Freefall Summer

by Tracy Barrett

My dad asked, “Any ideas?” Nobody said anything. “Okay, let’s think of other students who’ve had problems and see if we can spot any similarities. Noel, that girl last year who tried to do a hook turn right before landing on her first solo and broke her ankle—she was one of yours, right?”

  “Hey,” Randy protested. “You’re not going to blame Noel for that, are you?”

  “Nobody’s blaming anyone.” Louisa looked at my dad.

  Noel said, “She asked a lot about formation. She said she wanted to get off of student status as fast as possible and do the fun stuff, but after her injury, she never came back.”

  “Who was that?” Randy asked. “I don’t remember her.”

  “Some girl.” Noel shrugged. “Mostly jumped during the week. She was a nurse, I think?”

  Cynthia tapped on her keyboard. “Ah—here she is. Margaret Finnegan.”

  The girl whose logbook I had found. I made a mental note to give it to Cynthia after the meeting.

  “That’s the one,” my dad said. “So should her behavior have told us something? Was she reckless, or did she have a hard time following rules? What was it?”

  After a while, everyone decided that it was impossible to tell if someone was going to freak out. My dad finally gave up, said something about trying to get to know the AFF students better, and told everyone they could go.

  Our trailer was parked behind the office on a kind of unofficial campground with a raggedy volleyball net, two Porta-Johns, and a water spigot. Cynthia and her boyfriend lived in the apartment off the lounge, but anyone else who stayed overnight had to either sleep in the fleabag motel in Knoxton or camp out here. I had loved staying in the trailer when I was little; my mom called it “our little house on the big drop zone.” It had seemed so cozy then; now it just felt small and smelled mildewy.

  An unfamiliar tent was pitched off to the side as though its owner recognized that they weren’t a regular and should be careful not to take up someone’s usual spot. The tent was smallish and ragged. It wasn’t supposed to rain that weekend, so they’d be okay if they didn’t mind mosquitoes.

  Headlights swept around as a car pulled into the lot. It must have been the overnighter. I watched as the person parked and got out. Huh. Denny. He saw me looking at him and came over.

  “What are you still doing here?” I asked.

  “I thought I’d stay the night. No use wasting all that gas going back and forth.”

  “I didn’t think you had to worry about the price of gas.” I cringed at my words. “I mean—sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

  “What do you mean? Why did you think I didn’t have to worry about gas?” He sounded perplexed.

  “Um, your car, for one thing. I mean, it had to cost a lot, right? And you paid for the whole AFF course up front—”

  “I don’t have a whole lot of money,” he said. “My car was a project. My dad got it for me for my sixteenth birthday from a junkyard for practically nothing, and we spent an entire year making it run and cleaning it up. And someone else is paying for my jumps.”

  I didn’t know how to ask who without seeming nosy. He answered anyway.

  “Frederick’s parents are paying for the AFF course. And the videos.”

  “Why?”

  “It was something Frederick and I were going to do together—make a jump, I mean. When we graduated from high school. But then he got sick, and if he ever does make a jump, it won’t be for a long time. The chemo made his bones really fragile, and nobody knows if they’ll ever get stronger.”

  I said, “That sucks.”

  “Yeah. It really does. Anyway, Frederick still wanted me to do it, but I didn’t have enough time between graduation and the internship. My parents looked into drop zones around here, and yours had a better reputation than the other one.”

  “The Jump Ranch.”

  “Right. That one didn’t look safe, they said. And your dad doesn’t usually do static line, so if I came here it was AFF or tandem, and I didn’t like the idea of tandem. It didn’t seem like I would be making the jump, just going along for the ride, but Frederick’s dad said they wouldn’t pay for AFF—not because it was too expensive, but because it sounded more dangerous.”

  “Lots of people think that.”

  “But then Frederick watched the video of my tandem over and over, and when I told his parents I really loved doing it, they changed their minds and bought me the AFF course and a videographer so he could see them all. They said he keeps talking about getting better and making a jump with me.” He cleared his throat, and I looked away while he rubbed his eyes.

