Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [26]
When he finally gets a Clear Sky sales representative on the line, he asks, “When is the next flight out of Newark to St. Thomas?”
fourteen
“When is the next flight out of Newark to St. Thomas?!”
As far as Jessica is concerned, the sing-in was a smashing success. It worked well enough to get the Tristate Chapter of the Barry Manilow International Fan Club out of the Clear Sky customer service center and bring Jessica to the front of the line. But she’s still a few footsteps from the counter and has blurted the question too soon, with barely a glance at the person to whom it was directed. The Clear Sky customer service representative coaxes her to come closer with a shiny pink fingernail.
Jessica does a double take. Wait. Is that … Sylvia? she asks herself. Or have I been here so long that all Clear Sky employees are starting to look alike?
On another day, a surprise doppelgänger wouldn’t be a cause for alarm. But in light of everything that has already happened today, Jessica is starting to question her sanity. She turns to ask Garanimals whether she noticed a shift change while they were waiting on line, only to discover that Garanimals is gone. At some point during Jessica’s conversation with Hope, or perhaps after, while in the midst of her gastronomic voyage to Donutopia, Garanimals was replaced by an assortment of new and unhappily waylaid travelers. Jessica is a bit surprised that Garanimals cut and ran without one last farewell poke. Hadn’t she and Garanimals bonded? Briefly, of course, but in the intense way that soldiers invoke, you know, in the trenches against a common enemy? Apparently not. Jessica is feeling irrationally slighted by Garanimals’s brisk disregard.
“Please step forward,” says the woman who looks exactly like Sylvia, the Clear Sky gate agent who has already spurned her once today. It is only when Jessica gets within a few inches of the counter that she can read the employee name tag —SYLVIA—that confirms this is indeed the same woman she squared off against at Gate C-88 and not her (more) evil twin. Jessica thinks it’s odd that Sylvia didn’t bother to mention at any point during the finger-in-the-air cartography that a two-hour stint at the Clear Sky customer service center was the next shift of her rotating schedule, one designed by the Clear Sky Airlines Employee Satisfaction Task Force in the effort to relieve monotony and help alleviate the long-term psychological damage inflicted by hour after relentless hour of air rage.
“Hello again!” Jessica’s sugarcoated teeth are gritted into a deranged smile. All her donut energy is being exhausted by this smile, and it isn’t nearly enough. This smile is a grueling effort; she can feel the tension straining muscles well below her neck. Her shoulders are carrying more than their fair share of the weight of this smile. She might develop bursitis from this smile. “So, I’m still hoping to get to St. Thomas!”
Though Jessica was too busy licking smudgy frosting off her fingers to notice, it was Sylvia who’d had the unenviable task of informing the Tristate Chapter of the Barry Manilow International Fan Club that they were stuck in the city of Newark indefinitely. Sylvia is not ready to move on without a gripe or two, even though it’s totally unprofessional and frowned upon in the official Clear Sky Customer Ser vice Center Handbook, the same one that advises employees to be impersonal yet polite with all disgruntled passengers.
“You’re not one of those fan-clubbers, are you?”
“Noooooo,” Jessica insists.
When Sylvia looks heavenward and mouths THANK GOD, she is revealing more personality than is recommended in the Clear Sky Customer Service Center Handbook.