Positively Beautiful (16 page)

I
am
feeling a lot more comfortable flying. Not surprisingly, since I've spent almost every minute of the last week doing it. The school thought I was sick, Mom and Jill thought I was at school, and in reality … I've been flying.

I just couldn't do it. I couldn't face everybody. Just knowing that everybody would be talking about me made me feel like curling up like a roly-poly until the end of the school year. So I called the office, pretending to be Mom, and told them Erin Bailey was
very
sick and wouldn't be at school all week. Then I counted up my savings, money earned from working at the yogurt shop and some money Memaw left me, and went to see Stew.

“I want to learn to fly,” I say. “This week.”

“What, you mean after school?” He squints at me.

“No,
all
day,” I say. “I can pay you. Here.”

Stew never asked me why I wasn't in school. He took my money and for the next week we did ground school in the morning, studying charts that looked like upside-down wedding cakes and learning about V-speeds and operating temperatures, and then flew the rest of the day. When Stew had another lesson, I would sit in the hangar and study.

I pull back, sending Tweety soaring up as Stew begins patting his pocket, looking for his gum. He pulls out an empty pack and looks at it in disgust. I reach one hand into my jeans pocket and wordlessly hand him a full pack of gum. After a week spent in close quarters with Stew, I know his gum addiction masks his murderous need for a cigarette. As long as he has gum, he's a much more pleasant person. Relatively speaking, of course.

Stew takes the gum without saying anything, and I go back to my upward climb, turning as I do it so I can practice the stall in a bank. I feel the stall coming on even before the alarm goes off and I concentrate on using the rudder to keep the lift on the wings balanced.

“Head on a swivel,” Stew growls, and by now I know that means I'm supposed to be looking out for other aircraft. I crane my neck around, looking for traffic, thankful for the cushion that Stew threw at me after my third flight when I was having trouble seeing out the windows. I see the helicopter in the distance, the one Stew must have heard on the radio. It's going away, so I relax and go back to doing stalls again.

I do them again and again, and everything else seems to disappear until it's only me and Tweety Bird. I don't think about Mom, or school, or genes that won't behave the way they
are supposed to. It's like I am not even aware of myself. The rest of the world has faded into a blurry sepia of not-important. This is why I have grown to love flying. This is why I have gotten up every morning this week and gone to the airport, because when I'm in the air, nothing else matters. I execute a perfect power-off stall and think about my father and how he used to do this, and much more, when he was flying professionally. I wonder what it felt like to him when he was just learning to fly, and what he would say to me. Up here, I feel closer to him than I have since he died.

“I saw your dad fly at the National Championships in '94,” Stew says into the headphones.

I'm brought back to myself abruptly and turn to look at him in surprise. It's like he read my thoughts.

“You did?” I say cautiously.

“It was really something, watching him fly,” he says, and turns away.

I want to ask him more questions, but we're nearing the airport, and I need to get on the radio and tell the ATC, the air traffic controller, that I'm landing. Talking on the radio still stresses me out, despite all the scripts I've studied, so I don't get a chance to say anything else to Stew about my dad.

I find the airport, which is a lot harder than you would think, and then I'm back in the zone as I concentrate on repeating the ATC's instructions and locating which runway I'm supposed to use. I feel a surge of adrenaline as I do all of this without looking to Stew for confirmation that I have it right. I'm in control, this is
my
flight.

Landing is still the tricky part. I line up with the runway
and correct for the crosswind. I cut back the speed as we near the end of the tarmac, halfway expecting the stall alarm to go off,
rahrrr
,
rahrrr
,
rahrrr
, to let me know that my speed has dropped too much. But it doesn't, and I breathe a sigh of relief as the main wheels touch down. Up in the air is one thing, but finding that particular point where wheels touch ground still feels like a miracle. I concentrate on easing the front wheel down, and it hits, a little hard but not too bad, and we taxi to a stop beside the hangar.

I look at Stew. He looks out the window, as if the side of the hangar is the most interesting thing he's ever seen.

I sigh.

“I go back to school tomorrow. Do I have enough money left to keep taking lessons in the afternoons?” I say it calmly, as if the thought of going back to school doesn't make me want to gag.

“Yeah,” he says, still not looking at me.

I go to get out and he says, “Kid.”

I turn back to find him staring at me.

“You did … okay,” he says.

And that makes me feel like I just won a gold medal.

My first day back at school, I'm sitting outside at a picnic table. I have no one to sit with at lunch anymore. Even the girls I hung out with when Trina wasn't around haven't been welcoming. They've heard about what I did to Trina.

I check my e-mail. It will be at least another week before I get the results of the genetic test, but I'm already checking my
e-mail obsessively. I want to know … but I don't. I guess while I want to know if I'm negative, I don't want to know if I'm positive.

Michael comes out and leans against the edge of the table. He's wearing a dark hoodie pulled up over his head, even though we're not supposed to wear them up in school.

“Chaz is pretty messed up,” he says. “Trina isn't sure she wants to date him anymore.”

