The Flyers

by Beth Turley

  My heart pounded while I watched them, so smiley and confident doing the things they loved. The things that would help the readers get to know them. I ran my eyes across the prop table. There were no parts-of-a-cell worksheets. There were no pebbles to toss from a window. There was no Summer.

  “Your turn, Elena,” the photographer said. He adjusted some settings on his camera and gave me a thumbs-up. Cailin waited on the tarp.

  “What are you thinking?” Cailin asked. With Harlow and Whitney she didn’t even have to ask.

  “I guess the books?” I pointed to the stack at the end of the table. “I like school.”

  Cailin followed my eyes to the table and tapped her chin. More polish had peeled off her nails.

  “Hold that thought.”

  She came back with a microphone, silver with sparkles on the handle. It was heavy and unfamiliar in my hand. My skin jolted when I grabbed it, like the handle was electric. I pictured my Lyric Libro flying open in front of everyone, all my thoughts and songs on display.

  “No, I can’t.”

  “I know I caught you singing the other day. And I couldn’t hear you all that well, but I did see how you looked. You looked like my teammates do before we perform. I swear.”

  Cailin walked away with the wire to the microphone in her hand, guiding it so it would lie across the tarp. I stared down at the little holes in the top of the microphone and wished one would suck me in.

  “Okay, go ahead and start,” the lead photographer said. The other three Flyers sat in folding chairs behind him.

  I lifted the microphone to my mouth and tried to smile like all the other Flyers I’d seen in my copies of the magazine. The microphone cord dragged on the ground like a ball and chain when I moved around. I couldn’t focus on the camera. My brain was full of jumbled up lyrics.

  “Doing great, Elena,” the photographer said, but the tone of his voice and lowered camera made it clear that I wasn’t.

  “I can keep trying,” I said. The studio’s sound system played one of my favorites from the radio, where the background music stopped and it was just the singer’s voice belting out the lyrics.

  “It might help if you actually sing,” Cailin shouted with a smile.

  The photographer picked up the camera again. “She’s right. Even when artists are lip-synching, it helps them to actually sing.”

  The idea made me want to run back down the street, back to the subway with its crisscrossed map on the wall, back home. But the microphone cord was a tether keeping me there. Cailin, Harlow, and Whitney nodded at me, encouraging smiles on their faces. I had to try.

  I picked the microphone up again and the camera flashed. It left purple spots in my vision, blocked everything else out. I tuned in to the lyrics coming from the speaker and started to sing in my soft and shaky voice. I didn’t pay attention to who was in the room. It was just me and the music.

  I didn’t stop until the final note of the song had played. I came back down to earth where the Flyers were standing behind the camera, clapping.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Headquarters

  After we wrapped up at Lot 88, we took the subway into Midtown Manhattan. It was busier when we got off, the New York I remembered from our holiday trip. I saw the coffee shop our parents had ducked into for cappuccinos, the souvenir store where I bought Summer a snow globe for Hanukkah. Food trucks were up against the curb selling hot dogs and fries, and it all smelled like summertime.

  Mindy brought us into the lobby of the tallest building I’d ever actually been in.

  “Is this the Spread Your Wings headquarters?” Harlow asked. Her eyes glinted like the shiny tip of a pen.

  “Technically, this is a lobby,” Mindy answered, and winked. She shrugged her You’ve Got a Friend in Me bag up higher on her shoulder. “But yes, we’re going up to the office.”

  We were quiet on the elevator ride to the twentieth floor, like we were all too full of anticipation to say anything. The elevator music swelled with violins and got to the biggest, most dramatic part when the doors opened up again.

  A patch of purple carpet led up to the floor-to-ceiling doors, the Spread Your Wings logo printed on the frosted glass. I wanted to run my fingers over the letters just to be sure this was all real. Was I really walking through the maze of hallways, seeing the cover of every issue on the wall in a purple frame? There were cubicles on the left with dividers between them. Spread Your Wings employees typed at computers at small, snow-white desks, some of them decorated with pictures and stickers and cactuses in clay pots. It all had a quiet, soothing hum to it, like the inside of a library.

