Freefall Summer

by Tracy Barrett

  I stretched out the lines of Randy’s rig and made everything smooth. I flaked the canopy and pulled the slider into place, then stowed the lines and closed the pack. When I reached for the other rig, I saw Denny come in from the direction of the office. He was with my dad and Louisa.

  I’ve known Louisa forever. She was one of the SkyWitches—my mom’s demo team, the one that jumped into football games and concerts and things like that—and she was on my mom’s last load. She’d been under canopy when my mom had her accident, so she saw it all from the air. My dad saw it too, but from the ground. Not me. I was asleep in the lounge behind the office, coming down with the flu, although nobody knew that at the time.

  Louisa gave me a wink before the three of them went into the classroom at the back of the hangar, and I started on another rig.

  My phone pinged and I leaped for it. It wasn’t Theo; just Julia, who wanted to know if I could go with her to get a summer haircut on Monday. I told her I’d ask.

  Business was slower than it had been on Saturday morning—people were probably in church hoping they’d get holy enough to go to heaven if they died during their jump—and my dad had gone out with Norton and Mad Jack. Dad was always in a good mood after a jump since he hardly ever had the time to jump for fun anymore, so it was the best time to ask him. I found him in the office, where he was doing some bookkeeping.

  He looked up over his glasses. “Hey, C.C. What’s up?”

  “Julia wants me to go with her to get a haircut tomorrow. She asked if she could pick me up.” I could see refusal starting to form in his mind, so I went on hurriedly, “She’s had her license for nine months, and the salon is so close. She won’t have to go on any busy streets.” It didn’t look like he was weakening. “Come on, I don’t want my daddy to take me everyplace like it’s the first day of kindergarten.” Only he hadn’t been the one to take me that day. My mom had, and all summer she’d made school sound like so much fun that I was so excited that I hardly even noticed when she left me.

  “Sorry, hon.” He shook his head. “I like Julia, I really do, but I don’t trust her driving. I saw that dent in her fender when she came by the other day. How did that happen?”

  “I don’t know.” I did know; it was just a fender bender, and the way Julia told it, it was kind of the other guy’s fault too. But my dad would never believe that.

  “And I’ve seen her texting at the wheel, and—”

  “All right!” I spat. “I get it. I can’t ride with her. Fine. You can be my taxi service until I go to…” I stopped. If I had said “until I go to college,” he would have jumped on that and said he could still drive me then—Clemens wasn’t too far away.

  I stomped out before I completely lost it. I was seething, clenching my teeth so I wouldn’t shout at him. He was being utterly and completely ridiculous. So Julia texted while she was driving….She knew I didn’t like it and didn’t do it when I was in the car unless we were at a red light. And anyone can have a fender bender.

  I texted Julia and said I’d come but I’d have to take a bus. Then I flung a rig on the table and slammed it together. I tossed it on the “done” pile and grabbed another one. After the third, the repetitive motions did their work and calmed me down enough so that I could breathe normally.

  I texted Theo to ask when he was getting off work. He answered that he had to stay late and help with pool maintenance, so seeing each other that evening was out, but that he’d pick me up the next day and we’d go to lunch, just the two of us, no Julia or Justin. I squelched my irritation that he didn’t ask me first, assuming that of course I’d be okay with his plans, and I answered that he could pick me up at Julia’s salon at eleven o’clock.

  “Argh!” I shouted, tossing my phone on the table. Would anybody ever allow me to make up my mind for myself? I looked around. No one seemed to have heard me, and if they had, they’d probably think I was having a hard time untangling lines or something.

  I heard yelling from the classroom. I needed a break, so I went over and peeked in to see what was going on. Denny dangled in a harness a few feet off the ground, looking extremely foolish, while Louisa tried to fluster him. Neither one of them appeared to notice me.

  “You have line twists!” Louisa shouted. “They’re holding your canopy closed, and you’re falling too fast!” She grabbed him by the leg and gave a mighty heave, and he twirled in the air, hanging from the pretend parachute. “Do something!” She kept yelling while he yanked at the lines and looked at her hopefully.

