Flight Season: A Novel Read online

  He walks toward the passenger side of the car, arms tightly crossed over his abdomen, like he’s going to be sick. He leans in. “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My POS truck broke down again.” He’s got his elbows on the edge of the open window, but he’s looking away from me, across the parking lot.

  Who knows? Maybe that’s where his piece-of-shit truck is. I really couldn’t care less.

  “Door’s open,” I say.

  He yanks on the door and slouches into the passenger seat, while I roll his window up to trap in the cool air. He slams the door shut.

  “Sorry,” he mumbles. “I guess I pulled the door too hard.”

  I don’t say anything in reply.

  “See you tomorrow,” I tell Prashanti.

  “Yes, tomorrow,” she says. And then I roll up my window and she turns to march away.

  Suddenly my perfect car is feeling very small. And I’m feeling very sorry for myself. It’s as if TJ’s sucking all the oxygen out of the air.

  “Nice ride,” he says. “Is this one of those electric cars?”

  I pull out onto the highway and accelerate.

  “Yeah, it’s a Tesla.”

  He looks over at me quickly but then turns away just as fast.

  “Damn,” he says, drawing the word out. He’s running his hand across the dash. “So, let me guess. Your daddy bought you this fancy car to drive to that fancy Ivy League school. Am I right?”

  He did not just say that. I whip around to look at him, and he’s grinning. Grinning!

  That’s it. I’m done. My face is burning hot. I stare ahead at the road and grip the wheel hard to keep my hands from shaking.

  “You are right,” I say, my foot pressing on the gas. “My dad bought me this car as a parting gift. And then he died, leaving my mom and me with nothing but crushing grief and a nearly new Tesla.”

  Silence.

  “What?” I say, my voice rising. “No pissy response? Is that all too hard for your feeble mind to wrap around?” I’m launching the words at him, sharp and cold.

  I refuse to look at TJ, but I can see from the corner of my eye that he is watching me.

  “That was a crap thing to say,” he mumbles.

  “Yeah, well, I’m in a crap mood.”

  “No, I mean me. What I said.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sorry about your dad.”

  I want to look at him, because his voice sounds almost genuine, but I force myself not to.

  “Me too,” I bark back.

  He doesn’t say anything else. I lean forward to switch on some music. Acoustic guitar. Quiet, dark, just what I need.

  He reaches down to open his backpack and then pulls out a phone and some earbuds.

  “No offense,” he says, “but I’m gonna—”

  He’s holding the earbuds out for me to see.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Fine.”

  He shoves his earbuds into his ears and fools with the screen.

  And then I drive toward the coast, through scrubby pine forest and swampland, through forgotten half-empty Central Florida towns. And I try to listen to the mournful wail of the guitar, but TJ’s earbuds emit a constant thumping beat, which distracts and annoys me to no end.

  * * *

  “Where am I taking you?”

  I’m pulling into St. Augustine on 207, and—after almost an hour of stifling silence—I have to ask. I need to know which way to turn.

  “Old City,” he says. “Left here.”

  I really wish that hadn’t been his answer. But I try not to think too much about it—Old City, and how little I want to go back there.

  His fingers are drumming nervously on the dash. They have been for, like, ten minutes. I’m trying really hard not to look over at them.

  He’s driving me insane.

  I head up Ponce de Leon and then turn onto King Street, toward the tourist district.

  “Now what?” I ask, moving slowly past the fountain at Flagler College and then pausing in the road for a group of tourists to cross to the Lightner Museum.

  “Can you go down to Charlotte and drop me at the corner of Hypolita?” He’s pulling something out of his backpack. A shirt, maybe. “I’d say drop me wherever, but I’m already late.”

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” I say. “But I don’t really know the streets up here.”

  A horse-drawn buggy pulls out in front of me, so I have to stop. I glance over to see TJ pulling off the top of his scrubs.