  “This is some of our writing team,” Mindy said, motioning to the cubicles.

  “How do you get a job like this?” Harlow asked. Her eyes wandered everywhere. “In a place like this?”

  A writer with a shaved head and pink lipstick smiled and waved at me. She had superhero stickers on her computer monitor.

  “Luck,” Mindy answered.

  Harlow’s forehead creased. She fiddled with the pencil behind her ear.

  Mindy led us to a room labeled CONFERENCE 1205B. A long table with cushy-looking black chairs ran down the middle. Each seat had a pad of lined paper and a purple pen. The walls were painted violet with white stars, and a dry-erase board hung on the far wall with the words Personal Essay written inside a cloud shape. I stepped closer to the table and saw small ivory cards with our names written in purple script. I was next to Harlow on one side, and Whitney and Cailin were on the other. I took a picture of the setup—the pen and the paper and the stars on the wall—and sent it to Summer. The four unanswered texts I’d sent her filled up the screen and made my heart skip a beat.

  I heard footsteps from the hallway outside and a woman walked in, the most glamorous person I’d ever seen in real life. Her hair was black and parted right down the middle, and it was so long it touched her hips. The flowy shirt she wore was bright white against her brown skin. It was the kind of shirt other people would be afraid to wear in case they spilled something on it, but she held a steaming purple mug in her hand like there was no way a stain would happen on her watch. I recognized her from the Letter from the Editor section at the beginning of every issue. In April she’d written, Remember, dear reader, that your heart is everything, and I’d cut out the words and taped them to my wall.

  “Flyers, meet Akshita Balay, the lead editor at Spread Your Wings,” Mindy said with so much enthusiasm I felt like we should stand and applaud.

  “Welcome,” Akshita said. She placed her mug on the table and sat down. The string from a tea bag hung over the edge. Now that she was closer, I could smell the tea, citrus mixed with cinnamon. “Meeting the Flyers is truly my favorite part of the job, so I want to congratulate all of you, and thank you for being here. There would be no September issue, the back-to-school issue, without the content you help build.”

  She paused for a second, looking at each one of us, her eyes deep and shimmering. The urgency in them made me sit up straighter. She was telling us we were important and I believed her. In that moment I believed that I was supposed to be here.

  “I feel like school just ended. It’s strange to think about going back already,” Whitney said.

  Akshita smiled and took a sip of her tea.

  “One of the many interesting elements of magazine production. We are always thinking ahead. We live in the future.”

  In the seat next to me I saw Harlow start a bulleted list on her notepad. Live in the future, she wrote. She used her pencil instead of the purple pen. Mindy came around with red juice in tall, thin glasses and put one in front of each of us.

  “As you may know, each of you will be contributing an essay for the issue. This essay can be about anything important to you. We want you to dig deep, tap into your creative wells, and let our readers—your readers—get to know you. We hope your experiences with us will also provide some inspiration.”

  Harlow added Dig deep. Creative well. Inspira
tion. When Akshita stood to face the whiteboard, her back to us, I saw Cailin turn in her chair toward the wall, lift her phone, and aim it at a cluster of stars. Her finger pressed into the side button to take a picture.

  “We’ll be going over the components of a compelling personal essay, but first we’re going to start with some brainstorming.” Akshita ran her hand across the silver bar under the board. “Oh. No marker.”

  “I’ll get one!” Mindy declared, and waved her arms, knocking over a glass of the punch. It clattered against the table but didn’t break, pouring red liquid over the lightsabers printed on her chest. She stared down. “Holy Hercules, that did not just happen.”

  I heard Harlow make a muffled laughing sound in her throat. Whitney and Cailin rushed to cover their mouths. I had to look away, my heart aching for her. I was always fumbling my words the way Mindy had fumbled that glass. Diagnosis: an embarrassing moment. Treatment: try your best to brush past it. In Mindy’s case, find some extra-strength stain remover.

  “It’s okay, Mindy. Go… clean off,” Akshita said.

