Angelica makes a wide circle high over the field. She and Bobby look so small, so light, it’s like gravity has nothing to do with them anymore. It’s beautiful the way she soars, the sunlight glinting on her decorated frame. I know why Bobby wanted to fly her now. I know why the captain did. It’s free up there.
Still, I want Bobby to stay over the field. Don’t fly over the trees anymore, I plead with him in my mind. You can’t land that thing in the trees. But my ESP must be broken because the next thing I know he’s soaring far out over the woods, farther away than we’d planned on him going. Come back, my mind shouts to him. Come back.
This time it works. Angelica turns and begins to swoop lower. But she’s still above the spiny tops of the trees. “Give me your binoculars,” I tell Padgett, and rip them from his hands almost before he can get the strap loose from around his neck.
Angelica’s coming down more steeply, but she’s still too far away for me to get a good look at Bobby, even with the binoculars. What can he be thinking? He hasn’t even been up that long. It’s too soon to try to land now.
Closer and closer he comes. Lower and lower. It looks like Angelica’s wheels might clip the treetops. Pull up, Bobby, my mind shouts. Pull up. He doesn’t, but misses the trees anyway. Now he’s heading straight our way, the sound of the engine growing louder but not loud enough to drown out the cheers from the crowd.
Finally, I get the binoculars zeroed in on Bobby’s face. I hope to see a look of ecstasy, the pure joy of knowing he’s beyond the flames that pulled Covell down, but that’s not his expression at all. Instead, his mouth is set in a straight, hard line, his eyes completely focused. His hands grip the controls as if they are part of the machinery of life itself. Every molecule in his body and all the energy in every one of those molecules strain toward one purpose—to keep on going.
He whooshes low over our heads, waving at us as he does. The cheers boom louder than ever. Then he starts climbing again, flying like he was born knowing how. He soars higher and higher, freer and freer, the sky welcoming him like a favorite son.
“Wow,” says Padgett. “He’s a flying ace already.”
“You should’ve seen the expression on his face,” I say, leaning into Padgett’s side. “He is one hundred percent B-A-D-D.”
He wraps his arm around me. “You do pretty good at that yourself.”
“Yeah,” I say, staring into the sky. “I guess it runs in the family.”
Tim Tharp lives in Oklahoma, where he writes novels and teaches in the Humanities Department at Rose State College. In addition to earning a master’s degree in creative writing from Brown University, he has also spent time as a factory hand, construction laborer, psychiatric aide, record store clerk, and long-distance hitchhiker.
Tharp is the author of Falling Dark, for which he won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, and two young adult novels: Knights of the Hill Country, which was an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults, and The Spectacular Now, which was a National Book Award finalist in 2008.
Tim Tharp, Badd
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