“About what, baby?”
“She’s back there and everybody knows and nobody’s talking to her.” Maya turned her backpack strap over in her fingers. “I made that happen.”
And I had a decision to make, at thirty thousand feet, with a ten-year-old asking me the actual question, and I want to write down what I said because I’ve thought about it since and I’d say it again.
“No,” I said. “You didn’t make that happen. She made it happen when she assigned herself into a seat a stranger paid for and then said your name — ‘the girl’ — like you weren’t a person sitting right there. Everything after that is just what it looks like when somebody finds out.”
“But she’s alone back there.”
“She is.”
“That’s sad.”
“It is,” I said. “You’re allowed to think both. That she did a bad thing and that it’s sad she’s alone with it. That’s not weakness, Maya. That’s the whole skill. Most grown-ups can only manage one at a time.”
