Thinking of You

by Rachel Kane

  A sudden hush in the gymnasium. Oh no, Amanda, don’t go there.

  Benjamin, his face white with rage, leaned toward my sister. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me. My dad says your dad is too lazy to get a job, and that’s why you live in the trailer park. He says all your dad does is drink all day.”

  “You fucking dog,” said Benjamin. “I oughtta—”

  “You ought to what?” asked Amanda. “You going to punch a girl?”

  “Um, sis, maybe we should get a teacher,” I said.

  It’s funny the way things escalate when you’re a kid. And by funny I mean scary. I’ve had close calls as a grown-up, because when you’re gay, homophobia is the very air around you. You learn, depressingly enough, to steel yourself for it. But usually you can deal with it. Usually you can deescalate, or escape, or something.

  When you’re a kid, though, all the normal social barriers are gone. There’s nothing standing between you and raw aggression.

  Except, in this case, my sister was standing between us. And I was very scared on her behalf.

  “We don’t need a teacher,” said Amanda. “Because Benny is going to crawl back in his hole and leave us alone. Aren’t you, Benny? Or do you want everybody to know what a lazy drunk your dad is?”

  “I don’t think that’s helping,” I whispered.

  “You bitch,” he said through clenched teeth. “You shut your fucking mouth or I’ll—”

  Amanda’s fist was hard as a rock. I knew that from our big sibling fights. She could throw a punch. And when her fist connected with Benny’s skull, I could hear it, thock!

  He stepped back, eyes wide with surprise. But if she’d thought that would end it, she was wrong.

  No words this time. No threats. He aimed his fist at her and yelled.

  * * *

  “Come on!” screamed Jacob. “Wake up, man, can you move?”

  I blinked. Now the world was in slow motion, or at least my body was. “Are we okay?”

  He was trying to unbuckle my seatbelt. “We are far, far from okay. Can you move? Do I need to carry you?”

  I looked down at my hand. I had touched my forehead, and my fingers had come away bloody. That didn’t bother me, so much as the fact that when my fingers made contact, I couldn’t feel my head at all. That was troubling in a way I needed to describe in some detail to Jacob, and I was fuzzily trying to find the words, when he got me unbuckled.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, ignoring whatever I was saying, “I’ve got you, but we’ve got to move fast. That fuel could go any second.”

  That brought me to my senses. I was still in the plane. The bent wing was making it hard for Jacob to reach me.

  My arm felt electric, buzzing. Something definitely wrong there.

  There was no time to diagnose myself further. I pushed myself out of the seat, out of the narrow opening. My legs were wobbly, but before I could fall, Jacob’s shoulder was under my arm, holding me up. He drew me deeper into the woods.

  “Wait, I need to sit down a second,” I said.

  “Come on,” he said, taking me further and further away. It seemed ridiculous. Surely this was far enough. Surely he could set me down and let me take a small nap right here in the pine straw. That would be the gentlemanly thing to do.

  When the fuel ignited, I could feel it on my back. It was hot, and it forced us down, like the devil himself shoving us from behind. So loud my ears rang. And the smell, the burning, it was so strong.

  I didn’t realize I had passed out again, until I opened my eyes to find Jacob and dragged me even further away. I carefully propped myself up and looked back in the direction of the plane. Orange flames rose into thick black smoke.

  Beside me, Jacob was breathing heavily. His eyes were fixed to the plane, wary.

  You saved my life, I thought, and closed my eyes again.

  5

  Jacob

  I needed to think. That was the main thing. Find a way to use my racing mind to figure out what to do next.

  I swallowed. My throat was dry. My face was covered in sweat. My chest felt like someone had punched me in the breastbone. Okay. Maybe no thinking right this second. Maybe rest and recovery time instead.

  Eli looked okay. He was a little wobbly, but his injuries didn’t seem severe. I was worried about a concussion, but if he had one, there wasn’t anything I could do about it but keep him still.

  My annoyance with him earlier over all his questions had been replaced by guilt. So he was curious. He was a tourist, he was allowed to be curious.

  And I’d nearly killed him.

  I didn’t understand how that had happened. The plane’s engine had been overhauled just a few years ago. We kept it in pristine condition. To have it go like that… I shook my head. Later. I’d try to understand it later.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him.

  “You’ve asked me that four times.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “My arm feels really weird. And my head hurts. And blood keeps getting in my eyes.”

  I nodded, grateful for something concrete to do while I thought. “First things first,” I said, and stripped off my shirt. Underneath, I had on a white t-shirt, which was soaked in sweat, but at least it was clean. I pulled the t-shirt off and tore a long strip from the bottom. “We can use this as a bandage.”

  “I brought a first aid kit,” said Eli. “It’s in…oh. My backpack.”

  We both turned to look at the wreckage. The plane used to have a first aid kit as well. It was burned to a crisp now. More troubling, the radio was now nothing but charred metal and ash.

  I didn’t make a distress call.

  That bothered me more than anything. Could I have grabbed the radio? If I’d had more presence of mind, could I have called back to the tower and let them know we were going down?

