“No,” I said. “We will not talk about this tomorrow. You can’t go with that skank ho and expect to stay here. Period.”
He gaped at me, outraged. “I’ve been staying here a whole week, Leah, and you haven’t given it up. Most girls understand that if they don’t want to give it up, that’s fine, but their man is going to get it somewhere else.”
I put my chin in my hand and tapped my finger like he was a wildcat and I was a biologist truly perplexed by his behavior. “No,” I murmured, “I did not understand that. Sorry.”
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the truck. “I’m telling you, she doesn’t mean anything. She was just for today.”
“How does that make it better?” I didn’t know why I was asking. The idea that a man was having a one-night stand rather than an affair made it all better for some women, my mother included.
“Leah, please.” He stepped closer. I shouldn’t have looked into his dark eyes, but I did. They almost melted me. The hot breeze teased a lock of dark hair back and forth across his tanned forehead as he said, “I’ve wanted to get with you for so long. Back when we were kids and we rode the bus together, I used to dream about you. You wouldn’t give me the time of day. I’m so stoked we’re together now. I don’t want to lose you over something like this.” His hand touched mine. “Okay?”
His lashes were long. His eyes were warm. He looked adorable when he coaxed me. It would be so easy to tell him he could stay. He would want to wrap up his day with his friends (and that girl), and then he would come home to me.
Which sounded exactly like my mother’s life in miniature. Her boyfriend didn’t mean it when he screwed that other woman. It wouldn’t happen again. Sure.
“No,” I said. “Get out.” I was shouting now, and that was a page out of my mother’s life too, getting in a screaming fight with a man outside my trailer while a pickup idled in the dirt yard. There was no way out for me, whatever I did. The alcohol was kicking in for real now. The sky between the palms turned a funny color.
“Baby,” Mark growled, sliding his hand across my shoulders.
I shoved him away. “Why can’t people take no for an answer today? Get your stuff and go on. Anything you leave, I’m throwing in the garbage.” I couldn’t do this, of course. It was illegal. My mom and I had been evicted enough times that I knew the law.
Mark might have known the law too, but the wheels turned slowly behind his eyes. Even if I didn’t throw away his stuff, I might go through it now that I was angry, and there was something in it he didn’t want me to find, weed or worse.
“Fine.” He stomped across the yard toward the trailer. A cloud of dirt billowed around his feet. He mounted the cement blocks two at a time. The cloud of dirt reached me, and I turned away to avoid inhaling it.
“Leah,” Patrick called over the music and the engine noise and the pit bull. He crooked his finger at me. I walked over and leaned against the passenger door, peering at the girl, mildly curious. She’d pasted a silhouette above her left breast before she spent her day in the sun. Now she’d peeled it away to reveal a white Playboy bunny in the middle of her tan.
“What’s the holdup?” Patrick asked me.
“I’m kicking Mark out.”
Patrick’s eyebrows shot up. Not one eyebrow, like Grayson’s expression of skepticism. Both eyebrows. “What for?”
I switched into trailer park voice. Polite airport voice was gone now. The Admiral would not recognize me. “Mark brought this whore here and thought I wouldn’t find out he’s doing her. He can’t stay here. The trailer is set to self-destruct when it senses an IQ that low.” This wasn’t true, considering some of my mom’s boyfriends.
The girl leaned toward the window. “What did you call me?”
I was about to clarify it for her when Patrick interrupted us. “Ladies, ladies.” Normally boys like Patrick encouraged a good catfight, but he was sitting between us and was probably scared of getting scratched. To change the subject, he asked me, “Where’s the beer?” His eyes slid to the can in my hand. “Did you drink it all?”
I set my sunglasses on top of my head and looked him straight in the eye. “If you ever mention that beer to me again, I will retrieve it from its supersecret hiding place and shove the entire case, can by can, up your ass.”
Mark kicked the door of the trailer open so hard that it banged against the metal wall. He started down the cement blocks with the case of beer on his shoulder, the garbage bags of his stuff in the other hand, and the rifles underneath his arm.
