Текст книги "Such a Rush"
Автор книги: Jennifer Echols
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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 21 страниц)
“Correct.”
“But if his business is going to be as short-lived as you say, can’t you just ride it out and then go back to your airport job on the ground? I don’t see why you’re so upset at losing the crop-dusting job with that jerk. You’ve flown before but you’ve never had a job flying. Why do you need one now?”
“Because every type of pilot’s license has an age requirement, plus a requirement for the number of hours you’ve flown.”
“And a pesky requirement for good moral character.”
“That’s only for the airline pilot’s license. But yeah, that’s exactly what I’m up for next. For my commercial license I had to turn eighteen years old and log two hundred and fifty hours. At first I had to rent Mr. Hall’s airplane to get those hours. Airplane rental isn’t cheap. If he hadn’t started letting me use it for free, I wouldn’t have that license by now.”
“I see.”
Now we were passing the library. I checked out one or two books per visit so they wouldn’t be too heavy or bulky on the walk home. That way I always had a stack. I’d seen Molly check out a whole stack before. At once. And put them in her car.
“For the airline pilot’s license,” I said, “I have to be twenty-three years old, and I need to log fifteen hundred hours. Now that Mr. Hall is gone, that’s another twelve hundred and fifty hours of renting an airplane. Plus, if any airline is going to hire me, I need a college degree. How am I going to pay for all that in the next five years, Molly?”
“Hell if I know.”
“I’m going to get a job flying. Then I fly for free. I fly a lot and log a lot of hours. And I get paid more than minimum wage.”
“But if you can’t get a job flying,” she said, “maybe you keep your airport office job, work on your hours and your degree, but do it more slowly, as you save up your money. You don’t have to get that license the day you turn twenty-three.”
“True.” But if I didn’t get it at twenty-three, I would never get it. That life was too hard, always looking to the future and never living in the now, saving for an impossible goal. Thirty years later I would still be working in the airport office for minimum wage. There would be a rumor that I had been a pilot once, but most people wouldn’t believe it, looking at me.
“Yeah, I understand now,” Molly said.
Really?
“Maybe Alec and Grayson’s company won’t go under like you so gleefully expect,” she said, “and you can keep your job with them for a long time.”
“And continue to be the airport whore.”
“It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.”
We’d reached the beginning of the motels. Because we were still on the flophouse end of Heaven Beach, the signs out front boasted ridiculously low room rates, and the pools were small and stained and green.
I said, “Tell me the rest of your story, which is not nearly as interesting as my story. You finally connected with a guy at the café, and he had to go to bed. Aw.”
“Aw.” She poked out her bottom lip sympathetically.
“Will you see him again?”
She took in a slow breath and exhaled before she spoke, as if considering her answer. Which was not like her. “I think he’s going to be really busy this week.”
“But you were all excited about him a few minutes ago. You drove over to my mansion at eleven o’clock at night to tell me about him.” As I uttered the words, I realized they probably weren’t true. Maybe the boy didn’t even exist. Molly always had an excuse like this—she had to see me so she could tell me about a cute boy, or a dorky thing her mom had done, or something she’d seen on TV—but a lot of times when she came over, she was really checking on me, or getting me out of the trailer for a little while. Or casually driving me back to the café and feeding me, as if I didn’t know what was going on. I played along.
“I was excited about him,” she said, “but he seems awfully vanilla next to your whore story.”
“He does. Let’s trade places.” Now I was the one speaking before I thought. I sounded ungrateful and jealous and bitter. Which I was, but nobody wanted to hear that. I opened my mouth, thinking hard, forming a genuine apology.
She opened the console between us, brought out a white paper bag, and set it in my lap. “Warm chocolate croissant.”
“Oh!” My cry of ecstasy at a pastry was so heartfelt and genuine that I burst into laughter.
She glanced over at me with her eyebrows raised like she was worried about my sanity.
“Shut up.” I tore off a big bite of flaky croissant filled with gooey chocolate sauce and stuffed it into her mouth, purposefully smearing it across her cheek. “Mmph,” was all she said. Her mouth was full, and her dad’s chocolate croissants were that good.
And we were right to silence each other with food. It was better that we never apologized to each other. Then we’d be admitting that we were wrong and we owed each other something. That’s where people got into trouble.
“Look, genuine whores.” She nodded out the window at a couple of teenage girls crossing the street in front of us, both with bad blond dye jobs, both in ill-fitting, low-cut T-shirt dresses exposing the real or fake tattoos on their chests. One girl wore cheap heels and one was barefoot.
