Takeoffs and Landings

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Also by MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX

  Among the Impostors: A Sequel to Among the Hidden

  The Girl with 500 Middle Names

  Turnabout

  Just Ella

  Among the Hidden

  Leaving Fishers

  Don’t You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey

  Running Out of Time

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 2001 by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster.

  Book design by Paula Winicur

  The text for this book is set in Officina.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Haddix, Margaret Peterson.

  Takeoffs and landings / by Margaret Peterson Haddix.

  p. cm.

  Summary: An overweight, timid fifteen-year-old boy and his popular

  fourteen-year-old sister begin to overcome their guilt over their father’s

  death and reconnect with each other and their emotionally-distant mother

  when they accompany her on a two-week speaking tour.

  ISBN 0-689-83299-0

  ISBN: 978-1-4424-5779-9 (ebook)

  [1. Mothers—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 3. Travel—Fiction.

  4. Farm life—Ohio—Fiction. 5. Ohio—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H1164 Tak 2001

  [Fic]—dc21

  00-052222

  With thanks to my brother, John Peterson, for his helpful advice and agricultural information

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Lori

  Chapter 2: Chuck

  Chapter 3: Lori

  Chapter 4: Chuck

  Chapter 5: Lori

  Chapter 6: Chuck

  Chapter 7: Lori

  Chapter 8: Chuck

  Chapter 9: Lori

  Chapter 10: Chuck

  Chapter 11: Mom

  Chapter 12: Chuck

  Chapter 13: Lori

  Chapter 14: Chuck

  Chapter 15: Lori

  Chapter 16: Chuck

  Chapter 17: Lori

  Chapter 18: Chuck

  Chapter 19: Lori

  Chapter 20: Chuck

  Chapter 21: Lori

  Chapter 22: Chuck

  Chapter 23: Mom

  Chapter 24: Lori

  Chapter 25: Chuck

  Chapter 26: Lori

  Chapter 27: Chuck

  Chapter 28: Lori

  Chapter 29: Chuck

  Chapter 30: Lori

  Chapter 31: Chuck

  Chapter 32: Lori

  Chapter 33: Chuck

  Chapter 34: Mom

  Chapter 35: Lori & Chuck

  Chapter 36: Lori & Chuck

  Chapter 37: Chuck & Lori

  Chapter 38: Chuck

  Chapter 39: Lori

  Lori stared at her lap. They hadn’t even gotten on the plane yet, and already her sundress was a mass of wrinkles.

  She’d been warned.

  “Oh, that won’t travel well,” her mom had said when Lori came downstairs for breakfast that morning.

  Gram had barely glanced up from flipping pancakes to add, “Why don’t you wear one of those outfits your mother bought you?”

  That was all Lori needed to hear.

  “No,” she said. “I want to wear this.”

  She hated the way she sounded saying that—like she was four, not fourteen. Gram only made it worse.

  “She’s so proud of making that dress in 4-H last year. Won an Outstanding of the Day ribbon, you know?” she said to Mom, as if Lori weren’t right there listening—and perfectly able to speak for herself.

  Lori wasn’t proud of the dress. She knew the right side seam was just the tiniest bit wobbly, and the facing in the bodice never had lain right, no matter how many times Lori smashed it down with the iron. Plus, she was totally sick of the red-and-white flowered pattern of the material. She’d spent so much of last June and July cutting it, pinning it, sewing it, ripping out bad stitches in it. . . . Her hands went sweaty just looking at it. But, with both Mom and Gram suggesting she change, she absolutely had to wear the dress.

  Now, sitting in a contoured plastic seat at the airport, waiting to fly to Chicago, she wished she’d just put on one of her new outfits to begin with. Even though they came from Mom, those outfits were cool, in style, right. Already, Lori had seen six other girls wearing shirts and shorts just like the ones folded up in her suitcase. (For the record: No one else was wearing a squashed-up, homemade cotton sundress.) Mom had shopped at the Gap, Old Navy, even Abercrombie & Fitch. Some of Lori’s friends would practically kill for the clothes Lori was refusing to wear.

