“Leah. Okay,” he said soothingly, a soft contrast with my voice, which had risen to a shout. He touched my lip with two long fingers, shushing me. “I’ve hit a nerve and I don’t know what it is. What are you trying to tell me?”
“I am trying to tell you to shut? Up!” I was so angry that my brain was flooded with it and I couldn’t even see him anymore. Everything was ruined now. I had known better than to let him into the trailer.
“Why didn’t you do like that?” He chopped his hand back and forth across his throat. “I thought that was the signal.”
I chopped my hand back and forth across my throat in turn. “Because I would be doing this all night!”
“Great,” he muttered. “Now I have to start all over.” He rolled out of bed, dragged me after him, and threw me over his shoulder.
“Hey!” I yelled. He was laughing, a sound I’d longed for so deeply that, despite myself, I laughed too.
He set me down on the counter in the kitchen and kissed me again.
I knew he was making a point of working his body over my body in exactly the way he’d done it when he first arrived. I knew he was being sweet and accommodating my hang-up. I tried to get into what he was doing. But my mind was still on the bathroom floor with the leaking pipes, the slow rot, the landlord who thought that’s exactly what my mother and I deserved.
In my mind I put Grayson back where he belonged, at his shack by the beach, furnished with nothing but a futon and a surfboard. Instead of the counter, he kissed me on the sand, and I rose to meet him again.
The radio startled me awake. Grayson must have set the alarm accidentally when he turned the radio off. I hit the button and nuzzled against him, glad to have another hour in bed with him, another hour of sleep. But he slipped from the bed. The streetlight through the window lit the edges of his hard muscles as he felt around on the dark floor for his clothes.
“Leaving?” I asked, trying not to sound disappointed.
“I have to get back to the other side of town before Alec wakes up so he doesn’t guess where I’ve been.” Grayson sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand over my hand. “I know this sucks, but I need you to keep dating Alec for me. Now that you know why, you’ll do that for me, right?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I slid my hand out from under his hand. But I managed to keep my voice ironically pleasant as I asked, “What if he tells me tomorrow that he feels like we’ve gotten really close, and he wants to take it to the next level? What if he wants to come back here with me alone? What if he wants to go all the way? Should I let him? Can you stop by the store and buy me a new pack of condoms just in case?”
He closed his eyes like I’d slapped him. His face was three horizontal lines: two eyes, grim mouth. “That’s not going to happen. Either he doesn’t like you very much and none of this has worked, or he’ll see this week as just the beginning, and he’ll ask you to our prom next weekend.”
“Your prom!” High school stuff seemed a million miles away, especially for Grayson and Alec’s foreign town that really was eighty miles from here. “I hope you don’t expect me to go to Alec’s prom with him.”
“If he asks you, yes.”
“Then what if he wants to make prom night super-special?”
He looked out the window, his high cheekbones and long nose lit by the moon, and seemed to be considering it.
“That’s it,” I snapped. “You have officially lost your mind. I put up with this shit when I thought it was only going to last a week, and I didn’t know I was going to get tangled up with you. Now I’m through. Get out.”
He balled his fist and held it in front of his mouth. “Leah. We’re both mad, and it’s late, and we’re tired, and we just… we just—”
“What? You don’t even have a word for it, when you’re still trying to get me to screw your brother.”
He jerked up to standing then. He’d pulled his shirt over his head and was halfway across the dark room when he turned and said, “You don’t have to fake anything with him anymore. Just don’t tell him that I asked you to in the first place.”
“Oh! Thanks, Grayson, for clarifying that. You know, I’m beginning to wonder whether you only slept with me to get me to do what you wanted.”
He gaped at me. In the still dark, we could hear another man and woman outside a trailer up the road, screaming at each other.
Grayson’s hands were shaking as he touched one of his pointer fingers to the other. “I would not do that, Leah. To anybody.” He touched his middle finger. “And I especially wouldn’t do that to you. My God!” He extended his hand. “What was tonight, anyway?”