“How do you end up like that?” Molly asked me, not the whores.
I didn’t know whether they were really whores. There were plenty of whores on this end of town. But there were also lots of trailer park girls from farther inland, vacationing at the beach. Those girls and the whores looked about the same. Peering at these specimens, I decided they were tourists because they seemed happy.
As Molly pulled through the intersection, I changed my mind. The girls had reached the corner and were shouting at cars.
Talk about trading places. I wouldn’t even be trading if I were in those girls’ place. I would be taking a very small step. A girl ended up like that by growing up like me. She made the mistake of tangling with the other people around her. And she never ducked through that fence to the airport.
Not that it seemed to be doing me much good at the moment. I’d resisted working for Grayson. I was alarmed at being blackmailed. I resented having to throw myself at Alec. Yet in the end, I’d given in, hadn’t I? I wasn’t much better than those streetwalkers.
But the thought of reporting to the Hall Aviation hangar in the morning sent a little thrill through me. I would fly again for the first time in two months. Such a rush! I would get involved in Grayson and Alec’s game with each other. It was like starring on a TV reality show where I’d probably be publicly humiliated—but that was better than watching the show on TV at home, or not being able to watch it at all when the TV went missing and the trailer fell silent.
And I would see Grayson again. He needed me. He was using me. He didn’t have a crush on me, yet I could still feel his hand on my knee. Watching the whores shrink in the side mirror as Molly sped down the street, I put my own hand on my knee and rubbed my thumb back and forth, feeling that rush all over again.
six
I concentrated on that rush of feeling, relying on it to push me along, step by step, up the path through the trailer park, into the orange sunlight of early morning, across the long, wet grass that stuck black seeds to my ankles. I would see Grayson. I would fly a plane. Those were reasons to keep walking toward Hall Aviation and the beginning of my charade with Alec.
I’d fretted over what to wear: something innocent that Alec would like? He probably dated cheerleaders who wore pink and slept with teddy bears. Or something super-whorelike to make an ironic point to Grayson? At the tail end of fifteen minutes of trying on clothes, then standing on the toilet and leaning way over to see my torso in the mirror above the sink, I decided I’d better not risk angering Grayson and driving him to spill everything to my mom. I’d worn what I would have worn if everything were normal, everybody were still alive, and I was working for Mr. Hall instead of his son. Admittedly, hmmm, this was kind of whorelike after all, short shorts with a sexy cropped T-shirt cut to fit loose, which I would take off in the plane to reveal my bikini top underneath. The plane wasn’t air-conditioned, and the cockpit would heat to a hundred degrees up near the sun.
Where the tarmac started, I veered toward the pavement to step out of the cold grass. Huge hangars sat to my left, one of which was Mr. Simon’s. I passed it warily, looking through the vast doorway while trying not to look like I was looking. I didn’t want another confrontation with Mark this morning—or ever. Men shifted inside the hangar, but I didn’t recognize Mark’s quick movements. I doubted he could have made it in this early if he’d continued the bender he’d been on last night.
Recalling all the shit I’d been through in the past week with him, in a sex-for-flying exchange I hadn’t fully understood, I decided I couldn’t do this all over again with Grayson and Alec. Yet I kept walking, my flip-flops trailing dew across the asphalt embedded with white shells. I needed to lose these cold feet before I reached the Hall Aviation hangar. I didn’t want to flirt with Alec. He was crazy handsome, but I’d never been attracted to him like I had to Grayson, and the thought of flirting with him made my stomach hurt. I reminded myself I hadn’t flown in two months, and my whole future as a pilot was on the line.
As I passed the airport office, I picked up my pace. The yellow Piper already sat on the tarmac in front of Hall Aviation. The small side door and the wide front doors of the hangar were open to the morning, and the strange beat of alt-rock spilled out. I’d always kept my eyes and ears open when I went into the hangar and the boys were there. They played interesting music, wore T-shirts for bands I’d never heard of, and read books that were making the rounds at their high school but would never travel as far as Heaven Beach. I felt silly for looking up to the boys. They were from Wilmington, not New York City. I was from the armpit of the tourist industry, though, and it was all in your perspective. I kept my eyes and ears open around Molly for much the same reason. Her old friends in Atlanta were always clueing her in on the latest. She still was not as cool as these boys.
