Philip had looked at him steadily. “It’s going to cost you. You’re going to scrub out toilets and clean up boats until you’re old enough to take on more responsibility. After that you’re going to train to be a camp counselor. You like the forest, so I’d suggest wilderness training. You’ll learn survival skills. Not the sort you’ve learned so far, but how to live alongside nature. There’s no catch, Zach. No one is trying to screw you over. I’m offering to teach you to fly, that’s all. At your age my dad took me up. I wanted to do the same for you.”
“Why?” The suspicion refused to die.
“Because everyone needs a break now and then, and no one needs it more than you.”
The one thing he’d never been given in life was a break. Black eyes, swollen lips, broken bones—he’d been given all those things several times over, but this—this was something else.
For a horrible moment he’d thought he was going to break down right there and howl like a baby. It was years of practice at burying his feelings that saved him from humiliation.
“Right.” His throat had felt swollen and thick, as if he’d been caught in the neck by an insect with a big fat sti
nger. “Whatever makes you feel good.”
“There are rules.”
Rules had never stopped him doing anything. Mostly he stepped over them. Sometimes he kicked them in the teeth, but they never got in his way. Noticing Philip’s serious expression, he’d decided the least he could do was look as if he cared. “I’m listening.”
“No more taking things that don’t belong to you, no more being a badass. Flying a plane is serious business.”
Flying. The word made his mouth dry and his heart pound.
The guy was serious. He really was offering to teach him to fly. He probably thought it would change his life or something, which meant here was another do-good jerk he was going to disappoint, but who cared?
Zach figured that wasn’t his problem. To fly he would have promised anything.
How hard would it be to clean up his act?
So he had to stop stealing. Most of the kids here didn’t have shit worth taking anyway. Zach stole to ward off boredom and because it was his way of hitting back at them, not because he wanted what they had. He wouldn’t have been seen dead in a fancy sweatshirt.
“Sure.” He’d kept his tone casual. “I guess I can do that.”
And he had.
From that moment on, his life had a purpose and that purpose was flying.
Everything he did, he did for that one reason.
Math and physics had seemed pointless and boring taught in a classroom to thirty kids with glazed expressions, but math and physics applied to the science of flying gripped him. Hungry for knowledge, he’d studied it all and his brain had come alive.
But what he loved most of all was the plane.
Philip had taken him up every summer until he was finally old enough to learn. The first time he’d been allowed to take the controls his hands had shaken so much he’d been sure he was going to ditch the thing in the ocean.
When Philip had told him he was a natural he swelled with something he’d never felt before.
Pride.
The praise had fed him, nurtured him and ultimately freed him.
On the ground his life was a dead end with no way out, but in the air he saw more than sunshine and fluffy clouds beyond the horizon. He saw a world without limits, full of possibilities.
He saw hope.
With the aircraft he achieved a depth of understanding he’d never reached with another human being.
A social worker had once told him the only thing he was good at was screwing up. Given that she’d caught him breaking into her office to make his own additions to the case file she had on him, he hadn’t disagreed. He would even have considered it a fair summary of his talents. Until he’d put his hands on the controls of a plane. Then he’d known immediately there was something else he was good at.
From that moment on, flying was the only thing that mattered.