  She sighed. “Dude. I’m not up there with you. There’s no one up there with you. You’re in the freaking air, and you’re all alone, and you’re coming down too fast. You’re going to make a bi-i-i-ig crater when you hit the ground.”

  Whomp! I said to myself. I swallowed.

  “So what do you do?” She twirled him around again.

  “I don’t know.” He sounded sheepish.

  She sighed. “Well, you’re dead now, so let’s run through it once more and then you can try again. You don’t just pull the lines once. If you don’t clear the twist, you pull them again, and then you check your altimeter. Got it?”

  He nodded.

  “All right then. Okay, you just opened. What do you do?”

  He looked up.

  “Right, check the canopy. It looks all weird and bunched up because the lines got tangled when it tried to open. You start spinning and you’re coming down too fast.” She twirled him around and he yanked the lines.

  “No good. Still tangled.” Louisa increased the spin.

  He yanked again, and again. “Did it clear?”

  “Nope.”

  “So what do I do if pulling on the lines doesn’t clear it?” He sounded frustrated.

  “Look at your altimeter.” Denny waited for more instruction. “Go ahead, look at it!” He raised his wrist to his face like he was reading a watch. “It says you’re at three thousand feet. What do you do?”

  “Um…”

  “Clock’s ticking. You’re dropping. You have about thirty seconds of life left. Do you want ‘um’ to be your last word?”

  “But won’t the reserve open automatically?”

  “Dude.” She sighed again. “Look up. Your main is partially open. That’ll probably slow you down so much that the reserve won’t be triggered. And if it did, what if the two canopies got tangled with each other?”

  I felt sick.

  “Oh right!” Denny’s face brightened. He let go of the steering toggles and fumbled with the cutaway handle on his right shoulder.

  “Say it out loud!” Louisa barked.

  “Look red,” Denny said as he looked down at the red plastic handle. “Hands red.” He grabbed the handle with both hands and hesitated.

  “You’re falling!” Louisa said. “No good canopy!”

  “Look silver.” Denny turned his head to look at the reserve deployment handle on his left shoulder. “Pull red. Pull silver.” He yanked the red handle to jettison his main canopy, and then the silver one to open the reserve.

  “Congratulations,” Louisa said. “You just saved your own life. Remember, the AAD—”

  “The what?” he interrupted.

  “Automatic Activation Device. It fires the reserve automatically if you’re going too fast below a preset altitude. Reserves hardly ever malfunction, but don’t count on that. Open it yourself as soon as you’ve cut away the main. Remember this about your reserve: when in doubt, whip it out.”

  Denny said, almost fiercely, “Do it again.”

  Louisa set him spinning so fast his head wobbled. He pulled on the lines three times, looked at the dummy altimeter on his wrist, pulled on the cutaway handle, and then made the motions of dumping the reserve. He swung around and then back again slowly as the momentum of Louisa’s shove wore off.

  “You’re alive!” Louisa gave him a big smile. She pushed him backward until his feet were above the table and lowered him gently. I wondered if his legs had gone to sleep from dangling
for so long.

  I pulled back quickly before they could see me. I knew they’d practice it again and again until Louisa was sure that if Denny got line twists under canopy, he wouldn’t have to think about what to do, but would just react. She’d make him practice clearing bag locks and partial deployments and even extremely rare things like getting the pilot chute wrapped around his leg—nothing to do for that but cut the line with his hook knife and open the reserve and pray for no entanglement. Finally, he’d learn how to head into the wind under canopy and how to land. It would take at least four hours, depending on how well he did. My dad had the most expensive AFF course in the state, but it was also the one with the fewest accidents.

  Then Denny would jump and prove to himself or to whoever he kept texting or to his parents that he could do it, and he’d go to his internship on Monday and casually mention that he’d jumped out of a plane over the weekend, not just once but twice, and he would become the biggest deal in the lab for the day, and then he’d clean up monkey poop all summer.

