Such a Rush (22 page)

“Good night,” I said too quickly. “Thanks. I had fun.” I turned my key in the lock, escaped through the door, and closed it behind me before we could get into another scrape. And before I could gaze into the yard, checking to see how closely Grayson had been watching.

The odor of mildew hit me in the face and made me breathe shallowly. I never noticed it unless I’d been away for a while. The trailer was rotting underneath, where I couldn’t reach it, and there was nothing I could do.

Standing there with my back to the door, listening to the pit bull barking and Alec’s car starting through the thin aluminum, I was overcome with fatigue. I wasn’t sure I could
negotiate another night of Alec kissing me and Grayson looking on.

But Molly would be at the airport tomorrow. Molly made things easier for me, just by talking out her ass.

And I would get to fly again. Whenever this farce didn’t seem worth it over the next few days, I had to remember I was doing it to keep my wings and fly.

As I
walked over to the airport in the morning, I kept an eye on Mr. Simon’s hangar. I didn’t want to resolve anything with Mark. If I could just avoid him for the rest of my life, that would be perfect. I was in luck for once. His plane wasn’t visible through the tall open doors of the hangar. He’d arrived a lot earlier today than he had yesterday—possibly because he’d gotten in trouble with his uncle the day before—and he was already up.

Alec taxied the yellow Piper past me, waving to me from the cockpit. I waved back. Then I veered toward Molly, who stood in the grass between the runway and the taxiway, struggling to fold the huge red banner letters into the fabric sleeve that held them in place during flight. The morning breeze carried her scents of sunscreen and bug repellent. Walking nearer, I noticed that, though she might be chemically prepared for this job, she hadn’t dressed for it. She wore her blinged-out sunglasses, a stylish straw hat, diamond hoop earrings—the
diamonds might have been real—and cute beach clothes. The heavy-duty work gloves Grayson must have given her made her hands look like robot claws.

She didn’t approve of what I’d worn, either. With one mechanical hand, she gestured to my slouchy T-shirt layered over my bikini top. “I see you dress up for work.”

“How’s the labor going?” I joked.

“Laboriously.” She wiped her brow with her wrist and put both hands on her hips like she was winded already. She didn’t laugh like she should have. I wondered whether I’d offended her last night with my comment about her laboring. That didn’t make sense, because Molly didn’t get offended.

I couldn’t apologize to her, though. We didn’t operate that way. So I simply asked, “Why’d you want this job?”

“To watch over you and protect you from these animals, of course.”

That didn’t make sense, either. She should have been jumping up and down and squealing right now and telling me how hot these boys were and I was crazy not to do both of them at once right there in the hangar.

“Did you have to kiss Alec last night?” she asked.

“Yes.” I tried not to sound suspicious as I asked, “Did he tell you that?” I doubted he’d dished to her at the hangar this morning about taking me home last night.

“I just figured,” she said. “I’ve got something planned for tonight that may be more of a distraction so we can keep him off you. I okayed it with the boys already. We’ll eat dinner at my café. If we start there, my parents will be less likely to inquire in too much detail about the drunken orgy we’ll be attending later. Francie Mahoney’s parents have taken her little brother to Disney World. Alec and Grayson used to live here in town, so they’ll know a lot of people at her party. Maybe
Alec will hook up with his old flame from third grade, and that will get him off your case.”

“Oh God, no.” My words were drowned out by an engine. Alec raced past us on the runway, the yellow Piper sailing into the air.

When the roar had faded, I said, “Anything but that.” Most people in my high school hated me only in passing. A few rich girls would walk all the way across the hall just to make a nasty remark about my curly hair, if they thought of a good one and could get a friend to go with them as a witness and bodyguard. Francie was one of those girls. I’d tried to tell Molly this about her friends repeatedly, but she didn’t believe me. They were on their best behavior while she was around. They called me a sack of shit the instant Molly left the room. And Molly didn’t have PE with us.

“You don’t want Alec off your case?” Molly asked sharply.

“Of course I do,” I said, “as long as Grayson doesn’t mind.”

She shifted her weight and blew her bangs out of her eyes with a big sigh. “I’m trying my best to help you, but it’s not
always
about you. It’s
my
spring break of
my
senior year too, and maybe
I
want to go to this party.”

And maybe
I
didn’t have to go just because
she
was going. I almost told her this. But she’d already convinced the boys this should be our outing of the night. I couldn’t back out now, stand Alec up, anger Grayson. I would have to go.

She knew why I didn’t want to. She knew I had to go anyway. Her understanding of my situation and sympathy for my plight lasted right up until she got tired of it and turned her back on me.

Which wasn’t a fair assessment. We’d been friends for a couple of years, and I couldn’t recall that she’d done anything like this to me before. Of course, there hadn’t been boys
involved before, not since the beginning and Ryan. I hadn’t been blackmailed into dating someone before. We were in new territory and all bets were off.

“Look, we’ll talk about it later, okay?” she said. By which she meant that we would
not
talk about it and we were going to the party that night. “Alec’s already in the air. I have to get this banner hooked up. You go get your breakfast. My dad made a strawberry Danish for you, the kind with the Hawaiian raw sugar on top.”

That got me headed for the hangar again, and it wasn’t until I was halfway there that I realized she’d pointed me in that direction by baiting me with food, like I was a puppy. I didn’t know what to think about this girl I’d assumed I knew so well, suddenly set down in this place I knew so well, and acting like it was hers instead of mine, and these boys were hers.

But Grayson wasn’t hers. He’d made that clear last night. And he was standing outside the hangar, alternately glancing at his phone and gazing into the southwest corner of the clear blue sky. When he turned in my direction and saw me coming, he stared at me, or let me
think
he was staring at me behind his shades. Though the morning was cool, I felt sweat break out across my skin, whether his gaze was real or not.

