Such a Rush

But envying Molly was a dangerous road for me. I knew better than to go down it. I turned to Alec and opened my mouth to change the subject.

“Why did you want to start flying in the first place?” Molly spoke before I could, looking at Grayson. So she had noticed us watching the plane.

Grayson gazed at her for a moment like he hadn’t quite realized she was talking to him. It shouldn’t have been a personal question, and Molly was not rude for asking it, but it was a personal question for Grayson.

Finally he said, “It’s such a rush. I mean, it’s exactly the kind of thing I love to do.”

“Adrenaline junkie,” Alec broke in, explaining Grayson to Molly.

Grayson kept talking as if Alec hadn’t spoken. “Flying is perfectly safe if you do everything right. If you make one mistake, you could easily die. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life—”

Alec laughed.

“—so I couldn’t believe my dad was letting me do this, and I felt lucky.” As Grayson said this, his gaze drifted toward the sky again, where the Super Hercules had disappeared. Now he looked back at Molly. “I still do.”

She nodded shortly and turned to Alec. “What about you?”

Alec shrugged. “I’ve always been around it. I can’t remember a time when my dad wasn’t flying, or when Jake didn’t want to fly. Grayson and I were always hanging around Jake, wanting to do what he did and fighting with each other to see who could do it first.”

It was mostly Alec, not Grayson, who wanted to be like Jake. I glanced at Grayson to gauge his reaction. He was looking at the sky again.

“But that sounds like you don’t really want to fly,” Molly told Alec. “It sounds like you fell into this, and if you’d fallen into something else instead, that’s what you’d do.”

Alec frowned at her. “Isn’t that true of any family business? I mean, is the guy who inherits the shoe factory thinking to himself, This is where I belong, and this is what my whole personality and all of my talents are pointing me toward? Or is it the luck of the draw? I can’t imagine doing anything else.” He turned to me. “How about you? Why did you want to start flying?”

A sudden gust of wind picked up a pile of recycled paper napkins on the table. I slapped my hand down on them to keep them from blowing over the deck rail to litter the sand. People cared about stuff like that on the nice end of the beach.

And I puzzled through what Alec wanted to know about me. Molly had asked Grayson why he wanted to fly. She had asked Alec. We were going around the table, yet I’d expected to be left out.

“Not because of family,” Alec prompted me, “but maybe because of location, since you live near the airport. It’s convenience for you, just like it’s convenience for me.”

“It’s not convenience for me.” I tried to prevent the words from coming out sour. I was on this date with Alec right now because I wanted so badly to fly. This was not what I’d call convenient.

“Then what is it?” Molly asked.

“Convenience got me over to the airport,” I acknowledged. “A job was available within walking distance of where I lived. Curiosity drove me to take that first flying lesson. And then I was hooked.”

“But why?” Alec seemed genuinely curious.

I paused, looking straight into his blue eyes—by mistake, really. I was used to glancing at Grayson and seeing nothing but aviator shades, with my own shades hiding my eyes so he wasn’t sure I was looking. Two people could do that when one was working for the other, or one was being blackmailed by the other. Two people couldn’t do that when they were on a date. Alec and I were supposed to be co

And I saw his i

I told him, “It was the first time in my life I felt like I was in control.” I paused, like he would get some profound meaning from that short statement.

He didn’t. He only nodded for me to go on. But his open blue gaze had grown a little wary. On a date, you shared your deep thoughts with each other, but not that deep. We were eating sandwiches, for God’s sake.

I couldn’t stop. I’d never really examined this, and now that I was, I was finding out something about myself. “I could see,” I said. “For the first time, I could see what most people never saw. I could see the whole town, and how I fit into it, and how far I would have to go to get out of it. I got such a rush, seeing that. And until that plane ride, I hadn’t realized how low I’d felt for years, because I didn’t have a high to compare it with.” My voice ended on that high note, giving away how desperate I’d felt, how frightened I now was of never flying again.

I found my fork and picked around in my salad. Without looking up, I said, “So, Molly. Why do you love to fly?”

Both boys laughed, thank God. Awkward moment over.

“Flying makes me yak,” Molly said.

“What does your mom think about you flying, Leah?” Alec persisted. “Is she proud of you?”

I munched a bite of lettuce and swallowed. “She doesn’t know I’m a pilot.”

Alec’s blond brows furrowed. “How could she not know that?”

“She’s gone a lot,” I said simply, allowing him to draw his own conclusions. Maybe she was gone on business. Ha! Or she was caring for a sick friend. I left the statement there and hoped he would leave it too.

Molly ensured that nobody would leave it there. She offered, “We’ve been best friends since we were sixteen, and I’ve never met Leah’s mother.”

“Really?” Alec asked, astonished. “How is that possible?”

“She is literally never home,” Molly said.

“She’s there sometimes,” I said, rushing to my mom’s defense. When Molly eyed me dubiously, I said, “Okay, she’s not there much, but that’s my fault. She used to take me with her on visits to see her boyfriends, or she would invite them over to stay with us. But when I was ten, we lived near the army base. She got with a guy who’d been to Iraq and had problems. He beat her. He beat his fifteen-year-old son who lived with him too. One night his son hit me, and then—”

I stopped. The three of them were gaping at me.

This was what they got for asking me about this shit during di

“It wasn’t so bad,” I backtracked. “I told my mom I didn’t want to go to her boyfriends’ places anymore. I could stay at home by myself, and she could go where she wanted. I knew when I said it that she would be gone a lot. I didn’t picture her being gone almost always.” I crunched a baked potato chip. Ignoring their eyes on me, I looked past everyone at the water.

The TV said you should ignore bullies and they would leave you alone, eventually. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Likewise, you would think rich kids would stop badgering their poor friend when she didn’t melt down about her home life. But the more calmly I answered, the more they kept after me.

“What about your grandparents?” Alec asked.

“What about them?” I asked. “You mean, why haven’t I gone to live with them?”

He nodded, but his eyes were getting wider. He was going to stop me and say this was too much information after all.

I kind of enjoyed telling them, “My grandparents kicked my mom out of the house when she got pregnant at fifteen. She had to drop out of school so she could get a job. Sometimes I think that experience did something to her, being thrown out on her own like that, because she’ll do anything to avoid getting a job now.”

“That was eighteen years ago,” Molly said.

I resented the challenging tone in her voice. How dare this privileged rich girl question my story? I asked her, “So?”

“So, your mom should have gotten over it,” Molly said.

“Some people have problems,” I said. “When something awful happens, sometimes people get stuck.”