I took a generous handful.
I worked it into the ends of her hair. All the way through. Then, for good measure, twenty inches up the length.
It was very, very sticky.
I’ll be honest. I’d only meant to leave a small reminder. A little dab. A little pink souvenir.
But once you start with slime, it’s hard to stop. It just keeps going. It wants to spread.
When I was done, I wiped my hands on my napkin and screwed the lid back on the tub. About a third of it was gone.
Harold had watched the whole thing without saying a word.
“Remind me,” he murmured, “never to get on your bad side.”
“Then keep your hair to yourself.”
He touched the top of his head. He was mostly bald.
“At my age,” he said, “that’s not difficult.”
Brittany sat up.
Her hair came up with her. Slowly. Heavily. With a soft, wet sound.
She didn’t notice. Not right away. She was too busy counting the hundred dollars in her purse.
The boy across the aisle saw it first.
“Mom!” he hissed, grabbing his mother’s arm. “Mom! Look!”
“Don’t stare, Tyler.”
“But there’s something in her hair!”
Brittany turned around.
“What?” she said. “What are you all looking at?”
Nobody answered her.
The man in 23C had his hand over his mouth. The woman in 22F had turned all the way around in her seat. Tyler had both hands clamped over his mouth and his face was turning red.
Brittany frowned. She flipped her phone around to use the camera as a mirror.
The stream was still live.
So eleven hundred people got the same view she did, at the very same moment.
A thick rope of pink and purple glitter, sparkling with tiny silver stars, sitting on her shoulder like a pet.
“WHAT IS THAT?!”
She poked it.
Her finger came away still attached to it by a long, glittering thread.
“IS THAT SLIME?!”
“Slime, sweetheart,” I said. “It was meant for my granddaughter. You’re an early adopter.”
She whipped around in her seat. Her hair came with her, slowly, heavily, sticking to the headrest.
“YOU PUT SLIME IN MY HAIR?!”
“Your hair was in my lunch,” I said calmly. “And my wine. And my face. I thought we were exchanging things.”
“THESE EXTENSIONS COST EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS!”
“Yes, dear. You’ve mentioned that. I’d keep your hands away from it, if I were you.”
“DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!”
She grabbed at it.
That was a mistake.
The slime didn’t tear. It stretched. A long, glittering pink rope, from the back of her head all the way to her hand.
Her long acrylic nails sank right into it, like forks into a plate of spaghetti.
When she finally pulled her hand free, pink slime stretched between all five of her fingers like melted mozzarella.
She wiped it on her jeans. It stayed on her jeans. She wiped it on the armrest. It stayed on the armrest too. Now it was on both.
She shook her head hard, trying to fling it off.
A sticky strand whipped around and slapped her right across the cheek. And stayed there.
Tyler made a noise like a balloon losing air.
I’ll be honest. Sitting there, I felt like I’d taught her a lesson.
What I didn’t think about, not for one second, was what it might cost me once we landed.
Brittany grabbed at the strand on her cheek with the hand that was holding her phone.
The phone stuck to her palm.
She shook her hand. The phone stayed. She shook it harder. The phone swung back and forth on a pink glittery thread, like a yo-yo.
“MOM!” Tyler shouted, pointing. “SHE’S MAKING COTTON CANDY!”
His mother tried to shush him. She couldn’t. She was laughing too hard. She had her face buried in her neck pillow and her shoulders were shaking.
Brittany shot up out of her seat and into the aisle. Her hair came with her, slowly, with a sound like someone pulling off a Band-Aid. Some of the slime stayed behind on her headrest.
She turned around and looked down at me.
“YOU OLD WITCH!” she screamed. “LOOK WHAT YOU DID!”
Kelly came hurrying down the aisle.
“Ma’am! Ma’am, please, sit down!”
“I WANT OFF THIS PLANE!”
“Ma’am, we’re at thirty-five thousand feet.”
“I DON’T CARE! LOOK AT MY HAIR!”
And then she stood there, in the aisle, with one hand glued to her own head and the phone dangling from the other, and pointed straight at me.
“YOU TURNED MY EIGHT-HUNDRED-DOLLAR HAIR INTO A KINDERGARTEN CRAFT PROJECT!”
And that brings us back to where we started.
One young woman. One airplane full of people. And my crime, sitting right there on top of her head.
Kelly got her back into her seat. It took a while. Brittany was crying now, and swearing, and trying very hard not to touch anything, which meant she was holding both arms up in the air like a surgeon who’d just scrubbed in.
The phone was still stuck to her palm. Screen facing out. Pointed right at her own face.
