“You said there was no job.”
“There isn’t,” Grayson insisted, “and if you double-check with Mr. Simon about it, you’re going to be embarrassed. Anyway, you have a job now.” He closed the distance between our chairs and stood over me again. “Tomorrow morning at seven.”
My stomach was doing flips. I reached for my beer on the stump.
He snagged it before I did and poured the rest on the dead palm fronds behind my chair.
“Hey,” I protested.
He crumpled the can in one fist. Then he crossed the yard, jogged up the cement-block stairs, and swung through the aluminum door.
“Grayson!” I yelled. But I didn’t run after him into the trailer. The only thing worse than him rooting around in there was watching him while he did it, and seeing his expression of pity. I kept my eyes on the door, and waited, and wished for that beer back.
He leaned out the doorway. “Where’s the rest of the beer?”
“Gone,” I said. At the beach. At a party. At Patrick’s brother’s house, where Mark and that girl were getting it on in the basement, having a lot more fun than me right now.
Grayson ran down the steps and jogged across the dirt to stop in front of me with his hands on his hips. “No more drinking tonight.”
I opened my hands to show him they were empty.
“Seriously. No hangovers. I’ve told Alec too. We’re not crashing any planes this week.” He crouched in front of my chair so he was on my level and we faced each other. “I’m going to leave now. Will you be okay?”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even process anymore. My brain was too overloaded with Grayson, acting like himself but a million times worse because he was dragging me into his impulsive bad ideas this time; and Grayson, acting protective like a father.
When I said nothing, he reached forward and put his hand on my knee.
Electricity shot up my thigh and made my heart pump painfully.
Maybe Grayson felt the jolt too. He took his hand away. I could see my own shades reflected in his sunglasses, my dark curls sliding around my face in the breeze, my frown.
I finally guessed, “Yes? I’ll be okay.”
Satisfied, he stood. “See you bright and early,” he called as he crossed the gravel road and disappeared up the path. The pit bull lunged insanely.
I didn’t sit there long. Or maybe I sat there for a very long time. I was drunk. Twilight settled over the trees. But my heart raced. Although Grayson had left the trailer park, his gaze remained. I was seeing everything through his eyes again. I saw myself sitting alone in the dark, my knees pulled up to my chest in the plastic chair, watching the dust sparkle and slowly settle in the dusk, listening to the pit bull strain against his chain.
I moved back across the yard, into the trailer, and locked the door behind me, muffling but not shutting out the pit bull.
Inside, I retrieved my newspaper and I settled on the pitted sofa, facing the wall where the TV had been. I hoped to lose myself so the day would effectively be over, and I would have no time between now and seven a.m. to worry about what would happen tomorrow with Alec and Grayson. But right away, my stomach growled. The walk to the convenience store didn’t seem so far now. I didn’t dare walk there at night. Heaven Beach had an upscale resort end and a flophouse end. The trailer park was on the flophouse end, and whenever I walked along the highway after dark, men stopped their trucks to ask me whether I was working. Since boys seemed slow to take no for an answer today, I chose not to tempt fate. My stomach groaned in protest.
After a while, I jumped and dropped the paper at a shockingly loud knock on the aluminum door. “Who is it?” I hollered.
“Delivery.”
It was too much, a takeout order misdirected to my door when I was starving. I stomped across the trailer and flung the door open.
Startled, a Chinese guy backed down one cement block, nearly fell, and stepped up again. He held a big white bag in front of him like a shield, printed with red Chinese characters. “Delivery,” he repeated.
I inhaled one long, heavenly noseful of Chinese spice before I said, “Not mine.” I started to close the door.
“Compliments of Hall Aviation.” He shoved the bag at me and hopped off the cement blocks. “Don’t forget! Be there seven a.m. sharp!”
I watched his car disappear down the gravel road. Then I stared through the dust where his car had been, past the yard with the bellowing pit bull, at the path through the trees to the airport. I’d forgotten this when I was saying unkind things to Grayson, and kicking Mark out of the trailer, and threatening to shove beer cans up Patrick’s ass. But when I was a little girl, my mom always told me to be nice to everybody, no matter what they looked like or how they treated me, because I never knew who might be an angel God had sent to Earth in disguise.
Despite the fact that Molly lived on the upscale resort end of town, she deigned to be my friend. She didn’t mind that I lived in a trailer park. But she didn’t seem to consider it an actual home, either, or to think other people lived here. Around eleven I recognized the rhythm of a rock song tapped out in sharp beeps from her electric car.
That is, she didn’t mind that I lived in a trailer park, but she did care. She might even have sought me out. Her parents had run an architecture and interior design business in Atlanta. Now they had “retired” to the beach (they were way too young to retire, in their midforties like everybody’s parents except my embarrassingly young mother) and opened a café that was constructed to look weathered in order to appeal to vacationers on the rich end of town. From the peacenik stickers in the window to the organic menu, their café shouted bleeding-heart liberal. They had taught Molly to reserve judgment and value difference.
And Molly had learned well. The instant she’d moved to town two years before, she’d become the crusader of our high school, lobbying the lunchroom for vegetarian choices, organizing cleanup crews to keep the nearby bird habitats free of garbage. She was no pushover, though. When she thought I was trying to steal her boyfriend, she found me in the hallway between classes and, within hearing of everyone, told me what she thought of the school slut.
But when she saw the way the other girls joined in to bully me—that’s when, ironically, she befriended me. So in a way, she was using me. I was her Different friend. She gave herself brownie points for hanging with me. But she didn’t see herself in this light. And I hadn’t told her, because it would be like kicking a puppy. I was glad that she’d picked me for her cross-cultural experiment, instead of somebody else from the trailer park, like Aaron Traynor, who would have convinced her to try meth “just once,” or Ben Reynolds, who would have screwed her.
