Such a Rush (10 page)

But this was
way
none of Grayson’s business.

I still couldn’t read Grayson’s expression with his eyes hidden. He hadn’t taken off his shades when he came into the office. But when I asked him how Mark had phrased our living arrangement, Grayson arched one eyebrow again.

“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” I said. “No, I haven’t talked to Mr. Simon about the job, because Mark is the one who’s taking me flying in the Stearman every day this week. He’s showing me the ropes and giving me a taste of what I’ll be doing by myself in the summer. I asked off work from the airport and everything.”

“In the Stearman?” Grayson’s eyebrow stayed up.

“Yes,” I said. “We can’t go in one of the Air Tractors. They’re one-seaters.”

“I’ve personally heard Mr. Simon tell my dad that he would never let Mark take anybody for a ride in the Stearman.”

I didn’t doubt it, since Mark was a live wire. But I said carefully, “Did you overhear this on the office porch? A lot of bullshit flies around on the porch.” Mr. Hall had said many negative things about Grayson on the porch too.

Grayson got my meaning. His eyebrow went down. Then he asked pointedly, “Mark’s taking you flying every day this week? But not today?”

“No,” I said impatiently. “Starting tomorrow.”

“What time tomorrow?” he pressed me. “Have you set a time?”

We hadn’t set a time, and frankly, I’d begun to worry. Mark had promised me when we first talked about it that we’d start flying together on Monday morning, but here it was Sunday afternoon and he hadn’t mentioned it again. He was getting drunk at the beach. And I’d been afraid to bring it up—afraid that if I said the wrong thing to Mark, the job would disappear.

Which was pretty much what Grayson was telling me. Mark had told me a lie so he could move in with me.

I was frightened. But I couldn’t show Grayson this, so I tried to be furious instead. “Why can’t this be a transaction between pilots? In your mind, why does it have to be dirty?”

“You tell me,” Grayson said bitterly, removing his elbows from the counter and straightening to his full height. “That’s how you work. I used to envy the rare people you smiled at when you pumped their gas, like they’d done something special and earned a reward. But now I realize you were smiling at them because they’d given you something you wanted. A big tip. Flight time. You wouldn’t smile at someone without good reason.”

I hadn’t thought he noticed whether I smiled at him or not.

There was a possibility here. A spark. I’d always viewed him as Mr. Hall’s black sheep son, impossibly cool and way too good for me, passing through. Finally, here was a hint of reciprocation of the crush I’d pretended not to have on him since I was fourteen.

No. Mark might have fooled me. I wouldn’t let Grayson fool me too. Cheeks burning, I said sternly, “Grayson Hall. The second you feel cornered, you fly off the handle and say anything that pops into your head. You’ve always gotten away with it, and maybe you still will, but that’s not a good interview technique for potential employees. If there was
ever
a chance I would fly for you, you blew it the instant your mind fell into the gutter.”

My anger drained away. My fingers hurt from gripping the countertop. Grayson’s mirrored shades still stared me down like nothing was behind them.

Then he bit his lip. “I need you,” he said in his nicest tone so far.

“Tough.”

He put his fist down on the counter. Not hard. Just
there.
He balled it tightly and relaxed it.

He took a long, deep breath. His broad shoulders rose and fell with it.

And then, without another word, he turned and left the office. He crossed the porch and disappeared in the direction of the Hall Aviation hangar, where I couldn’t see him out the lobby windows.

All the tension whooshed out of the room behind him. Without it, there was nothing left to hold me up standing. I collapsed into my desk chair and took a few deep breaths. I felt like I was going to lose it, but Grayson might be hanging
around outside. Alec might. Mr. Simon might. I couldn’t lose it here at the airport. I had to get home.

I locked up for the day, shut off the connection between the radio and the outside loudspeaker, and put the cell phone in a drawer. When I’d first started working here, I’d stayed until eight some nights because being alone here was better than being alone at home. My supervisor from city hall made me stop because I was running up the light bill. He didn’t know I needed a handout, and I wasn’t going to tell him.

Locking the porch door from the outside, I couldn’t help one more glance at the Hall Aviation hangar. Grayson’s truck and Alec’s car were still parked outside, and they’d opened the wide door facing the runway as if they actually planned to bring an airplane out and power it up. I didn’t care. I would fly for Grayson Hall over my dead body.

I turned
my back on Mr. Hall’s hangar, water bottle in my hand, newspaper under my arm. Carrying my treasure, I walked most of the length of the airport, into the grass at the end of the strip. Where the chain-link fence turned a corner, I lifted the loose end of the wall of links and ducked underneath, onto the trail through the trees.

Most neighborhoods would be busy this time of day with the bustle of parents pulling in from work and greeting their kids. The trailer park would be busy later, at a partying hour. Right now it was quiet. Not a lot of people here had a regular job. A few of them were still sleeping off last night’s binge. For once, drinking the world away didn’t sound like a bad idea.

I walked just out of reach of the lunging pit bull. At my own trailer, I balanced on the cement blocks while I unlocked the aluminum door that had been kicked in four times since we’d lived here, three times by burglars, once by my mom’s ex-boyfriend Billy. After locking the door behind me, I walked
through the creaking hall, slumping lower and lower like I was coming in for a landing, and crashed into my bed.

One of Mr. Hall’s Pipers roared overhead. Over the years I’d grown to love the sound of planes approaching the runway and just clearing the treetops above our trailer. I prided myself on listening closely enough that I could identify the type of plane without looking. Today I felt like my mom, cringing and cursing at the racket and burying my head underneath the pillows.