  He is undressing. In my passenger seat. Why doesn’t this boy ever change clothes in a bathroom or a bedroom or something? Like a normal person? An image of the first time we met comes to mind, against my will. That time I allowed myself to look at his abs. Big mistake.

  “Left on San Marco,” he says, his arms over his head, blue scrubs coming off.

  Thank God he’s wearing an undershirt. Still, it’s a little too hard to drag my eyes away. He shoves the scrubs into his backpack. I’m starting to worry that maybe he’s planning to wriggle out of his pants, too. But he zips the bag closed.

  “And then left again up there, just before the city gate.”

  The city gate. That’s the main entryway to the tourist insanity. It also happens to be where the most humiliating night of my life began—the part that I remember.

  “Do you work on St. George Street?” I ask. I hate the way my voice sounds—worried, weak.

  “Why?” he spits out. “You got something against St. George?”

  “No, I just, uh—”

  His fingers are drumming again, and now his foot’s tapping too. I guess he’s really stressed about being late, which is strange, in light of the fact that—before Prashanti’s little intervention—he was planning to wait an hour for his cousin to come.

  “Okay, turn here, on Charlotte.”

  I ease onto a pretty little side street, passing a weathered wooden house with a sweet courtyard beside it. Old Town Coffee. I’d never noticed it before.

  “Do they have good coffee?” I ask.

  “Wouldn’t know,” he grumbles. “At four bucks a cup, I’m not planning to find out.”

  Ah, TJ. So charming.

  I resist saying anything, but I can’t help letting my eyes roll. TJ watches me, and then he blurts out, “I know the owners, though. They’re good people. So, yeah, you should try it.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I say, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I probably will—if I’m ever forced to be in the Old City again.

  We pass a couple of run-down T-shirt shops, dodging tourists walking down the center of the street (when there’s a perfectly good sidewalk a couple of feet away).

  “You can drop me up there,” he says.

  There’s an unusual store, or museum, maybe. The kinds of places that you only see in Old Town, St. Augustine. The sign says MUSEUM OF MYSTERY.

  “By the decapitated wax pirate?” I ask. There’s a disturbingly accurate wax figure blocking the sidewalk. Maybe that’s why the tourists keep veering out onto the street.

  “A little farther,” he says. “At the Hyppo.”

  I pull to a stop under a bright blue sign in the shape of a Popsicle. I look inside the shop. It’s cute, with distressed wood tables and walls covered in folk art.

  “You work here?” I ask.

  “Nope,” he says, throwing the car door open. “Thanks for the ride.”

  Why all the secrecy? Is he a male stripper or something? I guess that would explain why he seems so comfortable taking off his shirt in strange places.

  He grabs his backpack and jumps out of the car, slamming the door shut behind him. Part of me wants to squeal away, just to piss him off, but of course I can’t. Another horse-drawn buggy has just turned the corner, and it’s moving past me at an incredibly slow pace, with a sweating, heat-dazed couple looking out from the carriage’s leather bench.

  TJ turns the corner and drops his backpack on the sidewalk. He’s standing close to the wa
ll, like he’s trying to hide from me, shrugging on the white shirt he was holding in a tight ball. I inch the car forward so that he’s in full view.

  I lean across the passenger seat and watch as he ties a red scarf around his neck and tucks it into his collar.

  Oh my god.

  I know that scarf.

  Oh my god.

  I know that shirt.

  Oh my god.

  I know that logo, with the red flames surrounding it.

  Sabor do Brasil.

  The very site of my most shameful moment—the one I can’t remember.

  The first time I came home from Yale was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I hadn’t seen my parents for months, but Mom called every day. She always asked about how my classes were going, whether Yale was everything I’d imagined it would be.

  I consistently told her my classes were going great, that Yale was a dream. We had worked so hard to get me there, and I couldn’t bear to tell them anything but the good parts. Even though it was nothing like I had expected it to be, there were good parts.

