I hadn’t thought he noticed whether I smiled at him or not.
There was a possibility here. A spark. I’d always viewed him as Mr. Hall’s black sheep son, impossibly cool and way too good for me, passing through. Finally, here was a hint of reciprocation of the crush I’d pretended not to have on him since I was fourteen.
No. Mark might have fooled me. I wouldn’t let Grayson fool me too. Cheeks burning, I said sternly, “Grayson Hall. The second you feel cornered, you fly off the handle and say anything that pops into your head. You’ve always gotten away with it, and maybe you still will, but that’s not a good interview technique for potential employees. If there was ever a chance I would fly for you, you blew it the instant your mind fell into the gutter.”
My anger drained away. My fingers hurt from gripping the countertop. Grayson’s mirrored shades still stared me down like nothing was behind them.
Then he bit his lip. “I need you,” he said in his nicest tone so far.
“Tough.”
He put his fist down on the counter. Not hard. Just there. He balled it tightly and relaxed it.
He took a long, deep breath. His broad shoulders rose and fell with it.
And then, without another word, he turned and left the office. He crossed the porch and disappeared in the direction of the Hall Aviation hangar, where I couldn’t see him out the lobby windows.
All the tension whooshed out of the room behind him. Without it, there was nothing left to hold me up standing. I collapsed into my desk chair and took a few deep breaths. I felt like I was going to lose it, but Grayson might be hanging around outside. Alec might. Mr. Simon might. I couldn’t lose it here at the airport. I had to get home.
I locked up for the day, shut off the connection between the radio and the outside loudspeaker, and put the cell phone in a drawer. When I’d first started working here, I’d stayed until eight some nights because being alone here was better than being alone at home. My supervisor from city hall made me stop because I was running up the light bill. He didn’t know I needed a handout, and I wasn’t going to tell him.
Locking the porch door from the outside, I couldn’t help one more glance at the Hall Aviation hangar. Grayson’s truck and Alec’s car were still parked outside, and they’d opened the wide door facing the runway as if they actually planned to bring an airplane out and power it up. I didn’t care. I would fly for Grayson Hall over my dead body.
four
I turned my back on Mr. Hall’s hangar, water bottle in my hand, newspaper under my arm. Carrying my treasure, I walked most of the length of the airport, into the grass at the end of the strip. Where the chain-link fence turned a corner, I lifted the loose end of the wall of links and ducked underneath, onto the trail through the trees.
Most neighborhoods would be busy this time of day with the bustle of parents pulling in from work and greeting their kids. The trailer park would be busy later, at a partying hour. Right now it was quiet. Not a lot of people here had a regular job. A few of them were still sleeping off last night’s binge. For once, drinking the world away didn’t sound like a bad idea.
I walked just out of reach of the lunging pit bull. At my own trailer, I balanced on the cement blocks while I unlocked the aluminum door that had been kicked in four times since we’d lived here, three times by burglars, once by my mom’s ex-boyfriend Billy. After locking the door behind me, I walked through the creaking hall, slumping lower and lower like I was coming in for a landing, and crashed into my bed.
One of Mr. Hall’s Pipers roared overhead. Over the years I’d grown to love the sound of planes approaching the runway and just clearing the treetops above our trailer. I prided myself on listening closely enough that I could identify the type of plane without looking. Today I felt like my mom, cringing and cursing at the racket and burying my head underneath the pillows.
The newspaper crackled underneath me as I curled into a ball and hugged my knees. Maybe Grayson was right and I really didn’t have a job with Mr. Simon. When Mark had told me I could fly for his uncle, I’d felt like a heavy weight had been lifted from my chest. Mr. Simon could train me on the specifics of crop dusting. I didn’t want to fly a crop duster my whole life, but I could work my way through college by taking courses during the off-season and flying during the growing season—and I would rack up a huge portion of the flight hours I needed for my next certification. It had never occurred to me until Grayson brought it up that Mark was lying.
