Mostly their planes were too far away for me to see except as pinpoints in the sky. I concentrated on flying. I watched the few instruments for trouble. I listened to the engine, because a change in the pitch of its hum would be my first clue something had gone wrong with the plane or the banner. I relaxed into the rush of flight, my fingers and toes tingling with adrenaline at the knowledge that nothing but lift held me a thousand feet in the sky, and nothing below me could break my fall.
The truth was, this plane was not mine. It was tethered to the airport as surely as the pit bull was anchored to its trailer. But if I ever wanted to, just for a little while, braving dire consequences such as prison, I could head out over the Atlantic. Down to Florida. Up to New York. Wherever I wanted. I wasn’t going to do it, but the thought that I could made me smile.
Around ten, Alec announced over the radio that he was dropping his banner at the airport, then landing his plane. I gave him a few minutes so I wouldn’t crowd him, then headed in after him. Landing was a lot harder than taking off. The plane wanted to fly. It didn’t want to land. The asphalt rushing to meet the plane was potentially a more violent situation than the asphalt falling away underneath it. My eyes never stopped moving: over the instruments, all around me in the sky, on the ground, making sure Zeke was off the grassy strip before I roared across it to drop the banner. He couldn’t spell worth shit and he might not have the sense to get out of my way, either.
The runway was clear. I lost altitude exactly like I was landing but without decreasing my airspeed. It was important that I get as close to the ground as possible before dropping the banner so it didn’t float away on the wind and wrap itself around an expensive piece of equipment or knock somebody in the head with the heavy pole like it had knocked the glass door of the airport office last December. I didn’t need help with this. I had done it a hundred times in practice and I operated by feel. Still, I heard Mr. Hall yelling in my head, Drop drop drop.
I dropped the banner and pulled the plane into a safe climb, unlike the dangerous half-stalling climb of a banner pickup. I would leisurely circle around the airport and land. The wind was calm, the weather clear. There was no reason to feel shaken. Mr. Hall’s ghost was not in the cockpit in the seat behind me. I hadn’t heard his voice in my head, only the memory of his voice. Yet my hands trembled on the controls.
I’d expected to have a reaction like this if I ever flew in the Cessna again, since Mr. Hall had so often ridden beside me, teaching me. I hadn’t thought I’d react this way in one of the Pipers. Though he could have instructed me from the backseat, that would have added too much weight to tow a banner. He’d coached me on this kind of flying from the ground, over the radio. Especially dropping a banner.
And especially landing the lightweight Piper with its tendency to spin in a ground loop. As I announced my final approach over the radio in my babyish voice, he would be standing on the tarmac with his radio—
And there he was.
No, that was Zeke, the banner guy who couldn’t spell. He stood on the tarmac, watching my landing. I willed away the new, unwanted rush of adrenaline. No matter how ideal the conditions, flying was never safe, and I had to concentrate on landing this plane. I pushed Mr. Hall and the alarming sight of Zeke out of my mind as I lowered the plane to the asphalt and felt the gentle meeting of runway and rubber tires through the foot pedals.
The plane slowed to a crawl on the runway. I turned it and taxied toward the hangar, looking out all the while for Grayson landing behind me, or Mark landing. Wrecks happened on the taxiway as well as in the air. But the runway was clear. Zeke had moved to the grass, where he wrestled with the banner I’d dropped. I parked the plane outside the hangar, next to Alec’s yellow Piper, and cut the engine. The propeller in front of me transformed from a circular blur back into a propeller. Silence flooded the cockpit.
I winced at the sudden rush of emotion now that the adrenaline was leaving me, and I squinted to keep from crying. I couldn’t cry in an airplane out here on the tarmac. Pulling the headphones off my ears and over my thick hair, I opened the cockpit door and stepped way down onto the asphalt.
As I hurried through the dark hangar, Alec called “How was it?” from a corner. I couldn’t see after the bright sunlight outside, and with tears crowding my eyes. “Good,” I called back, still headed for the restroom in the back. With Alec in the hangar and Zeke on the runway and Grayson still up in the air, the bathroom should be empty, but with my luck, it would be occupied. In that case, I didn’t know where I would put these tears.
