Affective Needs

by Rebecca Taylor

  Porter was headed straight for his desk when his eyes landed on his jacket piled in front of me. His eyebrows rose in surprise, like he couldn’t figure why I would have his jacket, but he simply stopped at my seat and mumbled a thanks as he picked it up and continued on down the aisle.

  “You’re welcome,” I said too late. Crap! I had missed my chance, and now Mr. T was already blathering on about double integrals and line integrals in the plane. I would have to wait until he gave us time to work on our projects.

  Only he never did. “I trust you are all finding time after school and during your precious weekends to make some serious progress on your group projects.” Mr. T raised his eyebrows high over his wide eyes as a hint-hint-if-you-are-not-doing-this-you’re-going-to-be-totally-screwed reminder to not waste time and make sure we were getting this project done. “Remember, one-third”—he wrote the simple fraction on the board with a red dry erase marker—“of your total grade for the semester.” He turned back around to face us. “And like the real world, there are no second chances on this. No extra credit’s going to save your butts. Consider this your final warning, pre-adults.”

  We all slouched in our seats and worked hard at looking bored, but the reality was that Mr. T knew exactly how to strike real fear into every one of our overachieving souls. Sure, all of us were already heading to great schools and all of us were in the top one percent of our class. But only one of us could be number one, and we all had our sights on being counted, and remembered, as the person who graduated in that number one position. The best of the best.

  Just thinking about standing on the graduation stage in three short months and having my name called out as the head of our entire class ignited that flame of competitive desire in my gut. It made me want to intellectually trounce every other single person in this room. We all wanted that, we all wanted to be publicly declared “better” than everyone else.

  We all wanted it—except, I realized, Porter Creed.

  The bell rang, and this time I was ready. I was packed, out of my seat, and through the door before anyone else. In the hall, as the sound of loud voices, locker doors, and cell phones erupted all around me, I stood waiting for Porter to come out.

  Leaning against the weight of my too heavy backpack, I crossed my arms over my abdomen and tried to look about eighty times less nervous than I felt. The door opened and closed twice before Porter pushed through it and started heading into the herd of laughing, shoving, and texting students rushing off to their third-hour classes. Just seeing him, his tall frame, shaggy hair, lanky walk—I almost changed my mind, almost didn’t move.

  As he headed down the hall, the mass of other people closed in around him. If I waited even one second more, I would have to make a scene, rush and shove, in order to catch up with him. I took a breath and started walking fast.

  “Porter,” I dared to call.

  He either didn’t hear me or was ignoring me because he didn’t stop or look back. But some ponytailed sophomore did glance up from her phone to make eye contact with me before allowing a smirk to play across her lips. Ugh, a direct witness to my desperation. I shoved my shame down and then made it much worse by jogging several steps and reaching out to touch Porter’s arm. “Porter, wait a second.”

  He stopped dead, looked at his arm like he was maybe going to have to kick someone’s ass for daring to lay a hand on him, and then turned to look at me. It was subtle, but whatever defense he was preparing to take melted away almost the second he realized whose hand was on his arm.

  “Ruth?” he shook his head. “What do you want?”

  Good question. And one I didn’t really know how to answer. My hand was still on his arm, well past what was reasonable in order to get someone’s attention. I pulled it back. “I wanted to talk to you,” I finally managed.

  Someone slammed into my shoulder and knocked me forward into Porter, who managed to get his arms out in time to keep me from falling to the floor. “Watch it, you asshole!” Porter barked at the JV football jerks that had been walking backward down the hall throwing a tennis ball over the heads of everyone in the crowded hallway.

  The buzzcut blond turned. “Who you calling an ass—?” But the words died on his lips as soon as he looked up into Porter’s angry face.

  Still in Porter’s arms, I could feel his muscles tense up as he lifted me away from him and positioned me behind him. His entire frame seemed to expand and his chin lifted toward the junior jock who was now obviously desperate to find an immediate escape route. Porter had only been at Roosevelt for a few weeks—but after the incident in the hallway with the cops, his reputation was legend.

  The guy held up both his hands. “Look man, sorry. I didn’t mean to knock your girl,” he explained while taking a step backward.

  Porter’s brow wrinkled up. He looked more confused than angry now. I imagined he was trying to decide if he was going to kick this guy’s ass because he was a klutz, or because he had dared to assume that Porter and I were a couple. After a few more hot seconds while everyone waited to see what would happen next, Porter turned around and walked away. Not a single word, not to the JV jock who looked like he’d won the cosmic lucky-day lottery, and not to me.

  Porter left me standing there, wondering if I should run after him and say thanks, or give him some space because he was clearly on the edge of another one of his tirades.

  The safe bet was obviously to let him go. Leave him alone. Give him some time to cool off.

  I ran after him anyway.

  “Porter!” I called.

  His long legs carried him away even faster than before, and while I had to dodge and swerve through the mass of other students swarming the halls, everyone parted, like the Red Sea, for Porter to pass. Everyone could sense his presence, like a tsunami storming down the hall, and they leaped to get out of his way.

  I wanted to yell after him again but my fear of making a complete ass of myself kept me from it. He clearly knew I wanted to talk to him and was now hoping to get away.

  What the hell was I doing?

  I picked up my pace, jogged a few steps, and finally caught up to him at the end of the hall when he had to slow down for the stairs.

