Going Too Far

by Jennifer Echols

  A Broadway ticket might have been a frivolous expense when I was faced with eviction. But I’d wanted to study writing in New York City as long as I could remember. Now I was afraid I wouldn’t be here long. And if I didn’t make the most of my experience, it would be like I was never here.

  As I crunched numbers—God, my hourly pay was low, and tips were abysmal no matter how low I wore my necklines—I resisted looking up at the students entering the room. I especially avoided meeting the eyes of the two noisy guys who blustered in and sat directly across from me, just as they had on the first day of class. They knew each other from elsewhere, obviously, and the Indian one in particular was the cocky type who might give me a hard time about “Almost a Lady.” People had made fun of me for writing romantic stories before. I hoped he and his friend wouldn’t gang up on me.

  Summer was the last one in, and I felt my shoulders relax. I’d never been one of those timid girls who couldn’t take a step without the shadow of her best friend crossing her path. But putting my story in front of these strangers was like stripping naked in a men’s prison rec room. I turned to Summer, expecting a friendly roommate-type question designed to set me at ease, such as, How did calculus go?

  She looked me up and down and shrieked, “Where did you get that scarf?” drawing the boisterous guys’ attention.

  Busted! I tried to mix my expensive clothes from home with the cheap replacements I could afford. I was aiming for a gradual, graceful decline into poverty. But when I’d gotten dressed that morning after Summer had left for her eight o’clock, I’d been tired. I’d thrown on a T-shirt, a scarf, and my most comfortable jeans— all of which happened to be designer. I should have been more careful. Summer did not own any designer labels, but she wanted them. And she knew them when she saw them.

  I gazed at her blankly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I meant that I knew exactly what she was talking about, and we should discuss it later.

  But we’d been friends only five days, too short a time for her to decipher my unspoken messages. She looked me up and down again. “And those jeans,” she murmured.

  “I beg your damn pardon?” I asked, still telegraphing for her to shut up.

  She dumped her book bag in her richly upholstered chair, grasped my wrist, and dragged me out of my own richly upholstered chair. We both tripped on the edge of the Oriental rug as she pulled me toward the door.

  Most of my classes were held in modern buildings, like you’d expect at any college. But the honors freshman creative-writing class met in a converted town house. Our classroom was a long boardroom, the dark wooden paneling hung with portraits of dead scholars staring down at us from their frames. The thick, carved table and big comfy chairs replaced student desks. The stately room made the class and our writing seem important—until Summer and I tripped over the rug, which reminded us that we were just freshmen after all, wearing shorts and hooded sweatshirts. Or, in my case, a designer scarf and—

  “Designer jeans!” At least we’d reached the hallway and she’d pressed me against the wall before she hissed this at me, out of our classmates’ hearing. “I thought you said you shopped at the thrift store.”

  “I do shop at the thrift store.” The only thing I had actually purchased there was an outfit for my belly-dancing class. A little flamboyant but a lot cheaper than new workout clothes would have been. And I often browsed in the thrift store, which counted as shopping.

  “There is no way you got a two-hundred-dollar scarf in a thrift store,” she whispered. “And those jeans. They’re from last year. A size-four woman did not drop dead and give her almost-brand-new designer jeans to charity. I thought you didn’t have any money. You told me you were working at the coffee shop because your scholarship is tuition only. You didn’t say you have a line of credit from back home!”

  “I don’t. The scarf and the jeans were gifts.” Not a lie. My grandmother had bought all my clothes for the six years I lived with her.

  Summer pointed at me. “I knew all that detail in your story was a little too realistic. You’re really Rebecca, aren’t you? Just in the present day? You own a horse farm in Kentucky.”

  “ What? No! Why would you think that?”

  “Last weekend when Jørdis brought the Sunday Times to the dorm, you went straight to the horse section.”

  “There is no horse section of the New York Times.”

  She poked my breastbone. “You know what I mean. The horserace part of the sports section.”

  I drew myself up to my full height and looked down at Summer, trying to impress on her the ridiculousness of her theory, which was of course pretty damn close to the truth. I said haughtily, “I certainly do not own a horse farm.” My grandmother owned it. Even when she died eventually, I would never own it. She’d made sure of that.

  Summer stared stubbornly up at me. Then her eyes drifted down to boob level. “And that shirt. I should have known nobody looks that good in a regular old T-shirt, not even you. Who made it?” She grabbed my arm, whipped it behind my back, and rammed my face into the wall. Holding me there, she fumbled with my neck-line to read the label. “We’ve only known each other a few days,” she muttered, “but I always assumed I would share everything with my college roommate, and we are not getting off to a good start.”

  She was a poor girl trying to look rich. I was a former rich girl suddenly poor. As a tall redhead, I could not have looked more different from Summer, tiny and African-American—but we were both Southern and struggling to fit in here in New York. I had sensed this about her immediately, and I had liked her a whole lot until she dragged me out into the hall and threatened to blow my cover. I was just about to jab my elbow into her ribs to get her off me—I had to hide that designer T-shirt label at all costs—when a voice beside us purred, “Good afternoon, ladies.”