I threw on some clothes against the cool spring night, locked the door behind me, and dashed out to her. I was so happy to see her that I almost hugged her across the front seat of the car, but I didn’t dare ruin our friendship with a blatant show of my affection. Our bond had started with our mutual respect for each other’s toughness, sense of humor, and utter lack of sentimentality, and that’s how it would stay. I said, “Hey, bitch.”
“My God. You disgust me. You look like you just rolled out of bed, and I swear you’re prettier than me even with all my swagga.” She ran her hand down her side and out, presenting some part of her outfit—the low-cut top, maybe, or the miniskirt, or the platform shoes. She was no prettier and no less pretty than any rich girl at our high school.
I said, “I think it’s my hair.”
“You always think it’s your hair.” She looked over her shoulder to back the car across my yard and didn’t flinch when the bumper hit one of the plastic chairs, tipping it over. She turned forward again and tore out of the trailer park at fifty miles an hour.
“Good concert?” I asked.
“Please. I couldn’t wait to ditch those silly chicks I went with. I’ve been dying to tell you. At breakfast I finally connected with the coolest guy at the café!”
“If he’s so cool, why are you with me instead of him?”
“Smart-ass. I had the concert. You know I never break a commitment. And he’s working early tomorrow.” She stomped the brakes at the entrance to the highway and looked both ways before pulling into traffic, at least. “But tell me what you need to tell me first.”
“No, you go ahead.”
She stomped the accelerator and the car hissed toward town at top speed, which luckily wasn’t very fast or we both would have been dead when she first got her driver’s license. Then she glanced at me. “No, you go ahead. Something big’s happened. You look like you’re about to pass out.”
I told her everything that had happened with Grayson, and with Mark, and with Grayson again, leaving out the Chinese food, because that would sound like begging. Molly wasn’t allowed in the trailer, and she’d never opened the usually empty refrigerator.
She interjected a lot of “Wait a minute. You mean your friend Mr. Hall’s sons? Twins are so sexy!” and “He wants you to do what?” and “That ass!” which referred to both Mark and Grayson. Though I should have been accustomed to it by now, it was pretty strange to hear filthy language coming from her lips. She was naturally sunny and rich and innocent looking—a lot like Alec, actually—and she’d worn very heavy, glittery eye makeup to her concert, which she thought made her look older but actually made her look about twelve, with huge eyes like a cartoon character.
“I know,” I said. “I don’t understand how Grayson did it. I went into our talk thinking of myself as a pilot. Somehow I came out as the airport whore.”
Molly laughed so hard that I thought she would run off the road because I had said “whore.” Molly was easily amused by smut. Therefore, our conversations tended to be very dirty. I liked to hear her laugh.
When her giggles died down, I said, “You know I’m not a whore.” I was double-checking, actually. I had a bad rep around school, but that’s because the new girl at school was an easy target. After three and a half years here, I was still considered the new girl. Molly hadn’t lived here as long, but she’d blended in better. The new girl who lived in a trailer park was a sitting duck.
Molly cut her eyes sideways at me. “I know you’re not a practicing whore. But Mark Simon living with you? Even for just a week? I’m so glad you got rid of him.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Did you end up doing it?”
“No.”
“Gah!” Molly exclaimed. “I’m so relieved. I tried to be glad you were finally going to get some, but Mark Simon is not the crazy I would have picked out for you. Girls were talking about you. I mean, more than usual. That was out there, living with a guy when you’re only eighteen and you haven’t even graduated yet.”
It wasn’t like that, I almost told her. But I’d said this to her all week: It’s not like that. I sounded like my mother trying to explain a few of her military boyfriends to me. Why do you stay with him when he hits you, Mama? You don’t understand. It’s not like that.
“Do you think I gave Mark the wrong idea without meaning to?” I asked. “I never meant that I would do him in exchange for a job. Do you think Grayson is right, that I’ll look at Alec and he’ll fall at my feet?” What I wanted to ask was whether Mr. Hall had befriended me for the wrong reasons, like Grayson had said a year ago in the hangar, which seemed like a lifetime ago now. But I didn’t ask that. I didn’t want to know the answer.
She took a long breath, considering. “I do think you turn on a very sexy act around men when you need something, and you may not realize you’re doing it. Obviously you don’t realize it if you’re asking me about it.”
“Give me an example.”
“Ryan.” Ryan was the boyfriend Molly and I had argued about when we first met.
I hated it when she brought Ryan up. She didn’t know the whole truth about what had happened. The fact that I’d hidden it from her made my stomach twist even now. But my fib had landed me this beautiful friend. I wouldn’t let her go. So I continued with the tough act she loved so much. I said, “Oh, I realized I was seducing Ryan all right.”
She cackled at our oldest joke. “Okay, another example. You’ve gotten in one million fights at school, and you’ve been called to the principal’s office one million times, but you’ve never been suspended.”
“That’s because I don’t start the fights,” I said self-righteously.
“Maybe not,” Molly said, “but that’s not what those other girls and their friends are telling the principal, yet they’re getting suspended and you’re not.”
“So you do think I’m a whore,” I said grimly.
“No. You’re not doing the principal. The rumors about you aren’t true. But they’re not random, either. Think about it. Do you own a T-shirt that doesn’t show your cleavage?”
I put both hands over the deepest part of my V-neck.
“And then there’s Mark living with you,” she said. “You’re not a whore. You’re a chick who hasn’t exactly grown up with every advantage, and you’ve learned to use what you’ve got. You don’t do it on purpose. It’s second nature. You act girly and helpless and make men think you’re harmless.”
I swallowed.
“Leah. You look like you’re going to pass out again. I’m not helping.”
“Sure you are,” I said brightly. “You’re a candle in my window.”