“Are you drunk?” Grayson asked.
“No,” I said haughtily. “That, among other things, is a condition of my employment.”
“Stoned?”
“No.”
“Then why did you get within a hundred feet of Mark?”
“I didn’t know he was out there,” I said. “And I can’t imagine why he’s still after me.” The massive front door of the mansion opened. Alec and Molly stepped out. The way they tossed sentences at each other and jerked their heads away, they looked like they were arguing. I wondered what Molly and Alec had to argue about.
“Have you seen yourself in those shorts?” Grayson asked me. “I’m beginning to think you really don’t know.”
I leaned around the headrest to face him in the backseat. “Know what, Grayson? That nobody will hire me just as a pilot? That all my flying jobs come with a side order of sexy times? Yeah, I’m beginning to figure that out. Not that you’re to blame.”
“God!” Molly was saying to Alec as she got into the backseat and he sat down in the front. But as soon as Alec started the engine and rolled down the windows to let the heat escape, Francie skittered out of the mansion with her minions behind her, pointing toward the car.
“Go, Alec,” Grayson said quietly.
Francie’s long, straight, glossy locks bounced around her shoulders as she stopped by my door and screamed through the open window at me. “What are you trying to do, start a fight and bring the cops to my party? This is why I don’t invite trash.” She peered past me into the car. “Molly, this is why I don’t invite your trashy friend. Do not bring her near me again.” She called across me to Alec, “You’d better be careful. You’ll definitely catch something.”
Her friends behind her laughed. More and more people were streaming out of the mansion to hear what Francie would say to me: all the girls who were actively mean to me in the hall and the bathroom and PE, the whole reason I never ventured to the lunchroom, and now a lot of other people too, who had never given me a second glance but were realizing now who the trashy girl was that everybody had been talking about. I’d felt safe at school when those girls and certain boys weren’t around. Now I wouldn’t be safe anywhere.
As my world crumbled around me, I opened my mouth to insult Francie back. I had no idea what would have come out. Through long years of practice, I was pretty good in these situations, though there was no way I could hurt her as badly as she’d hurt me. Making fun of a girl for being rich didn’t have the same zing as bullying her for being poor.
Before I could say anything, Molly exclaimed “Francie!” in a truly shocked tone.
But Alec drowned her out. “That is a nasty thing to say.” His voice was louder than I’d ever heard it when he wasn’t trying to talk over engine noise. “This town has gone to seed since I left.” He hit the button to close all the windows. As a glass barrier rolled up to protect me from Francie, he threw the car into reverse to back out, then jerked it forward.
I watched Francie in the side mirror. She posed on her lawn, gaping in shock, half the school behind her. Her dear friend Molly couldn’t shut her up, but an adorable boy from a different town had been able to make her see herself for what she was. Or, more likely, he’d just embarrassed her into silence temporarily.
As he turned from the driveway onto the main road, he bit out, “What did you bring Leah here for, Molly?”
“I warned y’all Leah didn’t want to come!” Molly said. “I told you that’s why she was dressed that way, and you didn’t seem to mind then.”
“You didn’t tell us that girl would come after her,” Alec said.
“I’ve never seen Francie act that way!” Molly protested. “I knew she didn’t like Leah, but I thought that was because Leah can be kind of brusque, in case you haven’t noticed. Did Leah tell you what she said to Francie’s friend inside earlier? It was a doozy.”
“That’s because Francie followed Leah.” Grayson was speaking for the first time. “I told you that before. It was obvious they were waiting to corner her. That’s why I sent you after them.”
“Well, what do you expect?” Molly snapped. “Did you think Francie would welcome Leah to the party and compliment her on her cute outfit? Leah’s dressed like a hooker.”
“Hey,” Alec said disapprovingly. At the same time, Grayson said, “I think she looks nice.”
I turned around in my seat and glared at Grayson, furious with him for manipulating me and getting me into this whole ill-fated date in the first place. “I hope you’re enjoying this.”
