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You’re the one who showed Mike how to make paper airplanes. He showed his friends. There was a dusty old book at your grandparents’, something about how kids entertained themselves pre-radio days, which is, of course, like a thousand years ago. Your grandparents didn’t have a great television, though, so you actually sorted through their books whenever you got away from the dinner table.
It was like going back in time, which you enjoyed (Anne of Green Gables and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and The Witch of Blackbird Pond were perfect escapes). It was a way to hide from Mike, when his whining became unbearable, and from your dad droning on and on about Barry Goldwater, whoever the hell that was. It was like your dad didn’t know how to talk to his own parents.
Huh.
Maybe that was something you had in common.
Anyway, you found this book, in between a Pearl S. Buck novel called Peony and a tattered collection of Oz, and you rolled your eyes at “—BEFORE Radio!” in the title. It had a bunch of line drawings showing where the folds of the airplane went. How to select your paper size and shape. Ways to enhance speed.
You had nothing better to do.
Until you had an idea of college in your mind, an idea of career, you pretty much did things because you had nothing better to do.
Even romance.
(At the time, you wouldn’t have admitted it.)
Mike likes to claim he’s the best at everything he’s ever tried his hand at, but you were the airplane wizard. Yours flew faster, higher. Wind couldn’t be seen, except in what it did to the world around it. You watched the wind take your little creations and make them dance. You imagined the feeling of floating.
People say being drunk is like floating, but you try it eventually, and learn that it’s not.
“I think we’d better keep things under wraps,” you say, fingers cold in Jonathan’s. His hand is warmer than yours, but he doesn’t cling. He doesn’t keep you warm unless you ask him to. You’re still getting used to that, to what you want.
“Yeah,” he says. “Sounds like a good idea.”
“Just for a little while,” you add hastily. Just till Steve’s face heals up. You can’t forget the sight of him, his lips crusted with blood, his eye swollen shut, his nose misshapen. You had asked, of course, What happened to you? even thought that was no longer a fair question, coming from you.
He hadn’t really told you. You had to fill in the blank spaces of the longest night of your life with other people’s stories.
“Nancy,” Jonathan says, his squeeze of your hand very quick and firm: a reminder more than an embrace. Your scars are the same. Your scars are the same. “We can take this slow.”
He calls you Nancy more than Nance.
(Does he ever call you Nance?)
Holly is coloring at the table when you get home from school—delayed an hour because of the newspaper meeting. It’s January, and yes, you joined the newspaper. So did Jonathan.
It’s hard to pretend like the two of you aren’t something in the newsroom, and really, why should you have to? Steve isn’t there. Steve wouldn’t be caught dead doing journalism.
(You are going to be at all his games, covering them. Is that—is that moving on? When he sees you in the hall, he says hi. The swelling has gone, but the bruises are still the talk of the school. Everyone knows Billy did it. Nobody knows the real reason why.)
(In another life, or given half a chance, you’d kill Billy Hargrove yourself. Is that…loyalty? Friendship?)
“Hey, Hol,” you say. You miss her, all of a sudden, the sister who isn’t a baby anymore, isn’t even just a toddler. She’s getting taller, getting more talkative. You’re too far apart to know her like you knew Mike at that age.
Or maybe that’s an excuse, and you need to be so, so much better than you are.
“Hey.” She doesn’t look up from her crayons.
You sit down at the table—Mom’s in the garage poking around in the chest freezer for a steak she misplaced, and God, you hope you’re never relegated to the kind of life where you’re worried about a steak—and filch an unmarked page from Holly’s paper-stack.
You start folding.
Memory is funny. You can shut it up for years, inside your mind, but it lives in your hands. Even now, you can feel Barb’s strong fingers clasping yours when you (ill-advisedly) try to watch Alien together, alone in the basement.
You can feel the brush of Steve’s thumb along your jaw, the slight pressure as he opens your mouth, the warmth—
“You’re making a plane,” Holly says, jarring you from a memory you really, really didn’t mean to have.
“Yeah,” you say. “Yeah, I am. Do you—”
“Those really fly,” Holly informs you smugly, tapping her copper crayon on the edge of her paper like a teacher with a pointer. “Whoosh, whoosh. Steve showed me.”
And just like that, your offer to show her how evaporates, replaced by a twist in your chest that is not so easy to fold or refold as paper. “When was that?”
Holly shrugs. “You had a tummy-ache. Steve came down and waited for dinner.” Holly pauses to let this register—no doubt of sympathy, as she hates waiting for dinner. “And he said, look, Miss Holly. This is how you make a little plane.”
You swallow. “OK. That’s sweet.”
“Mm-hm.”
You finish your plane. Fold, fold, fold, quick as lightning, because memory is a funny thing. Then you give it to Holly and tell her it’s hers, because you don’t actually want to see where it goes when it flies.