“Somebody turn it off!” she wailed. “The stream! I can’t, my fingers are stuck!”
Nobody moved.
Kelly looked at the phone. She looked at all the slime. You could see her thinking, I did not get paid enough for this today.
I sighed.
“Hold still,” I said.
I stood up, leaned over the seat, and took the phone by its edges with a clean napkin. It came off her hand with a long, sad sllllp. I found the little red button at the bottom of the screen.
The screen was slimy. My finger kept sliding off.
It took three tries.
I couldn’t help seeing the last few comments before the screen went dark. They were scrolling by so fast I could barely read them.
LMAOOO
somebody get her some oil
why is nobody helping her
bro she literally threw her hair in grandma’s lunch for an HOUR
the fork thing tho
the WINE omg
grandma is my hero ngl
GRANDMA FOR PRESIDENT
Then I hit the button, and the screen went black.
“What were they saying?” Brittany asked. Her voice was small now. Wobbly.
I handed the phone back to her, wrapped in the napkin.
“They’re worried about your hair,” I said.
“Really?”
“Mostly.”
Kelly crouched down beside my seat. Her voice was low.
“Ma’am,” she said. “Did you do this?”
I looked at her.
I could have lied. I could have said I had no idea. I could have pointed at Tyler.
But I’d been a school librarian for thirty-one years. I’d spent three decades telling children that when you make a mess, you clean it up.
I’d had my childish fun. Now it was time to act my age.
“I did,” I said. “I’ll fix it.”
Kelly let out a long breath.
“There’s an empty seat next to her,” she said. “Twenty-three E. Please fix it. Quietly.”
I picked up my purse. Big trouble was probably waiting for me on the ground. I knew that. You can’t put slime in a stranger’s hair on an airplane without some kind of consequence.
But first things first.
As I stood up, Harold reached for something on his tray. He held up his little plastic salad box, the one that had come with lunch. He opened it and took out the tiny bottle of olive oil dressing.
He held it out to me like a surgeon handing over a scalpel.
“You’ll be needing this,” he said.
“Harold,” I said, “you are a gentleman and a scholar.”
“Only one of those is on my résumé.”
He handed me his salad too, while he was at it. “Use the croutons as a scraper if you need to.”
I sat down in 23E, next to Brittany.
She shrank away from me, against the window, like I was going to bite her.
“Why would I let you touch my hair again?”
“Because I know how to get this out,” I said. “And I promise not to put any more in.”
She looked at me for a long time.
Her mascara had run down her cheeks in two black lines. There was glitter on her eyebrow. There was a pink strand stuck to her chin.
She didn’t look like a shampoo commercial anymore.
She looked like a kid.
“Fine,” she said.
I picked up one sticky strand.
I put a drop of olive oil on it. Then I worked it with my thumb, slow and patient, the way you work out a knot in a shoelace.
The slime let go.
It just slid right off, into my napkin, like it had been waiting for permission.
Brittany stared.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “It’s coming out.”
“Oil breaks it down,” I said. “Hold still.”
“Don’t touch the clips,” she said quickly. “The clips are what hold the extensions in.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
I worked on the next strand. And the next. A drop of oil. A patient thumb. Wipe on the napkin.
I raised three children, and one of them, my Paul, had a terrible gum problem when he was seven. He fell asleep with a piece of bubble gum in his mouth every night for a month, no matter what I said, no matter how many times I took it away. I used to wake up and find it in his eyebrows. In his ears. Once, in a place on his pajamas I won’t describe.
This was easier than gum.
Kelly came back while I was working. She bent down low.
“Ma’am,” she said to Brittany. “Would you like the police to meet the aircraft when we land?”
“Yes!” Brittany snapped. “Absolutely!”
Kelly looked at me.
I kept working on the strand in my hands.
“I understand,” I said.
And I did. I’d done it. I’d put slime in a stranger’s hair. Whatever came next, I’d earned it.
“I’ll need to document what happened,” Kelly said. “I’ll check back with you both before we land.”
She left.
I picked up the next strand.
For a while, neither of us said anything.
The plane hummed. Somebody up front was snoring. Tyler kept peeking over his seat at us until his mother pulled him back down.
Brittany stared out the window. I worked on her hair.
Then she said, very quietly, “My extensions cost almost everything I had left this month.”
I didn’t look up.
“Then why spend it?”
“Because I wanted to look good.”
“You already did.”
She turned and looked at me like I’d said something in Russian.
“You don’t get it,” she said.