Patrick leaned nearer, as if he had a secret. I bent my head to hear him, so close now that the breeze blew my curls across his cheek.
“Mark really likes you,” Patrick said conspiratorially.
“He has a funny way of showing it,” I said in the same tone, mocking him.
“I mean,” Patrick whispered, “he may not be that easy to get rid of.”
“Don’t even talk to her.” Mark handed the case of beer to one of the boys in the payload, then swung the trash bags over the side without warning the other guy to move first. “Hey,” the guy protested. He drunkenly slid off his seat on the wheel well.
Mark pointed at me. “You can kiss that job with my uncle good-bye.”
I shrugged. I wholeheartedly agreed with Grayson now. Probably there had never been a job. Even if there had been a position open, Mark wouldn’t have the power to give it and take it away. His mother had kicked him out and his uncle hadn’t taken him in. That’s how close Mark and his family were. Funny that I had ever convinced myself this summer job was waiting for me, just by wanting it so badly.
He rounded the back of the truck. As he slid behind the steering wheel, the girl called across Patrick to me, “Serves you right. You need to learn how to treat a man.”
“If I ever see you again,” I told her, “I will beat you like a dog.” I was no more violent or tough than the next person, but talking big scared most people away as effectively as smacking them. I had learned this through trial and error at school. I thought I’d made my point, because her eyes widened at me before she remembered to scowl.
Patrick just winked at me, though. Then the engine revved. The music rose to a deafening level even for a trailer park. The truck whipped forward, then back, then forward, then back, in a drunken, poorly executed more-than-three-point turn. It had ground up enough dust to coat me before it finally sped down the narrow road through the trees, the pit bull barking at its highest pitch to sound the alarm.
I crossed the bare dirt and settled in a plastic chair near my bedroom window, under the tallest palm. There were two chairs. A stump between them served as a table. On this stylish side table was a small margarine tub filled with cigarette butts and rainwater. I never would have let this mess stay here if I’d known my mother or Mark had made it. I didn’t hang out in the yard, because of the pit bull.
But it didn’t bother me as much as it normally would have. I popped my neck, shook out my shoulders, took a long swig of delicious cheap-ass beer, and relaxed into the plastic chair. I gazed at my home of corrugated metal. It had been parked here so long that palmettos grew out from under it, and it was coated in a thin green film of moss or lichen or something. Whatever it was, it grew a lot better on the trailer than it did in the dirt yard. I listened to the music of the pit bull. I set my beer down on the stump, crossed my legs like I was having a tea party, and pondered the fact that the boys I knew had everything and I had nothing.
An airplane roared overhead, one of Mr. Hall’s Pipers. I looked up just in time to see the yellow one pass across a patch of blue sky between the trees. Grayson must be flying, or Alec, or some new dope they’d hired instead of me. An advertising banner stretched way behind the plane, but I couldn’t read what it said from underneath.
As the engine noise faded, the pit bull’s barking filled the empty space. The dog had reason this time. Someone knocked on the door of the pit bull’s trailer. And then Grayson was yelling over the barks, asking the owner where Leah Jones lived.
I waited for the fight-or-flight adrenaline spike to pass. Better to sit tight than to attempt an escape into the trailer. If Grayson turned, he might see my movement through the palm fronds and catch me more quickly. Even if I did make it through the door unseen, he would find me eventually. And when I opened the door, he would see inside. Outside was bad enough.
So I eased my sunglasses from my hair back down to cover my eyes, held my breath, and felt thankful Grayson had missed Mark and his crew by several minutes. Grayson hadn’t even located me yet, but I squirmed in his sights.
Maybe he wouldn’t find me after all, I began to think as he gave up on the pit bull owner and knocked on the door of another trailer. Good luck with that. The trailer park wasn’t known for its block parties or ice cream socials. As residents of three and a half years, my mom and I were some of the longer-term neighbors, yet I doubted a single person here knew my name, except the boys I was acquainted with through long years of hoping they would leave me alone on the bus. It was spring break, so they would be at the beach. If I sat here quietly, maybe Grayson would knock on a few more doors, give up, and go away.