  Summer and I jumped away from each other. Gabe Murphy was our writing teacher, a stubby man with a bulbous nose and lots of snow white hair. He would have looked jolly, like Santa Claus, except he dressed in a hoodie and cargo shorts and flip-flops like most of the class. I figured he’d been a surfer in California until one day he glanced in the mirror and realized he was forty pounds overweight and nearing retirement age, and he thought he’d better come to New York to pursue the writing career he’d always thought he would have plenty of time for later.

  I called him our writing teacher rather than our writing professor because I wasn’t sure he was a professor. That was a special designation the university gave to personages with fancy degrees. I doubted it applied to Gabe. I wasn’t sure whether to call him Dr. Murphy or Mr. Murphy or just plain Gabe. He hadn’t introduced himself, and the syllabus was labeled gabe murphy. No clue there. None of the other students had taken a stand on the issue, so I coped by calling him Excuse me, or—

  “Hello,” I said noncommittally. “Summer was just straightening my shirt before class. I want to look professional when we discuss my story.”

  “We’re writers,” he said. “We’re prone to eccentricity.” He tilted his head toward the classroom, indicating that we should follow him inside.

  When he’d disappeared through the doorway, the grin Summer had worn for him dropped away. She pointed at me again. “I am not through with you.”

  “I can tell!”

  We crossed the classroom threshold and bounced into our chairs. We couldn’t slip into them because they were huge and upholstered. Pulling them out and dragging them back up to the table caused a commotion in the quiet room. Even the noisy guys across from us had hushed with the entrance of Gabe. Now they watched us reprovingly, as if we were five-year-olds playing jacks in a church pew at a funeral.

  Ignoring the noise, Gabe said a few words about appreciating those of us who had been brave enough to share our stories first. As if we had volunteered for this. He shuffled through the stapled stories in front of him, making sure all three for the day were there. He had said during the first class meeting that nowadays, writing student
s were paranoid about sharing because they were afraid someone would nab their work and publish it on the internet. So our instructions were to place one copy of our stories on reserve in the library for the other students to read. Then we brought copies for everyone. The class made notes during the discussion and passed the copies back to the original author. I couldn’t wait to read my classmates’ glowing praise.

  “These stories have a natural order and flow nicely from one to the next,” Gabe was saying, “so let’s start with—”

  There was a knock on the door.

  I heard my sigh again in the stillness of the regal classroom. This one was not a sigh of satisfaction but a sigh of what-species-of-tree-slime-dares-knock-on-the-door-at-a-time-like-this.

  Gabe got up from his upholstered chair. This was not instantaneous because of the weight of the chair and the girth of his own belly beneath his La Jolla T-shirt. He opened the door a crack and talked in a low tone to the interloper. Summer and I were closest to the door. We couldn’t look over our shoulders and stare at Gabe without being obvious, but we could hear most of what was being said. The interloper wanted to transfer into our class. Gabe was telling him we did have space for one more, but a creative-writing class was a family unit, and before the interloper joined, the other students would need to approve. The interloper said he was sure that would not be a problem.

  I recognized his voice. Or rather, I recognized the tone of his voice. The Indian dude was cocky, but the interloper’s cockiness would make the Indian dude look modest in comparison.

  “Are you okay?” Summer whispered, managing to make even those breathy words sound high pitched. “Are you that worried about the class discussing your writing? You look really pale all of a sudden. I mean, you’re already pale, but it’s like your freckles have faded.”

  A dry “Thanks” was all I could manage. I was not okay. I was gripping the edge of the carved table so hard, I would not have been surprised if my fingers snapped off.

  The interloper was my stable boy.

  And I could not let him read my story.

  CONTINUE READING FOR AN EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT FROM

  SUCH A RUSH

  BY JENNIFER ECHOLS

  JULY 2012 FROM GALLERY BOOKS

  A sexy and poignant romantic tale of a young daredevil pilot caught between two brothers.

  When I was fourteen, I made a decision. If I was doomed to live in a trailer park next to an airport, I could complain about the smell of the jet fuel like my mom, I could drink myself to death over the noise like everybody else, or I could learn to fly.

  Heaven Beach, South Carolina, is anything but, if you live at the low-rent end of town. All her life, Leah Jones has been the grown-up in her family, while her mother moves from boyfriend to boyfriend, letting any available money slip out of her hands. At school, they may diss Leah as trash, but she’s the one who negotiates with the landlord when the rent’s not paid. At fourteen, she’s the one who gets a job at the nearby airstrip.

  But there’s one way Leah can escape reality. Saving every penny she can, she begs quiet Mr. Hall, who runs an aerial banner-advertising business at the airstrip and also offers flight lessons, to take her up just once. Leaving the trailer park far beneath her and swooping out over the sea is a rush greater than anything she’s ever experienced, and when Mr. Hall offers to give her cut-rate flight lessons, she feels ready to touch the sky.