  A few, at least.

  I soon discovered that I wasn’t the only one who avoided telling the whole truth on those daily calls. I came home to find my father very sick, much more than my parents had let on. They didn’t lie to me exactly. They always offered brief updates on the promising alternative treatments he was trying, and the success rates that each of them had.

  I guess they had decided to focus on only the good parts too.

  I wasn’t mad at them, not really. But I did feel blindsided, and worried. I was so afraid that my father might be dying, but none of us talked about that. We didn’t dare.

  By the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I felt like I would lose my mind if I didn’t get out of the house.

  Gillian was spending the holiday a couple of hours away, at Ponte Vedra Beach. She called on Saturday morning and told me she was meeting up with some friends in St. Augustine—Luke and David, her friends from boarding school. I had been at Yale long enough to know that the guys from Gillian’s boarding school tended to be entitled pricks. Places like Gillian’s school apparently feed Yale an endless supply of them.

  But I was desperate to escape the house, if only for a few hours.

  We met on the beach in St. Augustine, near the pier. The guys came stocked with plenty of beer and a couple of flasks filled with tequila.

  We got wasted and then took a cab to downtown St. Augustine. Somehow we ended up wandering into Sabor do Brasil.

  I remember a karaoke machine, a stage, and a small crowded dance floor. I remember singing “Low Rider” with two middle-aged bikers wearing black leather from head to toe. I remember one of them shared his frozen margarita with me and told Gillian he was from Connecticut too. Turns out, both bikers were investment bankers. I remember laughing about that with Gillian.

  I don’t remember much of what happened after that.

  A week later, when I finally gathered the energy to let Gillian know my father had died, the story of our “epic” night in St. Augustine had traveled far and wide. All my social feeds were clogged with details of the night I can’t remember—the terrible night I will never forget.

  I read enough to know that I danced topless on the karaoke stage. Then I shut down all of my social media accounts. Gillian made them take down the posts, and then she told me what I needed to know. I begged her to spare me any extra details, so she did. To this day, I don’t know all of what happened that night. I think, probably, I should keep it that way.

  Now, months later, TJ is watching me watching him. He leans toward me, his expression—sad? Worried?

  I realize two things at once: my hands are shaking so hard that I can barely grip the steering wheel, and for the first time since I met him ten days ago, TJ is actually looking at me.

  Does TJ know what I remember about that night—and maybe also what I don’t? Could he tell me? Could I bear to hear it?

  God, what if he knows? He must think I am a complete mess. He must see me as some irresponsible party girl with no respect for my own body.…

  A horn honks. In my rearview mirror I see the grill of a Chevy truck practically against my bumper. The horse-drawn carriage is already halfway to St. George Street, and the couple in the back has wrenched around to see what’s going on. And I’m sitting here, breaking down, blocking traffic. I ease forward, rolling into the intersection, not daring to look back.

  * * *

  Driving along San Marco, over the Bridge of Lions, through the heart of Anastasia Island—all the way back to the A-frame—I squeeze my eyes shut at every stoplight, desperate to block the memories. After six or seven stoplights, I finally start to breathe evenly, and my hands are steady again. I try to convince myself that I’m reading way too much into things. But I still can’t stop seeing that shirt, the flaming logo and the red silk scarf, and TJ’s worried eyes. I can’t stop remembering that terrible morning when I woke up on a pool deck outside of Gillian’s condo, wearing nothing but beer-stained jeans and a shirt just like the one TJ wore. I don’t know what happened to my own shirt, or my bra. I don’t know where my sandals ended up.

  “It’s probably for the best.” That’s what Gillian told me. “Just stupid drunk stuff, Vivi,” she said, her voice strangely cheerful. “Don’t even give it a second thought!”

  I did give it a second thought. In fact, I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Maybe it’s a survival strategy. Maybe by obsessing about this particular mistake, I can ignore all of the others.

  There are so many.

