Such a Rush

“You don’t want Alec off your case?” Molly asked sharply.

“Of course I do,” I said, “as long as Grayson doesn’t mind.”

She shifted her weight and blew her bangs out of her eyes with a big sigh. “I’m trying my best to help you, but it’s not always about you. It’s my spring break of my senior year too, and maybe I want to go to this party.”

And maybe I didn’t have to go just because she was going. I almost told her this. But she’d already convinced the boys this should be our outing of the night. I couldn’t back out now, stand Alec up, anger Grayson. I would have to go.

She knew why I didn’t want to. She knew I had to go anyway. Her understanding of my situation and sympathy for my plight lasted right up until she got tired of it and turned her back on me.

Which wasn’t a fair assessment. We’d been friends for a couple of years, and I couldn’t recall that she’d done anything like this to me before. Of course, there hadn’t been boys involved before, not since the begi

“Look, we’ll talk about it later, okay?” she said. By which she meant that we would not talk about it and we were going to the party that night. “Alec’s already in the air. I have to get this ba

That got me headed for the hangar again, and it wasn’t until I was halfway there that I realized she’d pointed me in that direction by baiting me with food, like I was a puppy. I didn’t know what to think about this girl I’d assumed I knew so well, suddenly set down in this place I knew so well, and acting like it was hers instead of mine, and these boys were hers.

But Grayson wasn’t hers. He’d made that clear last night. And he was standing outside the hangar, alternately glancing at his phone and gazing into the southwest corner of the clear blue sky. When he turned in my direction and saw me coming, he stared at me, or let me think he was staring at me behind his shades. Though the morning was cool, I felt sweat break out across my skin, whether his gaze was real or not.

But as I finally reached him, he was business as usual. “Watch out for the weather today.”

I tried to shake off the shivers he’d given me and act like a pilot. “You mean the storm system coming up from the Gulf?” I’d noticed it on the weather app when I used the airport office phone to talk to Molly the day before. The storm was angry, and its tornadoes had already torn up some towns in Mississippi. “It’s nowhere near us yet. It probably won’t get here until tonight.” It hadn’t even reached my mother, at a casino over in the mountains.

“Last Christmas, Dad had been watching that storm all day,” Grayson said, “and suddenly there was a wind advisory way before we thought. I don’t want anybody to get caught. Radio me if you run into turbulence you weren’t expecting. And if you see dark clouds, don’t wait for me to radio you. Come on in.”

I shrugged. I was all for caution, but he was being a little ridiculous. Shell-shocked from his own crash, I thought.

“Your breakfast is inside,” he said, nodding back toward the hangar. “When you’re through eating, before you check your plane and go up, could you take my truck and drive a ba

“I can’t do that,” I said.

“I’m telling you,” he said, “just do it before you go up. I’m keeping track of your hours and I’ll pay you overtime if you run over. No problem.”

“I can’t drive,” I said.

He pulled his hand back in surprise, keys jingling. “What do you mean, you can’t drive?”

I meant that nobody had ever taught me to drive, and it didn’t matter anyway because I didn’t have a car. But I wasn’t going down that road again. I was still pissed about trying to explain the washateria to Alec last night.

“You mean you can fly a plane but you can’t drive a car?” Grayson asked. “That’s crazy.”

I chopped my hand across my throat. This had been Mr. Hall’s way of telling us to kill the engine. I meant for Grayson to stop quizzing me on my home life. I’d had enough.

He balled his fist and squeezed until his hand turned white.

“Okay,” he said on a sigh. “Sorry. Go have something to eat.” He rounded the corner of the hangar and started his truck himself.

I walked into the darkness and feasted on strawberry Danish and eggs and ham, stuffing food into my mouth like a starving dog now that nobody was watching. The day continued to get better from there. I never missed a ba

Mr. Hall would have thought it was beautiful. In a Grayson-like outburst, he would have exclaimed, “Man, what a pretty day to fly!” and then settled with me in the cockpit for the ride. This time I hardly teared up, thinking of him. His memory made me happy.

My morning break didn’t coincide with Molly’s because she took a break while I flew, and she spelled out my new ba

I didn’t take my afternoon break with her. When I taxied to the hangar, Alec was sitting outside with his back to the corrugated metal wall of the building, smoking a cigarette and watching Molly struggle with the ba

“Welcome,” he said as I walked up. He patted the asphalt beside him like it was a plush seat. Giggling, I sank down. He offered me a cigarette and I shook my head.

He exhaled smoke away from me. “Beautiful day for flying,” he said, squinting into the sky. “Grayson’s already freaking out about the weather.”

“I think he’s nervous about the wind since his wreck last December,” I said.

“Is that what you think it is?” Alec asked. “I thought he was just being an overbearing ass.”

Weirdly, I wanted to jump to Grayson’s defense. He was being an overbearing ass, and not just about the weather. But somehow, while it was okay for me to think this, it wasn’t okay for Alec to say it.

Before I could open my mouth, Alec’s phone rang. He slipped it from his pocket, glanced at the screen, and gri

I put my hands behind me on the hot asphalt to push myself up. “Do you want me to—”

“Oh, gosh, no, sit down.” He pressed a button on the phone. “This is your favorite son speaking. How may I help you?”

Even though he’d told me he didn’t need privacy, I felt uncomfortable listening to his end of the conversation with his mom. I knew he and Jake looked like her, but the photo I’d seen of her had been decades old. As I pictured her now, she was a pudgy woman with cotton clothes like sacks and the same haircut she’d had in high school because it was easy and there was no reason to bother anymore, now that her eldest son was gone, and her husband was gone, who had cheated on her, and whom she had always loved.

I was basing this assumption on nothing. She might be slender and stylish with a professional job, a lawyer, suffering the loss of her son and sorry about her ex but already moving on, because her own life was important too. Either way, she was none of my business. I would never meet her. I’d cheapened this lady’s mourning with my nosey musings. I tried to relax and shut her out, but when I sat back against the corrugated metal building, I was shocked at the heat and sat up straight.