Such a Rush by Jennifer Echols Read Free Book Online

stay calm. In his natural state, he was nothing like Alec and Jake, not calm at all. I imagined every curse word that filled the cockpit when he turned the radio off.
    Either that, or he enjoyed the danger, the rush. Grayson was like that.
    Mr. Hall glanced at the wind sock, then brought the radio to his mouth. “Affirmative, it’s still bad.”
    Long minutes passed while we watched the dot make its way down the length of the runway, the banner now visible as a streak behind the dot. He reached the base of the runway and announced himself smoothly over the loudspeaker, then turned to make his final approach and announced himself again, exactly as Mr. Hall had taught us. The plane descended, roaring closer.
    After three years of watching countless banner pickups and drops from the airport office, I still found the sight shocking: how tiny the plane was, how long the banner, how tall and vivid the red letters. The banner he was towing, which he and Alec and I had been taking turns towing all week, was left over from the summer: SUNSET SPECIAL 2 FOR 1 BEACHCOMBERS . I’d been worried Beachcomber’s would blame us when customers asked for a special that the restaurant hadn’t run since last September. But there were no customers in December, at least none who would see the banner from the deserted beach on a blustery day.
    SUNSET SPECIAL 2 FOR 1 BEACHCOMBERS came closer and closer to us, dwarfing the plane. Grayson didn’t have to land. He only needed to get near enough to the ground to drop the banner safely, but he was having trouble even with that. The nose of the plane pointed diagonally toward us, rather than straight down the runway, to combat the wind. The left wing rolled up suddenly as Grayson lost control. All four of us watching made a noise.
    He straightened the plane as it roared even with us. He was close enough that I could make out the straw cowboy hat he always wore, but nothing else through the windows reflecting the clouds.
    “Drop drop drop,” Mr. Hall shouted, not into his radio but into the wind.
    On cue, the plane pitched up, climbing to a safer altitude. The banner hung in midair for a moment, then drifted slowly toward Earth. At least, that’s what it looked like at first. The four of us realized at the same time that it was coming toward us, just as Grayson commented over Mr. Hall’s radio, “Maybe y’all should move.”
    Alec and Jake dashed one way around the airport office. I ran and Mr. Hall jogged the other way. The seven-foot-tall banner rippled toward us like a snake, impossibly fast for its size, and smack, the metal pole at one end hit the office’s glass door.
    Wincing, I rounded the building to the front again and examined the glass. Amazingly, the pole hadn’t broken it. Now the pole scraped along the concrete floor of the porch, dragged by the banner going wild in the wind. Alec and Jake were rolling up the banner from the other end, which had wrapped itself around the far side of the building.
    “That’s some wind,” Jake shouted. I’d known Grayson was in trouble when I saw the Halls running. But if I’d had anylingering doubts, this sealed the deal: the fighter pilot home on leave after a year flying dangerous missions in Afghanistan, worried about the wind.
    “He could land at another airport,” Alec called to his dad.
    “I looked up the storm on radar,” I told Mr. Hall. “It’s a monster. Grayson won’t be able to fly past it. To do him any good, the runway would need a different heading.” That way, he could land into the wind, rather than the wind blowing across the airplane and tossing it off course. Community airports flashed through my mind, airfields up and down the coast where I’d practiced touch-and-go’s, landing and taking off repeatedly.
    “Florence,” Mr. Hall and I said at the same time. He brought the radio to his mouth again. “Florence has a couple of strips with different headings. Why don’t you fly on over there? We’ll come pick you