I meant for her to laugh at this, but she stared out the windshield, tapping one finger nervously on the steering wheel. “So, about these Hall boys. Are you in love with Alec?”

“What? No.” As I said this, we passed the convenience store. I was always amazed how little time it took to drive here when it took forever to walk here.

“Are you in love with the one who thinks you’re a whore?” she asked.

I snickered at the way she’d put it. Then I realized I shouldn’t be amused, because the way she’d put it was pretty accurate. “Grayson. No.” My skin tingled as I said his name, which was just stupid.

“I can’t put my finger on it, but you’re in love with somebody.”

I fished in her purse at my feet, found a clove cigarette, and lit it. “I’ve been watching them from afar for a while. The twins, and their father who died, and their older brother who died. I guess I’ve fallen a little in love with all of them.” One puff and the cigarette was making me sick. Mr. Hall was looking over my shoulder, telling me to put that garbage out. I stubbed it out carefully in an empty paper cup in her cup holder.

“So you’re nostalgic for their lost family, and you feel sorry for this guy. You’re making excuses to yourself for his poor social skills. But you can’t forget he’s blackmailing you into dating his brother. Worse, he’s blackmailing you into doing this dangerous job flying.”

“Well, I don’t know that it’s a dangerous job. Before Mr. Hall died, I actually wanted that job.”

“When Mr. Hall was running the show, yes. Now he’s not. With this inexperienced eighteen-year-old dude running the place, it’ll be even more like suicide than it was before.”

“I wouldn’t call it suicide.”

“You’ve described it to me, Leah. You’re flying this little tin can of a plane pulling this long, heavy banner it was never made to pull. And you’re fighting with the controls the whole time to keep the plane from stalling and plunging you to your death.”

“Technically, all of that is true, but a pilot wouldn’t phrase it so dramatically. If we did, we wouldn’t be pilots very long. Because that sounds like some crazy shit.”

“Exactly. And you said they’ve stripped all the instruments out of those little planes so they’re light enough to carry the banners. You’re flying without instruments, and that’s not dangerous?”

“They don’t take out all the instruments. The ones they’ve taken out, you don’t really need unless it’s cloudy or dark. I mean, yes, they’d be nice to have, but you don’t need them.”

Molly turned to gape at me.

I realized what I was saying did sound kind of lame. “Yes, I can hear myself,” I said. “Was that your next question? Yes.”

“Well,” she said, “since you love these guys so much, and you swear the job isn’t ‘that’ suicidal”—she took her hands off the steering wheel to make finger quotes—“I don’t see what the problem is. I mean, I understand your concern about the good moral character thing and your mother finding out that you forged her name. You’re just trying to keep your head down and your nose clean until you can get out of Heaven Beach.”

“Right.” We passed the grocery store. The few times I’d walked here to shop, the bags had pulled my arms out of their sockets, just like the heavy chocks on the tarmac, as I hiked back to the trailer. But if I could have driven here, I would have plopped the bags in the trunk and forgotten about them until I reached home. Yes, I was amazed at this miraculous invention called a car. On pretty much every drive Molly took me on, I was tempted to ask her to stop and let me get a few groceries. I never asked, though, and it never occurred to her.

“And maybe you have a little problem with authority—” Molly said.

“Who, me?”

“—so Grayson telling you what to do gets on your last nerve, especially when it involves whoredom.”

“Correct.”

“But if his business is going to be as short-lived as you say, can’t you just ride it out and then go back to your airport job on the ground? I don’t see why you’re so upset at losing the crop-dusting job with that jerk. You’ve flown before but you’ve never had a job flying. Why do you need one now?”

“Because every type of pilot’s license has an age requirement, plus a requirement for the number of hours you’ve flown.”

“And a pesky requirement for good moral character.”

“That’s only for the airline pilot’s license. But yeah, that’s exactly what I’m up for next. For my commercial license I had to turn eighteen years old and log two hundred and fifty hours. At first I had to rent Mr. Hall’s airplane to get those hours. Airplane rental isn’t cheap. If he hadn’t started letting me use it for free, I wouldn’t have that license by now.”

