**WATTYS 2022 WINNER** Seventeen-year-old Evelyn Werth is on an endless flight from hell. She's the only person onboard Aloha Airways Flight 1333 who's caught in a 28-minute time loop.
During each cycle, four things happen:
1. The Internet goes out...
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Still Loop 398
I'm standing under the luggage compartment that Heather just closed. I take a deep breath, willing myself to open it and deal with whatever consequences come when passengers catch me rifling through a bag that doesn't belong to me. One worse, a bag that belongs to one of them.
My nerves are in a jumble after my conversation with Rion about my backpack. I know I should just tell him. About my father's ashes in the sealed bag. About all the issues I've been speaking with Dr. Sheryl about surrounding my dad's death. But I can't bring myself to do it.
I'm still so angry. And I don't want to bring Rion into that.
Or maybe, I think, I first need to process it myself.
It was five months ago when my father announced that he was leaving. He hadn't been happy, he told me. He'd been talking it over with my mom, and he decided that he needed a new start somewhere else. He was leaving for a new life, without us, on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Just like that.
In a matter of seconds, my life became the plotline of a bad TV drama. The depressed dad with the midlife crisis, going on some sort of personal journey to find himself.
"Is it someone else? Are you having an affair?" It was the only two questions I had. The only ones that came to mind.
He didn't answer immediately, which told me everything I needed to know. He wanted out. A new life with a new woman, and maybe a new family. A break – possibly permanently – from everything.
And everything included me.
And then two weeks ago – over four months after he left for Hawaii to start this new chapter of his life – I unleashed on him. "You're a selfish man!" I yelled into the phone.
There was silence on the other end, and then a crackle from somewhere above the expansive ocean, in the over two thousand miles of distance between us.
My dad's voice was raw. "You don't know how life changes you, what it starts to feel like when you get older cause you're still so young. You just don't know." I stifled an angry laugh as he continued, "You might not realize it now, but you have something so many people would give anything for. You have the best thing in the world."
His voice was hoarse, clouded with emotion as he whispered in my ear. "You have your whole life in front of you. Innumerable possibilities. Countless outcomes. You have options, and dreams, and an unwritten future. There's no greater gift on this planet than that."
