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mind me tagging along on their date. I minded, though. I’d blown almost all my money on the lesson, and I couldn’t let them pay for my food. That was too much charity at once. “Thanks so much,” I said, “but my mom probably has dinner on the table waiting for me by now.” I almost laughed at my biggest lie of the day—further from the truth than my boyfriend Grayson, more outrageous than a forgery—and hurried out the side door.
    On the sunset walk home, I stopped to unlock the office and snag my bottle of water from the reception counter. I’dnever understood why someone would pay soda price for water. Or for soda, for that matter. I bought one bottle of water, took it home with me each night and washed it and refilled it, and replaced it only when the peeling label threatened to give away my secret. But not today. I did buy a pack of crackers from the machine in the break room. Sometimes when my mother appeared at the trailer, she stocked the refrigerator for me. I doubted she’d done that today, since she was out of money and she’d been so focused on the TV. My stomach rumbled at the thought of the real dinner I’d passed up with Mr. Hall.
    As I walked past the dark Simon Air Agriculture hangar, I popped the first cracker into my mouth. I craved a cigarette instead. But I had become a pilot today, and now I had something real to look forward to.

two
     
    Three years later
December
     
    My afternoon behind the counter at the airport office had been eerily quiet. Suddenly I jumped and the pages of my newspaper went flying. The weather app on the office’s cell phone beeped crazily. With a glance at the phone, and a glance outside at the sky, I shut off the noise and speed-dialed Hall Aviation.
    Mr. Hall answered, “Merry Christmas, Leah.”
    The bad news I’d been about to give him stopped in my mouth. He was still my flight instructor, and starting next April he would be my boss. We were all business. But Grayson and Alec were visiting him over Christmas break, and Jake was home on leave from Afghanistan. When I’d walked over to Hall Aviation to fly practice runs in the past week, the hangar had been full of boys teasing and shoving each other, and warmth. I heard the same uncharacteristic warmth in Mr. Hall’s voice now.
    I hated to tell him. “The weather service just issued a windadvisory. A storm’s coming in. Isn’t Grayson still up? You need to get him down.”
    The phone beeped. Mr. Hall had hung up on me.
    I used the phone to navigate to the weather forecast. The radar showed a wide, wicked storm moving in fast from the Atlantic.
    Setting the phone aside, I glanced toward the big windows facing the runway. Grayson, Alec, and I had all turned eighteen and earned our commercial licenses in the past few months, so Mr. Hall could finally employ us instead of random college-age pilots over spring break and during the summer. For days we’d taken turns flying the ancient planes as Mr. Hall taught us how to snag the long advertising banners and fly them down the beach and back. I’d gone up on my lunch hour from the airport office, and Grayson had climbed into the plane after I’d climbed out. From here behind the reception counter, I’d watched him take off. I hadn’t seen him land.
    Judging from Mr. Hall’s rude ending to our call, I’d been right. Grayson was still up.
    I swallowed my heart, then gathered the scattered pages and went back to reading the newspaper, a delicious luxury I swiped daily from the waiting area and examined between odd jobs if I’d already digested the month’s Plane & Pilot cover to cover. In the past couple of years, I’d made friends with a newcomer at school named Molly. The great thing about Molly was that she wasn’t embarrassed to be seen with me, so she saved me from being a complete outcast. The bad thing about her was that she was a normal girl in a normal home with a normal family. By comparison, she made me more aware of how far I was out of the