“I see.”

Now we were passing the library. I checked out one or two books per visit so they wouldn’t be too heavy or bulky on the walk home. That way I always had a stack. I’d seen Molly check out a whole stack before. At once. And put them in her car.

“For the airline pilot’s license,” I said, “I have to be twenty-three years old, and I need to log fifteen hundred hours. Now that Mr. Hall is gone, that’s another twelve hundred and fifty hours of renting an airplane. Plus, if any airline is going to hire me, I need a college degree. How am I going to pay for all that in the next five years, Molly?”

“Hell if I know.”

“I’m going to get a job flying. Then I fly for free. I fly a lot and log a lot of hours. And I get paid more than minimum wage.”

“But if you can’t get a job flying,” she said, “maybe you keep your airport office job, work on your hours and your degree, but do it more slowly, as you save up your money. You don’t have to get that license the day you turn twenty-three.”

“True.” But if I didn’t get it at twenty-three, I would never get it. That life was too hard, always looking to the future and never living in the now, saving for an impossible goal. Thirty years later I would still be working in the airport office for minimum wage. There would be a rumor that I had been a pilot once, but most people wouldn’t believe it, looking at me.

“Yeah, I understand now,” Molly said.

Really?

“Maybe Alec and Grayson’s company won’t go under like you so gleefully expect,” she said, “and you can keep your job with them for a long time.”

“And continue to be the airport whore.”

“It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.”

We’d reached the beginning of the motels. Because we were still on the flophouse end of Heaven Beach, the signs out front boasted ridiculously low room rates, and the pools were small and stained and green.

I said, “Tell me the rest of your story, which is not nearly as interesting as my story. You finally connected with a guy at the café, and he had to go to bed. Aw.”

“Aw.” She poked out her bottom lip sympathetically.

“Will you see him again?”

She took in a slow breath and exhaled before she spoke, as if considering her answer. Which was not like her. “I think he’s going to be really busy this week.”

“But you were all excited about him a few minutes ago. You drove over to my mansion at eleven o’clock at night to tell me about him.” As I uttered the words, I realized they probably weren’t true. Maybe the boy didn’t even exist. Molly always had an excuse like this—she had to see me so she could tell me about a cute boy, or a dorky thing her mom had done, or something she’d seen on TV—but a lot of times when she came over, she was really checking on me, or getting me out of the trailer for a little while. Or casually driving me back to the café and feeding me, as if I didn’t know what was going on. I played along.

“I was excited about him,” she said, “but he seems awfully vanilla next to your whore story.”

“He does. Let’s trade places.” Now I was the one speaking before I thought. I sounded ungrateful and jealous and bitter. Which I was, but nobody wanted to hear that. I opened my mouth, thinking hard, forming a genuine apology.

She opened the console between us, brought out a white paper bag, and set it in my lap. “Warm chocolate croissant.”

“Oh!” My cry of ecstasy at a pastry was so heartfelt and genuine that I burst into laughter.

She glanced over at me with her eyebrows raised like she was worried about my sanity.

“Shut up.” I tore off a big bite of flaky croissant filled with gooey chocolate sauce and stuffed it into her mouth, purposefully smearing it across her cheek. “Mmph,” was all she said. Her mouth was full, and her dad’s chocolate croissants were that good.

And we were right to silence each other with food. It was better that we never apologized to each other. Then we’d be admitting that we were wrong and we owed each other something. That’s where people got into trouble.

“Look, genuine whores.” She nodded out the window at a couple of teenage girls crossing the street in front of us, both with bad blond dye jobs, both in ill-fitting, low-cut T-shirt dresses exposing the real or fake tattoos on their chests. One girl wore cheap heels and one was barefoot.

“How do you end up like that?” Molly asked me, not the whores.

I didn’t know whether they were really whores. There were plenty of whores on this end of town. But there were also lots of trailer park girls from farther inland, vacationing at the beach. Those girls and the whores looked about the same. Peering at these specimens, I decided they were tourists because they seemed happy.

