Such a Rush (13 page)

Grayson looked me up and down. He moved his head enough that I wouldn’t miss the tilt of his hat, and the provocative meaning behind it. “Ridiculous as that sounds, yes. Trust me, I have an excellent reason. You trust me, don’t you, Leah?”

“I thought I had made it very clear that
no.
”

“And Alec can’t know I told you to do this. If he finds out, I will make your life as difficult as I possibly can.”

Not if I made
his
life difficult first. I let out a frustrated huff. “Is this all because I didn’t say yes to your job in the first place?”

“No. I was always going to ask you to do this too. But when you didn’t say yes in the first place, you made me mad, and I went and found something to hold over your head. Now I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.” He took off his straw cowboy hat. I saw his hair so seldom that it always surprised me: how blond it was, almost as light as Alec’s, and how curly, whereas Alec’s was board straight. Grayson’s hair reminded me how young he was, even though he was acting like a boss, a manipulator, a god.

He passed the back of his wrist across his sweating brow, then put his hat back on. “You kicked Mark out, right?”

I frowned at Grayson. “What? Why?”

“Because you’re out here drinking beer. Let me guess. You asked Mark about the crop-dusting job. You found out he made it up, like I said. So you broke up with him. Is that what happened?”

I ground my teeth together, squeezed my eyes shut behind my shades, anything to keep from sobbing in front of Grayson.

“Hey, Leah, seriously.” His voice was soft and sweet like the spring wind. “He didn’t threaten to hurt you or anything, did he?”

I put one hand up to my temple, which had begun to ache. “No, but thanks for asking.”

Grayson nodded. “We talked about you for a while this morning. I thought he was lying to you about that job, but I don’t think he could fake the way he feels about you.”

I took the bait. “How does he feel about me?”

“Very strongly.”

I flared my nostrils in distaste. “I think he could fake that,” I muttered. “He was cheating on me anyway.”

“Doesn’t matter with Mark,” Grayson said. “My mother warned me about girls like you.”

I sighed the longest sigh. “Girls like what, Grayson?”

“Girls with crazy boyfriends. She says girls like you are bad news. I need to know whether you really are. I want my brother to fall for you, but I don’t want to get him killed.”

The back of my neck prickled with danger, something the pit bull did not sense for once, because he was silent. This was the second time today someone had warned me about Mark. I didn’t know him that well, honestly. He hadn’t gotten violent when he left. But I knew he’d repeated his final semester in high school because he’d been suspended so many times for fighting.

“Last year we played a pickup basketball game at the
hangar,” Grayson said, “and I beat him. Later that afternoon when we were both trying to land, he cut me off.”

“In the
air
?” I asked.

“Yeah. He didn’t announce himself. He came in right underneath me. It could have been bad. Of course, nobody was outside watching. I should have told my dad, but he would have blamed it on me and told me to grow up.” He balled his fist and tapped it on his knee. “I wanted you to work for me, Leah, but I also didn’t want you to take a job where you’ll be around that guy.”

“You said there
was
no job.”

“There isn’t,” Grayson insisted, “and if you double-check with Mr. Simon about it, you’re going to be embarrassed. Anyway, you have a job now.” He closed the distance between our chairs and stood over me again. “Tomorrow morning at seven.”

My stomach was doing flips. I reached for my beer on the stump.

He snagged it before I did and poured the rest on the dead palm fronds behind my chair.

“Hey,” I protested.

He crumpled the can in one fist. Then he crossed the yard, jogged up the cement-block stairs, and swung through the aluminum door.

“Grayson!” I yelled. But I didn’t run after him into the trailer. The only thing worse than him rooting around in there was watching him while he did it, and seeing his expression of pity. I kept my eyes on the door, and waited, and wished for that beer back.

He leaned out the doorway. “Where’s the rest of the beer?”

“Gone,” I said. At the beach. At a party. At Patrick’s brother’s house, where Mark and that girl were getting it on in the basement, having a lot more fun than me right now.

Grayson ran down the steps and jogged across the dirt to stop in front of me with his hands on his hips. “No more drinking tonight.”

I opened my hands to show him they were empty.

“Seriously. No hangovers. I’ve told Alec too. We’re not crashing any planes this week.” He crouched in front of my chair so he was on my level and we faced each other. “I’m going to leave now. Will you be okay?”

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even process anymore. My brain was too overloaded with Grayson, acting like himself but a million times worse because he was dragging me into his impulsive bad ideas this time; and Grayson, acting protective like a father.

When I said nothing, he reached forward and put his hand on my knee.

Electricity shot up my thigh and made my heart pump painfully.

Maybe Grayson felt the jolt too. He took his hand away. I could see my own shades reflected in his sunglasses, my dark curls sliding around my face in the breeze, my frown.

I finally guessed, “Yes? I’ll be okay.”

Satisfied, he stood. “See you bright and early,” he called as he crossed the gravel road and disappeared up the path. The pit bull lunged insanely.

I didn’t sit there long. Or maybe I sat there for a very long time. I was drunk. Twilight settled over the trees. But my heart raced. Although Grayson had left the trailer park, his gaze remained. I was seeing everything through his eyes again. I saw myself sitting alone in the dark, my knees pulled up to my chest in the plastic chair, watching the dust sparkle and slowly settle in the dusk, listening to the pit bull strain against his chain.

I moved back across the yard, into the trailer, and locked the door behind me, muffling but not shutting out the pit bull.

Inside, I retrieved my newspaper and I settled on the pitted sofa, facing the wall where the TV had been. I hoped to lose myself so the day would effectively be over, and I would have no time between now and seven a.m. to worry about what would happen tomorrow with Alec and Grayson. But right away, my stomach growled. The walk to the convenience store didn’t seem so far now. I didn’t dare walk there at night. Heaven Beach had an upscale resort end and a flophouse end. The trailer park was on the flophouse end, and whenever I walked along the highway after dark, men stopped their trucks to ask me whether I was working. Since boys seemed slow to take no for an answer today, I chose not to tempt fate. My stomach groaned in protest.