“Try me.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“Everyone online looks perfect,” she said finally. “Perfect hair. Perfect skin. Perfect clothes. Perfect apartment. Perfect boyfriend. Perfect everything. And I’m sitting there in my studio apartment eating cereal for dinner, scrolling through it, and I just…” She stopped. “I just want to look like I belong there. With them.”
“And you think buying all of that will make you happy?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. A small, tired shrug. “Maybe.”
“That’s an expensive maybe.”
She almost laughed. Almost.
“I couldn’t afford the perfume either,” she said. “Back at the store. I put it on my credit card. It’s already almost maxed.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw you blink.”
She looked at me. “What?”
“When he read you the total. You blinked. Just for a second.” I wiped a strand on the napkin. “I’ve been a mother for fifty years, sweetheart. I know a blink.”
She looked down at her hands.
“I’m twenty-eight,” she said. “Everybody my age already has their life figured out. They’re married, or they have a house, or they’re, like, a marketing director. And I’m a receptionist at a car dealership. And I already feel old.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” I said. “You’re talking to a seventy-three-year-old.”
“I know.”
“And I’m having a perfectly lovely time.” I picked up another strand. “Apart from this flight.”
She actually smiled at that. A small one.
I didn’t lecture her. I’ve found, over the years, that hands are better than speeches. Speeches go in one ear and out the other. Hands stay.
So I just kept working.
After a while, she was watching my hands. Watching me work the oil into her hair, strand by strand.
“Your hands look like my grandma’s,” she said.
“Is that a compliment?”
“Yeah.” She turned back toward the window. “She used to braid my hair when I was little. Every morning before school. She’d sit me on the kitchen stool and braid it and hum the whole time.”
“Does she still?”
“No. She passed a few years ago.” Her voice got very small. “Three years in April.”
I stopped for a moment.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
“She used to say my hair was the prettiest in the whole school.” Brittany wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. “It wasn’t even long then. It was just regular brown hair. It came down to about here.” She touched her shoulder. “But she said it was the prettiest anyway.”
“She was right,” I said.
“You don’t even know what it looked like.”
“I don’t have to,” I said. “Grandmothers are always right about that.”
The slime was all out now.
What was left was a very oily, very shiny, perfectly intact head of eight-hundred-dollar extensions. It smelled like olive oil and cotton candy and French perfume, all at once. It was a lot.
But it was all there.
I picked up three clean strands.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Well,” I said. “I haven’t forgotten how.”
I braided it. One plain, simple braid, all the way down her back. It took a while. There was a lot of it. When I got to the end, I tied it off with the rubber band from Harold’s newspaper, which he’d passed forward over the seat without being asked.
Now nothing could catch on the seat again. Nothing could swing into anybody’s face. Nothing could fall into anybody’s rice.
“So it’s not ruined?” Brittany asked.
“It’s a salad, dear,” I said. “Wash it twice when you get to your hotel. Use dish soap first, then your regular shampoo. You’ll be fine.”
She reached back and touched the braid. Felt it all the way down, like she was counting.
“I haven’t worn a braid in years,” she said.
“It suits you.”
She looked at me.
“You’re a pretty girl, Brittany,” I said. “You don’t need eight hundred dollars of upgrades to prove it. Your grandmother knew that. I suspect you do too, somewhere underneath.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then she turned and looked straight at me.
“I’m sorry I kept throwing my hair at you,” she said. “And for what I said about your age.”
“That was rather rude.”
“I know.”
I tied off the very end of the braid one more time, to make sure.
“And I’m sorry I put slime in your hair,” I said.
“Yeah,” Brittany said. “That was pretty mean.”
“It was.”
She looked down at the braid over her shoulder.
“Thank you for fixing it, though.”
“You’re welcome, sweetheart.”
Kelly came back about twenty minutes later. The captain had just said we’d be starting our descent soon.
She crouched down in the aisle.
“Ma’am,” she said to Brittany. “About the police. Do you still want us to request that they meet the aircraft?”
Brittany looked at me.
I looked back. I didn’t say anything. It was her choice.
She hesitated for a long moment.
“No,” she said finally. “I changed my mind.”
Kelly nodded slowly. She wrote something down on her little pad. She looked at me with those tired, patient eyes, and something in her face softened, just a little.
“All right,” she said. “Then I’ll just make a note that there was a disturbance, and it was resolved between passengers.” She stood up. “Please don’t make me write anything else today, ladies.”
“We won’t,” I said.
After Kelly left, I turned to Brittany.
“Why did you change your mind?”
She picked at her nail polish. Some of the slime was still stuck under her acrylics.
