In Between

Chapter 1

The night was dark and the flight which was heading from New York to Los Angeles was quite empty meaning I had a whole aisle to myself; this meant no cramming my long legs under the seat, which was quite relieving. Soon I was stretched out across the row, my world slowly turning black as the drowsiness took over. I had a couple of hours to rest before we landed in LA.

CLASH! CLANG! ROAR!

I woke up to the violent shaking of the plane and loud noises from the turbulence which disturbed my sleep. The lights might have gone out for a moment but I was so disoriented that's hard to say. I lifted myself off the seat and checked my phone to see that it was 3:33 AM, which I figured left me an hour before we landed.  I sat upright to look out the window and my heart sunk to the floor. Outside was nothing but a wide deep blue ocean stretching out for miles, it doesn't take a genius to figure that there is no ocean between New York and LA. My heart began to pound against my chest, as I pulled at my short blonde hair thinking of a way to get out of here. I only had one option at this point. Raising my hand, I pressed the button to call the flight attendant and for the next few minutes, I tried to convince my brain that maybe it was a massive lake we were flying over or something else that could explain what I was seeing. I lifted my head from my hands after hearing the click of a button.

"Ahhhhh!" I yelled jumping five feet off my seat after seeing the flight attendant. She was grinning from ear to ear, while salty tears poured down her pale cheeks.

"How can I help you, sir?" She asked.

I froze for a moment, her reaction sending shivers down my spine, then decided to just ask my question.

"Where are we? Why does it look like we're flying over an ocean?"

She wiped her cheeks to clear the tears, a grin still plastered on her face.

"Sir, we will be landing in about an hour"

"I, Um, Uh, okay thank you," I said.

As she was walking away, I checked the time on my phone again. 3:33 AM blinked back at me. It hadn't changed, I had to have been waiting for the flight attendant for at least 5 minutes. How was it possible the time hadn't changed at all? Huh? I opened my laptop and saw that it displayed 3:33 AM as well. I pulled out my phone and started a stopwatch, and spent the next two hours looking back and forth between the clocks, eagerly waiting for the time to change.

But it never did...

I tapped the shoulder of a woman in front of me, she turned around with the wrinkles on her face scrunched up in an annoyed manner.

"Yes?" She asked.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, but do you know how long it is until we land?" I asked.

She narrowed her eyes. "I was told by the flight attendant over there, that it would be about an hour."

"Huh? That flight attendant, we talked two hours ago! Shouldn't we have already landed?"

She stared at me like I was crazy, muttering something under her breath. I was preparing to continue trying to convince her until I felt a hand on my shoulder pulling me up. I spun around to face a male flight attendant, grinning widely, tears flowing off of his cheeks and falling onto my red Converse.

"Sir I'm going to ask you to calm down, otherwise the captain will have to be called."

"That won't be necessary," I said as I sat back down in my row. My stopwatch continued ticking, now telling me that I have been on this plane for more than 20 hours. A flight attendant would come every hour to offer meals, still grinning while tears fell from their eyes.