But as I finally reached him, he was business as usual. “Watch out for the weather today.”

I tried to shake off the shivers he’d given me and act like a pilot. “You mean the storm system coming up from the Gulf?” I’d noticed it on the weather app when I used the airport office phone to talk to Molly the day before. The storm was angry, and its tornadoes had already torn up some towns in Mississippi. “It’s nowhere near us yet. It probably won’t get here until tonight.” It hadn’t even reached my mother, at a casino over in the mountains.

“Last Christmas, Dad had been watching that storm all day,” Grayson said, “and suddenly there was a wind advisory way before we thought. I don’t want anybody to get caught. Radio me if you run into turbulence you weren’t expecting. And if you see dark clouds, don’t wait for me to radio you. Come on in.”

I shrugged. I was all for caution, but he was being a little ridiculous. Shell-shocked from his own crash, I thought.

“Your breakfast is inside,” he said, nodding back toward the hangar. “When you’re through eating, before you check your plane and go up, could you take my truck and drive a banner out to Molly? That will save her some time. She can spell, but she’s going to have trouble keeping up with us at first.” He held out his keys to me.

“I can’t do that,” I said.

“I’m telling you,” he said, “just do it before you go up. I’m keeping track of your hours and I’ll pay you overtime if you run over. No problem.”

“I can’t drive,” I said.

He pulled his hand back in surprise, keys jingling. “What do you mean, you can’t drive?”

I meant that nobody had ever taught me to drive, and it didn’t matter anyway because I didn’t have a car. But I wasn’t going down that road again. I was still pissed about trying to explain the washateria to Alec last night.

“You mean you can fly a plane but you can’t drive a car?” Grayson asked. “That’s crazy.”

I chopped my hand across my throat. This had been Mr. Hall’s way of telling us to kill the engine. I meant for Grayson to stop quizzing me on my home life. I’d had enough.

He balled his fist and squeezed until his hand turned white.

“Okay,” he said on a sigh. “Sorry. Go have something to
eat.” He rounded the corner of the hangar and started his truck himself.

I walked into the darkness and feasted on strawberry Danish and eggs and ham, stuffing food into my mouth like a starving dog now that nobody was watching. The day continued to get better from there. I never missed a banner pickup, and I took three long flights up and down the sunny beach. By the third flight, the wind had picked up, but the storms were still a long way off, nothing to worry about yet.

Mr. Hall would have thought it was beautiful. In a Grayson-like outburst, he would have exclaimed, “
Man,
what a pretty day to fly!” and then settled with me in the cockpit for the ride. This time I hardly teared up, thinking of him. His memory made me happy.

My morning break didn’t coincide with Molly’s because she took a break while I flew, and she spelled out my new banner while I took a break. But she ate lunch with the boys and me. Things didn’t seem weird between us like they had when I’d talked to her alone that morning. Like the night before, she carried the conversation and took a lot of pressure off me. I decided there was nothing wrong with her after all. Early that morning she’d just been overwhelmed with work, maybe, or disoriented at waking up before ten on a school holiday.

I didn’t take my afternoon break with her. When I taxied to the hangar, Alec was sitting outside with his back to the corrugated metal wall of the building, smoking a cigarette and watching Molly struggle with the banner Grayson had just dropped, tiny across the field. I didn’t want to sit outside and be tempted to smoke, but I thought I should be sociable since apparently Alec and I had another date that night.

“Welcome,” he said as I walked up. He patted the asphalt
beside him like it was a plush seat. Giggling, I sank down. He offered me a cigarette and I shook my head.

He exhaled smoke away from me. “Beautiful day for flying,” he said, squinting into the sky. “Grayson’s already freaking out about the weather.”

“I think he’s nervous about the wind since his wreck last December,” I said.

“Is that what you think it is?” Alec asked. “I thought he was just being an overbearing ass.”

Weirdly, I wanted to jump to Grayson’s defense. He
was
being an overbearing ass, and not just about the weather. But somehow, while it was okay for me to think this, it wasn’t okay for Alec to say it.

Before I could open my mouth, Alec’s phone rang. He slipped it from his pocket, glanced at the screen, and grinned. “My mom.”

I put my hands behind me on the hot asphalt to push myself up. “Do you want me to—”

“Oh, gosh, no, sit down.” He pressed a button on the phone. “This is your favorite son speaking. How may I help you?”

Even though he’d told me he didn’t need privacy, I felt uncomfortable listening to his end of the conversation with his mom. I knew he and Jake looked like her, but the photo I’d seen of her had been decades old. As I pictured her now, she was a pudgy woman with cotton clothes like sacks and the same haircut she’d had in high school because it was easy and there was no reason to bother anymore, now that her eldest son was gone, and her husband was gone, who had cheated on her, and whom she had always loved.

I was basing this assumption on nothing. She might be slender and stylish with a professional job, a lawyer, suffering
the loss of her son and sorry about her ex but already moving on, because her own life was important too. Either way, she was none of my business. I would never meet her. I’d cheapened this lady’s mourning with my nosey musings. I tried to relax and shut her out, but when I sat back against the corrugated metal building, I was shocked at the heat and sat up straight.

Alec eyed me as he spoke. “No, it’s going great.” He pivoted the phone so he could still hear the speaker but the mouthpiece was away from his mouth, then took a drag from his cigarette. He moved the phone back and said, “Yes, really.” Smoke curled out of his mouth and around his lips. He moved the phone away again and exhaled in a quick huff that his mother wouldn’t hear. Then he said into the phone, “Mom. Mom. Mo-
ther.
Why don’t you believe me?”

Grayson was landing his plane. A gust inflated the wind sock on the tower and knocked Grayson a few feet off course, but he straightened up in time for the landing. Perfect.