“Because I know what the video looks like,” she mumbled.
“And what does it look like?”
She sighed.
“Like I had it coming.”
I thought about that.
“I’d have put it more kindly,” I said. “But I wouldn’t have put it differently.”
She gave a small laugh. A real one, this time.
I wasn’t sure if I should tell her the rest. I thought about it for a while.
Then I decided.
“And, sweetheart?” I said. “I believe you picked up something of mine.”
She frowned. “What?”
“A hundred dollars.”
She stared at me. Her mouth fell open.
“That was YOUR money? I thought it was mine! I thought I dropped it!”
I looked at her for a long moment.
She was a terrible liar. Her ears had gone bright pink.
“Of course you did, dear,” I said gently.
I pretended to believe her. It was the kindest thing I could do for both of us.
She dug into her purse and found the bill. It was a little crumpled. There was a tiny streak of pink glitter on Benjamin Franklin’s forehead.
She handed it over.
“Apology accepted,” I said, and tucked it back in my wallet. In case, Marth. Just in case.
I went back to my own seat.
Harold had kept it warm, or at least unoccupied. He’d also, I noticed, gathered up all the slimy napkins into the air sickness bag, folded the top over neatly, and put it in his seat pocket.
“Well,” he said. “That was the most interesting flight I’ve ever been on. And I once flew from Cleveland to Dallas next to a man with a live parrot under his coat.”
“Was it a nice parrot?”
“It was a very rude parrot. It called me something in Portuguese for two hours.”
I laughed.
Then the plane hit one more bump. A big one. My stomach went up into my throat. I grabbed the armrest.
Harold put his hand on top of mine again. Lightly. Not looking at me.
When the bumps stopped, he didn’t move it right away.
And I didn’t ask him to.
“Martha,” he said, after a while.
“Yes?”
“Would you like to get coffee when we land?”
I turned and looked at him. He was still facing straight ahead, at the seat back, where Brittany’s neat oily braid was hanging down over her headrest like a rope.
“Are you always this forward with women on airplanes?” I asked.
“Only the dangerous ones,” Harold said.
I laughed so hard that Tyler leaned across the aisle to see what was so funny.
“I suppose,” I said, “one cup wouldn’t hurt.”
The captain came on the speaker. We were starting our descent into Phoenix. Local temperature, ninety-eight degrees. Thank you for flying with us.
I looked out the window. The ground was getting closer. Brown and gold and wide open, with the mountains on the edges and the little toy houses with their bright blue swimming pools.
Eddie always said if you could see the ground, you’d feel better.
For the first time in forty-six years, I actually did.
When we got off the plane, Brittany waited for me at the end of the jetway.
She had her rhinestone phone in one hand and her two bottles of perfume in their little bag in the other. Her braid hung over her shoulder.
“Hey,” she said. “Perfume lady.”
“Martha,” I said.
“Martha.” She shifted from foot to foot. “My stream got, like, eighty thousand views. In two hours. People are clipping it. Somebody already made it a meme.”
“Oh dear.”
“No, it’s…” She made a face. “Most of them are on your side. Like, all of them are on your side. Somebody started a hashtag. Hashtag Slime Grandma.”
I closed my eyes. “My children are going to find out about this, aren’t they?”
“Probably,” she said. “Sorry.”
Then she held up her phone.
“I’m gonna post a video,” she said. “Tonight. After I wash my hair. Like… saying sorry. About the whole thing. Showing the braid.” She looked down at her sandals. “Is that okay? If I say what happened?”
“You can say whatever you like, sweetheart. It’s your channel.”
“I mean, I’m gonna say I was kind of the worst.”
“Then I’ll look forward to it,” I said.
She almost laughed.
Then she did something I didn’t expect. She stepped forward and gave me a quick, awkward hug. One arm. Over my shoulder. She smelled like olive oil and cotton candy and French perfume.
“Thanks for not letting it be ruined,” she said into my shoulder.
Then she let go and hurried off down the concourse, her braid swinging behind her.
It didn’t hit anybody.
Harold and I got coffee at a little place by baggage claim.
He had black coffee. I had tea, milk, no sugar. We sat at a sticky little table and talked for an hour, until his son called to say he was circling outside and could he please come out before airport security towed him.
Harold stood up and put on his tweed jacket.
He took a pen out of his inside pocket and wrote something on a paper napkin. His phone number, in neat professor handwriting.
“I’m in Phoenix for two weeks,” he said. “Meeting Winston Churchill. If you find yourself in need of more olive oil, or someone to hold your hand on the flight home.”
