one
September
In each South Carolina town where I’d lived—and I’d lived in a lot of them—the trailer park was next to the airport. After one more move when I was fourteen, I made a decision. If I was doomed to live in a trailer park my whole life, I could complain about the smell of jet fuel like my mom, I could drink myself to death over the noise like everybody else who lived here, or I could learn to fly.
Easier said than done. My first step was to cross the trailer park, duck through the fence around the airport, and ask for a job. For once I lucked out. The town of Heaven Beach was hiring someone to do office work and pump aviation gas, a hard combination to find. Men who were willing to work on the tarmac couldn’t type. Women who could type refused to get avgas on their hands. A hungry-looking fourteen-year-old girl would do fine.
I answered the phone, put chocks under the wheels of visiting airplanes, topped off the tanks for small corporate jets—anything that needed doing and required no skill. In other words, I ran the airport. There wasn’t more to a smalltown airport than this. No round-the-clock staff. No tower. No air traffic controller—what a joke. Nothing to keep planes from crashing into each other but the pilots themselves.
My reception counter faced the glass-walled lobby with a view of the runway. Lots of days I sat on the office porch instead, taking the airport cell phone with me in case someone actually called, and watched the planes take off and land. Behind the office were small hangars for private pilots. In front of the office, some pilots parked their planes out in the open, since nothing but a hurricane or a tornado would hurt them when they were tied down. To my left, between me and the trailer park, stretched the large corporate hangars. To my right were the flagpole and the windsock, the gas pumps, and more of the corrugated metal hangars. The closest hangar was covered in red and white lettering, peeling and faded from years of storms blowing in from the ocean:
HALL AVIATION
BANNER TOWING: ADVERTISE YOUR BUSINESS TO BEACHGOERS!
AIRPLANE RIDES WITH BEAUTIFUL OCEAN VIEWS
ASH SCATTERING OVER THE ATLANTIC
FLIGHT SCHOOL
In August I had watched the tiny Hall Aviation planes skim low over the grass beside the runway and snag banners that unfurled behind them in the air, many times longer than the planes themselves. By listening to the men who drank coffee and shot the shit with Mr. Hall on the office porch, I’d gathered that Mr. Hall’s oldest son was one of the banner-towing pilots. Mr. Hall’s twin sons my age were there to help too some Saturdays, piecing together the movable letters to make the banners. Alec was smiling and blond and looked like the nice, wholesome guy Mr. Hall seemed to think he was, whereas Grayson was always in trouble. He was slightly taller, with his hair covered by a straw cowboy hat and his eyes hidden behind mirrored aviator shades. I couldn’t tell whether he was gazing at me across the tarmac when I sat on the porch by myself to smoke a cigarette, but I imagined he was. My whole body suddenly felt sunburned even though I was in the shade.
They were gone now—the twins an hour and a half up the road to Wilmington, where they lived with their mom, and the oldest son back to college. The tourists had left the beach. The banner-towing business had shut down for the season. It was the perfect time to approach Mr. Hall about a lesson. Hall Aviation brochures were stuffed into plastic holders throughout the office for visitors to take. I knew the high price for a lesson without having to mortify myself by asking Mr. Hall in person.
But saving the money, and screwing up the courage to go with it, had taken me a whole month. I’d finally marched over to Hall Aviation and banged on the small door in the side of the hangar with the oo of SCHOOL painted across it. When Mr. Hall hollered from inside, I’d wandered among the airplanes and tools to a tiny office carved out of the corner. I’d sat in the chair in front of his desk and asked him to take me up. He’d given me the worst possible answer by handing me a permission form for my mother to sign.
She hadn’t been home when I’d walked back from the airport that night. I had lain awake in bed, trying to figure out the right way to present the form to her. She still hadn’t come home when I’d left for school that morning. All school day, I’d worried about what I would say to her. I could point out that flying was a possible career someday. She talked like that sometimes, told me I would make something of myself. I was afraid her support would disappear when she found out I’d been saving money for an extravagant lesson instead of giving it to her.
The scraggly coastal forest out the school bus window still seemed strange now that I’d spent a month in Heaven Beach. As the bus approached the trailer park, I hoped against hope my mom would be home and I could get this over with. Even if she said no, at least my torture would end.
I slid one hand down to touch the folded permission form through the pocket of my jeans. My cash for the flying lesson was wadded beneath that. Losing the money at school would have screwed me, but I’d been afraid to leave the money or the form in my room, where my mom might find them if she got desperate for funds, like she did sometimes, and started searching.
As I moved my hand, I felt Mark Simon watching me from across the aisle. He knew about my money somehow. He could tell that’s what I had in my pocket from the way I fingered it, and he would take it from me. That was always my first thought. I’d had a lot of things stolen from me on a lot of school buses.
But I forced myself to take a deep breath and relax, letting go of my gut reaction. Mark wasn’t that poor. He was riding this bus because he worked for his uncle at the airport after school, not because he lived in the trailer park. And as I glanced over at him, his look seemed less like larceny and more like lechery. He thought he’d caught me touching myself.
I was getting this kind of attention lately, and it was still new. Back inland near the Air Force base, the last place my mom and I had lived, I’d flown under the radar. I wore whatever clothes she found for me. I’d always hated my curly hair, so dark brown it might as well have been black except in the brightest sunlight. It tended to mat. I had broken a comb in it before. Then one glorious day last summer, I’d seen a makeover show on TV that said curly girls needed to make peace with their hair, get a good cut, use some product, and let it dry naturally. I did what I could with a cheap salon on my side of town and discount store product. The result was much better, and I’d made myself over completely in the weeks before we’d moved.
At my new school, my makeover had the desired effect. Nobody felt sorry for me anymore because my mom wasn’t taking care of me and I didn’t know how to take care of myself. I took care of myself and I looked it. The downside was that I’d gotten stares like these from boys like Mark, which prompted girls to label me a slut and stay away from me. But I knew what I was. I held my head high. Exchanging sympathy for pride was a fair trade-off.