The Flyers

by Beth Turley

  My heart squeezed, thinking of Harlow finding those clothes, the feeling of betrayal shooting straight through her. I hated that the feeling reminded me of Summer.

  “You really are a good investigative journalist,” Cailin said.

  “I didn’t want to be this time. But I needed to know why he did it. So I asked him. And he lied.” She gritted her teeth hard, like if she didn’t she would cry. “The next day the police were at our door. They’d caught him on camera.”

  Harlow’s hair hung down, covering her face. Whitney wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

  “He really is a stupid dumb stupidface,” Whitney said.

  It made Harlow laugh and lift her head a little.

  “The whole drive I just kept thinking about it. It filled me up and filled me up and by the time we got here, I was ready to explode.” She looked up at Cailin. “Which I did.”

  Cailin shook her head.

  “Don’t worry about it. Really.”

  I thought about how everyone had shared their secrets. Cailin with her photography page, Whitney’s anxiety, Harlow and her brother. I was the only one still locked tight.

  “I want to show you something,” I said, and before I could talk myself out of it I was at my duffel bag, unraveling the purple notebook from inside my hoodie, opening to the page I’d written on last night, after Summer sent her text, the blue city light coming in through the window. “I like to write songs.”

  I put my Lyric Libro next to the pizza box and let them read.

  I wanted to sail away with you

  Because you said you felt like sailing too.

  But I don’t want to run away anymore.

  I want to stay here upon the shore,

  Both of us sinking into the sand,

  No longer afraid to stand.

  I watched everyone’s eyes run down the lyrics, once and then again. I wondered what kind of melody the lyrics made in their heads, what it made them feel.

  Cailin was the first to look up.

  “Can I take a picture of this for ‘The Everyday’?” she asked.

  I fought the urge to pull the notebook away, hug it safe into my chest.

  “I don’t think it would fit there,” I answered.

  “It’s about beautiful things in everyday life.” She pointed to the notebook. “Your song definitely qualifies.”

  Whitney ran her finger over the last line.

  “Plus your handwriting is unreal,” she said.

  I thought about my words on Cailin’s photography page, mixed in with the flowers and landscapes. If I was going to be brave like the song said, brave enough to not sail away from hard things, this could be where I started.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Harlow flipped the notebook around so it faced Cailin. I watched her maneuver her phone so it looked at the song from the side, like the words were spilling out onto the page, like my handwritten letters were soldiers marching off into the distance. I looked away when she pressed post. My heart pounded and something rose in my chest, like I might scream or cry or laugh. It wasn’t a bad feeling.

  A singing competition played on the TV, and the two singers with the lowest scores stood holding hands, awaiting their fate. One was a guy with a banjo and pink hair. The other was tall and tan in a red ballgown.

  We went back to eating pizza, and I saw Cailin’s phone light up on the bed. It stayed lit, little notifications piling up on the screen. Cailin watched them pop up, one after another, chewing on her bottom lip.

  “That’s weird,” she said.

  “What is?” My skin turned to goose bumps, the air-conditioning suddenly too cold, my fingertips numb.

  “I don’t usually get any notifications on that page.” She picked up the phone. I waited for her to tell me everything was fine. Instead her eyes went wide. “Oh no. I’m so sorry, Elena.”

  The host of the show announced that the banjo player’s journey had come to an end.

  A buzzing came from the other bed, from my phone on top of the pillow. I picked it up and saw Summer’s name flash across the screen.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The New Language

  Cailin scrambled to the door after me. The phone kept buzzing in my hand.

  “I’m seriously so sorry, it was a complete accident,” she pleaded. I couldn’t see her phone on the bed anymore, but I pictured the screen filling up with more notifications, imagined what the comments would say.

  “It’s okay.” A few more buzzes and the call would go to voicemail. Maybe that would be easier. “I’ll be back.”

  I stepped into the hall and answered the phone.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hey.” Summer’s voice made me want to cry. She sounded like my best friend and a stranger at the same time.

  “Hi,” I said again. I walked down the hall, past the closed doors. I felt the cold floor through my thin striped socks.

  Summer scoffed. “I saw the picture of your poem. I’d recognize your handwriting anywhere.”

  “It’s a song.”

  “You write songs?”

  “Yeah.”

  I got to the end of the hall, turned around, and started back again.

  “And these songs are about me.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You never responded to my text,” Summer said.

  “I didn’t know what to say.”

  I felt every single mile between us. The distance that had been forming even if we never talked about it.

  “You just said it to the whole world on Cailin’s page instead.” Her words were fast, like always, but every one of them sounded hurt.

  “That was an accident.”

  She sniffed and the moment felt like a breakup scene in a movie. The static in the phone, Summer’s sniffles, the feeling of the walls closing in.

  “Well, I heard you loud and clear. You don’t want to be friends anymore. And I know I was harsh, but that sucks Elena, it really does. I apologized.”

  The hallway spun. That wasn’t what the song was about at all. I just wanted to stop being afraid all the time. Afraid of losing her. Afraid of my own voice.

  “Things have been different this year, Summer. It’s like I’m not good enough to be your friend anymore. It’s like I’m someone you pretend to be friends with but make fun of.”