The newspaper crackled underneath me as I curled into a ball and hugged my knees. Maybe Grayson was right and I really didn’t have a job with Mr. Simon. When Mark had told me I could fly for his uncle, I’d felt like a heavy weight had been lifted from my chest. Mr. Simon could train me on the specifics of crop dusting. I didn’t want to fly a crop duster my whole life, but I could work my way through college by taking courses during the off-season and flying during the growing season—and I would rack up a huge portion of the flight hours I needed for my next certification. It had never occurred to me until Grayson brought it up that Mark was lying.

But of course he was lying. I heaved myself up from the bed and trudged back into the combination kitchen and den. A blanket lay rumpled anyhow on the sofa where Mark had slept last night. All his worldly possessions were piled in the corner where he’d dumped them when my mom first said he could stay: garbage bags full of clothes, several rifles, and a plant light for growing marijuana indoors. He had not
told
me he grew marijuana, but boys his age did not grow tomatoes. Mark had told me what I wanted to hear in exchange for the prospect of sex and a free place to stay. He hadn’t forked over any cash to help with the rent, and now I doubted this had ever been his plan.

Both hands pressed to my mouth, I tried very hard not to panic. I knew the airport up, down, and sideways, and there were no other jobs.

On the bright side, I was all set to graduate from high school in a month and a half. I was one step ahead of my mom. And I hadn’t gotten pregnant. Two steps ahead of my mom. And I had a commercial pilot’s license.

With no paid experience as a commercial pilot. And my only solid reference was dead.

I longed for Molly. Even if I’d had a phone, I wouldn’t have called her. I refused to be that needy friend. I mean, I
was
that needy friend, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to whine on the phone to her and make it worse. Sometimes she dropped by, though, and took me for a drive. I listened to her talk about her problems, and maybe after a while, when there was no way I could be accused of taking and taking and taking without giving, I might mention one of
my
problems. That wasn’t happening tonight. She and her rich friends were at a beginning-of-spring-break concert. Even if I’d been able to afford it, I wouldn’t have gone. Her friends didn’t like me.

Molly or no Molly, moping would do me no good. The thing that bothered me most about my mom was that every time something went wrong, she went through the same motions, expecting different results. I needed to think out of the box.

But my mind was empty of ideas, my stomach empty to the point of nausea. For breakfast I’d eaten a pastry from the machine in the airport break room. For lunch I’d had a pack of crackers. In the back of my mind I’d been thinking Mark would have returned from the beach when I got here. But if he did show up soon, I wouldn’t ask him to drive me to the grocery store now. Not after what Grayson had told me. And the
closest convenience store was a two-mile walk, which hadn’t seemed so bad on other days but loomed tonight like the distance to China.

I opened every kitchen cabinet and found salt, cayenne pepper, and one beef jerky stick that had expired two years ago. It must have come with us the last time we moved. That was pretty bad, when your beef jerky expired, because it was manufactured to last through the apocalypse. The refrigerator held ketchup, mayo, and one unopened case of beer, which Mark had deposited when he’d come in late last night.

I opted for a beer. I sat with it on the couch, in the dip hollowed out in the cushion by one of my mom’s weightier boyfriends, and stared at the wall where the latest huge high-def miracle of a TV had been until earlier this week. My first-, second-, and third-grade photos stared back at me.

The beer smelled like vinegar and tasted like dirt. I felt a lot better after I drank it, so I had another.

I was on my third beer and feeling completely rejuvenated when Mark’s truck turned from the highway onto the gravel road through the trailer park. I didn’t have superhuman hearing. The trailer walls were thin and let in everything. I knew it was him by his favorite country band blaring from the open windows. My gaze shifted from my school photos on the wall to Mark’s pile of shit on the floor.

Suddenly I was seeing it through Grayson’s eyes, or Molly’s. There was a reason I never let Molly in the trailer.

I didn’t want Mark in here with me either. But he
lived here
. The den/kitchen walls collapsed around me like the shrink wrap Mr. Hall had used to package gadgets and tools for storage.

I jumped up and jerked open the door. The sun was low behind the trees, but the sky was still bright compared with the
murky trailer. I took my shades from the neck of my T-shirt and put them on, then started down the stairs.

I’d never drunk much. I didn’t want to flow into the same crowded pool as all the people around me and drown. Two and a half beers was quite a bit for me—obviously, or I wouldn’t have forgotten I was still holding one—and I worried about my balance as I descended the wobbly cement blocks. I felt my face color at how Grayson would stare in revulsion at a cement-block staircase outside a mobile home.

Then I felt a new wave of embarrassment that I was obsessing about Grayson. Mark would see my flushed face, think I was even drunker than I was, maybe try to take advantage of me. I was very thankful I was wearing sunglasses and he wouldn’t be able to see my eyes.

The music came closer and closer, inciting the pit bull to riot, until Mark’s enormous pickup truck with roll bars and fog lights weaved across the gravel road and stopped right in front of me. A couple of bare-chested guys from school waved to me from the payload. I waved back halfheartedly.

Mark slid out of the driver’s seat. His friend Patrick was in the passenger side. Patrick didn’t fit in with these guys. He was wearing a shirt, for one thing, and the shirt still had both its sleeves. Sometimes I wondered what he was hanging around Mark for. Pot was a good guess.

A girl sat in the middle. Her hair was bleached blond and her roots were black. Not every girl looked good as a blonde. I had learned this lesson from observing my mother. The girl wore one of Mark’s plaid shirts, tied beneath her big boobs in a tiny bikini. Judging from what I’d seen at school before Mark graduated, she fit his usual taste in girlfriends. Which was not a compliment. And which did not say a lot for me, either.

“Leah!” he exclaimed, rounding the hood of the truck,
staggering a little. I shouldn’t have worried he would notice how soused I was.
He
was drunker than
me.
He slurred, “What are you doing home?”

His use of the word
home
made me cringe. His question made me mad too. “This is when I always get off work,” I said. He would have known this if he didn’t stay out so late partying every night.