The Ring of the Queen (The Lost Tsar Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  Part VIII

  I want to teach. I want to speak. I want to travel.

  -Hillary Clinton

  “Wow! This is amazing!” Tania exclaimed as she looked out her window during takeoff.

  Great, she was braver than me. I wondered if I’d done the right thing by taking this trip, going to Russia, taking this class. I wondered if I should have asked Tania to come with me as well. I almost screamed bloody murder when the plane took off on my first flight.

  Tania turned and looked at me. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Sure, why do you ask?” I replied.

  “You’re grabbing the armrest so hard that your knuckles are white.”

  I realized that I was gripping the armrest at the moment that she mentioned it. I decided that I didn’t want the whole trip to be about hiding stupid stuff from my friend.

  “I don’t think I like to fly,” I said.

  “Really? Why? Does it scare you?”

  “I know it sounds stupid, but it does.”

  Tania smiled at me. “Oh, thank God. Cause that scared the crap out of me, almost literally.”

  “I thought that you thought it was amazing.”

  “I was just trying not to be a wimp.”

  I laughed and so did Tania. From that point on, I started to relax. Once that was over with and we were at our cruising altitude over the Atlantic Ocean, we sat and talked like two old friends that hadn’t seen each other in years. Tania told me even more about her and her family than she had when we’d chatted online. I had no idea that her family were politicians of a local type. Her dad and his dad and so on were city councilmen and her great grandfather had even been the mayor in his day. Tania had no such aspirations.

  “I’m not even sure what I want to do. I know I like history, and I love Russian history. I’m not sure I’ll be a good teacher though. I have what my mother calls an abrasive personality. I’m not sure what that means, but I think it means that I’m a pain in the ass,” she said.

  “You don’t strike me as abrasive,” I replied.

  “You haven’t seen me on a subway.”

  “I’ve never even been on a subway.”

  “Not even in Chicago?”

  “No. We normally just go for the tourist stuff like museums and sports; and for that we park in parking garages.”

  “Do you drive?” Tania asked me.

  “Yes, I do. Have to get around somehow.”

  “Well, I’ll teach you about subways, and you can teach me how to drive.”

  “You don’t drive?”

  “No need to, I have the subway.”

  “What happens if you want to go out of the city?”

  “This time I took a plane. We’ll see about the next time.”

  This was crazy. Here we were, two young girls, leaving the country. I had no idea how to navigate a subway system, and Tania had no idea how to drive a car. Together we might have made one person who could get around, but neither one of us could get around alone. I knew that I had asked her to come along, because I was afraid to go alone. I wondered if she would have come, if I hadn’t come with her.

  We talked some about history and about our classes. The attendants brought around food and headphones for us to use with the television and music services that were on our flight. For a while, it seemed like a perfectly normal thing that we were doing. I started to think that this was what it was supposed to be like to fly, and that I was getting that hang of it. I was watching episodes of “The Middle” on TV on the tiny screen in the back of the headrest of the seat in front of me. Tania had dozed off for a bit. I couldn’t sleep. I was of the impression that I would never be able to sleep on a plane. I wasn’t sure why.

  Then I found out.

  The plane began to shake suddenly as though it were being shaken by the very hand of God. It was a violent shake that I imagined must be similar to an Earthquake. Tania was instantly roused from her nap. She jumped in her seat and threw up the shade on her window.

  “What the hell?” she said.

  “We’re encountering some minor turbulence,” a voice said over the intercom. “The fasten seatbelt sign has been illuminated. Please return to your seats at this time. Thank you.”

  I was holding onto the armrest again. I’d only recently let it go. “A little turbulence? This is a little?”

  There was a man sitting across the aisle from me wearing a dark brown suit with a smartly striped tie to match and a light blue shirt. He had very little hair but a pleasant face. “I’ve noticed that this is the first time you girls have flown,” he said to us.

  “No shit,” Tania said angrily.

  “Anyway,” the man said. “This is fairly common. Just so you know. We’re flying over the Greenland and Iceland area. The winds are always a little different in this area. If you turn on the flight monitor on your screen, it will show you where we are. That’s how I always know when to expect turbulence.”

  I did as the man suggested. There it was. Right on my screen there was a map and it showed where we were at the time with a little cartoonish plane. “That’s pretty cool,” I said.

  Tania was looking over at my screen. “That is cool. How long does it last normally?”

  “From my experience, and I take this flight all the time, I would say about 10 more minutes,” he explained. “It could last a little longer or stop a little sooner. It varies.”

  As he finished saying that, the turbulence stopped. He was right. I guessed that he really did know what he was talking about. I was a novice. I knew that I could be a wuss, but I was hoping that by taking my first trip out in the world, I would start to get over my wussiness. My grandma used to say that the only way you would be able to get over a fear was to face it and do the thing that scares you. Then you would see that there was nothing to be afraid of. This was my time. I was afraid to travel, particularly to Russia. My mother was absolutely frantic at the idea, and I was pretty sure that her chronic paranoia was that largest part of my fear. I was sure that there was nothing to be frightened of in Russia, and that when I got there I would learn it for myself. Who knows, from there I might decide to travel the whole world. Once I learned that there was nothing to be scared of about traveling, who knows where I might go.

  I guess that the whole idea that turbulence was normal had calmed me down. I woke to the sun shining in our window, and the voice on the intercom telling us that we were about to land in Frankfurt, Germany. My adventure was about to begin.

  “Did you hear that?” Tania asked me. “We’re in Germany! Can you believe it?”

  “This is the last flight for us today. All passengers must deplane. You can find your connecting flight information at the gate. If you have any questions, there will be staff at the gate to assist you. Have a nice day,” the voice on the intercom said.

  Tania and I were thrilled to be in a foreign country. The airport looked like the ones that we’d come from. We guessed that most of them were similar. It was probably a standard thing. I mean airports all over the world must have been made to look alike, right? We found our flight information and we made our way to our next flight. It was already feeling like a familiar process. I had this. I could travel. I could go anywhere. I was going to become savvy and run all over the world. That was the idea anyway.

  It wasn’t long before we boarded our next flight. In a few hours we would be in Moscow.

  The Ring of the Queen