Such a Rush(71)
Author: Jennifer Echols

His voice rose as he said this. The louder he got, the faster my heart raced. I thought it couldn’t pump any faster, and then he told me Grayson had been in love with me for years.

But that didn’t fix any of this, or take away from the fact that Grayson had been manipulating us all.

“Alec,” I said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. And Grayson only—”

“It doesn’t matter what you meant, Leah,” Alec shouted. “I found Molly two years ago. I finally asked her out. But because of all this bullshit, it’s ruined now. She and I spent last night alone together, and she’s so convinced something happened between you and me that she’s not even talking to me now. Thanks for that.” He opened the door of his cockpit and climbed back up to look at the wing.

I didn’t want to leave things like this between Alec and me, but I wasn’t going to stand there and look at his feet.

I headed back down the tarmac. When I drew even with the upright poles, I waded through the long grass to Molly.

“Hey, chick,” she sang. She dropped the heavy end of a banner she’d been struggling with. A cloud of bugs lifted into the air. “What’s up?”

“Why did you tell Alec?”

As I watched, her face transformed from innocent teenager playing bad girl to a look of malice. I’d seen it on Francie’s face a few nights before. The only time I’d seen it on Molly was when she first confronted me about stealing Ryan from her two years ago.

“What you were doing was wrong,” she said, “and I was trying to warn him.”

“You knew why I was doing it,” I reminded her, “and when you told him, you were jeopardizing my whole flying career.”

“Well, maybe you don’t deserve a flying career,” she snapped. “Did you ever think about that? Maybe you don’t have good moral character. You forged your mother’s name. You shacked up with Mark. One day later, you tried to fool Alec into thinking you had feelings for him. You knew Ryan was dating me and you tried to steal him from me.”

“Is that what this is all about?” I demanded. “Ryan?”

“You’re supposed to be my best friend, but you scope out the ones I really like and steal them! Can’t I have anything?”

“I did not steal Ryan from you,” I said firmly. “He came on to me. I turned him down, and he spread it around school that he’d been with me anyway.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?” she exclaimed.

“Because you like the upside down,” I said. “The opposite. You think it’s cool to tell your friends that you go slumming with a poor girl. It makes you feel different and proud to lift me up from the ghetto.” I should have added the truth. When she thought I’d stolen Ryan, that had given me power and daring in her eyes. All I’d ever wanted from Molly was not to lose her. But I couldn’t tell her this. Not after everything she’d thrown at me.

“That’s what you really think?” she asked. “And you lied to stay friends with a bitch like me? It just proves I was right. I couldn’t trust you with Alec. You don’t have good moral character. You’re a liar.”

She was about to bend down and work on the sign again, like the conversation was over and I wasn’t standing there, but something over my shoulder caught her attention. I turned around.

Grayson waded through the grass after me. As he reached me, he held out a wad of bills and coins and dumped them into my cupped hand.

“I don’t want your money,” I told him. “I quit.”

“That’s for yesterday,” he said. “You’re fired.”

I turned and walked through the grass along a new trajectory, a diagonal that would spit me out on the tarmac closer to my trailer. Along the way I dropped a quarter in the grass and did not stoop to pick it up. Grayson and Molly had already lost interest in me and were screaming at each other, but I didn’t want to risk having them glance over at me and see me groveling in the dirt for a coin. Then it occurred to me that there was no reason for me to go home. There was nothing there to eat, nothing to read, no way to get out, and in two weeks I would be homeless.

In the shadows of Mr. Simon’s hangar, Mark was sitting in the cockpit of the crop duster, watching me approach.

I put a little extra swing in my walk and stepped over the threshold into his hangar. Sliding up to the open door of the cockpit, I whispered into the darkness, “Did I hear you whistle at me?”

“Normally you’d have quite a ride to the farm of the day,” Mark said into his mike as we bumped along the tarmac toward the end of the runway. “We spray farms as far away as three hundred miles. But since we’re taking the Stearman and you’re getting your feet wet, we’ll just buzz the folks near the airport. Do you really want a rush?”

His voice sounded strange in my headphones, precisely because it didn’t sound strange at all. He spoke the same as always. He wasn’t imitating Chuck Yeager or making any effort to sound like a cool, collected pilot. That’s when I had second thoughts about going up with him. But I couldn’t ask him to stop, taxi back to the hangar, and let me out just because his voice didn’t sound right. Not when this was the only chance I had left at a job flying.

“Yes,” I said.

He stopped at the end of the runway and ran up the engines, like he was supposed to. But he didn’t touch each instrument in the panel with his finger. He didn’t work his feet to make sure the rudders moved the way they should. I’d always felt a little silly going through these motions so methodically, the way Mr. Hall had taught me, like the rudders were suddenly going to quit working. Then I heard Mr. Hall in my head, reminding me that if something went wrong in the air, I couldn’t pull over. Clearly Mark had never received this warning. Or he didn’t care.

Aren’t you going to test the rudders? kept forming on my lips, and I kept brushing it away like an annoying bug. I had a vision of myself trapped in the back of this crop duster like a sardine in a can while Mark slung us all over the sky. But I’d never seen how he flew on a job. He was probably perfectly safe. I tried to picture what Grayson would do in this situation. If he needed a job flying a crop duster, he wouldn’t second-guess Mark’s prep at the end of the runway.

Of course, he wouldn’t walk up to Mark in the hangar and ask whether Mark had whistled at him, either. But Grayson would never need a crop-dusting job. Grayson and I were so far apart that we had nothing to do with each other. Thirty years from now, if a rumor ran around the airport that we’d had a one-night stand, we would still be so far apart that nobody would believe it.