  What had she been thinking?

  It was too bright in the airport. In the half-light of dawn that morning, as she’d tiptoed down the hall at home to peer in the full-length mirror without waking everyone up, Lori had had everything figured out. Her reflection had been perfect in that mirror. Her light brown hair arced just right, flowing to her shoulders. Her gray eyes sparkled. None of her stress-zits showed. Half in shadow, the dress was beautiful, perfectly fitted, maybe even the tiniest bit sultry. She’d watched a little fantasy in her mind: Lori walks into the airport with an air of confidence, striding as casually as if she’d been flying all her life. The crowd parts to make way for her. Everyone is in awe of her beauty, her style, her je ne sais quoi. Then someone steps forward. It is an incredibly handsome man—TV-star handsome, movie-star handsome, better looking than any guy in all of Pickford County. His fingers brush Lori’s arm, and the mere touch sends a thrill through her body. (Did that ever really happen outside of romance novels? Lori decided it could.)

  “Excuse me,” he whispers. “I am a fashion designer. I must know—where did you get that incredible creation?”

  “This old dress?” In her fantasies, Lori is humble as well as gorgeous. “I made it. It’s a Butterick pattern.”

  “Oh, but you have transformed it,” the man says. “You have genius as well as beauty. Will you—”

  And then Lori was stuck. Did she really want this fantasy man admiring her sewing skills? She didn’t even like to sew that much. And what was he going to offer her? A job? Not very romantic. A date? Come on, how old would this fantasy man have to be to be a successful fashion designer? She was only fourteen. It was kind of gross if he was too much older than that.

  This was a problem Lori often had with fantasies. After a certain point, they just weren’t very practical.

  Lori might have changed her clothes right then, before she went downstairs. But there was already another fantasy playing in her head: Lori walks into the kitchen. Mom takes one look at her and stops short.

  “You are not wearing that,” she says. “Go change.”

  “What’s wrong?” Lori taunts her. “Are you ashamed of me? Scared someone will find out you’ve kept your kids locked up in dinky old Pickford County while you’re out traveling the world?”

  Maybe Lori really would have had the nerve to say something like that, if Mom had out-and-out ordered her to change.

  Maybe not.

  Lori and her mother didn’t really talk. Oh, they spoke in each other’s presence—”Please pass the orange juice,” “Can I see your report card?” “Do you want me to do the dishes?”—but it had been years, probably, since they’d exchanged any words that actually meant anything. Mom was never around long eno
ugh for Lori to move from “Please pass the orange juice” to anything she really wanted to say.

  Lori toyed with one more fantasy. She could imagine having a different kind of mother, the kind Lori could sit and talk with for hours. The kind who could help Lori figure out what was going on inside her own head. Lori could imagine telling this perfect mother, You know what? I think maybe Gram was right. I did wear this dress because I was proud of it. I wanted people to see I was the kind of person who could make her own clothes if she had to. Like I’m as good as anybody out there, outside Pickford County. No—like I’m better. How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t anyone tell me how awful I looked?

  Lori couldn’t imagine saying that to her own mother in a million years. The kind of mother she could say that to wouldn’t be taking her to Chicago right now.

  That would be fine with Lori. She hadn’t asked for this trip.

  And the longer she sat in this strange, impersonal airport, the less she wanted to go. She felt uglier by the minute. She squirmed in her seat, embarrassed beyond words to be wearing such a horrible, homemade, crumpled sundress. Her hair had gone limp now, too, and her zits were probably as bright as neon signs. If anyone like that fashion designer she’d imagined was strolling through the airport right now, he’d run from her in horror. Probably all the other passengers were staring at her when she wasn’t looking and laughing at her from behind their USA Todays and their John Grishams. Get a load of that girl over there. Ever seen such a hick?