  “You’re doing another one tomorrow?” I asked. “What will that make—three?”

  “Four.”

  “Great.”

  “So—does that kind of thing happen often? Like with Travis?”

  I shook my head. “Not really. Sometimes.”

  “It didn’t even occur to me how scary that was until afterward,” he said. “I mean, it all happened so fast, and you seemed to know exactly what to do.”

  “Me? I didn’t do anything!”

  “You knew to get your dad to tell him to pull his feet up, and you told him to flare at exactly the right second. So you saved his life—”

  “Oh, I didn’t save—”

  Denny went on as though he hadn’t heard me. “You at least kept him from getting a broken leg. He needs to buy you a bottle of your favorite booze.”

  I didn’t know what to say, but Denny rescued me. “Hey, I went into Knoxton for dinner and all the diners were closed. Where do you eat around here?”

  “The diners are only open for lunch. Everyone in Knoxton eats dinner at home. There’s a 7-Eleven in town.” I considered. All he could get there would be chips and dip, which wouldn’t be the best way to get ready to spend the night in a small tent that looked holey and damp. “Can you wait here a second?”

  Back in the office, my dad was going over some papers. He was trying to figure out if he could have deduced something about Travis’s state of mind from his handwriting, no doubt. I watched him for a minute. The harsh light of his desk lamp threw shadows under his eyes and accentuated the lines around his mouth. It also showed that he had more gray in his hair than I’d noticed before.

  I cleared my throat and asked, “Dad, is it okay if Denny eats with us tonight? There’s plenty.”

  He didn’t look up. “Who?” He sounded distant.

  “Denny—you know, the AFF student. He’s camping out and didn’t know that Knoxton closes up at seven o’clock.”

  He lowered the papers. “You want him to eat with us?” I explained again. He looked at me over his reading glasses. “Sure. I guess so. You two go ahead. Just leave me something.” I lingered. “You want something else?” he asked.

  “Nope.” I left. It would have been nice if he’d said something about how well I’d handled the Travis situation. He’d probably been too concerned about the DZ’s reputation for it to cross his mind. Which was good, I guessed, or he might start wondering why Denny had taken my dad’s car and not his own, which might lead him to think that maybe I was the one who’d driven out there. It’s not like this was the first time a student had gotten into trouble, I told myself. He’s used to having it dealt with. No big deal.

  So a few minutes later Denny was setting up the grill outside the trailer while I boiled water. He made the hot dogs, I made the mac and cheese, and we both drank Cokes. I offered him ice, which he accepted.

  “No accounting for taste.” I sipped my iceless but perfectly cold drink.

  “Why don’t you like ice?”

  “Kills the bubbles.” That’s what my mom always said, anyway. Personally, I couldn’t tell the difference in the level of carbonation avec ice or sans ice, but I had started asking for Coke with no ice as soon as I was old enough to order for myself.

  My dad’s food was getting cold, so I piled it on a paper plate and took it to the office. He grunted his thanks but barely looked up. I tried no
t to worry about how hard he was working. He had a lot to deal with, what with his business and being a single father—an older father, on top of that. He’d been almost forty when my mom died. Dealing with me growing up had to be hard, even with Angie to give him advice about my clothes and hair and puberty.

  I left his dinner within reach and went back to where Denny was sitting on a camp chair, gazing up at the stars. A little breeze blew just enough to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and I settled on the other chair.

  He stretched and yawned. “Sorry. It’s just that this is so relaxing. No pressure. At least not until tomorrow morning.”

  “What kind of pressure are you expecting tomorrow morning? Do you feel like you have to jump because Frederick’s parents have already paid for it?”

  “Oh no, not at all. They’d be cool if I didn’t. But I still get anxiety before the jump, you know? And I always think maybe I’ve been lucky so far, and I should quit while I’m ahead.”