  Mindy hurried out of the conference room, arms crossed over her chest, orange hair hiding her face. Akshita sat back down. She took a long sip of her tea.

  “Another favorite part of Spread Your Wings. The unexpected,” she said when she set the mug back down. She smiled and her teeth were as white and straight as a picket fence. “But what you can expect is exploring this great city. Working with our writers and photographers. And developing your essays, which we consider human interest writing.”

  Harlow frowned.

  “So we won’t be doing much investigating? Into the hard-hitting news?”

  Akshita dipped the tea bag up and down, the sound like raindrops hitting a puddle.

  “Our stories are an investigation of the heart. What could be more hard-hitting than that?”

  Harlow stared down at the notepad. She wrote investigation of the heart between the lines.

  Akshita told us to do some free writing to get down some ideas for our essays. She said free writing was how we would unlock the treasure trunks in our heads. I thought about what my trunk would be filled with. My Lyric Libro would sit next to the stack of movies my family watches on Thursdays. There would be a film reel of memories of Summer and me sitting on the boat launch, planning where we’d sail off to.

  “We should sail to Puerto Rico. I’ve never been but I have family there. We can stay with them,” I offered one day last summer. The day was humid and foggy and my skin was sticky from the heat.

  “That’s not the point. We’re sailing to places where no one knows us,” Summer said, kicking her legs. Her feet were bare, her sneakers tipped over next to her thigh. They didn’t have my signature on them yet.

  “Why don’t we want anyone to know us?” I asked.

  She sniffed.

  “You can be anyone you want if no one knows you.”

  I watched the sun glare against the water. It was too bright to see far into the distance.

  “Antarctica, then?” I asked. “We can live with the penguins.”

  Summer laughed and reached down, splashing some lake water at my ankles.

  “Yeah. Antarctica.”

  I didn’t want to write about that piece of treasure, so I just wrote free write. Mindy walked back in. She had put on a loose blue sweatshirt with the Spread Your Wings logo. The soiled shirt was folded up in her hand. She placed a dry-erase marker on the table next to Akshita, then sat back in her seat, tucking the shirt into her bag.

  I skipped down a few spaces and in smaller letters started a song.

  A stain spreads out; it grows and grows.

  Whether it’ll come out no one knows.

  Some stains set, some stains heal.

  But that doesn’t change the way stains feel.

  “You have amazing handwriting,” Cailin said.

  I slammed my hand over the page hard enough to make everyone jump, to make Akshita drop her tea bag into her mug.

  “Oh. Thanks.” Heat shot up the back of my neck.

  “No problem,” Cailin said slowly.

  I waited for everyone to look away, for the blush to leave my face, then wrote a big X through the lyrics. I didn’t write anything else. The treasure trunk in my head was bolted shut, so I unlocked my phone instead. Summer still hadn’t answered.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Donut Hole

  James was one of the three Spread Your Wings staff photographers we had met that morning, and Akshita told us he’d be tagging along for the rest of our activities. He wore a black baseball cap and said things like “work it” and “that’s the stuff,” which reminded me of Dad when he tried to be funny. Mom would laugh so hard she’d snort, and that would make all of us laugh all over again. My heart squeezed thinking about them, thinking about being where everything was familiar. I let the rest of the group get farther ahead of me and dialed my home number.

  “It’s Elena,” Dad exclaimed when he answered. “Everyone, it’s Elena. She didn’t forget about us when she became famous.”

  I smiled and pressed the phone into my cheek like that would bring me closer to them. The sound of Mom’s footsteps came through the receiver, followed by Edgar’s singing clownfish.

  “Put her on speaker,” she said. “Tell us everything.”

  A taxi honked its horn and I startled. The crossing sign on the other side of the street showed an orange hand. Stop. The rest of the Flyers were on the other side. Whitney turned and waved me over.

  “Lenny? Are you all right?” Dad asked, his voice serious.

  I felt split in half, one ear full of home and the other full of the sounds of the city. They clashed like I couldn’t be in both places at once.