  Lori glanced around quickly, ready to glare at anyone hiding giggles. But the only person she caught looking in her direction was her brother Chuck.

  Chuck was someone else Lori couldn’t talk to. She’d practically forgotten he was there, practically forgotten he was going to be on this trip with her and Mom, too.

  Chuck was easy to forget. He was big and fat and dumb. And that was what people said about him when they were trying to be kind.

  Chuck looked away as soon as Lori’s eyes met his. Ordinarily, that would have been fine with Lori. But she was so miserable today that his glance away made her feel rejected. Even fat, gross, sweating—ugh—Chuck couldn’t stand to look at her. Lori bit her lip, holding back tears. Aside from Mom, who didn’t really count, Chuck was the only person she knew in this whole crowded, overly bright airport. Part of her wanted to cling to Chuck, the way she’d clung to him all those years ago at Daddy’s funeral.

  Part of her wanted to slide down a few seats, so nobody would think they were together.

  Mom came back from the bank of phones at the other end of the waiting area.

  “Well, that’s confirmed,” she said. “One of the organizers will meet us at the airport, so we won’t have to take the hotel shuttle.”

  They’d been away from home for only two hours, and already Mom sounded different. Her voice was crisper, more businesslike. She didn’t seem like the same person who’d been reading bedtime stories last night to Lori’s little sister, Emma, in a lulling, singsongy tone.

  No wonder Lori could never talk to Mom at home. Mom-at-home was just a fake, some role she played while she waited for her next flight out.

  “Excited?” Mom said, sitting down beside Lori. “Just think—your first plane trip.”

  Lori shrugged. If Mom couldn’t see how far away Lori was from excitement, there was no way Lori could tell her.

  Behind her, Chuck only grunted.

  Good for Chuck, Lori thought, as if they’d chosen sides and Chuck were on her team. She wished he were. She wished he were someone she could talk to, confide in. She wanted to ask him: Why is Mom really taking us on this trip? It made no sense. She wished Chuck could explain it to her. After years of traveling on business, why had Mom suddenly decided to take Lori and Chuck with her?

  But Chuck wasn’t the type of person who had any answers. And it had been years and years and years since they’d been Chuck-and-Lori, inseparable pals. “Joined at the hip,” Gram used to joke. Not anymore.

  Around them, people were talking in little clusters. Two businessmen types were comparing golf scores. A family with a toddler laughed as the child careened from seat to seat: “Now, come back here and give Grandma a good-bye kiss,” the mother implored.

  Lori felt like she and Chuck and Mom were an island of silence in the midst of all that chatter. She wished suddenly that the rest of her siblings had come, too—eight-year-old Emma, ten-year-old Joey, and eleven-year-old Mike. Joey would be rattling off a list of questions: How fast can our airplane fly? What will the ground look like from up there? How high will we be? How many people will be on the airplane? Mike would be pretending he knew all the answers: It’s thousands of miles an hour, right, Mom? And we’ll definitely be above the clouds. Definitely. And Emma would have Mom’s full attention, as usual: Do you remember when you told me that the clouds look like cotton balls up there? In the Raggedy Ann books, the clouds are bouncy, and you can jump from cloud to cloud. Could someone really do that?

  Most of the time, Lori’s younger brothers and sister drove her crazy. But if they’d come, they’d hide the fact that Chuck and Lori and Mom had nothing to say to one another.

  Only, Mom hadn’t invited them.

  Chuck was sweating. The backs of his legs stuck to the plastic airport chair.

  I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.

  Planes went up. Planes went down. Planes crashed. Happened all the time.

  He closed his eyes and saw plane parts strewn across a mountainside. Bodies bobbing in the Atlantic Ocean. That one crash had had a lot of kids. A whole high school French club thought they were going to Paris.

  Chuck made himself breathe slower.

  Mom flies a lot. Hasn’t killed her yet.

  Yet. She’d never had Chuck along. Bad-luck Chuck.