  “Jumping is a lot safer than—”

  “Yeah, I know. Safer than downhill skiing and riding motorcycles and a lot of other things that people think are okay, and then they say you’re crazy for jumping. Like my mom. She wants me to stop, so I didn’t tell her I’d be here this weekend.”

  “Huh. Like my dad. He thinks it’s perfectly fine for other people but not for me.”

  “My mom hitchhiked through Tibet when she was in college, and later she lived in a cottage on a beach in Greece with some guy she hardly knew. She’d die if I ever did anything like that. There should be a name for it—parents who don’t want their kids to do things that they did themselves and survived.”

  “So come up with a name, Mr. Psychologist.”

  He frowned in thought for a minute. “I know—the Icarus Complex.”

  “The what?” I asked.

  “Remember that Greek myth, the one about the father and son who flew out of a tower with wings they made from feathers and wax?”

  Every jumper knew that story. “Right. The father told his son not to fly too close to the sun or the wax would melt.”

  “The son was named Icarus,” Denny said. “They both flew out of the tower even though the father didn’t think his son could handle it, and it turns out he was right. Icarus got carried away with how much fun it was to fly, and he did go too close to the sun. I bet if his dad hadn’t told him about it, it wouldn’t even have occurred to him.”

  “And the wax melted, and he fell into the sea and drowned. Typical story about how teenagers are impulsive and won’t wear their seat belts.”

  “Exactly,” Denny said. “You know some parent made up that myth to scare their kid. And that was the first example of the Icarus Complex.”

  We talked for a long time—about his work in the lab (he said they didn’t hurt the monkeys, just used them in experiments about sharing and cooperation); about Frederick, who was having graft versus host issues, which meant that his body was trying to reject the bone marrow that had been injected into him; about Randy and the other instructors; about my art history class; about Denver and skiing and snowboarding. Denny asked me why we didn’t live in Knoxton, but made that long commute every weekend day.

  “We did live here until I was about to start kindergarten, and then my mom said we had to move to Hawkins,” I told him. “It supposedly has the best public schools in the county.” I didn’t tell him that I found out that after she died, my dad was planning to move the two of us back to Knoxton, but Dr. Mike said it would be hard on me to lose my house and my friends and school after losing my mom, so we stayed.

  We talked about a lot of things, but one subject that didn’t come up was Theo. Somehow, when I talked about what there was to do in Hawkins, I told Denny about Julia and Cory, partying at Nicole’s, and going to Manuelito’s, and I never mentioned Theo once.

  After most of the morning fog burned off, the sky was a soft blue, and the grass, still a pale spring green, sparkled with tiny droplets. The haze meant that visibility was a little lower than usual, but it was still plenty clear enough for skydiving.

  The Geezers had arrived just after dawn. While they waited for the fog to lift, they told shoulda-died stories. I could tell by the way they paused and glanced at me and cleared their throats and then laughed that they were leaving out some details, probably having to do with jumping under the influence. I wondered if things had changed all over the skydiving world in the decades since these guys were young, or if it was just my dad who was so strict about sober jumping.

  What looked like a whole college fraternity showed up next. I recognized them; they’d come a few weeks before, but the wind had risen and they’d had to go home without making their jumps. My dad had told them that the earlier they got there, the calmer it was likely to be. The forecast said winds five to ten, so they’d probably make it out this time. Not all of them looked like they thought this was good news.

  It was so busy in the hangar that I didn’t have time to take a break, except to run to the Porta-John and handle the phones for Cynthia once or twice. Denny came in after his fourth AFF, his rig bundled in his arms. I glanced up from the packing table. “How’d it go?” I didn’t really need to ask; his face was practically glowing, his eyes sparkling even more than usual.

  “Great!” I could swear I heard three exclamation points. “Where do you want this?” He held up his bundled-up rig.

  “Over there. On top of those others.”

  He dropped the jumble of lines and nylon and shrugged off the harness. “Sorry it got messed up,” he said.

  I glanced at it. It wasn’t so bad. “It’s okay,” I said. “You should see what Randy brings in. I think he tangles the lines on purpose.”