“I know.” I stare at the ground. “It's all so … terrible.”

“I didn't think you were like that,” he says.

This sears. “I'm not,” I say. “I'm really not. I … I don't know. I just don't know. I don't know what happened.” There is no excuse, and I know it.

He looks back at the school. “I guess I thought—” He stops and shrugs. “I guess I was hoping you weren't like everyone else I know.”

I nod miserably as he walks away.

Chaz is petrified to be seen near me. Whenever he sees me coming down the hall, he twitches like a rabbit caught in a trap. I think he's afraid if Trina sees him anywhere near me she'll break up with him for good. I'm happy they are still together, but neither of them wants to hear
that
from me.

In physics, Ms. Allison tells me I've fallen so far behind it's going to take an A on my final to even get a C in the class. In English, Ms. Garrison pats me on the shoulder as she passes out graded essays. She's given me a B, with a little frowny face and a “You can do better!” In gym, Molly Jenkins puts up with me talking to her, though she keeps looking back and forth between me and Trina.

“You really kissed Chaz?” Molly asks as we're walking out of the locker room.

“I really did,” I say.

She frowns, not getting it.

That's okay, because I don't get it either.

When I get home, Mom is lying on the couch. She still has her lab coat on. Nine days after her second chemo treatment and hospital stay, she's able to go to work, which makes her happy. She's worried about chemo brain, which can make her fuzzy and forgetful, but so far she's been okay. Just tired. Very, very tired. We've spent a lot of time watching movies and most of the time she is asleep by seven o'clock. I've taken over cooking, but I'm not very good at it. Everything tastes weird to her anyway. She can't even bear the taste of metal silverware, so we use plastic.

Four more rounds of chemo.

I'm beginning to wonder if she can stand it. If
I
can stand it. What happens if Mom ends up in the hospital again? We heard a woman talking in the chemo room and she'd spent almost the entire month in the hospital, from one complication or another. What if that happens to Mom?

The next chemo treatment starts in less than two weeks. My breath catches funny in my chest. This time we'll be alone. This time Jill isn't coming.

I check e-mail on my phone again as we sit and watch
The Breakfast Club
, but there's still no message about my genetic report. I sigh, and Mom hears me.

“How are you doing, Erin?” She's got her reindeer socks on, her feet propped up on the arm of the couch. She drips some eyedrops in her eyes. No matter how much she drinks water, my mother is a desert of dry skin, dry eyes, and dry mouth. She's been losing her hair, strand by strand, but so far it's not all gone.

“Fine,” I say, bright and cheery.
Just
hunky-dory!
Twelve more days until your next treatment, my best friend won't talk to me, the guy I like thinks I'm a tool, and the flying … the flying is going great, but I can't talk to you about that.

“How … how did Dad get into flying?” The words come before I have a chance to think.

She rolls over on the couch and looks at me. Then she picks up the remote and mutes the TV.

“Your dad? He always knew he wanted to fly. He grew up near an airport, and I guess he spent a lot of time there when he was a kid. He didn't get along with his parents so he spent all his free time watching the planes. When I met him, he'd already flown in the first Gulf War and was running private charters. He was also getting ready to compete in the US National Aerobatic Championship.”

“But … you never watched him fly?”

“What? Oh, no. At first, I loved watching him fly. I was there when he won the National Championship.”

“But you never went flying with him?”

“He wanted me to. He always said he wanted to show me a glory, which is some kind of circular rainbow you can only see from high up in the air. He said not only were they rare and beautiful, but that if two people looked at the same glory, it
would look different to each of them. He liked that. ‘
Your own personal glory
,' he used to say. I never could fly with him, though. In the end, I couldn't even
watch
him fly.”

“So … what changed?”

She lays her head back on the pillows and looks at the ceiling. “I thought
I
would change. I thought being near him would change
me.
I thought if I was with him, I would want to do things, go places, be
braver
. But it didn't work. It's hard to change yourself, and you can't rely on other people to do it for you.”

“I wish he hadn't died … ,” I say in a soft voice, looking at his picture on the mantel. “Do you think … do you think he would have liked me?”

She sits up and looks at me seriously. “Honey, you are the daughter he always wanted. Sometimes … it scares me. I don't want you to be hurt. The world can be a scary, dangerous place.”

Mom falls asleep on the couch and I cover her up. I check my e-mail again and I see I have a message from Ashley asking if I'd heard anything yet.

I go out to the garage and sit in the Mustang and e-mail her back.

No report yet. I feel so messy inside, like I'm going to fly apart, like I'm going to fracture into a thousand fragments, and I won't ever be able to find all the pieces of me. Is it wrong to feel the test is going to tell me something about myself I don't know? Knowing the blueprint of my genes, will that explain why I'm falling
apart? I feel so different from everybody else. I feel so alone. Why can't I just be normal? Why is this happening?

I put my head back against the seat. I should be studying for my physics final. Finals and the end of school are less than two weeks away. I can't though, not right now. An icy tremble starts in the center of me, and then my whole body is vibrating with unspeakable, arctic emotion.