He stared back at me, lips parted, brows raised, looking almost apologetic.
I shifted my go-to-hell look to Molly. “And I’m sorry you’re not enjoying it. You told Grayson and Alec last night that you decided to be my friend instead of sticking with Ryan because I’m so fun and brazen for a poor girl. Now you’re saying you don’t want me to dress like a whore and stick up for myself when you drag me to a party thrown by your bitch friend who hates me and calls me trash to my face every time she sees me. You need to make up your mind, girlfriend, how you like your charity case.”
Delicate brows pulled low in a scowl, Molly took a long breath. She was going to tell me I was right. She didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. My heart was breaking already, but I wasn’t going to be used as anybody’s emotional punching bag—not Francie’s, not Molly’s.
Only Grayson’s. And only while he made me.
Instead, Molly slapped her hands over her face and burst into tears. Her sobs were loud at first. She tried to contain them, holding her breath, and ended up with a case of the hiccups.
Grayson could have slipped an arm around her to comfort her. I didn’t want him to, but that would have been humane. He chose the low road: “This is so awkward. You’re still coming to work tomorrow, right, Molly? I told you, no drinking this week, and no drama.”
“Really?” I shouted at him. “I’m about to lose my best friend and it’s still about work for you?”
“Yes, it’s about work for me,” he said. “I’m your boss.”
At the same time, Molly wailed, “You’re not about to lose your—” She hiccupped. “Please, Leah, you’re not about to lose your—”
“Molly, you would deserve it if you did,” Alec muttered. I could tell from the way he was looking in the rearview mirror that he was watching her.
“And what about you, Leah?” Grayson accused me. “You didn’t tell us Mark Simon would be at the party.” I felt his hand on my shoulder. “You promised me he wouldn’t come after Alec.”
I turned around again and frowned at Grayson. “I promised you no such thing. I told you Mark wasn’t dangerous.”
“He came after you, and Alec and I had to save your ass. In effect, he came after Alec.”
“Alec and you did not exactly have to save my ass,” I muttered at the same time Alec said with uncharacteristic bitterness, “Shut up, Grayson.”
We rode in silence for several minutes, except for the country music on the radio, and Molly hiccupping.
“I don’t know what you girls have going on with each other,” Grayson said quietly. “I think it would help if we all were more honest with each other.”
Molly snorted.
I glared at her, terrified all over again that Grayson would guess I’d told her about seducing Alec. Grayson glared at her too, and Alec continued to stare hard at her in the rearview mirror.
“Pardon me,” she grumbled.
The closer we got to her house, the more I worried. I still believed I was her charity case. But whatever her motivation for calling me a friend, I called her a friend because I was more myself around her. I relaxed more, laughed more. I wasn’t willing to throw that away over one party. Our relationship was a delicate balance. I shouldn’t have tipped the scales by telling her how I really felt.
At her house, she got out and slammed the car door without a word. I got out too and reached for her hand. She didn’t swing it playfully as we walked to
her front door, but she didn’t pull away, either. On the porch, I closed the distance between us and hugged her. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said so somberly that I believed her. “I honestly didn’t think Francie would do that. And even if she did, I had no idea you cared.”
Fair enough. Molly was so popular that girls never told her to leave their parties. She probably hadn’t been trying to be mean to me. She simply had no clue what my life felt like, and she never would.
“I’m drunk,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She backed up and put her hand on the doorknob. “I will have regained some of my IQ points by tomorrow, and we’ll talk.”
“Deal.” I laughed, so relieved that the Molly I loved was coming back. But as I gently closed the door behind her and walked to Alec’s idling car, I knew everything was all wrong. We’d never had an argument like this before, not since we became friends in the first place. Something had come between us. It had to do with the boys. And we’d broken the most important unspoken rule of our bond. We shouldn’t have told each other we were sorry.