I could hardly see the doorknob in the shadows. I turned it and stepped into the pitch-black room and flicked on the light and closed and locked the door behind me and collapsed against the door. I could not make a noise. I shoved my fists into my eyes and screamed silently about everything I had lost.
Why couldn’t Mr. Hall be here this week, running this business like always? His life had been small—coffee, corned beef sandwiches because he had grown up in Pennsylvania and still had a taste for Yankee delis, flying—but his life had been nice, and I had enjoyed sharing it with him. It wasn’t fair that he’d had his son taken away and then died alone in his condo and waited half a day for a friend to find him.
That thought choked a noise out of me. I wrapped both arms around my waist and squeezed the air out of my chest so I wouldn’t have any noise left in me to scream. I wished Mr. Hall were here. I wished I’d never felt I needed to let Mark into my life. I wished Grayson weren’t forcing me to fake feelings for Alec. I wished I could fly without relying on anyone. Or relying only on Mr. Hall would be okay, if I could just have that back. I missed his gruff voice, his kind words, his powdery-smelling old-man cologne closed up in the cockpit with me. Dizzy with despair, I set my forehead against the door.
Someone knocked. I felt like I’d been shot in the head. I jumped even higher than I had when the delivery guy had knocked on the door of my trailer the night before.
“Leah,” Alec called. “Open up.”
“Just a sec.” Glancing in the mirror above the sink, I saw there was no way to disguise that I’d been bawling my eyes out. I ran water into my cupped hands anyway and splashed it over my face.
“Come on, Leah,” Alec called. “I feel the same way.”
I paused with a paper towel halfway to my face and considered my red-rimmed eyes in the mirror. I wouldn’t convince him to ask me on a date while I looked this way, but I had a hard time caring when I felt like death. I unlocked and opened the door and walked into his arms.
“Shhh,” he said, stroking my hair as I sobbed into his T-shirt. “I cried yesterday, the first time I went up. Grayson had gone to talk to you about working for him. I was alone so it was okay.” He squeezed me gently. “You can hear my dad yelling at you, can’t you?”
I nodded against his shirt. “Sorry. I’m getting you all wet.” He felt shitty enough about his dad. I didn’t mean to make things worse for him. The last thing he needed was to comfort somebody else. I put both hands on his chest and pushed away.
“Nah, I probably got my sweat all over you. Too hot for this.” He stepped away from me and pulled his T-shirt off over his head.
The back of the hangar was dim after the bright sunlight and the bright bathroom, and my eyes seemed to jump around in the dimness, unable to focus completely on his smooth skin, his muscled chest and arms, his compact body.
“I’m going out for a smoke,” he said. “Want one?”
I did. It would be a great way to bond with him and take another step toward him asking me out, but I couldn’t. I’d promised his dad that I would stop smoking. I had stopped, and I didn’t want to be tempted now, when I felt weak. “No thanks,” I croaked. “I’d better stay in here and cool down.”
He reached out and rubbed his hand up and down my bare arm a few times, soothing. In the dim light, he was monochromatic, his skin and blond hair the same color.
I followed him into the main part of the hangar. While he kept going out the wide door to the tarmac, I stopped in front of an electric fan and let it blow on my bare stomach. The sweat underneath my bikini top turned cold.
“Good job, Leah,” Grayson called over the noise. “Nice acting.”
I was too stunned and hurt and angry to speak, but not too angry to look for him. He was in Mr. Hall’s tiny office, typing on a computer keyboard, gazing at the screen. He didn’t even care what horrified expression passed across my face.
The words I quit formed on my lips. Also, You are cruel. I took a breath to say them.
An alt-rock song, strange and tinny sounding, sang in his office. He picked up his phone and watched the screen for several seconds as if he thought it might change.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. I didn’t want to care, but his face had gone white, like someone else had died.
He looked up at me in surprise. He’d forgotten I was standing there, though he’d lobbed an ugly insult at me ten seconds before. Whoever was calling owned all his attention. He shook his head almost imperceptibly—at me, maybe, but I wasn’t sure. He finally put the phone to his ear and managed a “Hi, Mom!” that sounded a lot more cheerful than he looked.
I turned my body so the fan cooled my back. My ears were out of the wind, though, so I could hear him as he said, “No, everything is good. The plan is good. He’s not making things any easier, but he’s doing what I told you he’d do.”