I could see tonight had meant as much to him as it had to me. And he was willing to throw every bit of it away in order to manipulate Alec, just like he’d always planned. I’d played this game when I thought I was the only one getting hurt. But I wouldn’t continue to play Alec. Why couldn’t Grayson see this was wrong?
“So you won’t do some immoral things to keep Alec out of the military,” I pointed out. “Other immoral things to keep Alec out of the military are perfectly fine.”
Grayson spread both arms wide, exasperated. “Yes!”
If Grayson didn’t see my point, I would make him see. “I’m going to tell Alec.”
“You are not,” Grayson growled.
“I’ll be at work at seven,” I warned him. “I’ll give you until then to tell him. If you don’t, I will.”
He balled both fists.
Put one to his mouth and one on his hip.
Seemed to be holding his breath.
Finally he stomped out of the room, down the hall, and out of the trailer. The pit bull became hysterical, but the aluminum door did not bang shut.
Staring at the poster of the beautiful Airbus floating in the Hudson, I knew I was right. I knew I would go through with my threat. Yet I wanted to call Grayson back. He was under so much pressure, but he hadn’t slammed my door.
I walked up the path and emerged from the trees onto the bright airstrip as usual. Nothing else was as usual this morning. Mark must have had an early night, because he was in Mr. Simon’s hangar, checking the fuel level in his Air Tractor. He whistled at me as I passed. I ignored him.
Molly was already out in the grass, unrolling a banner for Alec. But all the Hall Aviation planes were still there. First I swung around the doorjamb of the office and faced Grayson, grim behind the desk, his blond hair wet from a shower. I fought down the urge to go to him and embrace him and smell him. What I asked was, “Did you tell Alec?”
He glared up at me with pure hatred in his eyes. “No,” he said curtly.
“It was kind of late when we talked last night,” I said loud enough to make him cringe and look through the doorway to see whether Alec was listening. “Maybe you’re kind of fuzzy on this. I said I would give you until I got to work this morning to tell him, and then I would tell him.”
He squeezed all the blood out of his fist. His jaw went white too. He said very slowly, “I’m going to give you every opportunity not to do that.”
I flounced out of his office. Alec stood in the open doorway of his airplane, peering into the gas tank on top of the wing, just as Mark had been.
I called, “Alec, can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure thing.” He hopped down from the doorway and leaned against the strut. “What’s up?”
He was so handsome, grinning, round-faced and blond and blue-eyed and innocent, that I found myself faltering. What if he really had fallen for me, and my revelation crushed him?
“Wow,” I said. “I wanted to tell you something because I think you deserve to know, but this is a lot harder than I thought.”
He never stopped grinning. He didn’t even sound particularly sarcastic as he said, “You’ve only been pretending to like me? Grayson blackmailed you to do that, hoping I would cling to you instead of joining the military?”
“Yes,” I said on a huge sigh of relief. “He did tell y
ou.”
“Molly told me,” Alec said, and now I could hear the bitterness in his voice.
“Molly told you!” I exclaimed, glancing past his airplane to the field, where Molly stretched tall to hang a banner on the upright poles. “When?”
“Sunday night.”
Sunday had been the day Grayson first came to my trailer. Sunday night, Molly had taken me for a drive. “Alec, you hadn’t even met Molly on Sunday night.”
“I’ve known her for a long time,” Alec said self-righteously. “Sort of known her, but it seemed pointless to try to start something with her when I wasn’t in town that often. I knew I would be here this week, so Sunday morning I asked her out. That night she called me to say my brother was forcing her best friend to pretend to like me.”
My stomach twisted. No wonder Molly had acted so strangely all week. And when I felt like she’d betrayed me by dragging me to Francie’s party, that hadn’t scratched the surface of what she’d done to me.
“So you knew all along?” I murmured. “And you played along with it? Why, Alec?”