  Denny pulled at the lines and managed to untangle them. “You want to show me how to do this?” he asked. “Your dad said that everyone off student status should know how to do their own, and I only have one more jump, if I do okay.”

  “Going for number five today?”

  “I wish, but I have to get back to town.” He watched as I closed the pack of the rig I’d been working on. “So, okay if I give it a try?”

  “You can help with the untangling as long as I’m the one who actually does the packing,” I said. I pulled the slider out of the heap and started following one line after another, straightening each one out as I went.

  Denny did the same, and as he ran his fingers up a line, his hand brushed mine. We both jumped, and Denny said, “Sorry” although he hadn’t done anything to apologize for.

  “It’s okay,” I said again, and then to cover up the awkwardness I said, “If you feel any roughness or see anything that looks like wear, let me know.”

  “Okay.” He remained bent over the table, but I could see his ear, and it was pink.

  When we had taken out all the tangles, I told Denny that I had to do the rest on my own, and then Noel came in and dumped three tandem rigs on the table. Being paid by the hour instead of by the rig wasn’t cutting down on my workload any.

  Denny said, “I’ll let you get back to it. See you Saturday.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to—” But he was gone.

  It was almost two o’clock by the time I was able to stop for lunch, which was a leftover hot dog that I microwaved and wrapped in a piece of mushy white bread. I ate it standing up and then went back to the hangar.

  Even when students came in jabbering and the Geezers told jokes, it seemed quiet without Denny. I listened to music, but my mind kept wandering. Denny wasn’t as hot as Theo—he was shorter and much quieter, but he was definitely good-looking. He had such serious eyes, and the way his eyebrows arched over them…I turned up the volume on my iPod.

  When we finally left for home, I reclined the passenger seat until I was almost lying down and said to my dad, “If I’m going to be on salary instead of piecework, I need to negotiate some breaks.”

  He glanced over at me and grinned. “Wiped out?”

  “Um-hmm.” I hoped he wouldn’t ask me anything about
the Travis incident. It was hard to lie to him, but if he figured out that I’d been the one driving, I’d be grounded forever.

  “Staying home tonight, then?”

  I nodded. It had been a long weekend—first, driving off the DZ without my dad knowing, then watching Travis nearly sizzle on the wires, and then Denny acting like touching me startled him. But I was so tired that instead of thinking, I fell asleep until we got home.

  Julia came over and we watched some TV. She said Justin was being a jerk, so she was avoiding him.

  “What did he do this time?” I asked, more because I had to than because I really was interested in the answer. In my opinion Justin was pretty much always a jerk, so when Julia got mad at him, I usually couldn’t see what was so much worse than usual.

  It turned out to be about canceling on her when something came up with his cousin. “He doesn’t even like his cousin,” Julia said.

  “Maybe it was important to his parents,” I said.

  Julia shook her head and crunched a pretzel. “I think he just didn’t feel like going out with me.”

  I didn’t remind her that they spent most evenings and many days together and that she canceled on him all the time. Julia claimed to have abandonment issues because of the way her dad had left the family, and that when someone (especially Justin) did something that reminded her of that, it was hurtful. So all I said was, “Gives you and me some time together anyway, with Theo and Justin both deserting us.”

  “Would serve them right if we found someone else. Any hot prospects at the DZ?”

  Even though I knew she was kidding, the question caught me off guard. After a pause I said, “No,” but I knew my answer sounded fake.

  Of course Julia caught it. She muted the TV and turned to me with a gleam in her dark eyes. “I don’t believe you! Something’s going on there. Spill!”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Nothing’s going on. I just—”

  Julia wagged her finger at me. “Nuh-uh! You’re turning red, and I can tell you’re lying. What? Who? Is it Randy?”

  I sighed, exasperated. Julia had been to the DZ a few times in the spring, and Randy had made a big play for her. She had said she wasn’t interested, but afterward she asked about him a few times and said he was cute. “Of course it isn’t Randy.”