I’d never eaten an organic fruit as far as I knew, except maybe at Molly’s parents’ café. I wondered if they tasted different and whether I would be able to tell. I definitely hadn’t bought one. My mom would die twice if I paid that much for a banana. Grayson and I were from different worlds.
“You’ll spend all day every day breathing that crap,” he said. “Aren’t you worried about your health?”
I laughed. “Yeah. That’s why I’d rather spend my summer flying an airplane built this century.”
He gaped at me in mock disapproval. “We keep up the maintenance on our planes. We have to. You know the FAA says any plane has to fly like it did when it was built.”
“Yours were built in the 1950s.”
“It was a very good decade for airplanes. It never bothered you before. And you’re completely trained in banner towing. You didn’t pay anything to learn it. Isn’t Simon making you pay for training? A lot of those crop-dusting jackasses will charge to teach you how to do it. They’ll promise to hold a job for you. You drop thousands of dollars for training and then your job mysteriously disappears.”
I stared at him like he was an alien life-form. On what planet did an eighteen-year-old girl living in a trailer park have thousands of dollars to drop on anything, much less crop-duster training? I said, “No, I’m not paying for it.”
One of Grayson’s eyebrows tilted up sharply behind his sunglasses. “How’d you manage that arrangement?”
I thought I heard something ugly in his tone, but I didn’t want to call him on it without being sure. I asked innocently, “What do you mean? It’s not strange. I paid your dad for flying lessons and rented his airplane for a long time.” The rental and lessons had been cut-rate, but I had paid for them. Mr. Hall probably knew I wouldn’t have taken them otherwise. “He only let me use his plane for free after I agreed I’d fly banners for him. Pilots take care of each other.”
“No, my dad took care of you,” Grayson corrected me.
I’d thought so too. His dad had been kind to me because he’d missed the three sons who hadn’t lived with him fulltime for years and years. And I was not above turning this around and using it against Grayson if he wouldn’t leave me alone. I didn’t want to. I had more respect for his dad than that. But I absolutely was not going to let Grayson guilt me into working for him, only to close up shop and abandon me when it was too late for me to start over with another job flying this summer.
Exasperated, I asked, “Why do you want me to fly for you? There will be ten college guys hanging around at the beginning of the summer, begging you to hire them.”
“I can’t wait until then,” Grayson said. “We have contracts. My dad scheduled banners this week because he knew you and Alec and I would be on spring break. I need you tomorrow.”
I put my hands on my hips. “That is kind of short notice, Grayson.”
He opened both hands. For the first time he looked like the Grayson I’d known from a distance for three and a half years, the one who tried to talk himself out of trouble. “We only decided a few days ago that we were going to reopen the business.”
“Exactly,” I said. “You’re starting it on a whim, and that’s how you’ll end it. I can’t work for a whim. In case you hadn’t noticed, I need an actual job.”
“Right.” He folded his arms across his faded rock band T-shirt. He was tall and slim, and it wasn’t until moments like this that I noticed how muscular he was. His biceps strained against the sleeves of his T-shirt. But this was no time to admire his body. His body language told me he really was back to the Grayson I knew. He felt cornered, like his dad was shouting at him. Next came a counterattack.
“Tell me more about your actual job,” Grayson said. “You’ve talked to Mr. Simon about it, right?”
“No, I talked to Mark,” I said, suspicious. Grayson was driving at something. Granted, Mark was not the decision-making person in charge of Simon Air Agriculture, but he wouldn’t have told me I could fly for Mr. Simon this summer without checking it or okaying it. Would he?
Grayson nodded. “Mark told me this morning that he’s shacking up with you.”
I put several fingers to my mouth, something between shushing him with one finger and covering my mouth with my hand in horror.
A toilet flushed and then whooshed louder as the Admiral opened the bathroom door. I stood there with my hand to my mouth, watching Grayson fill the space in front of me with his own mouth in a hard line. I hoped the Admiral hadn’t heard what Grayson had said. The Admiral and I weren’t close, but I’d always assumed he thought I was a nice girl. Grayson thought I was not, I realized. I listened for the Admiral as I puzzled through it:
Mark was at the beach with his friends right now, but he’d flown a crop-dusting run that morning. (The Admiral’s footsteps sounded from the bathroom back to the break room.) Grayson’s truck had been at the Hall Aviation hangar early that morning too. (The Admiral fed coins into the vending machine.) Hall Aviation and Mr. Simon’s crop-dusting business used the same mechanic. (The Admiral’s M&M’s fell into the chute with a clank.) It was plausible Grayson and Mark had run into each other and talked.
“See you tomorrow, Leah,” the Admiral called in his normal voice, not the tone of someone who’d overheard what Grayson had said to me.
“Yes, sir,” I called back. As the front door of the office opened and shut behind me, I continued to watch Grayson and think. It was not plausible that Mark had walked up to Grayson and blurted that we were living together. “Did he say that?” I asked Grayson incredulously.
“Yes.”
“Did he phrase it that way?” After the initial shock of Grayson knowing more about me than I wanted him to know, I realized I didn’t need to ask. Of course Mark had phrased it this way, because Mark was turning out to be kind of an ass**le.
I only hoped that’s all Grayson knew, because there was more to the story. For years I’d stuck to my policy of avoiding Mark and boys like him. That became easier when Mark turned sixteen and stopped riding the bus, and easier still when he graduated from high school last December, a semester late. He worked at the airport every day, but mostly in the mornings and early afternoons when I was still at school. I might hear him announce himself over the airport frequency and watch him land an ugly Air Tractor, but our paths rarely crossed.