After a while, I jumped and dropped the paper at a shockingly loud knock on the aluminum door. “Who is it?” I hollered.

“Delivery.”

It was too much, a takeout order misdirected to my door when I was starving. I stomped across the trailer and flung the door open.

Startled, a Chinese guy backed down one cement block, nearly fell, and stepped up again. He held a big white bag in front of him like a shield, printed with red Chinese characters. “Delivery,” he repeated.

I inhaled one long, heavenly noseful of Chinese spice before I said, “Not mine.” I started to close the door.

“Compliments of Hall Aviation.” He shoved the bag at me and hopped off the cement blocks. “Don’t forget! Be there seven a.m. sharp!”

I watched his car disappear down the gravel road. Then I
stared through the dust where his car had been, past the yard with the bellowing pit bull, at the path through the trees to the airport. I’d forgotten this when I was saying unkind things to Grayson, and kicking Mark out of the trailer, and threatening to shove beer cans up Patrick’s ass. But when I was a little girl, my mom always told me to be nice to everybody, no matter what they looked like or how they treated me, because I never knew who might be an angel God had sent to Earth in disguise.

Despite the fact that Molly
lived on the upscale resort end of town, she deigned to be my friend. She didn’t mind that I lived in a trailer park. But she didn’t seem to consider it an actual home, either, or to think other people lived here. Around eleven I recognized the rhythm of a rock song tapped out in sharp beeps from her electric car.

That is, she didn’t
mind
that I lived in a trailer park, but she did
care
. She might even have sought me out. Her parents had run an architecture and interior design business in Atlanta. Now they had “retired” to the beach (they were way too young to retire, in their midforties like everybody’s parents except my embarrassingly young mother) and opened a café that was constructed to look weathered in order to appeal to vacationers on the rich end of town. From the peacenik stickers in the window to the organic menu, their café shouted bleeding-heart liberal. They had taught Molly to reserve judgment and value difference.

And Molly had learned well. The instant she’d moved to town two years before, she’d become the crusader of our high school, lobbying the lunchroom for vegetarian choices, organizing cleanup crews to keep the nearby bird habitats free of garbage. She was no pushover, though. When she thought I was trying to steal her boyfriend, she found me in the hallway
between classes and, within hearing of everyone, told me what she thought of the school slut.

But when she saw the way the other girls joined in to bully me—that’s when, ironically, she befriended me. So in a way, she was using me. I was her Different friend. She gave herself brownie points for hanging with me. But she didn’t see herself in this light. And I hadn’t told her, because it would be like kicking a puppy. I was glad that she’d picked me for her cross-cultural experiment, instead of somebody else from the trailer park, like Aaron Traynor, who would have convinced her to try meth “just once,” or Ben Reynolds, who would have screwed her.

I threw on some clothes against the cool spring night, locked the door behind me, and dashed out to her. I was so happy to see her that I almost hugged her across the front seat of the car, but I didn’t dare ruin our friendship with a blatant show of my affection. Our bond had started with our mutual respect for each other’s toughness, sense of humor, and utter lack of sentimentality, and that’s how it would stay. I said, “Hey, bitch.”

“My God. You disgust me. You look like you just rolled out of bed, and I swear you’re prettier than me even with all my swagga.” She ran her hand down her side and out, presenting some part of her outfit—the low-cut top, maybe, or the miniskirt, or the platform shoes. She was no prettier and no less pretty than any rich girl at our high school.

I said, “I think it’s my hair.”

“You always think it’s your hair.” She looked over her shoulder to back the car across my yard and didn’t flinch when the bumper hit one of the plastic chairs, tipping it over. She turned forward again and tore out of the trailer park at fifty miles an hour.

“Good concert?” I asked.

“Please. I couldn’t wait to ditch those silly chicks I went with. I’ve been dying to tell you. At breakfast I finally connected with the coolest guy at the café!”

“If he’s so cool, why are you with me instead of him?”

“Smart-ass. I had the concert. You know I never break a commitment. And he’s working early tomorrow.” She stomped the brakes at the entrance to the highway and looked both ways before pulling into traffic, at least. “But tell me what you need to tell me first.”

“No, you go ahead.”

She stomped the accelerator and the car hissed toward town at top speed, which luckily wasn’t very fast or we both would have been dead when she first got her driver’s license. Then she glanced at me. “No,
you
go ahead. Something big’s happened. You look like you’re about to pass out.”

I told her everything that had happened with Grayson, and with Mark, and with Grayson again, leaving out the Chinese food, because that would sound like begging. Molly wasn’t allowed in the trailer, and she’d never opened the usually empty refrigerator.

She interjected a lot of “Wait a minute. You mean your friend Mr. Hall’s sons? Twins are so sexy!” and “He wants you to do
what
?” and “That ass!” which referred to both Mark and Grayson. Though I should have been accustomed to it by now, it was pretty strange to hear filthy language coming from her lips. She was naturally sunny and rich and innocent looking—a lot like Alec, actually—and she’d worn very heavy, glittery eye makeup to her concert, which she thought made her look older but actually made her look about twelve, with huge eyes like a cartoon character.

“I know,” I said. “I don’t understand how Grayson did it.
I went into our talk thinking of myself as a pilot. Somehow I came out as the airport whore.”

Molly laughed so hard that I thought she would run off the road because I had said “whore.” Molly was easily amused by smut. Therefore, our conversations tended to be very dirty. I liked to hear her laugh.