  By the time she’s a high school senior, Leah has become a good enough pilot that Mr. Hall offers her a job flying a banner plane. It seems like a dream come true . . . but turns out to be just as fleeting as any dream. Mr. Hall dies suddenly, leaving everything he owned in the hands of his teenage sons: golden boy Alec and adrenaline junkie Grayson. And they’re determined to keep the banner planes flying. Though Leah has crushed on Grayson for years, she’s leery of getting involved in what now seems like a doomed business—until Grayson betrays her by digging up her most damning secret. Holding it over her head, he forces her to fly for secret reasons of his own, reasons involving Alec. Now Leah finds herself drawn into a battle between brothers—and the consequences could be deadly.

  Engrossing and intense, Such a Rush is a captivating story from an author with rising star power.

  one

  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.

  My reception counter faced the glass-walled lobby with a view of the runway. Lots of days I sat on the office porch instead, taking the airport cell phone with me in case someone actually called, and watched the planes take off and land. Behind the office were small hangars for private pilots. In front of the office, some pilots parked their planes out in the open, since nothing but a hurricane or a tornado would hurt them when they were tied down. To my left, between me and the trailer park, stretched the large corporate hangars. To my right were the flagpole and the windsock, the gas pumps, and more of the corrugated metal hangars. The closest hangar was covered in red and white lettering, peeling and faded from years of storms blowing in from the ocean:

  HALL AVIATION

  BANNER TOWING: ADVERTISE YOUR BUSINESS TO BEACHGOERS!

  AIRPLANE RIDES WITH BEAUTIFUL OCEAN VIEWS

  ASH SCATTERING OVER THE ATLANTIC

  FLIGHT SCHOOL

  In August I had watched the tiny Hall Aviation planes skim low over the grass beside the runway and snag banners that unfurled behind them in the air, many times longer than the planes themselves. By listening to the men who drank coffee and shot the shit with Mr. Hall on the office porch, I’d gathered that Mr. Hall’s oldest son was one of the banner-towing pilots. Mr. Hall’s twin sons my age were there to help too some Saturdays, piecing together the movable letters to make the banners. Alec was smiling and blond and looked like the nice, wholesome guy Mr. Hall seemed to think he was, whereas Grayson was always in trouble. He was slightly taller, with his hair covered by a straw cowboy hat and his eyes hidden behind mirrored aviator shades. I couldn’t tell whether he was gazing at me across the tarmac when I sat on the porch by myself to smoke a cigarette, but I imagined he was. My whole body suddenly felt sunburned even though I was in the shade.

  They were gone now—the twins an hour and a half up the road to Wilmington, where they lived with their mom, and the oldest son back to college. The tourists had left the beach. The banner-towing business had shut down for the season. It was the perfect time to approach Mr. Hall about a lesson. Hall Aviation brochures were stuffed into plastic holders throughout the office for visitors to take. I knew the high price for a lesson without having to mortify myself by asking Mr. Hall in person.

  But saving the money, and screwing up the courage to go with it, had taken me a whole month. I’d finally marched over to Hall Aviation and banged on the small door in the side of the hangar with the oo of SCHOOL painted across it. When Mr. Hall hollered from inside, I’d wandered among the airpla
nes and tools to a tiny office carved out of the corner. I’d sat in the chair in front of his desk and asked him to take me up. He’d given me the worst possible answer by handing me a permission form for my mother to sign.

  She hadn’t been home when I’d walked back from the airport that night. I had lain awake in bed, trying to figure out the right way to present the form to her. She still hadn’t come home when I’d left for school that morning. All school day, I’d worried about what I would say to her. I could point out that flying was a possible career someday. She talked like that sometimes, told me I would make something of myself. I was afraid her support would disappear when she found out I’d been saving money for an extravagant lesson instead of giving it to her.

  The scraggly coastal forest out the school bus window still seemed strange now that I’d spent a month in Heaven Beach. As the bus approached the trailer park, I hoped against hope my mom would be home and I could get this over with. Even if she said no, at least my torture would end.

  I slid one hand down to touch the folded permission form through the pocket of my jeans. My cash for the flying lesson was wadded beneath that. Losing the money at school would have screwed me, but I’d been afraid to leave the money or the form in my room, where my mom might find them if she got desperate for funds, like she did sometimes, and started searching.

  As I moved my hand, I felt Mark Simon watching me from across the aisle. He knew about my money somehow. He could tell that’s what I had in my pocket from the way I fingered it, and he would take it from me. That was always my first thought. I’d had a lot of things stolen from me on a lot of school buses.

  But I forced myself to take a deep breath and relax, letting go of my gut reaction. Mark wasn’t that poor. He was riding this bus because he worked for his uncle at the airport after school, not because he lived in the trailer park. And as I glanced over at him, his look seemed less like larceny and more like lechery. He thought he’d caught me touching myself.