I locked up for the day, shut off the connection between the radio and the outside loudspeaker, and put the cell phone in a drawer. When I’d first started working here, I’d stayed until eight some nights because being alone here was better than being alone at home. My supervisor from city hall made me stop because I was running up the light bill. He didn’t know I needed a handout, and I wasn’t going to tell him.
Locking the porch door from the outside, I couldn’t help one more glance at the Hall Aviation hangar. Grayson’s truck and Alec’s car were still parked outside, and they’d opened the wide door facing the runway as if they actually planned to bring an airplane out and power it up. I didn’t care. I would fly for Grayson Hall over my dead body.
four
I turned my back on Mr. Hall’s hangar, water bottle in my hand, newspaper under my arm. Carrying my treasure, I walked most of the length of the airport, into the grass at the end of the strip. Where the chain-link fence turned a corner, I lifted the loose end of the wall of links and ducked underneath, onto the trail through the trees.
Most neighborhoods would be busy this time of day with the bustle of parents pulling in from work and greeting their kids. The trailer park would be busy later, at a partying hour. Right now it was quiet. Not a lot of people here had a regular job. A few of them were still sleeping off last night’s binge. For once, drinking the world away didn’t sound like a bad idea.
I walked just out of reach of the lunging pit bull. At my own trailer, I balanced on the cement blocks while I unlocked the aluminum door that had been kicked in four times since we’d lived here, three times by burglars, once by my mom’s ex-boyfriend Billy. After locking the door behind me, I walked through the creaking hall, slumping lower and lower like I was coming in for a landing, and crashed into my bed.
One of Mr. Hall’s Pipers roared overhead. Over the years I’d grown to love the sound of planes approaching the runway and just clearing the treetops above our trailer. I prided myself on listening closely enough that I could identify the type of plane without looking. Today I felt like my mom, cringing and cursing at the racket and burying my head underneath the pillows.
The newspaper crackled underneath me as I curled into a ball and hugged my knees. Maybe Grayson was right and I really didn’t have a job with Mr. Simon. When Mark had told me I could fly for his uncle, I’d felt like a heavy weight had been lifted from my chest. Mr. Simon could train me on the specifics of crop dusting. I didn’t want to fly a crop duster my whole life, but I could work my way through college by taking courses during the off-season and flying during the growing season—and I would rack up a huge portion of the flight hours I needed for my next certification. It had never occurred to me until Grayson brought it up that Mark was lying.
But of course he was lying. I heaved myself up from the bed and trudged back into the combination kitchen and den. A blanket lay rumpled anyhow on the sofa where Mark had slept last night. All his worldly possessions were piled in the corner where he’d dumped them when my mom first said he could stay: garbage bags full of clothes, several rifles, and a plant light for growing marijuana indoors. He had not told me he grew marijuana, but boys his age did not grow tomatoes. Mark had told me what I wanted to hear in exchange for the prospect of sex and a free place to stay. He hadn’t forked over any cash to help with the rent, and now I doubted this had ever been his plan.
Both hands pressed to my mouth, I tried very hard not to panic. I knew the airport up, down, and sideways, and there were no other jobs.
On the bright side, I was all set to graduate from high school in a month and a half. I was one step ahead of my mom. And I hadn’t gotten pregnant. Two steps ahead of my mom. And I had a commercial pilot’s license.
With no paid experience as a commercial pilot. And my only solid reference was dead.
I longed for Molly. Even if I’d had a phone, I wouldn’t have called her. I refused to be that needy friend. I mean, I was that needy friend, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to whine on the phone to her and make it worse. Sometimes she dropped by, though, and took me for a drive. I listened to her talk about her problems, and maybe after a while, when there was no way I could be accused of taking and taking and taking without giving, I might mention one of my problems. That wasn’t happening tonight. She and her rich friends were at a beginning-of-spring-break concert. Even if I’d been able to afford it, I wouldn’t have gone. Her friends didn’t like me.
Molly or no Molly, moping would do me no good. The thing that bothered me most about my mom was that every time something went wrong, she went through the same motions, expecting different results. I needed to think out of the box.
But my mind was empty of ideas, my stomach empty to the point of nausea. For breakfast I’d eaten a pastry from the machine in the airport break room. For lunch I’d had a pack of crackers. In the back of my mind I’d been thinking Mark would have returned from the beach when I got here. But if he did show up soon, I wouldn’t ask him to drive me to the grocery store now. Not after what Grayson had told me. And the closest convenience store was a two-mile walk, which hadn’t seemed so bad on other days but loomed tonight like the distance to China.
I opened every kitchen cabinet and found salt, cayenne pepper, and one beef jerky stick that had expired two years ago. It must have come with us the last time we moved. That was pretty bad, when your beef jerky expired, because it was manufactured to last through the apocalypse. The refrigerator held ketchup, mayo, and one unopened case of beer, which Mark had deposited when he’d come in late last night.
I opted for a beer. I sat with it on the couch, in the dip hollowed out in the cushion by one of my mom’s weightier boyfriends, and stared at the wall where the latest huge high-def miracle of a TV had been until earlier this week. My first-, second-, and third-grade photos stared back at me.
The beer smelled like vinegar and tasted like dirt. I felt a lot better after I drank it, so I had another.
I was on my third beer and feeling completely rejuvenated when Mark’s truck turned from the highway onto the gravel road through the trailer park. I didn’t have superhuman hearing. The trailer walls were thin and let in everything. I knew it was him by his favorite country band blaring from the open windows. My gaze shifted from my school photos on the wall to Mark’s pile of shit on the floor.
Suddenly I was seeing it through Grayson’s eyes, or Molly’s. There was a reason I never let Molly in the trailer.