Such a Rush (24 page)

I was afraid that she would come out with the words
airport whore.
But she let it go, pressing everyone for what we wanted for dinner. I was glad she’d gotten my message, at least. If she was going to drag me to her rich-girl party, I was going to make her wish she hadn’t.

We took our gourmet organic food, which always tasted a lot better than it sounded, outside into the ocean breeze. The deck was empty because most of the tourists had eaten already. If we’d been on the flophouse end of town, the beach would still have been full of tourists, many of them staggering and
sunburned to the point of hospitalization. Such things didn’t happen here on the magazine spread end. Only the sandpipers trotted across the beach. A stray toddler chased them. Behind that, his mother ambled along, half watching him in this safe environment, not the least bit afraid of him encountering a cigarette butt and picking it up to eat it.

At first, the noise of a plane was hard to discern from the noise of the surf, growing and fading on the wind. The engine’s growl loomed louder. On the horizon down the beach, I recognized the Coast Guard Super Hercules from the station in North Carolina. It had passed me in midair earlier in the day. I had announced myself over the radio because it was coming so fast and I didn’t want it to run me down or get its propellers tangled in my banner.

Coming back in my direction now, materializing out of nothing, the plane was gorgeous and classic: orange and white with four propellers and a huge tail. It flew so low over the beach, and its wingspan was so wide, it looked like an alien spacecraft hovering over the planet, something that shouldn’t have been able to fly with human technology. It drew even with us and I put my hands over my ears. It passed us and I turned to watch. It was gone surprisingly fast, blocked out by the roof of a mansion as the beach took a slight turn. I could still hear it, though.

Disappointed that I couldn’t see it anymore, I turned back to the table. Alec was turning back at the same time. Grayson’s eyes stared where the plane had disappeared. Molly focused on her plate, munching salad, unaware that we’d been distracted.

I remembered what Mr. Hall had told me when I first asked him for a lesson: the kids who watch planes are destined to be pilots. And I envied Molly. She heard a plane and thought,
Hmmm, a plane,
and went back to eating without even
registering, instead of looking around desperately and wanting a piece of the action. She wasn’t driven toward a life that was out of her reach.

But envying Molly was a dangerous road for me. I knew better than to go down it. I turned to Alec and opened my mouth to change the subject.

“Why did you want to start flying in the first place?” Molly spoke before I could, looking at Grayson. So she
had
noticed us watching the plane.

Grayson gazed at her for a moment like he hadn’t quite realized she was talking to him. It shouldn’t have been a personal question, and Molly was not rude for asking it, but it
was
a personal question for Grayson.

Finally he said, “It’s such a rush. I mean, it’s exactly the kind of thing I love to do.”

“Adrenaline junkie,” Alec broke in, explaining Grayson to Molly.

Grayson kept talking as if Alec hadn’t spoken. “Flying is perfectly safe if you do everything right. If you make one mistake, you could easily die. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life—”

Alec laughed.

“—so I couldn’t believe my dad was letting me do this, and I felt lucky.” As Grayson said this, his gaze drifted toward the sky again, where the Super Hercules had disappeared. Now he looked back at Molly. “I still do.”

She nodded shortly and turned to Alec. “What about you?”

Alec shrugged. “I’ve always been around it. I can’t remember a time when my dad wasn’t flying, or when Jake didn’t want to fly. Grayson and I were always hanging around Jake, wanting to do what he did and fighting with each other to see who could do it first.”

It was mostly Alec, not Grayson, who wanted to be like Jake. I glanced at Grayson to gauge his reaction. He was looking at the sky again.

“But that sounds like you don’t really want to fly,” Molly told Alec. “It sounds like you fell into this, and if you’d fallen into something else instead, that’s what you’d do.”

Alec frowned at her. “Isn’t that true of any family business? I mean, is the guy who inherits the shoe factory thinking to himself,
This is where I belong, and this is what my whole personality and all of my talents are pointing me toward
? Or is it the luck of the draw? I can’t imagine doing anything else.” He turned to me. “How about you? Why did you want to start flying?”

A sudden gust of wind picked up a pile of recycled paper napkins on the table. I slapped my hand down on them to keep them from blowing over the deck rail to litter the sand. People cared about stuff like that on the nice end of the beach.

And I puzzled through what Alec wanted to know about me. Molly had asked Grayson why he wanted to fly. She had asked Alec. We were going around the table, yet I’d expected to be left out.

“Not because of family,” Alec prompted me, “but maybe because of location, since you live near the airport. It’s convenience for you, just like it’s convenience for me.”

“It’s not convenience for me.” I tried to prevent the words from coming out sour. I was on this date with Alec right now because I wanted so badly to fly. This was not what I’d call convenient.

“Then what is it?” Molly asked.

“Convenience got me over to the airport,” I acknowledged. “A job was available within walking distance of where I lived. Curiosity drove me to take that first flying lesson. And then I was hooked.”

“But why?” Alec seemed genuinely curious.

I paused, looking straight into his blue eyes—by mistake, really. I was used to glancing at Grayson and seeing nothing but aviator shades, with my own shades hiding my eyes so he wasn’t sure I was looking. Two people could do that when one was working for the other, or one was being blackmailed by the other. Two people couldn’t do that when they were on a date. Alec and I were supposed to be connecting, looking into each other’s eyes on purpose.

And I saw his innocent expectations there. He was asking a simple question. We were getting to know each other. This was what normal teenagers did.

I told him, “It was the first time in my life I felt like I was in control.” I paused, like he would get some profound meaning from that short statement.

He didn’t. He only nodded for me to go on. But his open blue gaze had grown a little wary. On a date, you shared your deep thoughts with each other, but not
that
deep. We were eating sandwiches, for God’s sake.