  Lori was staring at him. Why? Oh. He must have snorted. Kids at school always made fun of him for that.

  Sorry, Princess Lori, he thought. Sorry I bothered you.

  You’d think she’d be nicer to him. Seeing as how they were all going to die.

  No, Lori would live. She has good luck.

  The sun always shone on Lori. She walked on a path of light.

  Chuck crawled in darkness, groping his way through the muck.

  He saw a face in his mind. Girl from school, wide-spaced eyes, freckles across the nose. A new kid. She was asking somebody: “That’s Lori Lawson’s brother?”

  The girl’s eyes bulged, her jaw practically scraped the floor. Like he was Frankenstein and Lori was Miss America. Like Lori was Einstein and he was the idiot drooling in the back of the classroom. Like he was pond scum and she was the peak of evolution.

  Well, all that was just about true.

  The only thing Chuck had on Lori was being born first.

  Far as he could tell, the extra year hadn’t helped him any.

  Mom was talking now. Chuck focused too late to catch any of her words, but she pointed; he understood. It was almost time to get on the plane.

  Chuck’s stomach lurched. He pictured his plate at breakfast: five of Gram’s thick pancakes, stacked. And then—gone. The plate was empty when he put it on the counter.

  Stupid. Shouldn’t have eaten so much.

  Or not. Why die on an empty stomach?

  Did Daddy—?

  Chuck didn’t let himself think about that. He stared out across the waiting room chairs, all welded together in rows, like a grid. A pattern. People and luggage jammed in the seats and aisles, messing up the pattern. Random. Everyone about to fly. To die?

  You wanted this, Chuck accused himself. You wanted it bad.

  He could see himself, last spring, begging Pop. “Please. I’ll do night work all by myself for a month. Just let me go with Mom. I’ll pay attention to everything you say. I’ll work hard.”

  Pop chuckling, rubbing his bald head. A little grim. “You should be paying attention anyway. You should work hard all the time.”

  Pop was right. Chuck was just thinking
of the trip as a chance to avoid replanting beans, baling hay, feeding hogs, spreading manure.

  No. He’d wanted the trip for more than that. He remembered what he’d thought: In Chicago and Los Angeles and wherever else Mom wants to go, nobody will know I’m just fat, dumb Chuck Lawson. Maybe . . .

  It wasn’t worth hoping for.

  He’d always be fat.

  He’d always be dumb.

  And if nobody else noticed, Lori would always be there, remembering.

  Still . . .

  All spring, he’d silently cheered Mom on as she argued with Pop that, yes, Chuck could take two weeks off from farmwork without causing them to slide into bankruptcy once and for all. Even when he didn’t like the way she argued.

  “You’ve said yourself he’s not that much help, anyway,” she’d said one night after Chuck was supposed to be upstairs in his room, doing his homework. “Didn’t you say last year that he cost you hundreds of dollars, running over three rows of beans by mistake? I’ll be saving you money, taking him away!”

  Chuck was in the kitchen, eating peanut butter straight from the jar. Mom and Pop and Gram were in the front room, talking over the noise of the TV. Chuck flattened himself against the wall (as much as he could; he didn’t have the kind of body that flattened). He couldn’t quite hear Pop’s answer, but Mom’s reply came through loud and clear.

  “Yes, of course I’m joking. I know you’re not getting any younger, and you rely on the boys for help. But we’re just talking about two weeks here. I’ll pay for you to hire somebody to take Chuck’s place. I just think it’s time for Chuck and Lori both to see more of the world than Pickford County. And to see what I do.”

  Pop’s answer was a mumble again. It might even have been Gram who spoke.

  “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Pickford County,” Mom said.

  Chuck reminded himself that Gram and Pop were Mom’s parents. They were mostly raising her kids for her. She couldn’t afford to cross them.

  Hopelessly, he slunk up the stairs, back to the homework he didn’t understand.

  But the next morning, before taking off on another trip, Mom told Chuck and Lori not to make any plans for the last two weeks of June.