But of course he was lying. I heaved myself up from the bed and trudged back into the combination kitchen and den. A blanket lay rumpled anyhow on the sofa where Mark had slept last night. All his worldly possessions were piled in the corner where he’d dumped them when my mom first said he could stay: garbage bags full of clothes, several rifles, and a plant light for growing marijuana indoors. He had not told me he grew marijuana, but boys his age did not grow tomatoes. Mark had told me what I wanted to hear in exchange for the prospect of sex and a free place to stay. He hadn’t forked over any cash to help with the rent, and now I doubted this had ever been his plan.
Both hands pressed to my mouth, I tried very hard not to panic. I knew the airport up, down, and sideways, and there were no other jobs.
On the bright side, I was all set to graduate from high school in a month and a half. I was one step ahead of my mom. And I hadn’t gotten pregnant. Two steps ahead of my mom. And I had a commercial pilot’s license.
With no paid experience as a commercial pilot. And my only solid reference was dead.
I longed for Molly. Even if I’d had a phone, I wouldn’t have called her. I refused to be that needy friend. I mean, I was that needy friend, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to whine on the phone to her and make it worse. Sometimes she dropped by, though, and took me for a drive. I listened to her talk about her problems, and maybe after a while, when there was no way I could be accused of taking and taking and taking without giving, I might mention one of my problems. That wasn’t happening tonight. She and her rich friends were at a beginning-of-spring-break concert. Even if I’d been able to afford it, I wouldn’t have gone. Her friends didn’t like me.
Molly or no Molly, moping would do me no good. The thing that bothered me most about my mom was that every time something went wrong, she went through the same motions, expecting different results. I needed to think out of the box.
But my mind was empty of ideas, my stomach empty to the point of nausea. For breakfast I’d eaten a pastry from the machine in the airport break room. For lunch I’d had a pack of crackers. In the back of my mind I’d been thinking Mark would have returned from the beach when I got here. But if he did show up soon, I wouldn’t ask him to drive me to the grocery store now. Not after what Grayson had told me. And the closest convenience store was a two-mile walk, which hadn’t seemed so bad on other days but loomed tonight like the distance to China.
I opened every kitchen cabinet and found salt, cayenne pepper, and one beef jerky stick that had expired two years ago. It must have come with us the last time we moved. That was pretty bad, when your beef jerky expired, because it was manufactured to last through the apocalypse. The refrigerator held ketchup, mayo, and one unopened case of beer, which Mark had deposited when he’d come in late last night.
I opted for a beer. I sat with it on the couch, in the dip hollowed out in the cushion by one of my mom’s weightier boyfriends, and stared at the wall where the latest huge high-def miracle of a TV had been until earlier this week. My first-, second-, and third-grade photos stared back at me.
The beer smelled like vinegar and tasted like dirt. I felt a lot better after I drank it, so I had another.
I was on my third beer and feeling completely rejuvenated when Mark’s truck turned from the highway onto the gravel road through the trailer park. I didn’t have superhuman hearing. The trailer walls were thin and let in everything. I knew it was him by his favorite country band blaring from the open windows. My gaze shifted from my school photos on the wall to Mark’s pile of shit on the floor.
Suddenly I was seeing it through Grayson’s eyes, or Molly’s. There was a reason I never let Molly in the trailer.
I didn’t want Mark in here with me either. But he lived here. The den/kitchen walls collapsed around me like the shrink wrap Mr. Hall had used to package gadgets and tools for storage.
I jumped up and jerked open the door. The sun was low behind the trees, but the sky was still bright compared with the murky trailer. I took my shades from the neck of my T-shirt and put them on, then started down the stairs.
I’d never drunk much. I didn’t want to flow into the same crowded pool as all the people around me and drown. Two and a half beers was quite a bit for me—obviously, or I wouldn’t have forgotten I was still holding one—and I worried about my balance as I descended the wobbly cement blocks. I felt my face color at how Grayson would stare in revulsion at a cement-block staircase outside a mobile home.