Nonchalantly I turned my head in the darkness so I could see Grayson in the bright office. Normally he acted comfortable with his tall body. He took up a lot of space when standing. Sitting, he spread himself out over a chair and the surrounding area. But as he sat in the chair behind the desk in the office, he looked half his size, knees drawn close, ankles crossed on the floor, one arm hugging himself, head down and cradled in the palm that held the phone. “Alec told you that?” he asked.
I didn’t want to get in his business. The more I did, the more he was likely to get in mine, which was how I’d gotten in this mess in the first place. But I was so alarmed at how he looked that I watched him unabashedly now, waiting for a different angle so I could glean some information about what had gone so horribly wrong that he curled into a tight ball.
He glanced up at me, and I thought I was busted.
But he couldn’t see me very well, out in the dusky hangar. Almost as soon as he looked up, he looked down again, reabsorbed into the conversation, as if I weren’t there. “I’m doing everything I can. I’m doing some other things you don’t know about.”
To keep Grayson from blackmailing me, I’d been hoping for a way to blackmail him right back. Here it was. Whatever Grayson was trying to get Alec to do, their mom was in on it. I felt sure I was the part of the plan Grayson hadn’t told her about. She was a middle-class mom, after all. She’d been married to Mr. Hall once upon a time. I couldn’t imagine that she would approve of Grayson forcing me to date Alec, no matter what the reason was. All I had to do was threaten Grayson that I would tell her, just like he’d threatened to tell my mom about me.
But as I thought this through in my head, I realized there were big holes in my plan. I had no way to get to Wilmington to talk to this lady. I could steal Grayson’s phone, punch the speed-dial marked Mom, and call her. Then a strange girl would be calling her to say her middle-class son had blackmailed me to date her other middle-class son, months after the deaths of their father and brother. She would call the police. When the cops cruised to my address and saw where I lived, they would arrest me for extortion. I lived in a trailer and people assumed the worst about me.
“Love you too. Bye.” He clicked off the phone and stared at it in his hand for a few moments. Glanced at his watch. Scooted back the chair with a rattle of ancient casters and walked out of the office. Stopped short when he saw me standing there.
While he was on the phone, he had forgotten again that I was there. He’d even forgotten about insulting me down to my very bones.
He realized I’d overheard him on the phone with his mom.
He was afraid he’d given away why he wanted me to go out with Alec.
He went back over his words, calculating whether or not he was safe.
I saw it all in his face, surprisingly easy to read when he wasn’t wearing his shades—which was probably why he wore them so much, like his whole life was a poker game and he was trying to prevent himself from telling his hand. I just wished I really had overheard something that gave away his secret. I still didn’t have a clue.
I spun on my flip-flop and headed farther into the hangar to refill my water bottle from the fountain, hoping the whole time that he wouldn’t hurl another stone at me. I wasn’t sure I could take it. Then I escaped back outside to my airplane.
eight
Grayson had lunch delivered to the hangar. My empty refrigerator must have given him a shock, and he wanted to make sure I didn’t faint in flight and crash his plane. We’re not crashing any planes this week.
While we ate, I made another attempt to flirt with Alec where Grayson could see. Alec was friendly as always but hard to flirt with. I tried to talk to him about the alt-rock music I loved so much blasting from a speaker in the corner. He said it was Grayson’s. Alec tried to explain to me that he preferred country music but his player didn’t dock with the contraption they used in the hangar. Soon I would have to admit I’d never owned a contraption, a player, or a computer, and I had no idea how to download music. Grayson spent most of the hour in Mr. Hall’s office, poring over ledger books.
Late in the afternoon, I let Grayson and Alec land first, hoping they’d want to pack up for the day and get out of there, and they would hardly notice me. As I came in for my own landing, scanning the runway, I did a double take as a figure crossed the tarmac. Mr. Hall was my first thought—the same disorienting shock I’d received that morning. Then Zeke. But Grayson had sent him home for the day after we snagged our last banners. Because I’d been thinking about Grayson and Alec, they passed through my mind. As I came closer, though, I saw it was Leon, who was manning the airport office for the week while I was flying. He held up the airport’s cell phone.