I stepped through the side door, on high alert. But the boys both sat in lawn chairs in front of the red Piper and had their heads bent to breakfast in boxes on their laps. I felt a pang of jealousy mixed with hunger, all one and the same for me when I hadn’t eaten breakfast. With the prospect of Alec asking me out on a date that night but no iron-clad plans for dinner or a ride into town, I’d carefully hoarded the Chinese leftovers. I dared not waste them by gorging myself on them for breakfast.
“Heeeeeeey!” I called in a parody of some girl who was not being blackmailed and was naturally sweet and gave a shit about other people. I walked toward Alec and put my arms out.
Startled, he set his breakfast aside on a nearby tool bench and stood to hug me. He was just as handsome as I remembered him, his hair bright blond, his face round and friendly. He didn’t beam at me, exactly, but the default setting on his face was a half-smile, and he managed that for me. “Hey, Leah!” he exclaimed, wrapping both arms around me and squeezing briefly. “Long time no see.”
Then I turned to Grayson, who wore his shades and straw cowboy hat in the gentle light of morning. I didn’t want to hug him or touch him. I was angry at him for manipulating me. But in that moment, it seemed strange to hug Alec and not him, especially when Alec must know Grayson and I had talked recently. How else would Grayson have hired me? I prompted Grayson, “Heeeeeeey!”
He looked up at me without moving his head. For a split second he glared at me over his sunglasses.
Then he set his breakfast aside too and stood. “Heeeeeeey!” he replied in an unenthusiastic imitation, more resigned than sarcastic. He came in for a hug and slid his hand very slowly across my bare waist where my T-shirt rode up.
His hand trailed heat and seemed to take forever, though its passage across my skin was one motion with his body coming closer, moving in for the hug. His other arm curved around my back, and he brought me in tight within his arms for a fraction of a second before letting me go. He backed into his chair again and picked up his breakfast.
As an afterthought, he slid another takeout box from a table, handed it to me, and gestured for me to take a seat on the empty sofa.
And I was still standing there, dazed, wondering what the difference had been between Grayson’s hug and Alec’s, and fighting my attraction for the boy who meant to sabotage me.
I eased down very carefully onto the sofa. I’d always been wary of it because dust rose when anyone touched it. The boys and Mr. Hall had never seemed to give it much thought, probably because fifteen years ago, way before the divorce, when they all lived here in Heaven Beach together, it was in their den. Only after I’d sat down did I notice the logo on the takeout box in my hands. “Oh! This is from my friend Molly’s parents’ café. Do you guys know Molly?”
Grayson shook his head without looking at me.
“Tall? Auburn hair? Probably some inappropriate glitter on her face at seven in the morning?”
Alec shook his head without looking at me.
Giving up, I opened the box, and oh, a ham-and-egg biscuit waited inside with a cup of cold fruit and a warm chocolate croissant. To have been so hungry and so bereft while walking across the tarmac, and now to be presented with Molly’s dad’s warm chocolate croissant, not as warm as the one in Molly’s car last night but still flaky and gooey enough… it was so good that I knew something bad was about to happen.
I gazed at Grayson in his lawn chair and tried to catch his eye to thank him for the food, but he was absorbed in his own croissant.
I dug into my breakfast before my reverence got weird, like I was at church. “I’m so excited about flying!” I exclaimed between bites. “I haven’t flown in a while.”
Both boys stopped chewing and looked up at me. I hadn’t mentioned Mr. Hall’s death. I hadn’t needed to. For the past two months I’d gotten used to walking around in my own space, where I was the only person who had known Mr. Hall and missed him. But when I’d stepped into the hangar, I’d entered an alternate universe where other people were thinking exactly like me.
If Alec was going to be convinced to ask me out, I needed help out of this awkward situation. I thought Grayson would help me—interject a comment, something. But he just stood and wandered into Mr. Hall’s little office in the corner.
After chewing and swallowing, Alec finally said, “I hadn’t flown in a while, either. I took one of the Pipers up last night and flew some banner practice runs, just to make sure I could still do it.”
“I heard you,” I said. Then I wished I hadn’t said this, because I was reminding him that I lived in the trailer park.
This time Grayson did rescue me. He came back from the office, handed me a clipboard with forms attached, sank down into his lawn chair, and took a long sip from a large paper coffee cup with his eyes closed.
