MY EYES ARE dark, moist earth.
These other eyes—superimposed over mine—are the deep Arctic Ocean with ice marbling underneath. I shiver, pull Dom’s hands from my skin, and turn away from the mirror, into his chest. “We’d better get back.” I feel the foreign eyes on my spine, and the hairs rise on my neck and my stomach flutters with nerves.
“What? Noooo,” he groans, sliding his hands down my arms. “That has, like, five kinds of rejection and suck written all over it.”
I scoot out of his grasp. “My dad asked me to go up on the sunset jump,” I lie, willing myself not to look at the mirror and the ghostly otherness within it.
Dom does an exaggerated package shift; whether it’s for show or not, I don’t know and don’t care. I want to feel the sun on my back instead of phantom eyes. I leave him standing in the hall as I fling open the door and hop past the steps onto the concrete floor of the hangar. I’m outside before he’s even turned off the light.
I can tell he’s disappointed. He takes forever to lock the door. But when he turns toward me, his eyes crease with concern. “You okay?”
I slide onto his bike, trying to remember if I’ve ever been so creeped out. “I’ll be okay if you let me drive us back.”
“Woman—”
I turn the key and gas it. “You getting on back or walking?”
“I know better than to tangle with you when you have the tiger look.”
“Hold on tight,” I warn, and then suck in my breath when he hooks his fingers inside the inseam of my shorts.
“No fair!” I yell as I gun it so fast the front tire pops off the pavement and we lurch forward.
“I never object when you do it to me,” he yells back. We both laugh into the wind.
“Dammit, I forgot to pack my chute from the last jump. I left it lying on the mat,” I tell Dom as we pull up to the skydive center.
He slides off the bike, helps me with the kickstand, and kisses my forehead. “I’ll pack it for you. I’m faster.”
“Okay.” I toss him his bike keys. “But you’d better not pack me for a hard opening like you did the other day.”
“I was mad at you for flirting with that tool in the aviator glasses.”
“I was not flirting with him!” I caress his wind-stung cheek. “You wanna go up?”
He wipes his eyes with both fists like a tired toddler. “Nah. I’d like to do one more practice session on the creepers before we try the new formation.”
I wish he would jump with me this time. The image in the mirror has me unsettled, the sensation coating my skin and sinking in, infecting my spirit. I want Dom’s hand in mine as we fly. But it’s just as well. There’s business to handle with my dad. Surely there’s a way to change his mind about the big-way, and having Dom there will only make me look like I need him—which I don’t.
My sneakers pound the desert sand as I jog into the hangar toward my parents’ office. Dad’s still behind his desk, talking on the phone. I fade into the wallpaper and wait until I’m acknowledged, like I’ve been trained to do. He hangs up and raises his eyebrows. “Yes?”
This is a man who appreciates directness, so I get to the point. “I care about this place as much as you do. What can I do to convince you I’m ready for the big-way?”
Dad stands up from behind his desk. I hold my breath as he walks toward me, then holds my arms. “Exhibit patience, for starters. I know you love this place and want it to do well. You don’t have to prove anything.”
I step out of his circle of power. “Another way to say you don’t believe I can.”
His tone flips like a switch. “Don’t come in here and try to browbeat me, kiddo. It ain’t gonna happen.”
I fix him with what I think is a disarming smile but I’m sure comes off more like I’m constipated. “I wasn’t raised to back down,” I answer with a lift of my chin. I know I sound like a tired war movie, but it’s his language, so I speak it. Dad dismisses me by pointing at the door.
Dom’s kneeling by my chute, straightening the parachute lines, when I stomp over.
“Whoa!” he says, grabbing my hand. “Spill.”
“Commander Crotchety in there”—I thumb toward the office—“refuses to let me be part of the big-way we’re doing to lure the X Games here.” Dom’s eyes go wide. I’ve lit up his entire brain with visions of glory. “He says I need to be perfect, precise. I can land my pinky toe on a penny in the middle of the DZ. I’ve done tons of formation jumps with you guys. What else do I have to do to show him?”
He holds my jumpsuit out for me to step into. “You know that famous thing where Babe Ruth points to the outfield and calls it?”
“Not really, but what’s your point?” I ask, punching my arms into the suit.
“Call it.” When I show no sign of understanding, he zips me up and adds, “Call your opening altitude and call where you’ll touch down. Be precise about it. Hotdog your descent and stick the landing. Make it pretty. I’ll film it so you can show him how good you are. He’s too busy to watch you, so he doesn’t see that you’re a badass skydiver.”
