“And you look sexy when you dance.”
I put my hands on my hips. He probably thought I was trying to look sexier. I put my hands down. “I told you yesterday. It’s enough for you to make me date Alec. You can’t insult me too.”
He gaped at me. “I’m not insulting you. How is that insulting?”
“You’re being sarcastic.” I wasn’t sure whether this was true.
“I’m not being sarcastic.”
“Well, you can’t make me date Alec and then compliment me, either,” I said.
“It’s not a compliment. It’s a fact. You looked beautiful last night, and you looked great dancing.”
This was how things had started with Mark a few weeks ago. We’d been talking in the airport office about a job flying with his uncle, and suddenly he was asking me out.
Except that Mark had not been blackmailing me.
And when Mark had told me I was beautiful, I’d felt flattered. I hadn’t experienced this rush of pleasure through my body, my face flushing, my skin tingling like sunburn in the heat. I hadn’t fallen for Mark’s line like I was falling for Grayson’s. I hadn’t felt stupid.
“Are you coming on to me?” I asked sternly.
He lowered his shades on his nose and looked over them at me, his big gray eyes serious. “Considering your reaction, I guess not.”
“You can’t come on to me and make me date Alec.”
He pushed his shades back up so his eyes were hidden. “I have to make you date Alec.”
“Then stop talking to me.”
“Okay.” He took a deep breath and tapped his tightly balled fist against his mouth.
The airport was eerily quiet, no airplane noises at all, no traffic noises this far out from town, just bugs screaming in the long grass.
Finally I said, “Exhale.”
He let out his breath in a long sigh, his broad shoulders sagging with it.
“You’re having a hard time,” I said gently.
He nodded, gazing at the sky.
“I’m sorry.” I closed the two steps between us and put my hand on his shoulder. When he didn’t flinch or shrug away, I rubbed his shoulder in a comforting way. I meant the gesture to be comforting, anyway, but I was distracted by how hard and muscular his shoulder was. And then I noticed that chill bumps popped up on his skin.
I was so confused about what he intended. But if I’d asked him for a straight answer, I doubted he could have given me one. He was confused himself.
It was time for me to fly, and there was no room for confusion in the cockpit of an airplane. Sliding my hand from his tight shoulder, I grabbed my drink from the hangar, then walked to the orange Piper. Grayson sat there watching until I took off.
eleven
This time I didn’t bother to stand on the toilet and check my look in the mirror over the sink. My sympathy for Grayson had faded. Now I was only fed up with him for coming on to me but making me date his brother. Fed up with Alec for playing along. Fed up with Molly for dragging me to this party. Also, I’d already worn my one clubbing dress and rinsed it in the sink. It hadn’t dried yet. Whatever I wore next would be inappropriate. If Molly was going to force me to a party where the girls would call me trash, and Grayson was going to treat me that way, I would dress the part.
I chose a pair of shorts that were too small a couple of years ago and obscene now that I’d grown a few inches taller. Molly, who had good fashion sense except for the glitter, would have told me that if I was showing that much leg, my top should be more demure so the whole outfit wouldn’t be overkill. I went for overkill with a tight, low-cut knit shirt. I ventured into my mother’s catastrophe of a closet for a pair of stilettos.
I wasn’t waiting for the boys outside my trailer this time. I listened for Alec’s car, then made my grand entrance down the wobbly cement-block staircase, watching their expressions. I couldn’t read them, really. They both stared at me openmouthed. Alec said something without taking his eyes off me. Grayson said something back. He jumped out of the front seat, left the door open, and slid into the back. Normally he would have focused on his phone again immediately, but he watched me cross the yard.
I slid into the car beside Alec. My shorts rode even higher on my thighs. You’re welcome.
I was so exasperated with everybody that I hadn’t even thought the whole night through. But when I walked with the boys into the café, suddenly I was embarrassed. Molly’s mom and dad hugged me as warmly as always. To judge by their reactions, I might as well have been wearing footed flannel pajamas. I was embarrassed anyway. It was almost like dressing this way for a flying lesson with Mr. Hall, which I never would have done.
And then, when Molly walked from the kitchen into the café, she cackled. “Jesus Christ, girl, you really don’t want to go to this party.”
“What do you mean?” Grayson asked her.
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—”