I looked down at the W-4. “You’re taking out taxes?” I couldn’t hide the dismay in my voice. As a pilot, I’d be making three times as much per hour as I’d made when I was the airport gofer. In my mind I was already socking that money away without giving up a fourth of it in taxes.
“Surprise. It’s the law,” Grayson said, picking up his takeout box again.
“I know,” I said. “I just—”
“Didn’t think I was smart enough to figure out how to withhold taxes?”
I couldn’t believe he was picking a fight with me when he’d said he wanted me to go out with Alec. But he was looking at me very intentionally with angry accusations in his gray eyes.
I muttered, “Didn’t think you’d bother.” I tore off a big hunk of my chocolate croissant and stuffed it into my mouth, half-afraid he would take my breakfast away.
Alec tried to ease the tension this time. “Grayson’s been studying the taxes. Reading a book on business tax law for idiots. They make a great pair.” He slapped Grayson on the back.
Grayson grimaced. At first I thought Alec had slapped him so hard it hurt—but even if he had, Grayson wouldn’t have shown pain. These boys didn’t play that way.
Then I realized Grayson was showing a sort of pain. It wasn’t the slap on the back but Alec’s words that had hurt him. Alec had implied that Grayson was an idiot and irresponsible. Grayson would have embraced this characterization five months ago if it had gotten him out of a chore for Mr. Hall. And now it hurt.
When Grayson didn’t laugh or slap Alec back, Alec leaned forward and looked up into Grayson’s face, trying to meet his eyes. Suddenly Alec gave up. “I’ll ask Zeke if he needs help with the banners and then get going.” He rose from his lawn chair with the default smile on his face. “I’ll see y’all at break.”
My mouth was stuffed full. I swallowed quickly. “Bye, Alec!” I called brightly, but by then he’d disappeared through the wide door facing the runway. I turned to Grayson. “That was not successful,” I said quietly. “You’re not helping.”
He glared at me. “What do you want me to do? Get you a room?”
I was on the edge of standing up, throwing my half-eaten breakfast in the garbage, and stomping out of the hangar. To hell with Grayson, and Alec, and my career as a pilot, and food. I could swallow a lot of insults, but not directly to my face. That was too much like a threat, and it called for an immediate reaction, like someone kicking in my trailer door.
Seeing the look on my face, he widened his gray eyes at me. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”
“Then you need to get more,” I said, “and stop insulting me for doing what you are making me do.”
“You’re right,” he grumbled. “I meant to say that I don’t expect him to jump you the first time you walk into the hangar. It might take a few days for him to ask you out. A few hours, at least. Possibly in a more romantic setting that doesn’t smell this strongly of avgas.” He took another bite, proving that the smell of fuel didn’t bother him any more than it bothered me, then nodded to my breakfast. “After you finish, you can take the orange Piper up. Fly for about two hours and then come in for a break.”
“I might not need one that soon,” I said. I wasn’t sucking down coffee like Grayson was, and I was used to spending hours in an airplane without a pee.
“Take one anyway.” Grayson’s voice rose like he was angry at me for talking back.
I swallowed my resentment along with my biscuit. Mr. Hall would have kept tight control over me when I came to work for him too. But Grayson was not Mr. Hall. Grayson didn’t know this job much better than I did.
“Remember,” he said, “in an emergency, drop the banner over an unpopulated area. What matters most is,” he touched his thumb, “other people,” he touched his pointer finger, “you.”
“Then the airplane, then the banner,” I finished for him. “I know, Grayson. You and I learned this at the same time. You don’t have to repeat it to me.”
He squeezed the armrest of his lawn chair so tightly that his knuckles turned white. “If I don’t repeat it, who’s going to?”
The hangar wasn’t empty. It contained the lawn chairs, the sofa, lots of filing cabinets and worktables and equipment, the red Piper, the orange Piper, and the white four-seater Cessna. But the hangar seemed huge and empty as Grayson’s voice rang against the metal walls. Any other time in the past three and a half years, I would have known he was imitating Mr. Hall. Now I knew he wasn’t. As my skin went cold, I wondered whether he heard how much he sounded like his dead father.
An engine started just outside the hangar, Alec in the yellow Piper, taxiing away. That loud rumble canceled out Grayson’s echoing voice. Grayson talked over the noise. “Nobody can crash this week, do you understand? If anybody crashes, all of this is for nothing. You can complain, Leah, but at some point—at this point—I am in charge, I am blackmailing you, and shut up.” His gray eyes were narrow and his jaw was set. He’d backed down and apologized to me after his comment about getting a room. He wasn’t backing down this time.