I couldn’t stop. I’d never really examined this, and now that I was, I was finding out something about myself. “I could see,” I said. “For the first time, I could see what most people never saw. I could see the whole town, and how I fit into it, and how far I would have to go to get out of it. I got such a rush, seeing that. And until that plane ride, I hadn’t realized how low I’d felt for years, because I didn’t have a high to compare it with.” My voice ended on that high note, giving away how desperate I’d felt, how frightened I now was of never flying again.

I found my fork and picked around in my salad. Without looking up, I said, “So, Molly. Why do
you
love to fly?”

Both boys laughed, thank God. Awkward moment over.

“Flying makes me yak,” Molly said.

“What does your mom think about you flying, Leah?” Alec persisted. “Is she proud of you?”

I munched a bite of lettuce and swallowed. “She doesn’t know I’m a pilot.”

Alec’s blond brows furrowed. “How could she not know that?”

“She’s gone a lot,” I said simply, allowing him to draw his own conclusions. Maybe she was gone on business. Ha! Or she was caring for a sick friend. I left the statement there and hoped he would leave it too.

Molly ensured that nobody would leave it there. She offered, “We’ve been best friends since we were sixteen, and I’ve never met Leah’s mother.”

“Really?” Alec asked, astonished. “How is that possible?”

“She is literally never home,” Molly said.

“She’s there sometimes,” I said, rushing to my mom’s defense. When Molly eyed me dubiously, I said, “Okay, she’s not there much, but that’s my fault. She used to take me with her on visits to see her boyfriends, or she would invite them over to stay with us. But when I was ten, we lived near the army base. She got with a guy who’d been to Iraq and had problems. He beat her. He beat his fifteen-year-old son who lived with him too. One night his son hit
me,
and then—”

I stopped. The three of them were gaping at me.

This was what they got for asking me about this shit during dinner.

“It wasn’t so bad,” I backtracked. “I told my mom I didn’t want to go to her boyfriends’ places anymore. I could stay at home by myself, and she could go where she wanted. I knew when I said it that she would be gone a lot. I didn’t picture her being gone almost always.” I crunched a baked potato chip.
Ignoring their eyes on me, I looked past everyone at the water.

The TV said you should ignore bullies and they would leave you alone, eventually. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Likewise, you would think rich kids would stop badgering their poor friend when she didn’t melt down about her home life. But the more calmly I answered, the more they kept after me.

“What about your grandparents?” Alec asked.

“What about them?” I asked. “You mean, why haven’t I gone to live with them?”

He nodded, but his eyes were getting wider. He was going to stop me and say this was too much information after all.

I kind of enjoyed telling them, “My grandparents kicked my mom out of the house when she got pregnant at fifteen. She had to drop out of school so she could get a job. Sometimes I think that experience did something to her, being thrown out on her own like that, because she’ll do anything to avoid getting a job now.”

“That was eighteen years ago,” Molly said.

I resented the challenging tone in her voice. How dare this privileged rich girl question my story? I asked her, “So?”

“So, your mom should have gotten over it,” Molly said.

“Some people have problems,” I said. “When something awful happens, sometimes people get stuck.”

Grayson moved in the corner of my eye. He’d been so quiet that I’d almost forgotten he was sitting there, listening to this whole mortifying conversation. I turned to him to give him my special go-to-hell face.

But he was staring at me with a shocked expression—not bad shock like Alec, as if he were horrified by my life story, but good shock, as if he’d had an epiphany.

“That explains why she doesn’t get a job,” Molly said. “What part of your mother’s problem makes her leave you alone all the time?”

I was still so surprised by the way Grayson was acting that it took me a second to realize Molly had deeply insulted my mom. Pride took over as I turned back to Molly. “I’m eighteen years old,” I said. “There’s no reason for my mother to mother me. Why are you harping on this?”

“Because people deserve to be treated with respect,” Molly said haughtily. “Children should be cared for. Friends and relatives should not lie to each other. And when I see that happening, I’m going to call it like it is.”

My skin burned so hot that I glanced at the setting sun to make sure it hadn’t caught me in its bright beam. Molly was talking about Grayson blackmailing me to date Alec. Why was she talking about this? She didn’t need to make a point to
me.
She knew Grayson had me over a barrel. If she let Alec know he was being fooled, or even if she let Grayson know I’d told her about the whole arrangement, Grayson could get so angry that he’d show my forgery to my mother and everyone at the airport.

But I didn’t dare telegraph this to Molly with a look. A sideways glance at Grayson let me know he was still watching me, rapt, like he was seeing me for the first time. I was almost relieved when Alec kept on with his questions.

“You’ve never even tried to contact your grandparents?” Alec asked. “Maybe they’ve had a change of heart.”

Right. Like they had decided to start donating to charity: namely, me. I bit out, “Contact them, how, Alec? They live somewhere in South Carolina and their last name is Jones. You do the math.”

“What about your other grandparents?” he asked.

“I’ve never met them, either.”

“What about your dad? Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a soft thud as someone kicked Alec under the table. He didn’t get the hint. He said, “I don’t mean right this second. I mean in general.”

I took a deep breath. This fake dating thing was wearing me down. I needed to think about it further, really plan it all out, and invent some kind of brainless persona who could go out with Alec without exposing her heart to danger. This sharing of my own actual life was above and beyond the call of duty for this job, and I didn’t want to do it anymore. Finally I said on a sigh, “I don’t know that either. I don’t know who my dad is.”

Alec’s own dad hadn’t lived with him for years, but Alec had known where his dad was. His dad had paid child support and held joint custody, on paper at least. Alec, from his suburban Wilmington home in a neighborhood with paved roads and curbs and sidewalks, with a TV in every bedroom, could not fathom not knowing who his father was.