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.”
I meant for her to laugh at this, but she stared out the windshield, tapping one finger nervously on the steering wheel. “So, about these Hall boys. Are you in love with Alec?”
“What? No.” As I said this, we passed the convenience store. I was always amazed how little time it took to drive here when it took forever to walk here.
“Are you in love with the one who thinks you’re a whore?” she asked.
I snickered at the way she’d put it. Then I realized I shouldn’t be amused, because the way she’d put it was pretty accurate. “Grayson. No.” My skin tingled as I said his name, which was just stupid.
“I can’t put my finger on it, but you’re in love with somebody.”
I fished in her purse at my feet, found a clove cigarette, and lit it. “I’ve been watching them from afar for a while. The twins, and their father who died, and their older brother who died. I guess I’ve fallen a little in love with all of them.” One puff and the cigarette was making me sick. Mr. Hall was looking over my shoulder, telling me to put that garbage out. I stubbed it out carefully in an empty paper cup in her cup holder.
“So you’re nostalgic for their lost family, and you feel sorry for this guy. You’re making excuses to yourself for his poor social skills. But you can’t forget he’s blackmailing you into dating his brother. Worse, he’s blackmailing you into doing this dangerous job flying.”
“Well, I don’t know that it’s a dangerous job. Before Mr. Hall died, I actually wanted that job.”
“When Mr. Hall was running the show, yes. Now he’s not. With this inexperienced eighteen-year-old dude running the place, it’ll be even more like suicide than it was before.”
“I wouldn’t call it suicide.”
“You’ve described it to me, Leah. You’re flying this little tin can of a plane pulling this long, heavy banner it was never made to pull. And you’re fighting with the controls the whole time to keep the plane from stalling and plunging you to your death.”
“Technically, all of that is true, but a pilot wouldn’t phrase it so dramatically. If we did, we wouldn’t be pilots very long. Because that sounds like some crazy shit.”
“Exactly. And you said they’ve stripped all the instruments out of those little planes so they’re light enough to carry the banners. You’re flying without instruments, and that’s not dangerous?”
“They don’t take out all the instruments. The ones they’ve taken out, you don’t really need unless it’s cloudy or dark. I mean, yes, they’d be nice to have, but you don’t need them.”
Molly turned to gape at me.
I realized what I was saying did sound kind of lame. “Yes, I can hear myself,” I said. “Was that your next question? Yes.”
“Well,” she said, “since you love these guys so much, and you swear the job isn’t ‘that’ suicidal”—she took her hands off the steering wheel to make finger quotes—“I don’t see what the problem is. I mean, I understand your concern about the good moral character thing and your mother finding out that you forged her name. You’re just trying to keep your head down and your nose clean until you can get out of Heaven Beach.”
“Right.” We passed the grocery store. The few times I’d walked here to shop, the bags had pulled my arms out of their sockets, just like the heavy chocks on the tarmac, as I hiked back to the trailer. But if I could have driven here, I would have plopped the bags in the trunk and forgotten about them until I reached home. Yes, I was amazed at this miraculous invention called a car. On pretty much every drive Moll
y took me on, I was tempted to ask her to stop and let me get a few groceries. I never asked, though, and it never occurred to her.
“And maybe you have a little problem with authority—” Molly said.
“Who, me?”
“—so Grayson telling you what to do gets on your last nerve, especially when it involves whoredom.”
“Correct.”
“But if his business is going to be as short-lived as you say, can’t you just ride it out and then go back to your airport job on the ground? I don’t see why you’re so upset at losing the crop-dusting job with that jerk. You’ve flown before but you’ve never had a job flying. Why do you need one now?”
“Because every type of pilot’s license has an age requirement, plus a requirement for the number of hours you’ve flown.”
“And a pesky requirement for good moral character.”
“That’s only for the airline pilot’s license. But yeah, that’s exactly what I’m up for next. For my commercial license I had to turn eighteen years old and log two hundred and fifty hours. At first I had to rent Mr. Hall’s airplane to get those hours. Airplane rental isn’t cheap. If he hadn’t started letting me use it for free, I wouldn’t have that license by now.”
“I see.”
Now we were passing the library. I checked out one or two books per visit so they wouldn’t be too heavy or bulky on the walk home. That way I always had a stack. I’d seen Molly check out a whole stack before. At once. And put them in her car.
“For the airline pilot’s license,” I said, “I have to be twenty-three years old, and I need to log fifteen hundred hours. Now that Mr. Hall is gone, that’s another twelve hundred and fifty hours of renting an airplane. Plus, if any airline is going to hire me, I need a college degree. How am I going to pay for all that in the next five years, Molly?”
“Hell if I know.”
“I’m going to get a job flying. Then I fly for free. I fly a lot and log a lot of hours. And I get paid more than minimum wage.”