He stood. “Ready?”
He wasn’t asking me whether I was ready. He was telling me I was. I stuffed the last of the biscuit into my mouth, threw away my garbage, and followed him over to the orange Piper. Automatically I took my place at the wing, like I’d done a million times with Mr. Hall. When I saw Grayson had control of the guide on the back wheel, I pushed the strut. One good shove got the plane rolling out of the hangar, and it didn’t take much strength to guide it all the way out onto the tarmac.
In the distance, Alec was taking off. A lone figure in the grassy strip between the tarmac and the runway struggled with a hook on a rope between upright poles. A long banner stretched out behind him and rippled in the morning breeze. Zeke, Alec had said, but I didn’t know this person. I didn’t want to ask Grayson about him when we were both in this mood, but I had a right to know who would be setting up the banners I was risking my life to snag with an airplane. “Who’s Zeke?”
“Somebody the unemployment office sent,” Grayson called from behind the tail. His voice betrayed none of the emotion we’d let slip a few minutes before. “I don’t have high hopes for him.”
“That’s not reassuring,” I said. “But gosh, if you figured out how to hire a guy from the unemployment office? You are running this business.”
Grayson half-turned to me, a warning, not sure whether I was making fun of him. I wasn’t sure either.
“I just made a phone call,” he muttered. Then he patted the tail of the airplane fondly. “Check this one out really well before you go. We haven’t taken it up yet, so it hasn’t run since… my dad died.”
Only a slight hesitation let me know he felt a stab of pain as he said the words. I felt the stab too and wished he’d left the sentence hanging. But I was impressed that he’d gotten it out.
He slipped back into the shadows of the hangar.
With a sigh, I turned to my airplane. And immediately cheered up. I was about to fly again.
But first I had a lot of things to check. I walked all around the plane, running my hand along the fuselage, looking for anything broken. I checked the oil. I pulled the towbar on the back of the plane, checked the ropes and hooks for towing the banners, and brought the hooks into the cockpit so I could throw them out the window at just the right time. I went back into the hangar, my eyes straining in the dark after the bright sunlight, and felt blindly in a toolbox for a dipstick. Grayson was in a far corner of the hangar, rummaging around the red Piper, and didn’t say anything. I went back out and checked the gas. Then I hopped up into the seat and started the engine—my pulse raced with the roar—and taxied over to the gas pumps.
One of Mr. Simon’s Air Tractors was parked there already. I hoped Mark wasn’t in it. But of course he would be. That was my luck. As I drove closer, I saw I was right. Mark climbed out of the cockpit very slowly, like he was hungover. No surprise there either.
He glanced over at my plane. I faced the sun, and I hoped he hadn’t seen me behind the glare off the windshield. He might not know I was flying for Grayson. I could shrink behind the controls and let him pump his gas and taxi away before I got out, thus avoiding another shitstorm altogether.
Settling back to wait, I pulled off my shirt and opened one of the windows to circulate the air in the already hot cockpit. Even though it was only the middle of April, it was summer. The trees across the runway were in full leaf. The grass where Zeke wrestled with the banner was green and long, waving in the breeze like it was tapping its foot, waiting for somebody to wake up from a long winter’s nap and cut it. Really the summer lasted here from April until October, at least. It was strange that the town filled with spring breakers in March, when the weather was so fickle, warm one day and wintry the next. It was strange that the town cleared of tourists in the warm September and October, when the gray tide rolled onto the tan beach under a blue sky without giving it much thought, unimpeded by drunk college students and dangerously sunburned children and obese tattooed exhibitionists. Summer in Heaven Beach went on whether people noticed or not.
I opened the other window. Along with warm air, the heavy scent of honeysuckle rushed in, and the growl of Alec’s plane. He dropped out of the sky and dipped low over the grass, headed for the banner pickup between the poles. The sight was frightening. He looked like he was going too slow to remain airborne. But I knew from experience that this was what a banner pickup looked like, and there was no getting the human eye used to it. The nose pitched up sharply. The engine groaned. The plane slowed even more, perilously close to losing lift and dropping like a stone. The banner, which had been all but invisible sleeping in the grass, protested being roused. It wiggled and thrashed and finally, when it couldn’t resist any longer, unfurled to its full length and height in a diagonal line behind Alec’s still-climbing plane: 4$ COCKTALLS LIV BAND CAPTAN FRANKS LOUNG.