“He doesn’t see me, period.”
I look away from Dom’s sympathetic eyes. Already a radical plan is formulating. The most radical I’ve ever had. Maybe you don’t have to die to earn Dad’s respect. Maybe you just have to show him you’re not afraid to. “Pack it to open fast,” I tell Dom.
“Boldly go.” He smirks.
“You bet your ass. Where no man has gone before.”
He gets back to folding my chute. Then he looks up at me. “And babe, I’m putting a penny in the dirt.”
I rip a page from the back of someone’s jump log and write on it, then march it into Dad’s office. He doesn’t even look at me or the paper as I toss it on his desk and about-face, slinging my helmet over my shoulder.
The pilot goes full throttle for takeoff, engines thunder, and the plane vibrates with power. Cold air sneaks in under the jump door next to me as I mentally run through what I’m about to do. We rumble down the runway, and I try to ignore the eyes of the other jumpers on me; recalling the eyes in the mirror causes unfamiliar nerves to fire off in my belly. I don’t know if it’s the memory of ghostly eyes in the motor home or what I’m about to do, but I’ve never been this on edge before a jump. My stomach is a taut, jelly-filled drum.
Once every other skydiver has exited the plane, I hold the metal edges of the doorway and lean forward into the wide open. Deep breath in, blow it out, and dive. Cool air hits my skin and presses like a giant hand against my torso. I go immediately into track position, hurtling through the pink-and-blue sky like a dart until I’m directly over the clean circle in the desert where I’m to execute a perfect landing. I ease into my arch.
There’s nothing to do now but fall.
It’s odd being out here alone again for the second time today, not part of a formation, and not goofing off with Dom, kissing in freefall. It’s extremely lonely, like I’m disassociated from what I’m doing. Like maybe I’m not real. Not as if I’m dreaming. More like . . . like I could be someone else’s dream.
What if I was?
If I bounced, would another girl sit up in bed, sweating and panting, grateful it was just a dream?
This thought spooks me, makes me distrust myself for the first time, and this is one jump where I can’t afford doubts. Every fluttering gnat of fear in my belly is squashed by the weight of my stubborn will. I have to do this. The risk I’m taking is worth it. It is. I’ll show my father I’m precise.
The number I wrote on the slip of logbook said simply 1K. I wish I could see his face when he realizes what it means—eight hundred feet below oh-shit altitude, where we must make a decision in an emergency. I had to turn off my automatic activation device to do this jump.
I’d laugh if the wind weren’t pulling my cheeks back to my ears.
Dom is filming me, and I’m going to give him something memorable. But I can’t fight the lonely drag as I fall; it’s like no one, not even God, is watching me right now. I think of the specter eyes in the mirror, the spooky sensation of being watched instead of being the watcher. How can my own reflection scare me so much?
For a moment in that motor home, I was my own ghost.
I blow through the altitude where I’d normally pull. But this is no normal jump. I’ve had one jump when my chute failed to open and I had to deploy a reserve. This time, this one time, if there is a problem, I won’t have time to deploy my reserve. My objectives are: Pull as low as I can. Don’t die.
It’s like playing chicken with the earth.
With every five hundred feet I lose, my heart hammers five hundred beats faster. My fingers are twitching to pull. It’s all I can do not to reach for the cord. The ground is rushing at me so fast, and I can see people lined up around the drop zone. I’m certain I’ll hear their gasps on the video later.
There’s no taking my eyes off my altimeter now. I reach one thousand feet above ground level and pull, and my chute fans open in a violent gust. My legs swing hard underneath me as the chute jerks me upright. I do a quick check of the canopy and lines as I grab the toggles, realizing I have time for one-quarter of my turn before my feet touch the earth. I slam into the ground and roll. All breath has been knocked from me. Desperately I struggle for oxygen, but my body refuses to take in air.
For too long, all I see is white.
Did I ever pull at all?
Did someone just cry out in her sleep?
Peripheral vision opens up, color streams in fragments, and footsteps batter toward me. Dom stares down with the video camera pointed at my face. A wild-eyed mania has replaced his normally cool expression. I scared him. I excited him too, but the dilated fear is still in his eyes.
“Jesus, Ry! That was . . . Whooo! You are unbelievable!”
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.