By Sheer Accident

The five men take their seats, two rows in front of Nadine. Two of them turn their heads and try to make the most innocent look as if they want to say: “Sorry to delay the flight. It was by accident.” Nadine is relieved and a little excited that the plane has taken off. She has the aisle seat and the chair next to her is free. At first it makes her a bit uncertain. “Is it okay to have nobody next to you?” she wonders. “Is somebody missing?” A little later Nadine starts to enjoy the empty space and starts to think about it as a luxury. “This is fantastic.” She considers herself a lucky bird and tries to relax. “If I can doze a little, this emotional journey will go quicker - or at least seem to”, is her reasoning. The stewardess offers something to drink. At first, out of some sort of humility, Nadine almost rejects the offer. She is just in time to correct herself pretending to be a frequent flyer, and a moment later she enjoys a Coke with ice. In four days it’s Andre’s birthday. He turns twenty already. She has not seen him for a long time and wonders if he has changed much. “He is obviously quite cool with flying airplanes...” And then she begins to worry: “What if he is just like those guys that I was hanging around with... before I met Erwin? Oh my god! Really?... Although... He also knows we are actually not brother and sister... disgusting!” For a second Nadine doubts whether it is a good idea that she goes to Andre, and immediately after she’s ashamed of her own thoughts. “What a silly idea Nadine,” she corrects herself, “it is just really nice with Andre, Tom and Olga!” The five latecomers are pretty active and energetic. They talk a lot, and often Nadine notices their laughter. They seem excited. They behave so different than the other people in the plane. Most other passengers are quite. Some are reading, some do seemingly nothing and others have even tried to fall asleep from the moment they’d sat down. Nadine decides to give herself the assignment to find out what the tracksuit men are up to, what they will be doing in the States and for a little bit of fun, which of the men would suit her best for a love affair. She’d already concluded that all of the candidates were actually too old for her, but it is just a game, so she can pretend that she herself is older too. “Whatever,” she thinks, “I’m going to assess and ‘scorecard’ the guys, it’s fun to do!” Nadine had often invented such puzzles to entertain herself, to imagine herself in a world she could design according to her own fantasies and desires. Nadine first focuses on the men wearing the same tracksuits. She is interested to find out what bonds these men; what is their final destination and what are their objectives for this travel? She is certain that no woman could have been involved in the selection of those suits and wonders what these guys do and why they chose these tracksuits. The colors range from purple to blue to silver. The design pattern shows angular shapes and triangles on the slightly reflecting fabric. Nadine’s imagination takes her through several possibilities: “Windsurfers perhaps? Nope, they would have much cooler looking suits. Or have I lost my fashion sense? Is this perhaps hot on the California coast?” It’s hard for her to find out. “Are they sailors? Yes maybe it’s a sailing team!” Immediately after, Nadine is not sure anymore “It must be a sport that binds them.” She just feels that, but again it remains uncertain what sport it is. “Ice-Skaters do not go to Los Angeles and then I would have seen a familiar face.” In her country the Netherlands, many long-track ice-skaters are celebrities, with lots of exposure on television. “Ice-Skaters are not much team driven, though, right? Or am I just coming to the wrong conclusion based on the fact the race is individual?” Nadine ponders almost aloud. She sits back, relaxing while overthinking the possibilities. Spontaneously a smile slips on her face. Two of the four men in ugly suits are dark haired and the other two are more and less blond. Both a dark haired man as a blond have a mustache. Nadine does not like mustaches. Soon she finds the dark haired one without a mustache actually ‘hot’, too old for her, but a handsome cool guy. The blond without a mustache is the youngest and clearly the joker, because when he says something the group always laughs. He also has a disarmingly sweet face. The dark man without a mustache is the quietest, but also the sturdiest. Now and again - she can’t seem to help it - Nadine’s thoughts go to how it would be if something did go wrong with the plane. She had been flying only once before, a round trip above her hometown, with the father of a friend. Scary, she’d found it. The small Cessna looked so fragile, everything was moving, trembling and shaking. The skin was thinner than those of any car. The dashboard seemed homemade. It looked like the gauges were put in a black piece of sawn board, somewhere in a messy home garage. The windows were full of tiny small cracks that one could see very clearly in the reflection of sunlight. The flight had lasted half an hour and Nadine had, as a complete layman, spent at least twenty-five minutes of it inspecting the plane and therefore she had seen only little of the magnificent view, which had been of course the initial purpose of the outing. “Yet this huge plane is solid. Everything looks professional and strong. The skin is thick and really, it’s just impossible to understand that such a heavy monster can fly”, Nadine confirms to herself.