“Molly asked me to, for one thing,” he said. “She told me I could never let you know she’d spilled the beans. But it was all typical Grayson anyway. Underhanded. Breaking the rules. He convinced our mom that he’d changed. I realized Sunday night he hasn’t changed at all. I was curious to see how far he’d take it. And he’s been in love with you since the day you first walked onto this airstrip three and a half years ago. I thought it would be fun to make out with you and see how he liked getting double-crossed by his own brother.”
His voice rose as he said this. The louder he got, the faster my heart raced. I thought it couldn’t pump any faster, and then he told me Grayson had been in love with me for years.
But that didn’t fix any of this, or take away from the fact that Grayson had been manipulating us all.
“Alec,” I said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. And Grayson only—”
“It doesn’t matter what you meant, Leah,” Alec shouted. “I found Molly two years ago. I finally asked her out. But because of all this bullshit, it’s ruined now. She and I spent last night alone together, and she’s so convinced something happened between you and me that she’s not even talking to me now. Thanks for that.” He opened the door of his cockpit and climbed back up to look at the wing.
I didn’t want to leave things like this between Alec and me, but I wasn’t going to stand there and look at his feet.
I headed back down the tarmac. When I drew even with the upright poles, I waded through the long grass to Molly.
“Hey, chick,” she sang. She dropped the heavy end of a banner she’d been struggling with. A cloud of bugs lifted into the air. “What’s up?”
“Why did you tell Alec?”
As I watched, her face transformed from innocent teenager playing bad girl to a look of malice. I’d seen it on Francie’s face a few nights before. The only time I’d seen it on Molly was when she first confronted me about stealing Ryan from her two years ago.
“What you were doing was wrong,” she said, “and I was trying to warn him.”
“You knew why I was doing it,” I reminded her, “and when you told him, you were jeopardizing my whole flying career.”
“Well, maybe you don’t deserve a flying career,” she snapped. “Did you ever think about that? Maybe you don’t have good moral character. You forged your mother’s name. You shacked up with Mark. One day later, you tried to fool Alec into thinking you had feelings for him. You knew Ryan was dating me and you tried to steal him from me.”
“Is that what this is all about?” I demanded. “Ryan?”
“You’re supposed to be my best friend, but you scope out the ones I really like and steal them! Can’t I have anything?”
“I did not steal Ryan from you,” I said firmly. “He came on to me. I turned him down, and he spread it around school that he’d been with me anyway.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?” she exclaimed.
“Because you like the upside down,” I said. “The opposite. You think it’s cool to tell your friends that you go slumming with a poor girl. It makes you feel different and proud to lift me up from the ghetto.” I should have added the truth. When she thought I’d stolen Ryan, that had given me power and daring in her eyes. All I’d ever wanted from Molly was not to lose her. But I couldn’t tell her this. Not after everything she’d thrown at me.
“That’s what you really think?” she asked. “And you lied to stay friends with a bitch like me? It just proves I was right. I couldn’t trust you with Alec. You don’t have good moral character. You’re a liar.”
She was about to bend down and work on the sign again, like the conversation was over and I wasn’t standing there, but something over my shoulder caught her attention. I turned around.
Grayson waded through the grass after me. As he reached me, he held out a wad of bills and coins and dumped them into my cupped hand.
“I don’t want your money,” I told him. “I quit.”
“That’s for yesterday,” he said. “You’re fired.”
I turned and walked through the grass along a new trajectory, a diagonal that would spit me out on the tarmac closer to my trailer. Along the way I dropped a quarter in the grass and did not stoop to pick it up. Grayson and Molly had already lost interest in me and were screaming at each other, but I didn’t want to risk having them glance over at me and see me groveling in the dirt for a coin. Then it occurred to me that there was no reason for me to go home. There was nothing there to eat, nothing to read, no way to get out, and in two weeks I would be homeless.
In the shadows of Mr. Simon’s hangar, Mark was sitting in the cockpit of the crop duster, watching me approach.