  And I would pack rigs every weekend and go out with Theo and study art history and then go back to school for junior year, and everything would go along on its predictable path.

  When I heard them finishing up in the classroom, I went into the office instead of the hangar so that Denny wouldn’t think I was waiting for him, which was stupid—he knew I was there to work. Then I went outside to watch. I shaded my eyes and stared up at the plane, which turned in the sky to set up for jump run. It looked like they’d gone all the way to the full fourteen thousand feet.

  A little cluster of tandem students stood at the fence saying, “No way I would go out the door by myself” and things like that. Patsy and Randy had come out to watch; an AFF student was enough of a novelty to pass the time between loads. Leon was out on the field, ready to talk Denny into his landing via the radio in his helmet. My dad and Louisa were of course in the plane, probably joking around to relax Denny, acting like falling almost three miles on purpose was just an ordinary thing people did every day. Which it was to them.

  The engine noise dropped a little. “There’s the cut,” Randy said unnecessarily; Patsy and I had heard it too, and the students watching wouldn’t know what it meant: that the pilot had cut the engine back a little so they’d be going slower when the jumpers exited.

  First, the tandems came out, and then someone was standing in the door of the plane. Must be Mad Jack, who was shooting Denny’s video. He dropped, and an instant later a knot of people fell through the door and smoothed into a three-way formation. It had to be my dad and Louisa with Denny in the middle. The tiny dot of Mad Jack fell with them, hanging just outside their formation. They were falling nice and stable.

  Elsewhere in the sky, the tandem canopies opened—one, two, three, four—but I hardly paid attention. My dad and Louisa tracked away from Denny, and for an instant he was falling all alone. I’d heard that this was the scariest moment for a student. I wondered what he was feeling—exhilarated and powerful? Terrified? Confused? For a moment a longing to find out for myself filled my chest, but I squelched it.

  Denny was close enough that I could see his arm move in toward his hip and then out again. He was too far away for me to see the pilot chute come out, but it must have, because suddenly the canopy unfurled like a huge green-and-white-striped flag and flew over his head.

  “Good for him,” Patsy said softly, and I wondered if she was remembering her own first AFF. I wondered what it felt like when opening shock jerked you so hard it could give you whiplash, but you didn’t care because it meant that your canopy was open and you’d saved your own life. I wondered if the grab of the leg straps hurt or if you even felt it at all, and I imagined how beautiful even an ugly canopy must look because it was carrying you safely to the ground, and all you had left to do was steer yourself to the landing area, face into the wind, and touch the ground again.

  I wondered if I’d ever know.

  Of course Denny tried to stand up his landing, but even though he faced into the wind and flared at just the right moment thanks to Leon’s radioed instructions, he tumbled onto his face. He jumped up, though, and shouted, “Woo-hoo!” Louisa and my dad high-fived him, and Louisa hugged him.

  I didn’t want Denny to know I’d been watching, so I went back into the hangar and started packing again. Soon he came in, with his rig bundled up in his arms. “Where do you want this?” he asked. Despite a grin big enough to give him chipmunk cheeks, his face shone with tears.

  “Over there.” I gestured with my chin and turned back to the packing table so he could wipe off his face without me looking at him. “So how was it?”

  He dropped the rig on the floor. “Oh my God. Awesome. Amazing. The best thing I’ve ever done. I don’t see why you’re not up there all the time.” I pretended I needed to concentrate on what I was doing.

  He came closer. I could feel the excitement radiating off him and smell his adrenaline. “Can I help?”

  I shook my head. “Only two people are supposed to pack a rig. A rigger”—I wasn’t technically a rigger, but whatever—“or the person jumping the rig.”

  “So if I’m going to make another jump, I could pack that one?”

  “Not unless you’re going to do another tandem. This is a tandem rig.” I stopped what I was doing and turned to face him. “Are you going to make another jump?”

  He nodded. “But your dad wants me to wait a week. To give me a chance to process this one, he said.”

