I fight to pull air into my lungs. Now the camera is annoying me. Avery skids up next to him. “What, are you crazy?”
“What, are you new?” my voice croaks. As I start to push myself up, my fingers alight on something smooth and hard in the dirt. I grab it and hold it out to the camera with a wide smile. “The penny, bitches.”
Dom stops filming and holds his hand out to help me up. “Damn, that was something. When I said ‘call it,’ I didn’t mean for you to call a suicide altitude. I don’t know if I’d ever do that,” he says, much more serious.
I glare at him and his backpedaling support. “Well, those who can’t do . . . dare.”
“I didn’t dare you to do that.”
I gather my chute, and when I look up, I notice my father leaning against the golf cart, his arms folded and face deep red, mouth set into a grim line. Instead of looking impressed, he looks . . . murderous.
Four
“YOU WANT TO tell me what the hell you thought you were doing?” my father demands like a carnival barker in front of everyone who’s gathered around.
I thrust my chin up. “I was being precise.”
He shoves off the cart and is in my face immediately. “You’re lucky you’re not precisely dead! One problem, goddamn it! That’s all it would have taken. One! And you’d be in the ground, DOA!”
“I wanted to show?—”
“All you did, young lady, was prove to me how reckless and irresponsible you are!”
I fling my chute on the ground between us. “I showed I have the skill!”
“Bullshit. You showed you don’t belong on my DZ. I don’t need the job of shoveling your foolish ass off the dirt.”
“Girl’s got balls, man!” someone yells out.
“More balls than you,” I say through clenched teeth. I know it’s a low blow. “You’re a coward, Dad. You’re too scared to give me a chance to prove myself. I’m invisible to you. What in the hell do I have to do?” I shove him in the chest, and even I’m surprised at the rage I feel toward him. The detached observer in me wonders if it’s the adrenaline.
Dad steps back, catching himself from falling. He rakes his hands over his buzzed hair like he’s got to do something with his hands in order not to strangle me. His voice switches to a low growl, which is scarier than his barking lecture. “Get off this airport right now.” He throws himself into the golf cart and peels out, spitting dust at me in its wake.
Dom and I walk back to the hangar in silence. I’m numb; I don’t even flinch when a snake slithers out of the sagebrush in front of us, crosses our path, and slips into the dry weeds. He puts his arm around my shoulder and stops me. “You gotta understand, your dad, he?—”
“Don’t tell me about my dad!” I yell, shrugging out from under his arm. “Piss off.”
“Don’t be a bitch to me. I didn’t make you do it, Ry. You managed to fuck up all on your own.”
“Oh my God! Hop aboard the Ryan-will-slap-you express!” I shove him, too. Not once, but twice, hard in his chest. His black hair covers one eye. The other narrows with anger. Whatever. If people don’t want to be attacked, why do they rattle my cage?
Mom is standing in front of the hangar as I walk up. Dad’s hastily parked golf cart bakes in the sun next to her. She wrings her hands, waiting for me to approach. Her face doesn’t look reprimanding; it’s sad.
“You’re not going to lecture me too, are you?”
“Go home, poppet. Check on your grandmother. I’ll speak to you later. In the meantime, why don’t you ponder the treasure that is this life, ’cause, baby girl, you spend it like it’s cash burning a hole in your pocket.”
On a normal day our house is cornea-stabbing white, but after I cry in the car for ten minutes as I drive home, it’s like staring into the face of the sun. I squint as I walk toward it: a study in straight lines and right angles. Modern rectangular boxes of gleaming stucco contrast with black beams and walls of glass. Mom often hoses off the sides of the house, trying to beat back the desert that surrounds us. I think she’s afraid she’ll wake up one day and everything in her world will have turned to beige.
We’ve managed to create an oasis out of the three things that tolerate the heat of the Mojave Desert: palm trees, a flowering shrub called pride of Barbados (Mom loves that), and cacti.
Cacti are creepy. Joe and I joke that they are aliens waiting for a command from the mother ship. If this happens, my family is toast. We’re completely surrounded.
I admit a few are strangely beautiful, with improbable flowers that seep out of them like colorful dew. But most are otherworldly petri-dish experiments magnified by a million. Some are tall and arty, while others look like pissed-off cucumbers.
Mom is obsessed with these beautiful, strange, and prickly creatures. Maybe that’s why she’s attracted to my father. She doesn’t say it, but I think she resents that we have to live in this barren wasteland because Dad can’t take the high stimulus of cities and people.