  No, you couldn’t. Stop second-guessing yourself. If you’d taken your hands off the yoke long enough to call for help, we’d be dead right now.

  Yeah, but now nobody knew where we were. No one knew that we had crashed.

  I shook my head. Right now I had an injured man who needed my help.

  I wound the strip of white cotton around Eli’s head. Blood instantly soaked it red, so I pulled one more strip off and applied it to the cut. His eyes looked okay; he was able to focus on me, and his pupils were reacting normally.

  “This might hurt,” I said, taking his hand.

  “Oh boy,” he said. “More pain.”

  But as I touched his wrist, forearm, and upper arm, there were no points of pain, nothing to suggest a broken bone.

  “It just feels like it went to sleep,” he said, “and now it’s waking up.”

  “Maybe you banged it in the plane,” I said. “Hit a nerve or something.”

  Once we’d determined he was okay, I felt a weight slide off me. Now I could focus on getting us out of here. I stood up and took out my phone.

  “You get a signal out here?” he asked.

  I looked at the display. No bars. There wasn’t a cell tower for miles and miles. I slid the phone back into my pocket. “Can you walk?”

  He winced, but he did make it back to his feet. “I think so.”

  “All right. Come on.”

  “Wait, where are we going?” he asked.

  “The airfield. Same place we were headed before, just on foot. But it’s a long damn hike. We’ll be lucky to get there by nightfall.”

  He dragged his fingers through his hair, pulling on the strands. Looked stressed as hell.

  “Jacob, I don’t want to tell you your business, but shouldn’t we stay here? Wait for someone to rescue us?”

  I didn’t want to stand around and chat. Eli was going to slow me down enough, and we couldn’t trek through the woods after sundown. We had to make progress, and we had to do it now.

  “Who’s going to rescue us?” I asked him.

  “Like…the police? The airplane police?”

  I stared at h
im. “The airplane police?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Who does search and rescue?”

  “Nobody,” I said. The urgency to move was like a buzzing in my skull. “Nobody does search and rescue, if they don’t realize we’re missing.”

  If I’d made the mayday call, they would realize.

  “I mean, surely someone will come,” Eli insisted. “Look at all the smoke.”

  I shook my head. “You can’t count on anyone seeing it. It’s not tourist season. Nobody’s here.”

  “But won’t the airport we’re flying to realize we didn’t show up, and—”

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m going to say this as nicely as possible. We’re going to make it out of here, and we’re going to be fine. But in order to do that, you have to do what I say. You don’t know anything about the mountain. You don’t know anything about our situation. So I need you to stop offering an opinion, unless you’re doing it while walking in that direction.”

  I pointed deep into the forest. North.

  But he dug in his heels. “I’m sure the Big Gruff Man act goes over well with the ladies, Jake, but you’re not the fucking boss of me. The plane is a fucking beacon, and someone will see it. It makes sense to stay here, rather than wandering off into the woods to get eaten by wolves or something.”

  I hadn’t expected him to get personal. Man, fucking tourists, am I right? I didn’t even know what to say to him. “There aren’t any goddamn wolves in this part of the country!”

  Didn’t mean to shout.

  My hands were in fists. I relaxed them. I took a breath. Calm the fuck down. He’s just a city boy, he doesn’t understand. Calm down, explain it slowly.

  Easier said than done. I closed my eyes and took one more breath.

  “If anyone does see the smoke, if anyone puts two and two together, they’re going to need a place to land a search party.” I pointed north. “They’re going to land at the old airfield. That’s where we need to go. It’s a big damn forest, Eli, and that smoke isn’t going to last forever. We’re going to be needles in a haystack unless we get to the airfield.”

  I could see him thinking about it, could almost hear him thinking up another objection.

  Goddamn it, I just needed him to trust me. Any chance we had of making it through this unscathed meant heading up there. Staying at the plane was not an option.

  Maybe I should pick him up and start walking. Sling him over my shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

  He walked away from me, not towards the plane, and not in the right direction either. At first I was about to yell at him not to run off. But I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. Circling, like he’d dropped something on the ground and was trying to find it.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “I need something, a rock, something big and flat.”

  “There are plenty of rocks. It’s a mountain.”

  “Will you just help me?” he said. “Something like a shovel blade.”

  Now I was seriously confused, but I realized he had something in mind, and maybe if I just let him have his way on this, he’d stop fighting me and let us head up to the cabins.

  “Something like this?” I said, pulling a flat chunk of granite from the dark soil.

  “Exactly like that.” He took the stone from me. “Now…how close to the plane can I get?”

  “What the hell are you up to?”

  “Is it going to explode again?”

  I shook my head, still not understanding. “It’s done all the exploding it’s going to do, but it’s going to burn for quite a while.”

  I watched in horror as he started walking back to the plane.

  “What are you doing?” I called after him. “Your stuff is gone! Burned up! There’s nothing in the plane for you!”

  “Dude, I know that,” he said.

  I caught up to him. “Then what the fuck are you doing?”