Wow, Zeke couldn’t spell. If that episode back in the hangar was a sample of how Grayson would act for the rest of the week—an awful lot like his father—he was going to blow a gasket.
I turned back to Mark, who was knocking his head repeatedly against the gas pump. Something wasn’t right—something other than Mark. I had pumped enough gas into airplanes that I could tell. Then I realized what it was. I jumped out of the cockpit. “Mark, whoa, whoa, whoa!”
He kept his forehead on the gas pump but turned to look at me. “Back so soon? I knew you’d change your mind.”
I stopped the gas pump, carefully took the heavy nozzle out of Mark’s gas tank, and hit the button for the electric motor to coil the hose back up. Quickly I checked the area for sparks, small fires, anything else unusual. While Mark watched, I uncoiled the grounding clip, pulled it across the asphalt, and attached it to the tailpipe of the crop duster. “Didn’t your uncle teach you never to pump gas without grounding your airplane first? You could cause a spark and blow the whole place up.”
“That never happens,” he said.
Which was true. But only because everybody was grounding their airplanes before they pumped gas, except him.
“Do you understand what I’m telling you?” I insisted. “A spark that ignited the underground gas tank would take half the airport with it.”
He grinned and shrugged. “Some way to go. Boom! At least it wouldn’t hurt.” He cocked his head to one side, then closed his eye like moving his head had hurt. He eased his head back to its normal position. “What are you doing in that dead guy’s plane?”
The confrontation was inevitable now. Better to have it while nobody was watching. “I’m flying for Hall Aviation.”
“No!” he shouted.
I shrank back at the violence of his reaction.
The next second, the violence was gone, and he gave me a charming smile. “Come fly for my uncle! I’ll take you up…”
“When?” I prompted him.
“Soon. Patrick’s having a party tonight. Come with me and we’ll talk about it.”
“Take that ‘blond’ friend of yours.” I made finger quotes around her bleach-blond hair with black roots. “I have to get to work.”
He must have been in a lot of trouble with his uncle and very late, because with only a few more pointed looks up and down my body, he taxied back to Mr. Simon’s hangar.
Standing in the cockpit doorway and hauling the heavy hose on top of the wing, I gassed up my own plane on the Hall Aviation account, then carefully retracted the hose and the grounding wire. My heart sped faster and faster as I cranked the engine again, slipped on the headphones, and taxied to the end of the runway.
Here I paused, going through Mr. Hall’s checklist in my mind. The hand controls and foot pedals moved the flaps and the rudder the way they were supposed to. I put my finger on every dial in the instrument panel in turn, making sure each was working. The meter confirmed I had a full tank of gas. The altimeter worked. Finally I ran up the engines and checked the magnetos. The plane vibrated like it would shake to pieces, but all three Pipers were like that. There wasn’t much else I could do to find out whether the plane was working properly short of flying and crashing.
Pressing the button to broadcast over the radio, I announced my departure into the mike at my lips. My childish voice in my own headphones surprised me every time. I sounded nothing like a pilot.
Remembering what Grayson had told me about Mark’s vindictive landing after a basketball game, I looked around for Mark. He’d parked the crop duster in front of Mr. Simon’s hangar. The rest of the airport was clear. The skies were clear. I looked a second time, because the only people saving me from crashing into another plane were the other pilot and me.
I turned from the taxiway onto the runway for the first time since the day Mr. Hall died. The wind was calm. Taking off wouldn’t be hard. I had done it a thousand times. The butterflies in my stomach weren’t from fear. They were from anticipation.
The hair on my arms stood up. I squeezed the controls to brace myself so I wouldn’t shiver with the chill of wanting. Normal people got that feeling when they quit smoking cigarettes. I had gotten it then too.
Normal people did not get that feeling when faced with danger.
Here it came. I sped the plane down the runway. All I had to do was keep it fast and straight. The shape of the wings and airspeed and physics did the rest. The plane wanted to fly.
Suddenly it soared. The view out the front of the windshield changed gradually, so it was hard to tell how high I was. But out the side window, the plane separated from its shadow on the asphalt like Siamese twins cut loose from each other. The ground rushed away. The trees, so towering and textured before, flattened into uniform treetops like a field of grass. As I turned the plane, the ocean two miles away glinted into view. This time I couldn’t suppress the shiver of pleasure.