I put a little extra swing in my walk and stepped over the threshold into his hangar. Sliding up to the open door of the cockpit, I whispered into the darkness, “Did I hear you whistle at me?”
“Normally you’d have quite a ride to the farm of the day,” Mark said into his mike as we bumped along the tarmac toward the end of the runway. “We spray farms as far away as three hundred miles. But since we’re taking the Stearman and you’re getting your feet wet, we’ll just buzz the folks near the airport. Do you really want a rush?”
His voice sounded strange in my headphones, precisely because it didn’t sound strange at all. He spoke the same as always. He wasn’t imitating Chuck Yeager or making any effort to sound like a cool, collected pilot. That’s when I had second thoughts about going up with him. But I couldn’t ask him to stop, taxi back to the hangar, and let me out just because his voice didn’t sound right. Not when this was the only chance I had left at a job flying.
“Yes,” I said.
He stopped at the end of the runway and ran up the engines, like he was supposed to. But he didn’t touch each instrument in the panel with his finger. He didn’t work his feet to make sure the rudders moved the way they should. I’d always felt a little silly going through these motions so methodically, the way Mr. Hall had taught me, like the rudders were suddenly going to quit working. Then I heard Mr. Hall in my head, reminding me that if something went wrong in the air, I couldn’t pull over. Clearly Mark had never received this warning. Or he didn’t care.
Aren’t you going to test the rudders? kept forming on my lips, and I kept brushing it away like an annoying bug. I had a vision of myself trapped in the back of this crop duster like a sardine in a can while Mark slung us all over the sky. But I’d never seen how he flew on a job. He was probably perfectly safe. I tried to picture what Grayson would do in this situation. If he needed a job flying a crop duster, he wouldn’t second-guess Mark’s prep at the end of the runway.
Of course, he wouldn’t walk up to Mark in the hangar and ask whether Mark had whistled at him, either. But Grayson would never need a crop-dusting job. Grayson and I were so far apart that we had nothing to do with each other. Thirty years from now, if a rumor ran around the airport
that we’d had a one-night stand, we would still be so far apart that nobody would believe it.
Mark announced our departure over the airport frequency in his usual lilting tone, laughing at the end. His voice sounded louder as he released that button and talked only to me. “Get ready for the ride of your life, Leah. Later tonight, that is. The flight will be fun too.”
My head jerked back against my seat as he accelerated suddenly. My stomach turned over and over as I processed what he meant: we would have sex later because he’d taken me flying. I wished I hadn’t marched straight from an argument with Grayson and Molly and Alec into Mark’s hangar. But what else was I going to do, go home?
The plane sped past the huge hangars on that end of the runway, past Mr. Simon’s hangar. Alec had joined Grayson and Molly at the upright poles in the middle of the field. Grayson and Alec shouted at each other. Alec shoved Grayson. Molly tried to separate them, her ridiculous heavy work gloves hovering between them. They all stopped and watched the Stearman take off.
Mark took his hand from the stick and waved to them. There was no cabin in the biplane. Goggles and a small windscreen were the only things separating us from the open air. So the boys might have heard Mark as he shouted, “I’ve got your girlfriend, fucker!”
And then we were in the sky, zooming upward at a banner-towing angle. When I piloted a tow plane, I needed to fly at this angle to get the banner off the ground quickly. There was no reason for Mark to be flying this way, unless—
“I wanted you to feel some G’s!” he said into the mike. “Now, step one. Survey the area for tractors, combines, cows. We don’t want to hit anything when we’re down near the ground. Cows will fuck you up. Take a look.”
I was surprised he wanted to give me this demonstration so close to the airport. Other planes would be taking off and landing. But this was what I’d wanted, right? To feel a rush? I sat straighter in my seat and craned my neck to see past the lower wings. Rows of cotton flashed beneath us fast as strobe lights, unbroken all the way to the forest. “I don’t see anything,” I said.