Mirage(2)

So what’s my excuse? People always want to know why I nonchalantly do something that to them is inconceivable.

I’m addicted to the rush.

Avery doesn’t jump, but she recently discovered she likes to hang out here. For a boy-crazy girl, a skydiving center is a very target-rich environment. She skids to a halt in the packed dirt, casting billowing clouds of copper dust around the tires and my feet. “I thought you had to work today,” I say, a little breathless from my landing and the afternoon heat.

“Oh, I worked . . . until I didn’t want to anymore. Then I claimed ‘female issues.’ My boss let me go faster than you can say ‘superabsorbent.’ He can’t stand it when a woman brings up that she is, in fact, a woman.”

“Most men can’t,” I answer. “My dad would give his remaining testicle to have had a boy instead of me.”

“How many does that jump make?” she asks, quickly deflecting the topic of my dad’s post-IED balls and saving me from how I sounded nine years old for a second there.

“Two sixty-eight.” I’ve racked up a good number of jumps since I convinced my parents to sign for me when I reached legal jumping age last year. I argued for it on the grounds that it’s not good business if you’re not confident enough to let your own offspring jump. My dad shrugged indifferently and signed. My mother stared at me long and hard before shaking her head and mumbling something about destiny and that she has no control over how and when I die. “Death doesn’t want me,” I reassured her. “Too busy working for the government.” The way Dad jerked his head up and scowled made me wish I’d kept my mouth shut.

I can’t say anything right around him.

Birthday Boy intercepts us with his hair blown back all Einstein and rings around his eyes where his goggles indented his skin. He’s smiling the broad smile of a man who is temporarily insane with his own superpowers.

“You are so drinking tonight,” I predict, at which point he lets out a huge whooping yell and punches at the sky in triumph.

Avery grabs my arm, startled, and leans in. “He’s positively primal.”

“Yeah,” I mumble, tugging impatiently at a corner of my chute that has snagged on a green ruffle of sagebrush. “Watch out for him, though. He’s high on adrenaline. It’s like twenty buckets of caffeine. For the next three hours he’ll be invincible.”

“Excellent,” she says, fixing him with lowered lashes and a sideways look.

“Yeah, excellent. Until you’ll find him curled up in the fetal position under a picnic table, sound asleep from the adrenaline crash.”

“Or the whiskey.”

“True that.”

“You guys make it look all cool and thrilling, but normal people don’t actually like jumping out of airplanes,” Avery says.

“I make it a point not to be normal.”

“Clearly. You’re you. But something about humans pretending they can fly is a definite major violation of the rules of nature.”

“Would we do it otherwise? Humans break rules to prove we can.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, “I could live my whole life without falling out of a plane, thanks.”

I stop short of calling her a whuffo for hanging out here when she has no intention of ever jumping. But if she eyes my Dominix again with those lashes like she’s eyeing Birthday Boy right now, it’s on.

“Falling is the easy part. Trick is,” I say, tapping her on the chest, “taking the leap.”

Avery snorts, but not without some blend of admiration and incredulity in her eyes. “You’re nuts.”

“Oh, hell, yes.” I pull the rest of my chute into my arms and climb aboard the golf cart. “I’d rather be crazy and fully alive than safe and half-dead.”





Two


THE DROP-ZONE HANGAR has its back to the westerly winds. It’s open, with jumpers getting their rigs on for the next hop, riggers on the mats meticulously folding and packing chutes, and a couple of guys napping in lawn chairs. One has his mouth hanging open. It’ll be a matter of minutes before someone shoots the air compressor in his piehole or glues his shoes to the floor.

Under the row of flags on the back wall, a large group of guys slide around the concrete floor on creepers, practicing their formation dive. Their bellies are on the boards, feet in the air, as they move and switch patterns. It’s like synchronized swimming on wheels, only sweatier and with lots of laughing and swearing.

I dump my rig in a pile on the carpet and run over to the group, take a flying leap, and land on Dom’s back. We roll across the floor, bounce into the wall, ricochet, and spin in a circle. All the while I hold on tight and kiss the back of his warm neck, burying my nose in his jet-black hair, which reminds me of rippling water at midnight.

“Now this is my idea of a tandem,” Dom murmurs. He reaches behind him and squeezes my butt.

“Ryan Poitier Sharpe!” My mother’s Caribbean accent cuts through the chatter in the hangar. I roll off Dom and sit on my knees. She stands right outside the hangar doors. Late-afternoon light glows behind her vivid flowered shirt and red head wrap. Her lips are color coordinated with the wrap and glowing like a stoplight against her smooth black skin. My mother is a hibiscus in the eternal beige of the desert.