Back at the car, Alec covered my hand with his on the seat between us, not like flirting with me but like comforting a friend, and I gave him a small smile.
Grayson immersed himself in his phone all the way to the airport. We dropped him off at the hangar. He didn’t climb into his truck immediately. He unlocked the side door of the hangar.
“Is he really staying here that late to finish paperwork?” I asked Alec.
“He did last night,” Alec said. “Tonight he’s worried about the airplanes in the storms.”
On the short drive from the airport to the trailer park, I tried and failed to think of something to say. The night had been full and there was plenty to discuss, but every subject seemed touchy between Alec and me.
And I was so bone-tired. Maybe flying all day had fatigued me. Spilling my guts about my lack of a family. Unsuccessfully skirting Francie. Fighting with Mark. Nearly losing Molly. Pining after Grayson and hating myself for doing it.
“May I walk you to your door that is too an actual door?” Alec asked.
I laughed, trying not to sound nervous. I didn’t want to kiss Alec anywhere, but especially not at my door. “Can we stay in the car for a minute instead? The dog will calm down eventually. If we’re standing outside, he won’t.”
“Okay.” Alec parked in the dirt clearing and turned off the engine. Into that silence, the noise of the trailer park flowed: the pit bull having a fit at the end of his chain, the wind tossing the trees and making the joints of the metal trailers screech, a couple standing in the road and cursing at each other. Staying in the car parked in the dirt yard was awkward. I should have told Alec to come inside the trailer. But I wasn’t going to do that.
He cleared his throat. “I wanted to ask you something.”
Uh-oh. Every time Alec had asked me something tonight, I’d wished he hadn’t.
But I said, “Okay,” and grinned at him, like if I grinned hard enough, the hard ball of dread in my stomach would dissolve. I hoped he didn’t ask to get serious with me, physically or emotionally, because I didn’t know what I would do if that happened.
“It seems like you have two modes,” he said. “One is a giggly, flirty mode. The other is a no-nonsense pilot mode. They never mix or cross. You’re like two different people. Did you know you do that?”
My heart raced. I tried to talk myself down from panic. Alec hadn’t figured out I was putting on an act with him. He’d known me for a long time and had observed me acting different ways over the course of years.
I shook my head no. “I’ve been told that I do that, though.” I glanced slyly over at him. “Which one am I doing now?”
“Flirty mode.”
“Which one do you like better?”
“Definitely flirty mode.” He grinned at me. “Come here.”
The lead-up was so sweet and sexy. If I’d liked him romantically at all, I would have enjoyed his kiss. But as it was, the only thing good I could say about it was that it was fifty percent shorter than his kiss the night before.
He gave me one more peck on the lips and backed away. “Anyway, here’s the reason I asked about your modes.”
If I’d known he wanted to have an actual conversation, I would have drawn the kiss out longer.
“I have trouble reading you sometimes,” he said. “You have these two personalities. I never know which one I’ll be talking to. They get offended at different things. Then, at the café, you told us why you want to fly, and that was so…”
He looked out the windshield at the palm trees swaying violently in the wind.
“Honest. Finally. Maybe for the first time ever.” He looked straight at me.
I shrank back.
“I jumped on that and asked you about your dad,” he said. “And then, when you got mad… I’m really sorry about that. I thought about it later and realized that wasn’t a question I should ever have asked anyone. It’s just that you fooled me, because flirty Leah wouldn’t have minded. Anyone can ask her anything. No-nonsense Leah minded. A lot.”
I laughed. “She did.”
“Forgive me.”
“I forgive you.”
I hoped all this forgiveness would equal a good-bye, but he still walked me to the door and gave me another kiss. A short one, and then I was inside my trailer that smelled like a basement. I removed my slutty makeup and clothes and cuddled in bed to read myself to sleep, listening to the clock-radio yammer about a tornado one county south.