  Denny couldn’t have been earning much, if anything, as an intern. His parents must have been paying for his jumps, although some parents freak out at the thought of their kid jumping out of a plane and refuse to pay for it. They had to have a lot of money—tandems are pretty expensive, and the AFF course costs over a thousand.

  Not my business, though. I lifted another bundle of nylon and rope onto the table. This rig had gotten messed up, so I had to focus. Without raising my head, I asked Denny, “Aren’t you going to call her and tell her about it?” I wished the words back in my mouth the instant I said them.

  He asked, “Her? Who’s her?”

  “Whoever you were talking to yesterday after your tandem.”

  “Oh. That wasn’t a her. That was a him.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  He didn’t seem to hear me, and he swiped at his phone. Then he held it out to me. I squinted through the light filtering in the open door.

  It was a picture of a boy about my age, with spiky black hair and startling blue eyes, wearing what looked like a track uniform and laughing at the camera. Very handsome. Denny swiped his thumb over the picture and the next one came up. I bit my lip. It was obviously the same guy, but this time his smile seemed forced, his hair was gone, and there were dark circles under his blue eyes, which looked faded somehow. His face was puffy, and he was leaning back in a recliner, looking like he could barely hold his head up.

  Denny turned the phone toward himself and looked at it before sliding it back in his pocket. “My best friend. Not my boyfriend, if that’s what you were thinking. His name’s Frederick.” His lips curled in a little smile. “If you call him Fred or Freddy he—well, let’s say he doesn’t react well. It’s Frederick.”

  “Or F-bomb?”

  “Did I say that? Yes, but I’m the only one who can call him that.”

  “What’s the matter with him?” I hoped it was okay to ask, but I figured Denny wouldn’t have shown me the second picture if he didn’t expect me to be curious.

  “Leukemia.”

  “Jeez.” I didn’t know much about leukemia, only that it was a kind of blood cancer and that people sometimes died from it. “How long’s he had it?” I felt tentative asking about such a personal thing, but Denny didn’t seem to mind.

  “Since winter break, sophomore year. Or at least that’s when they diagnosed it. He hadn’t been feeling well for a few months, so he’d probably had it for a while by then.”

  “Is he going to be okay?”<
br />
  Denny shrugged. His face was hard, as though he was trying not to show any expression. “Don’t know. He felt great for a while after his first round of treatment. He came back to school and everything, but then he got sick again.”

  I didn’t really know Denny at all, plus I’d never known anyone my age who was that sick. Would it be better to ask another question or change the subject? Say something optimistic or be sympathetic? I never knew how to talk about someone who had died or might be going to die, even though people seemed to think I should. What I did know was that when people say your life can change in an instant, that’s only half the story. It’s not just your life that changes. It’s you. You become a whole different person. You go from being a girl whose parents jump out of airplanes to being a girl whose mother is dead, or from being a guy with a best friend to being a guy with a maybe-dying best friend. I knew without him telling me that people at school treated him differently than before, and that he even thought of himself differently.

  I couldn’t say any of this—I didn’t want Denny to think I was assuming Frederick would die. Denny seemed to want to talk about it, though. “They did chemo, which sucked, and then they tried some experimental thing with his immune system, but that made him even worse. So they did a bone-marrow transplant yesterday morning.”

  “Sounds serious.”

  “It’s kind of the last thing they try. It makes you really sick, and a lot of people die from them, so they don’t do it unless you’re for sure going to die without it.”

  “So are you going home now to spend time with him?”

  Denny gazed out the door at the bright sky, the colorful canopies, the happy people landing and laughing and whooping. “I wish. But Denver’s too far. Anyway, I couldn’t see him even if I was there. They killed his bone marrow to get rid of his immune system. Everything in his room has to be sterile, like in one of those bubbles, you know? He can’t have a phone, and his own parents can’t even touch him. They have to talk to him through a sheet of plastic. He’ll be really sick for a long time before he gets better. If he gets better. He won’t be able to see anyone else for weeks, not even his little brother.”