Harry looked like a fat little old man compared to their father. Kevin had been tall and lean, with a smile that wouldn’t quit. Emma was thirty-two years old when he died, thirty-seven when she met Harry, and thirty-nine now. Maggie had friends with mothers that age and older, and they still seemed young and full of life. Emma looked like an old woman. Harry had just turned fifty and seemed even older. Maggie had thought her father was so glamorous, and her mother had been pretty when he was alive, but she wasn’t anymore. She didn’t seem to care, and Harry didn’t either. He was a devoted husband, responsible, and accepted her as she was. She talked about going back to nursing sometimes but it had been too many years and the hours were too long, so she took menial jobs instead.
Maggie dreamed of going back to Florida when she finished high school. She missed the warm weather and the friends she’d made there. Moving to another town as a civilian wasn’t like moving to another base in the Air Force. In the military there were always people to welcome you and make you feel at home. In civilian life, no one made it easier for you. You had to figure it out on your own, and meet new friends in a new school. And most of the girls were mean.
When Maggie turned seventeen after they moved to Chicago and started her senior year in high school, she ate lunch alone in the cafeteria every day. She hadn’t made it into the clique of popular girls, and didn’t want to. None of the boys noticed her. She didn’t care about them either. Her grades were okay, but she didn’t like her new school. She hardly knew her teachers. They’d never tried to get to know her. She was planning to go to a state college when she graduated, and didn’t know what she wanted to study yet. Her mother had gotten her a summer job as a waitress at the hotel. She hated it, but she had no idea what else to do. She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to go to college, but her mother said that her father would have expected it of her, so she felt she had no choice.
Maggie was leaving school one day, when someone flashed past her. She could feel the wind rush by her face. He would have knocked her down if he’d come any closer, but he was careful not to. She wasn’t even sure who or what it was. When she turned around and looked, it was a boy on a skateboard, moving at full speed. He glanced back and waved at her. She hadn’t seen a smile as dazzling as that since her father. He was tall like Kevin too, with sandy blond hair, and she thought he had blue eyes when he looked back at her. He was wearing a knit cap pulled down in the chilly autumn breeze. She was going to yell at him to watch out when he flew past her, but she didn’t have time to. He was still smiling as he went around the corner and disappeared. He had frightened her for a minute, and then she went to meet Tommy at their bus stop to go home, and she forgot about the boy on the skateboard. She saw him again a few days later, on his way to school. He got off the board and carried it the last block to school, and came up alongside her.
“You’re not supposed to skate on the sidewalk,” she scolded him.
“I don’t. I was just saying hi to you,” he said with that enormous smile that started in his eyes and transformed his whole face. He had bright blue eyes and an aura of boyish innocence.
“You almost knocked me down.” She frowned. She didn’t know what else to say to him. She hadn’t dated any boys yet. The girls in her class were much cooler than she was. She was an innocent compared to them. At seventeen she’d only kissed a boy once. He’d been drunk at a school dance and she’d run away from him. He scared her.
“I didn’t almost knock you down,” the boy said clearly. “I wouldn’t do that. I’ve been watching you. Are you new at school?” He was curious about her and seemed more confident than she was. Her palms were sweating while she talked to him and tried to look indifferent.
“I was, last year. We moved here in April, from Miami.”
He whistled. “Wow. Big change. The weather, if nothing else.”
“The school too,” she admitted. He had noticed her keeping to herself, away from the other girls. It was a big school, and not easy to make friends.
“Why Chicago?” he asked her.
“My stepfather got a job here, so we had to move.”
“My parents are divorced too,” he commiserated. “It sucks sometimes, doesn’t it?”
“My father died eight years ago. My mom remarried when I was fifteen,” she said in a soft voice.
“I’m sorry. That’s tough. Cancer?” he asked cautiously.
“He was a test pilot in the Air Force,” she said proudly. “And a fighter pilot in Vietnam. His plane malfunctioned, and it crashed. It was fun when he was alive. We moved around a lot. It’s different in civilian life, and not so fun.” She looked into his eyes as he held the door open for her and they walked into school together. He had said he was a senior too. There were a thousand kids in their class, which made it even harder to meet people, and she was shy. She’d gone to a lot of different schools until they moved to Miami, but she still hadn’t gotten used to it. Being the new girl was hard. She thought civilian kids were much snootier than military kids, especially the girls. In the military, your status depended on your father’s rank. Here, it was about a lot of other things: where you lived, what you wore, what kind of car your father drove, your parents’ jobs. She didn’t have any of the obvious status symbols the other girls did, which might have impressed them, so she didn’t try.
“Your father sounds cool. I want to learn to hang glide when I finish school,” he said with a grin.
“Do you want to be a pilot?” Her eyes lit up when she asked him. It was familiar ground for her. Finally.
“I want to be a lot of things. I want to race motorcycles. I’ve got a friend who lets me ride his on weekends.”
“That’s dangerous,” she commented.
“So is everything worth doing. I want to jump out of an airplane and see what that feels like,” he said, smiling at her, and then looked at her regretfully. “I have a class in five minutes. Econ. I suck at it.”
“Me too,” she admitted with a grin. “I like history, and Spanish.”
“I hate school,” he said, and lately she wondered if she did too. Her school in Miami had been smaller and easier to navigate, and she’d learned Spanish from her Hispanic classmates. No one spoke Spanish here. “Well, see ya,” he said, and stopped at his locker to put his skateboard away. She walked past him to her locker at the far end of another hallway. It had been nice talking to him for a few minutes.
She didn’t see him again for several days, and then he caught up to her leaving school on a Friday. She was hurrying, afraid to be late to meet Tommy at the bus stop.
“Want to see me race tomorrow?” he asked her. “My friend let me enter his motorcycle in a race. I just turned eighteen, so I have a license.” She thought about it and decided she did want to see him race. It sounded exciting. She didn’t know what her mother would say. She probably wouldn’t like it, but Maggie wasn’t going to ask her. Her mom didn’t have to know everything she did. She’d have to find someone to leave Tommy with. She watched him for her mom on Saturdays, while her mother worked at the hotel gift shop. They had promoted her to manager.