  When he got as close as he could to the still-burning plane, close enough that I could feel the heat on my bare skin, he pushed the rock into the soft dark soil. I watched him drag it forward, pulling all the straw and leaves out of the way. He drew a long, dark line with the stone, pointing in the direction I’d urged him to walk.

  “What…” My voice trailed off.

  At the furthest point, he turned a few degrees to the left, and then came back. Then went back to that point, turned a few degrees to the right, and returned.

  I laughed. “You think anybody’s going to see that?”

  He stood at the point of the giant arrow he had carved into the dirt, looking proud of himself. He planted the stone right at the point of the arrow. “How could they miss it? Now when they come to save us, they’ll know which direction we went.”

  I didn’t think it would do any good, but hell, at least now he was coming with me.

  “Can you believe it?” Eli asked.

  I looked up. I guess I’d gotten lost in my thoughts, or maybe my head was just quiet for a while. We might be in a bad situation, but it was a pretty day, and I could be forgiven for pretending this was just a walk in the woods. Better that than dwell on my guilt.

  “Believe what?”

  “Dude, we were in a plane crash. We literally plummeted out of the sky.”

  “I’m glad you remembered. At least you don’t have amnesia.”

  “No, don’t you see? Who gets to say that? Who has a story like that? We were like Icarus, flying too close to the sun!”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know who Icarus is, but there was nothing wrong with our altitude.”

  “I was being figurative, Jacob. You don’t think it’s kind of cool that you can tell people you survived that? It doesn’t give you this rush of energy?”

  Stopping, I turned to him. “That plane is my pop’s livelihood. Thanks to me, his life just got a lot more complicated.”

  “Yeah, but insurance—”

  “No. It’s not just the money. It’s what’s going to happen to him when he realizes we crashed.”

  “But we lived!”

  All I could do is stare at Eli for a minute. How could anyone be so cheerful about this? It was like he was disconnected from the reality of what we just went through. Like he couldn’t see that other people were going to have feelings about this.

  “Imagine your sister,” I said. “Imagine what she’s going to go through, between the time she hears that we’re missing, and the time she finds out that you’re safe.”

  “I don’t…oh.”

  “Everyone you love is going to think you died. And sure, the good news is, you didn’t die, and you’ll be safe at home before long. But the in-between time is going to be torture for them. So no, right now I’m not thinking about what a great story this will make. Right now I’m worried about my pop.”

  That silenced Eli. He looked troubled. I don’t think any of this had occurred to him at all.

  “Damn, you’re a downer,” he said.

  You’re being awfully hard on a guy who just crash-landed and nearly broke his skull, I told myself.

  He started walking. He looked bashful, forlorn, and I felt yet another sting of guilt. Was I being too hard on him? Was he just not thinking straight?

  I had the sudden urge to go after him, to grab his arms, to tell him it was going to be okay.

  Yeah, not gonna do that.

  No. Definitely not.

  I slowly followed him.

  6

  Eli

  I still thought it would make a good story. I was coming to realize though, that Jacob and I weren’t going to be best pals through this adventure. I was glad he was with me; clearly he had the skills necessary to get us to safety.

  Still, he didn’t like me, and that made things uncomfortable.

  Bonus Uncomfortable Fact: He never did button his shirt back up.

  I was wearing strips of his t-shirt as a bandage, but the plaid shirt he’d had on over it was now hanging open, and his chest was bare beneath it.

  I m
ean, I didn’t stare. That would have been rude, and let’s be honest, when you’re alone with a straight man in the middle of the forest, you don’t want to be obvious.

  But damn.

  In this modern age where it seems like everyone is at the gym 24/7 working on their perfect bodies, taking supplements of dubious provenance, having cryo treatments to sculpt troublesome body fat, all the crazy stuff that people did to make themselves acceptable in an increasingly judgmental world, seeing a guy who was just naturally beautiful was enough to make you catch your breath.

  Rule one of being lost in the forest with a straight guy: Don’t think so much about his body that you get a hard-on.

  Yeah, that seemed like a good rule. If I kept thinking about it, it was going to make things pretty awkward.

  Better to take my mind off it entirely.

  “So how far is the airfield, do you think?”

  Jacob looked back the way we came. “If I had a map, it would be easier to say. The way I see it, we’ve got two possibilities. One is that we hit one of the trails going up there. If we do that, it’s not that long a trek, and we could be there by this afternoon. The problem is if we don’t find a trail, and have to keep walking this way. It’s steeper than you think…and it’s going to get worse, before it levels out again. That’s why I wanted to move on, so we could get there before dark.”

  Boy, that wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear. I’d somehow imagined us on an easy hike. It hadn’t occurred to me that we were going uphill.

  Something about that thought, the realization that this wasn’t going to be easy, came crashing down on me. I don’t think it had really occurred to me before that we weren’t safe. Just because we’d survived the crash didn’t mean we were home free.

  “Maybe we should have stayed with the plane,” I said.

  “We’ve been over that.”

  “I know, but we’re going to be walking for hours. It’s going to get cold, but the plane is going to stay warm. Maybe we should have camped there.”

  I could see him tensing up.

  “Just trust me,” Jacob said, “it’s going to be a lot faster this way.”