Such a Rush

“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.”

“But if you can’t get a job flying,” she said, “maybe you keep your airport office job, work on your hours and your degree, but do it more slowly, as you save up your money. You don’t have to get that license the day you turn twenty-three.”

“True.” But if I didn’t get it at twenty-three, I would never get it. That life was too hard, always looking to the future and never living in the now, saving for an impossible goal. Thirty years later I would still be working in the airport office for minimum wage. There would be a rumor that I had been a pilot once, but most people wouldn’t believe it, looking at me.

“Yeah, I understand now,” Molly said.

Really?

“Maybe Alec and Grayson’s company won’t go under like you so gleefully expect,” she said, “and you can keep your job with them for a long time.”

“And continue to be the airport whore.”

“It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.”

We’d reached the begi

I said, “Tell me the rest of your story, which is not nearly as interesting as my story. You finally co

“Aw.” She poked out her bottom lip sympathetically.

“Will you see him again?”

She took in a slow breath and exhaled before she spoke, as if considering her answer. Which was not like her. “I think he’s going to be really busy this week.”

“But you were all excited about him a few minutes ago. You drove over to my mansion at eleven o’clock at night to tell me about him.” As I uttered the words, I realized they probably weren’t true. Maybe the boy didn’t even exist. Molly always had an excuse like this—she had to see me so she could tell me about a cute boy, or a dorky thing her mom had done, or something she’d seen on TV—but a lot of times when she came over, she was really checking on me, or getting me out of the trailer for a little while. Or casually driving me back to the café and feeding me, as if I didn’t know what was going on. I played along.

“I was excited about him,” she said, “but he seems awfully vanilla next to your whore story.”

“He does. Let’s trade places.” Now I was the one speaking before I thought. I sounded ungrateful and jealous and bitter. Which I was, but nobody wanted to hear that. I opened my mouth, thinking hard, forming a genuine apology.

She opened the console between us, brought out a white paper bag, and set it in my lap. “Warm chocolate croissant.”

“Oh!” My cry of ecstasy at a pastry was so heartfelt and genuine that I burst into laughter.

She glanced over at me with her eyebrows raised like she was worried about my sanity.

“Shut up.” I tore off a big bite of flaky croissant filled with gooey chocolate sauce and stuffed it into her mouth, purposefully smearing it across her cheek. “Mmph,” was all she said. Her mouth was full, and her dad’s chocolate croissants were that good.

And we were right to silence each other with food. It was better that we never apologized to each other. Then we’d be admitting that we were wrong and we owed each other something. That’s where people got into trouble.

“Look, genuine whores.” She nodded out the window at a couple of teenage girls crossing the street in front of us, both with bad blond dye jobs, both in ill-fitting, low-cut T-shirt dresses exposing the real or fake tattoos on their chests. One girl wore cheap heels and one was barefoot.

“How do you end up like that?” Molly asked me, not the whores.

I didn’t know whether they were really whores. There were plenty of whores on this end of town. But there were also lots of trailer park girls from farther inland, vacationing at the beach. Those girls and the whores looked about the same. Peering at these specimens, I decided they were tourists because they seemed happy.

As Molly pulled through the intersection, I changed my mind. The girls had reached the corner and were shouting at cars.

Talk about trading places. I wouldn’t even be trading if I were in those girls’ place. I would be taking a very small step. A girl ended up like that by growing up like me. She made the mistake of tangling with the other people around her. And she never ducked through that fence to the airport.

Not that it seemed to be doing me much good at the moment. I’d resisted working for Grayson. I was alarmed at being blackmailed. I resented having to throw myself at Alec. Yet in the end, I’d given in, hadn’t I? I wasn’t much better than those streetwalkers.

But the thought of reporting to the Hall Aviation hangar in the morning sent a little thrill through me. I would fly again for the first time in two months. Such a rush! I would get involved in Grayson and Alec’s game with each other. It was like starring on a TV reality show where I’d probably be publicly humiliated—but that was better than watching the show on TV at home, or not being able to watch it at all when the TV went missing and the trailer fell silent.

And I would see Grayson again. He needed me. He was using me. He didn’t have a crush on me, yet I could still feel his hand on my knee. Watching the whores shrink in the side mirror as Molly sped down the street, I put my own hand on my knee and rubbed my thumb back and forth, feeling that rush all over again.

six

I concentrated on that rush of feeling, relying on it to push me along, step by step, up the path through the trailer park, into the orange sunlight of early morning, across the long, wet grass that stuck black seeds to my ankles. I would see Grayson. I would fly a plane. Those were reasons to keep walking toward Hall Aviation and the begi

I’d fretted over what to wear: something i