Off to Seek a Wizard... -5- Somewhere... Over Colorado, Way Up High by Erin Halfelven

 
I went to the lavatory and took off my painful maryjanes. Then I dithered for a while on whether to take off my stockings. For one thing, it was cool enough in the cabin that having an extra layer on most of my legs was more comfortable, plus the added feeling of not being, you know, exposed. But the problem was that bunching up the stocking toes to fit the flops' between-toes what-do-you-call-that-part-a-post? looked excessively dorky.

Kind of like the music they played in the lavatory on the plane. Is it that annoying to discourage people from spending too much time in the bathroom? Show tunes from 1940s musicals on a lo-fi speaker, barf me out.

Eventually, I made the more girly decision and went with looks over comfort even though I grumbled about it in the privacy of the lavatory. One thing studying magic does is teach you that a successful illusion is created by attention to as many details as you can control. At least my toenails were painted to match my fingers in a nice glossy pearl white.

I stuffed my shoes and socks into the carry-on and spent some time with the mirror, touching up my makeup. Not that it needed much, but I guess I was a bit insecure about my looks with a hunky guy like George sitting next to me. Huh? George was a hunk? Well, yeah, compared to the original me, he was.

I flipped my hair and admired my little emerald earrings too. I was glad I had got my ears pierced and Daddy bought me the expensive earrings for my seventeenth birthday which was not for another few weeks. He said I could later sell them to help with college tuition when I went back to being Dale Steffani instead of Stephanie Dale.

Looking in the mirror, I had to convince myself that I couldn't see even a trace of the boy I really was. I had to have the confidence to go out and be Stephanie to make this work. And in order to not be all mopey and paranoid, I had to enjoy being Stephanie. Well, why not? I'd already found out that no one holds doors open for a skinny boy or smiles as much as they do when they see a pretty girl. Being Stephanie was pretty cool, actually.

Finally, I put everything away in my purse and carry-on and left the lavatory to head back to my seat just as the fasten seat belt lights went on again. The flops made that sound they make as I hurried down the aisle and got buckled into 12B after squeezing past George without even thinking about the fact that I had had my butt probably right in his face. I stuffed the carry-on under my seat before I thought about what I had just done.

I had to not look at George and fight off an attack of the giggles just when the captain's voice came on the intercom and talked about turbulence and gaining a bit more altitude to get past the last of the storm clouds. What he didn't tell us was that there were still tornados from Colorado to Louisiana and points between and that we had flown a more northerly route to avoid them.

And what no one mentions is that when there are tornados, there is debris in the air, sometimes as high up as four miles or more. And at the time no one knew that a small church near where Colorado, Oklahoma and Kansas come together had been hit with a tornado and completely destroyed, fortunately with no one inside.

So it took everyone by surprise when the plane flying along at 26,000 feet got hit by a piano.