  “I’ll call you back,” I said. I put my phone in my pocket and hustled the rest of the way across the street, feeling farther from home and my family and Summer than I had since I’d arrived in New York. Whitney turned back again to smile at me, and the afternoon light was bright, and it didn’t feel so bad to be exactly where I was. The sun still shone when I was on my own.

  We stopped at a gourmet donut shop called the Donut Hole two blocks away from the Spread Your Wings building. The name was painted on the window, and the Os were pink-frosted donuts. I knew it was a Flyers tradition to stop at the Donut Hole. Every September issue had a two-page spread of pictures of the Flyers with their hands wrapped around decorated donuts.

  “Why do all the Flyers come here?” Harlow asked.

  “Donuts are Akshita’s favorite,” James answered, then snapped a picture of me peering through a donut O to see the real donuts inside. “Fierce.”

  When we were all inside, Mindy stayed at the door.

  “I’m going to the gift shop next door for a new shirt before I melt in this hoodie. James, can you keep an eye on the minions?”

  “You got it,” he answered.

  The café was almost empty and smelled like berries and chocolate syrup. We took a table by the window. I sat in one of the inside chairs and pressed my shoulder into the sun-warmed glass, allowing the afternoon rays to thaw out the air-conditioning goose bumps across my skin.

  “I’ll give you all some space,” James said. He handed his boxy black camera to Cailin. “Want to take the shots?”

  Cailin’s face lit up. I’d seen that look before, on episode four of On the Mat when her team qualified to attend the world championships.

  “Yes please,” she said. She held the camera between her hands like a baby bird when she sat down, studying the lens and all the buttons.

  A waiter in a sugar-dusted black apron came by our table and dropped a list in front of each of us. The flavors of donuts were typed out in swirly letters, with a checkbox next to each one. He reached into his apron for a handful of yellow golf pencils, said he’d be back in a few to get our orders, and disappeared into the kitchen. I read through the list. Mint Mayhem, Carrot Cake Chaos, Fruity Pebble Power. If Summer were here, she’d check Blueberry Bonan
za.

  “What are you going to write your essays about?” Whitney asked the table. She was across from me, and I could see my reflection in her glasses.

  “Probably being on the show. I have a lot to say.” Cailin held up the camera and took a test shot of the window, THE DONUT HOLE spelled backward.

  “I would read that.” Whitney checked the box for Mint Mayhem. “Harlow?”

  Harlow was looking at the menu like it was in a different language. She rolled the golf pencil between her fingers.

  “I don’t know. I thought we’d be doing more reporting. Like on what’s going on in the city. Or what’s in an Everything but the Kitchen Sink donut.”

  “Only one way to find out,” I said, and everyone laughed when Harlow checked the box. It felt warmer than the sunlight on my shoulder.

  The waiter collected our checklists, then came back with a big tray of donuts on peach-colored plates. He put our orders in front of each of us. My Caramel Craze was coated in toffee crumbles and beige buttercream. I took a bite. The donut was soft and sweet with a caramel core. I noticed Cailin had ordered the Blueberry Bonanza, and fresh blueberries were planted like flowers in the indigo frosting. We ate in silence for a second, and the I’m-a-Flyer feeling shot through me like a sugar rush, like it had when I sang at Lot 88 and when Akshita first welcomed us.

  Cailin picked up the camera and aimed it at Harlow.

  “Say ‘Everything but the Kitchen Sink.’ ”

  Harlow picked up the donut, covered in peanuts and pretzels and peppermint candies, and held it to her eye like a monocle. She smiled and said the words, and then leaned closer to Whitney, who picked up her donut too and did the same pose.

  “Hurry, I’m getting frosting on my glasses!” Whitney warned.

  Cailin smiled and I thought she looked happier than in any scene in On the Mat.

  I took out my phone to take a picture of my donut to post to my page, even though a bite was taken out. Before I could post, a new picture from Summer’s page loaded on the screen. Cailin clicked the camera to take another shot, this time with the lens on me as I stared at my phone.