Such a Rush (2 page)
Authors: Jennifer Echols
Tags: #Fiction, #Coming of Age, #Contemporary Women, #Family Life, #Juvenile Fiction, #Family, #General, #Girls & Women, #Love & Romance
Jennifer Echols
is the author of teen romantic dramas for MTV Books and teen romantic comedies for Simon Pulse. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her family. Please visit her online at
www.jennifer-echols.com
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JACKET DESIGN BY LAYWAN KWAN
JACKET PHOTOGRAPH © VANESA MUNOZ/TREVILLION
PHOTOGRAPH OF AIRPLANE ON BACK COVER BY BATTERMAN PHOTOGRAPHY
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK OXLEY/STUDIO 16
COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER
Other romantic dramas by Jennifer Echols
Love Story
Forget You
Going Too Far
Available from MTV Books
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Gallery Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Jennifer Echols
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First MTV Books/Gallery Books hardcover edition July 2012
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Designed by Ruth Lee-Mui
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4516-5801-9
ISBN 978-1-4516-5805-7 (ebook)
For my dad and my son,
whose love of flying inspired this book.
Heartfelt thanks
to my brilliant editor, Lauren McKenna, for her enthusiasm; my incomparable agent, Laura Bradford, for making this book happen; my dad and my brother, both pilots, who patiently explained how to fly (and crash) an airplane; my partner in crime, Erin Downing, for reading it and getting it; and as always, my wise critique partners, Catherine Chant and Victoria Dahl, for their unwavering support.
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.