it.
I hoped she was right, because if it had been stolen, then I'd be placing an ancient Egyptian–style curse on the klepto who had my bag. Although, I'd need my laptop to Google ancient Egyptian curses first. Fucking irony.
The line to speak to a baggage agent was insanely long, so I told Angela to go ahead and collect her luggage from the carousel while I waited. One hour and forty minutes later, and I still felt as hopeless as I had when I'd first discovered my bag was gone. All that time spent just to get to the counter to give my name, cell number, and the address of the hostel that the university had set up for us. The old "don't call us, we'll call you," Egyptian edition.
Tired and empty-handed, I found Angela waiting for me near the exit doors.
"No luck with the bag?"
My shoulders slumped even lower. "They said they'll call me, but who knows if that'll even happen."
Angela sighed. "I'm just glad that I packed multiple bags for this very reason." I knew my lost luggage was just a convenient justification for over-packing, but I decided to humor her this time for the sake of the extra outfits I could borrow.
Despite the rough start, I wasn't going to let this get me down. My journey had yet to begin, and I wasn't going to waste the "beginning of it stressing over something I couldn't control like stolen luggage. Straightening my spine and lifting my chin, I grabbed one of Angela's bags. "Come on, let's go find our shuttle outside."