  “How could you think that? You’re like my whole life, Elena.”

  There were too many things to say, all of them piling up like the notifications on Cailin’s phone.

  “But you shut me out when you had your first kiss. You made fun of my piercings on the bus to the tree farm. You’ve been hanging out with Riah instead of me, and—” I felt my voice ready to break. “I heard you in the locker room with Kendra and Sara. You told them you wanted me to back off.”

  The line was silent, the space between her and me stretching even further.

  “I have to go,” Summer said, and the line went dead. I kept the phone to my ear when I dropped down in the middle of the hallway, a few doors away from our room, hoping Summer might come back but knowing she wouldn’t.

  The door on the left side of me opened and Mindy peeked her head out.

  “Everything okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I mumbled.

  Mindy came to sit with me on the floor. She wore pajamas with glass slippers on them.

  “I heard a little bit. Thin walls,” she said.

  “I think I just lost my best friend.”

  Down the hall Whitney’s head peeked out from our door, then disappeared back inside.

  “Do you want to find her?”

  I stared at one of the glass slippers on her pajama pants. A diamond sparkled on the toe.

  “What?”

  “You say you lost her. Well, maybe she’s in the elevator.” Mindy pointed behind us, toward the elevator in the middle of the hall. “Or at the pool. Or in an enchanted forest. I bet you can find her.”

  I snort-laughed.

  “I think she’s
hidden a little better than that.”

  “How else can I put this?” Mindy clicked her heels together. “I took a Portuguese class last semester. Hardest class I’ve ever taken. But of course it was, you know? It’s a new language. And sometimes, when you get older and you and everyone around you starts learning new things about themselves, people start speaking different languages. And we have to learn to translate.”

  If the things Summer said about me made up a new language, I wasn’t sure it was one I wanted to study.

  “What if you can’t?” I asked.

  Mindy stuck her legs straight out in front of her, matching the way I was sitting.

  “It happens. Sometimes people can’t speak your new language with you.” She tapped her knee against my leg. “I think you’re one of the ones who can.”

  I stared down at my legs until the plaid fabric blurred.

  “What if she doesn’t want me to?” The words were small and scared.

  “She does.” Mindy stood and held out her hand. When I took it, she hoisted me up. “I promise,” she added.

  I held that with me when we said good night, when I walked back down the hall to the room. I realized I’d walked out without a key, but when I got there, the door was propped open with Cailin’s suitcase. Whitney, Harlow, and Cailin were leaned into the headboard together when I walked in, Cailin in the middle with her phone out, the others watching her scroll. She tossed it to the side when I walked in, and scrambled across the bed.

  “I’m sorry, Elena. How you showed us your song and I totally ruined it,” she said. Everyone’s face was serious when I sat at the edge of the bed.

  I looked around the room at all the mess and clutter we’d created over the past couple days. At the four of us sitting close together.

  “It’s okay. I think it needed to happen.”

  “Cailin’s photography page gained a thousand followers in five minutes. We’ve been watching the numbers go up,” Whitney said.

  “How?” I asked.

  “I put the tag on the song picture, since I thought it was on the Everyday page. Now everyone can find it,” Cailin said.

  “Sorry, Cailin.”

  “Don’t be! Everyone loves it,” she said, a big smile across her face.

  I stopped myself from thinking that Cailin was lucky, lucky that she had followers who loved everything she did, lucky her secrets could come out without everything falling apart. I knew her better now. And not everything was perfect in her world either.

  “They’re great pictures.”

  Cailin shook her head.

  “Not the pictures, your song! See for yourself.”

  She grabbed the phone from where she’d thrown it and pulled up the picture, then handed it to me.

  The song had over two thousand likes. Comment after comment popped up underneath.

  This is so meaningful.

  Wow, I can really relate to this.

  You should post more of these.

  “You’re a star, Elena,” Whitney said.

  I read and read and thought about how if I’d sailed away with Summer, I never would have had this moment.

  Chapter Thirty

  The Idea

  When we got to the Spread Your Wings office the next morning, Akshita was at the table in a black pantsuit. Her hair was swept into a high ponytail. She smiled when we walked in, but her eyes didn’t.

  “Good to see you, Flyers,” she said. “We have to finish your essays today so please take a seat.”

  We took the same seats that we had the last time we were here, even though there weren’t name tags anymore. Instead there was a tablet at each spot. When I sat down, I saw that it was opened to a blank document, the words My Flyer Essay already typed into the header.

  “Akshita, I’m sorry about the other night,” Harlow said.

  “We promise to turn it around for the last day,” Cailin added.

  Akshita smiled.

  “Like I said in my toast. Every Flyer experience is different. That doesn’t make one better than the other.”

  I looked around to my fellow Flyers. We all nodded at each other.

  “We also had an idea for the essays,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Akshita asked.

  “We want to write it together. One essay from all of us,” Whitney added.

  Akshita’s eyes narrowed like she might say no, and then she stood.

  “Brilliant.” She got up and grabbed a marker, facing the whiteboard. She wrote collaboration in big letters. “Let’s brainstorm.”