  I pull onto the parking pad to see my mom sitting on the staircase that leads to the A-shaped gate. The gate’s still open, and so is the mailbox. There’s a pile of mail spread on the ground around her—magazines and leaflets, envelopes and cards.

  She stands up and walks toward me, holding a single sheet of red-tinted paper. She has this sort of stunned look, like she’s walking through a dream, or maybe a nightmare.

  Is it possible that we got another notice from Yale?

  My heart starts to race again, and I remind myself that Yale would never send correspondence on red paper—the Ivy League is far too understated for that.

  I step out of the car and walk toward her. “Is everything okay?”

  “I should have told you,” she says. “I should have told you earlier.”

  I take the sheet of paper from her hand.

  PRE-FORECLOSURE NOTICE

  I look up at her. “What does this mean?”

  “I was so overwhelmed, Viv. I mean, I couldn’t even handle going to the grocery store.”

  And that’s when I put it all together—all the red sheets of paper, all the avoided conversations. I can barely manage to form the words.

  “Are we losing our house?”

  “I just didn’t deal—not with the lawn or the pool, not the bills.”

  “None of them?”

  She looks down at the ground, silent.

  “Since when?” I ask.

  “Awhile.” She goes back to the stairs and slumps down in the middle of the mail. “But then I came here and I started to make art and to get better, and now I’m trying.” She picks up a red envelope. “Really, I am.”

  “Mom,” I say, my voice sharp. “Are we losing the house? Is that why we’re here?” I glance behind her, toward the strange A-frame.

  “I’m working on it.” She releases a single loud sob. “I’m trying.”

  I sit down next to her and take the envelope. Florida Power & Light.

  “Please believe me!” she cries. “I’m doing my best.”

  “I can help,” I say, gently taking her hand in mine. “I can pay the bills. I’m good at that kind of stuff. Just give me your bank passwords—I mean, do you know them?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Did you forget? Is that the problem? Or did he not have time to tell you what they were?”

  She shakes her head, her face twisted with worry.

  “I’ll go to
the house,” I tell her. My mind searches for a solution. “His office. I mean, they must be written down somewhere.”

  “Viv, it’s not the passwords. It’s the money.” She tilts her head to the sky and looks up. She can’t even look me in the eye. “We don’t have the money.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask. “Do we need to move money from a different account? Deposit a check?”

  “There are no checks left to deposit.”

  “We can cash out stocks, right?”

  Mom pulls away from me, riffles through a stack of papers, and hands me one. A bank statement. I scan the columns, looking for the bottom line.

  $123.81

  That’s all? I look again.

  -$123.81

  Oh sweet Jesus. It’s a negative number. In Mom’s bank account. Even my personal account has a couple hundred dollars, at least. How did Mom let this happen?

  “That’s impossible,” I say, trying to remain calm and focused. “Dad made a lot of money, right? It must be in a different account or something. We’ll find it.”

  “It’s gone.”

  “All of it?”

  “And then some.”

  And, I guess because I’m the most profoundly selfish person on the planet, all I can think about is Yale.

  “My school. Next semester? You paid for it, right?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?” Suddenly my whole body is shaking and I’m angry as hell. “How can you not even know?”

  I’m yelling. But I deserve to yell!

  I killed myself to get into that school. I practically sold my soul to the devil. Grades and clubs, sports I hated and volunteer gigs I couldn’t have cared less about. Sleepless nights, hunched over piles of SAT prep books. And now I’m working my ass off, putting up with all manner of bullshit in that godforsaken ICU so that I can go back in the fall, and my mom doesn’t even know if we’ve paid for it yet? I mean, what the hell?

  “I’ll call the school. We’ll work it out.” Mom’s begging again.

  I drop her hand and stand up. “It’s fine, Mom,” I grumble, even though we both know it’s anything but fine. I start gathering up the unpaid bills and cutoff notices. “I’ll take over from here.”