I knew from watching TV during tornado warnings in the past, back in the heady, luxurious days of owning a television, that the meteorologists liked to say, “If you’re in a trailer home, get to your safe place.” Like there was a safe place for me. What was I supposed to do without a car, go outside and lie in a wet ditch, waiting for the pit bull to jerk out of his collar and tear me to shreds? This time I even turned off the radio. Why bother? A tornado probably wasn’t going to hit me. And if it did, I was going to die. Hunkering next to the toilet wasn’t going to change that when my trailer home wrapped around a tree with me inside it.
Most of my life was a huge effort to look like everybody else. Occasionally I realized there was no point in making the effort, and there was a certain delicious luxury in giving up entirely. This was one of those times, I decided, as the tornado sirens woke me. They were spaced throughout the town, but of course the city planners put one smack in the middle of the trailer park, because people out here wouldn’t complain when it rang in our heads, much as we didn’t officially complain about the airplanes screaming overhead. I lay in bed, holding on to either edge of the mattress. The wind shook a palm frond in front of the streetlight streaming through the window.
People who lived in houses said the noise of the rain was soothing. In South Carolina in the springtime, the rain pounded so hard it hurt. The sound on the metal roof of a trailer was a special kind of torture. The additional sound of a train, the tornado noise people talked about, would have given me such a rush churning through the forest.
I jerked up to sitting at a noise that trumped even the tornado siren and split the drum of the rain. Someone was pounding at the door.
I stumbled through the dark trailer, heart thumping, certain someone had gotten caught in the storm and was coming to me for shelter. Who? Nobody would come to me for help. Maybe my mom’s boyfriend, Roger, had dropped her off and she had lost her key. Or Mark was using the cover of the storm to trick himself inside. My instincts told me to pull more clothes over my tank top and boxers I’d been sleeping in, but I couldn’t spare the time if someone was in trouble.
“Who is it?” I shouted.
“Grayson!” He pounded the door again, a single blow that shook the metal walls. I jumped backward in surprise, then moved forward to jerk the door open.
He was soaked, his blond hair dark, rivulets of water streaming down his cheeks, his T-shirt plastered against his chest.
“Co
me on.” I put out one hand to drag him inside. There was an exception to my nobody-comes-in-my-trailer rule, apparently.
He hung back. “I’m already wet. There’s a tornado at the edge of the county. Get your stuff and let’s go.”
I ran back to my bedroom, able to navigate the dark much better now that it mattered. Saving myself from a tornado hadn’t been important. Now that Grayson was involved, the thought of the freight train tearing up the palm trees on its way straight for us made me sob. I shoved my feet into my flip-flops, grabbed my purse, and ran. I paused beside Grayson on the cement-block stairs long enough to lock the door. In the five seconds this took, I was already as wet as him. We jogged down the steps and through the yard, a floodplain of mud, to his truck.
The inside of the cab was a relief from the rain, but drops pounded the roof. As he ripped onto the gravel road, the raindrops turned to white streaks in the headlights. He yelled above the noise, “I called Alec to make sure he knew about the tornado. I asked him if he was with you, and he said no. I’d hoped you’d still be out with him.”
“No,” I yelled back, “he’s a perfect gentleman.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
I wondered what Grayson meant by this. He wanted Alec to keep me out all night until the public places closed and there was nothing left to do but go somewhere private and paw each other? Did he really intend me to do that with Alec, knowing I wasn’t into him?
The way Grayson was looking at me, it seemed that’s exactly what he intended me to do. As he paused at the highway, he glanced at me with a dark expression. Suddenly conscious of the soaked boxers and tank top I wore, I wanted to cross my arms over my chest, but I wasn’t going to let him intimidate me.
Finally he said, “It sounded like Alec was still out, though. Do you know where he went?”
“No.”
“And he didn’t sound particularly concerned about you. He told me he’d dropped you off and that you would hear the tornado siren and you’d be okay.”