  * * *

  That night we ate dinner with Mindy and James at a Mediterranean restaurant near the Tappiston. The food had all the right flavors, no clumpy pasta or metallic tomato sauce. There was even a garden terrace, and we sat near a bush with purple flowers. When we got back to the hotel, Cailin pulled a jar of clay face mask from her suitcase, and the four of us sat on the floor and caked the pink goo on our faces, the mask cracking on my cheeks every time I laughed. We read the early copy of the August issue we’d been given at headquarters. I was responsible for flipping the pages.

  Around midnight we were on the last page of the issue where the horoscopes were.

  “Oh hey, I can expect great fortune,” Harlow said, pointing to the Libra write-up.

  “Do you really believe in those things?” Cailin asked. It made sense she would be skeptical about astrology—she was a Taurus.

  I glanced at the Cancer horoscope. This month will bring great change. Do not try to resist it.

  “I believe in it,” I said.

  “You know what I believe in?” Whitney asked, standing up from the bed and stomping her foot. We all looked up at her.

  “What?” Harlow asked.

  “Fashion.” Whitney tossed her head back and lifted her arms. She still had little flecks of the pink mask around her temples. She wore a flannel set of pajamas with sheep on them.

  “Whitney, you have farm animals on your clothes.” Cailin laughed. She sat up cross-legged. I watched her take a picture of our setup on the ground, the sheets spread out like a picnic blanket.

  “Not for long.” She straightened out her glasses. “Let’s have a fashion show.”

  We all smiled over Whitney’s idea and stood up from the sea of sheets. Once our clothes were dumped out onto the bed, we scoured the selection. Harlow ended up in a jersey and jeans. Cailin borrowed Whitney’s flowery headband. Whitney saw me studying my pile and reached in, extracting the black dress I’d worn on the first day. On the train ride to New York, and down to the pool, where I’d wondered how I would ever fit in to this group.

  When we were dressed, we went out to the hall and turned it into a catwalk, laughing when Cailin did cartwheels down the carpet, and when Whitney strutted like a real runway model. We couldn’t contain ourselves when Harlow took her turn, taking the pencil out from behind her ear and pointing at all of us like a scolding teacher.

  A door opened down the hall and Mindy stepped out. Her hair was like an orange cyclone.

  “You Flyers want to get us kicked out of the hotel on the last night?” She rubbed her eyes.

  “Sorry, Mindy,” Cailin said.

  “We’ll go to bed,” Harlow said, and we scrambled into the room.

  “Ha. Kidding,” Whitney whispered just to us.

  * * *

  When I woke up, the alarm clock next to the bed said 5:15 in red block numbers. I looked toward the window. It was dark, with just the smallest bit of purple light coming through. I almost closed my eyes to claim another two hours of sleep before we had to get up, pack, and leave, but instead I got up and went to the window. The buildings were all black shadows, but the sky was swirled-up blue and pink.

  “What are you doing?” Whitney mumbled.

  I turned around. She was watching me, her glasses on the pillow next to her.

  “Watching the sunrise. Come see.”

  “It’s so early.”

  “It’s worth it.”

  She
groaned and dropped her head back down, but a second later she was pushing off her blanket. She stood next to me at the window, adjusting her glasses. The sky was even brighter, the sun crawling higher, when Cailin came to the window. Orange had crept in when Harlow joined.

  I wondered if what I was doing was wrong. Watching the sunrise had been something I did with Summer, like going to the boat launch. But there was lots of room on that dock. There was room at this window for all of us to stand and stare straight up at the sky.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The Departure

  We said goodbye in the Tappiston lobby. Taxis were coming to take Cailin back to the airport, and Whitney and me to Grand Central. A gray SUV pulled up in front of the hotel.

  “My mom is here,” Harlow said.

  I remembered thinking the lobby was like a castle. If it were a castle, then Harlow would be a knight, leaving to go battle whatever was out there for her. I guess we all were.

  The four of us huddled.

  “We have to stay in touch,” Whitney said. “Through a group chat.”

  We had to give each other our numbers on the first day in case of emergency, in case of separation, and now we’d use them because we were separating. I wondered when we’d ever be all together again. If we ever would be.

  “What should we call it?” I asked.

  “Akshita’s Angels?” Harlow suggested.

  “How about the Flyers?” Cailin added.

  Harlow’s mom rolled down her window outside. She waved at us, her face made of the same features as Harlow’s. We were running out of time.

  “C-H-E-W,” I spelled.

  Everyone stared at me.

  “Chew?” Whitney asked.

  “Cailin, Harlow, Elena, Whitney.”

  We laughed one last time, and the moment was full of pizza and palm frond fan blades, the trees in Central Park. It was full of face masks and bad spaghetti and Wint-O-Green mints. Secrets.

  * * *

  Whitney’s train was departing from tunnel fifteen. Mine was at twenty-seven. We stood in the center of Grand Central where the information booth was, the constellations above our heads again. It felt like so much had changed since the last time we were here, but the stars were still there, the Cancer crab scurrying across the blue. I wondered what my horoscope said today. You will have to say goodbye.