Then I felt a new wave of embarrassment that I was obsessing about Grayson. Mark would see my flushed face, think I was even drunker than I was, maybe try to take advantage of me. I was very thankful I was wearing sunglasses and he wouldn’t be able to see my eyes.
The music came closer and closer, inciting the pit bull to riot, until Mark’s enormous pickup truck with roll bars and fog lights weaved across the gravel road and stopped right in front of me. A couple of bare-chested guys from school waved to me from the payload. I waved back halfheartedly.
Mark slid out of the driver’s seat. His friend Patrick was in the passenger side. Patrick didn’t fit in with these guys. He was wearing a shirt, for one thing, and the shirt still had both its sleeves. Sometimes I wondered what he was hanging around Mark for. Pot was a good guess.
A girl sat in the middle. Her hair was bleached blond and her roots were black. Not every girl looked good as a blonde. I had learned this lesson from observing my mother. The girl wore one of Mark’s plaid shirts, tied beneath her big boobs in a tiny bikini. Judging from what I’d seen at school before Mark graduated, she fit his usual taste in girlfriends. Which was not a compliment. And which did not say a lot for me, either.
“Leah!” he exclaimed, rounding the hood of the truck, staggering a little. I shouldn’t have worried he would notice how soused I was. He was drunker than me. He slurred, “What are you doing home?”
His use of the word home made me cringe. His question made me mad too. “This is when I always get off work,” I said. He would have known this if he didn’t stay out so late partying every night.
But I looked past him at the girl in the front seat. She’d scooted away from Patrick now that she had more room. Which meant she wasn’t with Patrick. And Mark hadn’t wanted me to see her. He’d thought I would be gone.
Shocker: I didn’t care. Things had not been great between Mark and me, but I was shocked at how relieved I felt to see this girl wearing his shirt. A few girls at school had found out he was staying with me. They’d told me how lucky I was that my mom let my boyfriend stay with us. They had no idea.
Mark staying with me was not fun. It felt crowded. I’d dreaded walking home from the airport at night. I’d wanted him to drive me to get dinner tonight, because I was hungry, but also because that was an excuse not to get too friendly again in the long expanse of time before bed. He went out partying but he always came back. He never went away completely.
Strangest of all, although Grayson had not come through the chain-link fence to the trailer park and likely never would, his gaze had followed me. I was seeing everything through his eyes now. I had no chance with a boy like Grayson, but he had ruined Mark for me.
Mark was staring at the can in my hand. “You didn’t get into my beer, did you? I just bought it last night. That’s what we stopped by for.”
This rubbed me the wrong way, probably because there was nothing else in the fridge. “You told my mom when you moved in that you would help with rent. You haven’t helped with shit, so I took three beers and we’ll call it even.” My angry words made me even angrier and gave me the courage to add, “I want you to move out.”
“What?” Mark glanced over my shoulder at the girl in the truck, then turned back to me. “Why?” He was very drunk. There was no more denial. He started backpedaling immediately. “Aw, Leah, c’mere.” He pulled me into a hug.
I lingered in his arms for a moment, relaxing with my cheek on his hot, sunburned shoulder. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d needed a hug.
The girl’s cackle rose above the country music and the noise of the idling truck.
I pulled away. “I want you to move out,” I repeated.
“Your mom said I could move in!”
“My mom isn’t here.”
He rolled his eyes. “Is this about flying? You think I was lying because we haven’t talked about it again. I’m going to take you up.”
Would I let him continue to stay with me if he promised I could still have the crop-dusting job? I wasn’t sure. “When?” I pressed him.
He frowned at me. “When, what?”
“When are you taking me up? Last week you said tomorrow.”
He shook his head, then blinked a few times as if shaking his head had disoriented him. “Tomorrow’s not good.”
“Tuesday, then,” I insisted.
“Tuesday’s not good either. Later in the week, though.” He put his hand on my arm. “I can tell you’re mad, and you’ve had a few.” He glanced at the beer can in my hand again. “I’ll spend the night with Patrick”—by which he meant his new girlfriend—“and you and I can talk about this tomorrow.”