But from our talk a few hours before, I knew Grayson wanted me to work for him. He wanted it badly for some reason. He wouldn’t go away until I talked him out of it. In the past year, I’d had a run-in with Ben Reynolds when he got off the bus with me, followed me home, and wouldn’t go away. I hadn’t let him in the door, so he’d found a heavy branch in the woods and walked around the trailer, banging the club against the metal walls as he went, around and around until I thought I would go insane. I’d had no way to call for help. My mom had let the bill go unpaid way too many times for us to have a phone.
“Leah Jones,” Grayson said to a man across the road.
“Is her mother’s name Patsy?” the man asked.
“No,” Grayson said. “It’s Sheryl.”
The fact that Grayson knew my mother’s name set off tornado sirens in my head, but I didn’t know what they meant. I just listened through the trees as Grayson made his way down the row of trailers. Nobody had heard of me. On his fourth or fifth try he got wise. Now I was not just Leah Jones. I was Leah Jones, walks down this path to the airport every day, tiny eighteen-year-old girl, “dark hair like this.” I pictured the motion he made with his hands as he pantomimed the explosion of my curls in the coastal humidity.
“Oh, I know what girl you mean,” said a woman. “She lives right there.”
For thirty seconds I expected Grayson to walk past the palm fronds that framed the road, into my yard. I still jumped when he did appear because he was so shockingly out of context. He crossed the dirt to my chair, kicking up hardly any dust with his flip-flops, and stood right in front of me.
I looked up at him. He was a lot taller than I remembered.
He stared down at me like a stern state trooper, eyes inscrutable behind his sunglasses. His straw cowboy hat mashed his blond curls against his head, and a drop of sweat trickled from his hairline down his cheek. “Can we talk?”
Politely I inclined my head, inviting him to sit in the other plastic chair. Behind my own sunglasses, out of the corner of my eye, I caught another glimpse of the makeshift ashtray and wished for a cigarette, any distraction to fumble with.
He sat down and slapped a mosquito on his arm. “Does your mom know you fly?”
It seemed like an innocent question, a friendly conversation starter. I knew better. After three and a half years of basically pretending I didn’t exist, Grayson had not come through the fence and searched for me just to have a casual chat.
“Of course she knows,” I lied, staring now where he was pointing. He’d taken a sheet of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it on his thigh. My mother’s ironically neat and upstanding signature, underlined with a flourish, was at the bottom of the form Mr. Hall had wanted her to sign when he started giving me flying lessons.
Grayson’s broad fingertip tapped the paper, denting the signature, which seemed more delicate with every strike, as if every tap were a hammer blow, until it dawned on me what he meant. I had forged my mother’s signature on that form, and somehow he knew.
I grabbed for the form.
Before I could touch it, he snatched it away and held it above his head. “I have copies,” he said. “In fact, I mailed one home to Wilmington, so don’t bother.”
Slowly I sat back in my plastic chair and tried to wipe the emotion off my face, whatever it was—surprise, fear, horror, blind panic.
He relaxed too. He brought the form back down to his thigh and smoothed the wrinkled paper with his palm as if it were the original Declaration of Independence. “I’m sure this signature looks exactly like your mother’s. You signed it carefully. I have a lot of experience forging my mother’s name on report cards, and even I wouldn’t have noticed this if my dad hadn’t marked it with a sticky note.” With his thumb and middle finger he thumped the yellow square hanging off one side of the form. An arrow drawn on the note pointed to the forgery. “Like he suspected what you’d done, and then decided to let it go.”
“There’s no way you could prove that,” I said quickly. “You’d have to pay for a handwriting expert or something, and the FAA doesn’t care. Nobody cares that much about me.”
“I care about you, Leah,” he said sarcastically. “But luckily, I don’t have to hire a handwriting expert or report you to the FAA. All I have to do is show this to your mother.”