I pull when I’m high enough to still enjoy some canopy time. My legs dangle from the harness like I’m a kid in a swing; then I press them together as I make my final turn into the wind and run out my landing in the large, flat circle of cleared sagebrush. There’s enough of a light, heated breeze that I have to spin around and drop one toggle so my canopy won’t fill with air, become a sail, and try to drag me across the desert.
The distinctive putt-putt sound of my parents’ drop-zone golf cart bounces toward me, my cousin Avery behind the wheel. Her approach reminds me of when Dom and I were on his motorcycle and we had to totally alter course because we spotted a swarm of Mormon crickets advancing like a low red cloud.
I sigh with disappointment. My dad never comes out to get me. He does it for his “boys”?—?all the military guys with their faded Army Ranger caps with their Army “blood wings” pinned on the front who make the drop zone their second home. If you can’t be in a combat zone, you might as well be skydiving, right? I think they’re addicted to risk.
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