Love at First Flight: The fake-dating romantic comedy to fly away with

Chapter 2

'So, who thinks I should go to my ten-year school reunion?' I asked loudly. The chatter around me stopped abruptly. Everyone lowered their cards and regarded me as if I'd asked the world's most confounding question, one that didn't have an easy answer. When, really, what I'd intended was a simple 'yes' or 'no'. I ran my eyes over the people sitting in front of me and then started to realize why my question had not been so straightforward after all.

'I can see I'm asking the wrong demographic here.' I looked back down at my cards.

'Does it look like any of us enjoyed our high-school experience and want to relive any part of it?' Zane asked with what was clearly sarcasm. That much was very obvious. Even I – who was not good at deciphering tones – was able to glean that.

I peered up from my cards again, taking in the faces of the motley crew of Pokémon players who gathered here every Friday night to battle each other's mythical monsters. As far as geeky subculture went, this was the epitome of it. We were the teens who didn't go to parties on a Friday night but stayed in and traded cards. Who got high on 'Donking', not drugs; 'Aurora energies', not alcohol. Each one of us was awkward in everyday conversations, but not the con- versations here, where we got swept away in a fantasy realm and could talk about the new Super G-Max Thunderbolt X-star until our vocal cords were completely worn out.

'Have none of you been to your high-school reunions?' I asked.

Everyone shook their heads, except for Sheila.

'It wasn't that bad, actually,' she said. 'In fact, a few of them apolo- gized for bullying me. A lot changes in ten years – people change too. For me, I wanted to show them that I wasn't the same person I was back in high school. It was kind of cathartic.'

'Huh?' I looked at Sheila thoughtfully. She was a successful game designer now but, like me, she hadn't exactly fitted in at a main- stream school. Looking around the room, you could tell that no one here had fitted into the high-school mould, but we all fitted in here. This place was our sanctuary, a safe enclave separate from the scary world outside.

'I hated school,' Orion said, wringing her hands together nervously.

'It sucked,' Jono added, and Silent Abe, who never talked, nodded.

'I was homeschooled,' Anele added, 'but I'm pretty sure I would have hated it too.'

I looked back down at my cards and smiled. A mew VMAX with a choice belt, two fusion strike energies and four power tablets. A powerful combination. If I played this, I would defeat my oppon- ent in one swift move.

'Take that,' I said, playing the card with a dramatic flourish. A few 'oooh's rose up from the crowd, and then my opponent, Zane, grabbed his head and shook it.

'No. Not mew VMAX.' He conceded defeat and I folded my arms and smiled. But as pleased as I was, I was also somewhat thoughtful. Maybe Sheila was right. I also wasn't that shy, softly spoken girl who sat on the sidelines any more. For goodness' sake, I steered planes to safety and won card games with one swoop. Maybe the reunion wasn't the worst idea ever.

I opened the WhatsApp group when I climbed into my car at the end of the evening. The reunion was next month in Cape Town at the old girls' school hall. It would be easy getting there: one of the perks of being an air traffic controller was discounted plane tickets.

It was also over a work-free weekend, so no need to put in for leave. The reunion comprised a series of events that I'd already familiar- ized myself with.

Day one was a champagne get-together, followed the next day by wine tasting and lunch in the winelands. Which left Sunday free for me to visit my two favorite places in the world: the aquarium and the air force museum. I could catch a late-afternoon flight back to Jo'burg and be back at work on Monday. The trip to the museum and aquar- ium almost made the reunion feel like something I could handle.

I've been obsessed with three things my entire life – fish, every- thing aviation and synonyms – although it should be noted that aviation has always been my first love. I think it started way before I was even conscious of it. Before I was born, my parents had been expecting a boy. But when I arrived without a penis the general medical consensus was that the angle of my genital tubercle (as they call it at that stage) had been misinterpreted in my scans. As my mom always says, 'Even before day one, I've pointed in my own unique direction.'

However, because they'd been expecting a boy, they'd decorated accordingly, down to the blue walls and airplane mobile that hung over my crib. They'd repainted the walls, but agreed that airplanes were gender neutral. Besides I loved that mobile. In the beginning, I think it was the colors and movements that attracted me to it. But as I got older I became enthralled with it. I would stare at the planes and wonder where they'd been and where they were going. I'd wonder who was flying them, how many people were on board and how it was that they all spun around each other so perfectly without ever crashing into one another.

By the time I was ten I could name every modern plane in the sky and give you a run-down of their specs, not to mention name just about every single tropical fish there was. I had wanted to become a marine biologist or a pilot when I grew up. But after watching a TV show on air traffic controllers I decided that was the perfect job for

me. It was the precise nature of the job, which left no room for error. A job that was full of patterns and directions and facts. There were also no impressing clients or making office small talk. The only talk was technical talk to pilots, which I could do.

But if I went to my school reunion I'd be forced to make the afore- mentioned small talk. The thought was so off-putting that the idea of the aircraft museum and aquarium the next day was almost not enough to push through it. Almost . . .