I took the napkin. I folded it carefully and put it in my wallet, next to Eddie’s hundred-dollar bill.
“I fly home on the twenty-third,” I said.
“So do I,” Harold said. “What a small world.”
Joanne was waiting for me at the curb with Emily in the back seat.
Emily practically fell out of the car to hug me. She’s getting so tall. She has her grandfather’s ears. They stick out a little, and she hates it, and I tell her every single time that they’re perfect.
“Grandma! Grandma! Did you get it? Did you find it? Tommy said they had it at the airport!”
Tommy, apparently, could not keep a secret.
I knelt down on the hot sidewalk, my knee complaining, and unzipped my purse.
I took out the tub of Galaxy Unicorn Mega Slime.
Emily gasped. Then she took it from me with both hands and looked at it.
Then she frowned.
She shook it. It made its soft, sucking sound. Then she unscrewed the lid and looked inside.
“Grandma,” she said slowly. “Why is a third of it gone?”
Behind her, Joanne was staring at her phone.
“Mom,” she said, in a very strange voice. “Mom. Why is there a video of you on the internet?”
I stood up slowly.
“Well,” I said. “That’s a long story.”
Joanne turned her phone around. And there I was, on the screen. Leaning over a seat on an airplane with a napkin, trying to press the red button on a slimy phone. Underneath, it said 214,000 views.
And under that: #SlimeGrandma.
“Mom,” Joanne said. “What did you do?”
Emily grabbed the phone out of her hand. She watched the video. She watched it twice. Her eyes got bigger and bigger.
Then she looked up at me.
“Grandma,” she whispered. “You’re famous.”
“I’m not famous, sweetheart. I’m a sidebar.”
“You put my slime in a lady’s hair?”
“She put her hair in my lunch first.”
Emily thought about that very seriously.
“That’s fair,” she said.
That night, after a big dinner with the wolves, who wanted to hear the whole story four times and made me act out the part with the phone stuck to her hand, I sat on Joanne’s back porch with a glass of iced tea.
Emily came out and sat beside me on the porch swing. She had the slime tub in her lap.
“Grandma?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Was it fun?”
I thought about it.
I thought about the hair in my rice. And the wine. And Fifty years ago? And the look on that girl’s face when she saw herself in the phone.
And then I thought about the braid. And the girl’s grandmother, who used to braid her hair every morning and hum the whole time. And Your hands look like my grandma’s.
And Harold’s hand on top of mine.
“Some of it was fun,” I said. “Some of it wasn’t very nice of me.”
“Which part?”
“The slime part.”
Emily giggled.
“But then I fixed it,” I said. “That was the important part. When you make a mess, you clean it up. Even if the other person started it.”
“Even if they were really, really mean?”
“Especially then,” I said. “Otherwise you’re just two people being mean at each other on an airplane. And nobody needs that.”
Emily nodded slowly, like this was very important information.
My phone buzzed on the table.
It was a notification. Brittany had posted a new video.
I’m not very good with the phone. But Emily helped me open it.
Brittany was sitting on a hotel bed with clean, wet hair, and it was all in one simple braid. No makeup. Just a tired, slightly pink face.
“Okay, guys,” she said. “So. I owe somebody an apology.”
She talked for about three minutes. She said she’d been rude. She said she’d been selfish. She said she’d been putting her hair in an old lady’s lunch for an hour and acting like it was the old lady’s fault.
“And she could’ve just let me sit there,” Brittany said. “With slime in my hair. She could’ve let me land like that. But she didn’t. She sat down and fixed it, with salad dressing, for like forty-five minutes, and she braided it, and she didn’t even make me feel stupid.” She touched the braid. “My grandma used to braid my hair like this. I forgot how much I missed it.”
She looked into the camera.
“So. Martha. If you see this. I’m sorry. And thank you.”
Then she leaned closer to the camera and said, very seriously, “Also, everybody, please stop sending me olive oil. I have, like, nine bottles.”
The video ended.
Emily looked up at me.
“Grandma,” she said. “Are you crying?”
“No,” I said. “It’s the slime fumes.”
Emily would get a check for her birthday instead. Joanne thought that was perfectly reasonable.
But I promised her that before I flew home, we’d go to the toy store, just the two of us, and buy a replacement together. A brand-new tub of Galaxy Unicorn Mega Slime, all the way full.
We went that Saturday. They had one left, on the very top shelf.
Emily stretched it four feet across her mother’s kitchen, just like the girl on YouTube, while the wolves cheered.
It got stuck in the ceiling fan.
I didn’t say a word. I just went and got the olive oil.