As Molly pulled through the intersection, I changed my mind. The girls had reached the corner and were shouting at cars.

Talk about trading places. I wouldn’t even be trading if I were in those girls’ place. I would be taking a very small step. A girl ended up like that by growing up like me. She made the mistake of tangling with the other people around her. And she never ducked through that fence to the airport.

Not that it seemed to be doing me much good at the moment. I’d resisted working for Grayson. I was alarmed at being blackmailed. I resented having to throw myself at Alec. Yet in the end, I’d given in, hadn’t I? I wasn’t much better than those streetwalkers.

But the thought of reporting to the Hall Aviation hangar in the morning sent a little thrill through me. I would fly again for the first time in two months. Such a rush! I would get involved in Grayson and Alec’s game with each other. It was like starring on a TV reality show where I’d probably be publicly humiliated—but that was better than watching the show on TV at home, or not being able to watch it at all when the TV went missing and the trailer fell silent.

And I would see Grayson again. He needed me. He was using me. He didn’t have a crush on me, yet I could still feel his hand on my knee. Watching the whores shrink in the side mirror as Molly sped down the street, I put my own hand on my knee and rubbed my thumb back and forth, feeling that rush all over again.

six

I concentrated on that rush of feeling, relying on it to push me along, step by step, up the path through the trailer park, into the orange sunlight of early morning, across the long, wet grass that stuck black seeds to my ankles. I would see Grayson. I would fly a plane. Those were reasons to keep walking toward Hall Aviation and the beginning of my charade with Alec.

I’d fretted over what to wear: something innocent that Alec would like? He probably dated cheerleaders who wore pink and slept with teddy bears. Or something super-whorelike to make an ironic point to Grayson? At the tail end of fifteen minutes of trying on clothes, then standing on the toilet and leaning way over to see my torso in the mirror above the sink, I decided I’d better not risk angering Grayson and driving him to spill everything to my mom. I’d worn what I would have worn if everything were normal, everybody were still alive, and I was working for Mr. Hall instead of his son. Admittedly, hmmm, this was kind of whorelike after all, short shorts with a sexy cropped T-shirt cut to fit loose, which I would take off in the plane to reveal my bikini top underneath. The plane wasn’t air-conditioned, and the cockpit would heat to a hundred degrees up near the sun.

Where the tarmac started, I veered toward the pavement to step out of the cold grass. Huge hangars sat to my left, one of which was Mr. Simon’s. I passed it warily, looking through the vast doorway while trying not to look like I was looking. I didn’t want another confrontation with Mark this morning—or ever. Men shifted inside the hangar, but I didn’t recognize Mark’s quick movements. I doubted he could have made it in this early if he’d continued the bender he’d been on last night.

Recalling all the shit I’d been through in the past week with him, in a sex-for-flying exchange I hadn’t fully understood, I decided I couldn’t do this all over again with Grayson and Alec. Yet I kept walking, my flip-flops trailing dew across the asphalt embedded with white shells. I needed to lose these cold feet before I reached the Hall Aviation hangar. I didn’t want to flirt with Alec. He was crazy handsome, but I’d never been attracted to him like I had to Grayson, and the thought of flirting with him made my stomach hurt. I reminded myself I hadn’t flown in two months, and my whole future as a pilot was on the line.

As I passed the airport office, I picked up my pace. The yellow Piper already sat on the tarmac in front of Hall Aviation. The small side door and the wide front doors of the hangar were open to the morning, and the strange beat of alt-rock spilled out. I’d always kept my eyes and ears open when I went into the hangar and the boys were there. They played interesting music, wore T-shirts for bands I’d never heard of, and read books that were making the rounds at their high school but would never travel as far as Heaven Beach. I felt silly for looking up to the boys. They were from Wilmington, not New York City. I was from the armpit of the tourist industry, though, and it was all in your perspective. I kept my eyes and ears open around Molly for much the same reason. Her old friends in Atlanta were always clueing her in on the latest. She still was not as cool as these boys.