  The bell for third-hour rang and any stragglers left lingering in the hall quickly slammed their locker doors and either headed to class or ducked into the restrooms so they could try and ditch.

  Porter was halfway down the stairs and obviously had no intention of going to his third-hour class.

  “Porter?” I asked, now right behind him.

  He either heard me or chose to stop ignoring me, because he finally stopped. His shoulders slumped and he turned around. “What, Ruth?” he looked up into my eyes. “What do you want?”

  “I . . .” Even with his black, swollen eye and split lip, Porter Creed’s direct stare made my breath catch in my chest. “I want to talk to you.”

  “So I gathered,” he said as he turned and continued down the stairs. “Make it quick. I’m on my way out.”

  “How?” I rushed down the stairs beside him. I had to hang on to the rail to make sure I didn’t go crashing to my death trying to keep up. “They’ve got cameras on all the doors. It’s not like leaving at lunch, they’ll have a record of you ditching.”

  Porter shook his head and laughed. “And?”

  “And you’ll get detention!”

  He stopped again and looked at me like I might be just a little bit insane. “You’re serious?”

  “Yes, I’m serious,” I said as he started back down. “Maybe even suspended!”

  Porter raised his hand and nodded. “I’ll take my chances.”

  We were just about to pass my mother’s office door. She wasn’t there, I knew, she had third-hour up in room 233.

  “Can you at least stop for a second so I can talk to you?”

  “No. You want to talk, then you’ll need to come with.”

  If I wanted to talk to him, I would have to leave campus—again. I didn’t think. “Wel
l if we’re doing that, let’s at least be smart about it.”

  At this, Porter stopped and looked at me again. “You’re coming?”

  “Yes, but I’m not going to just walk into trouble like an idiot.” On my left, I reached out and opened the door to my mom’s office. “Come on,” I said.

  Porter looked around, and then followed me inside. “What the hell are you doing?” he whispered, and shut the door behind him. “And people think I’m crazy . . . this is school psych’s office.”

  He would know that; I’m sure my mother saw him several times a week in this very office for counseling. “I know,” I said, but I stopped short of telling him why I knew. For some reason, I didn’t want Porter to know that the school psych was my mom, not yet anyway. My mother kept her hall passes in the top right-hand drawer of her desk. I pulled it open and removed the pink pad of slips.

  Porter stood next to me with his hands shoved deep into the front pockets of his jeans while I grabbed a pen and filled out two slips, one for Porter, and one for myself. I ripped them off, handed Porter his, and replaced the pad inside my mother’s desk. Porter stared at the pass in his hand while I moved around him and opened the door. “You’re not exactly the Miss Innocent I took you for,” he said.

  I stuck my head out the door and checked the hall for security. It wasn’t likely they would say anything to me if I was by myself, but if they saw Porter they would probably get suspicious enough to stop us and ask some very pointed questions about what we were up to.

  And I didn’t want to lie any more than was absolutely necessary.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” Porter held the slip I’d given him up in the air like a tiny pink flag.

  I grabbed his arm and pulled him out the door. “If anyone stops us now, I will just tell them that Ms. Carrie Ann asked me to come pull you from class. Tomorrow, take it to the attendance clerk and tell them you were with her for whatever classes you miss today. They’ll change your unexcused absences to excused.”

  When I looked sideways to see if he was listening, there was a distinctly impressed arch to his eyebrows and shape of his lips. “Hmm,” he said as he carefully folded the slip and placed it in his back pocket.

  I didn’t tell him that I had done this very thing, legitimately, probably a hundred times, for other kids that my mother needed escorted from one place to another. Sometimes even for other teachers. But those were sanctioned because my mother and other teachers trusted me—implicitly. What I was doing right now went completely against that trust.

  Certainly I had my issues, but being a rule breaker was not one of them. In all honesty, it made my insides squirm.

  “But pink paper doesn’t solve our problem of how to get out of the building without being seen on camera,” I said.

  “Leave that to me,” Porter smiled.

  I followed him to Roosevelt’s bottom floor, down an obscure hallway I had never seen, through a door into a maintenance storage room, and finally out a back door that led outside. I came to the conclusion Porter Creed knew exactly how to case a joint for the best escape route. As we left the building, Porter pointed up to the walls outside the exterior maintenance door, “See, no cameras.”

  He was right, of course.

  It wasn’t snowing, but it was still freezing so I reached into my bag and pulled out my sweatshirt with my keys. “So where now?” I asked.

  Porter heard the jangle of my keys and eyed them in my hand. “You have a car?”

  I shrugged as I slipped my arms through the sleeves of my sweatshirt. “Yes.”

  Porter turned and faced the parking lot, looked at his watch, then turned back to me with an expression that was so unfamiliar on his face, it almost made me laugh. Porter Creed looked . . . hopeful. “Any chance I could get you to take me somewhere?” he asked.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Twenty minutes after sneaking through the single crack in my high school’s student surveillance system, I was sitting in the front seat of Vader doing something with the one person that I never, ever, would have guessed I would be doing.

  “This is awesome,” Porter said with a gravity in his voice that led me to believe he actually understood what it meant to be inspired to the point of awe. “Thank you, Ruth,” he added, never even bothering to pull his eyes from the view outside Vader’s windshield.

  I sat and stared with him, not at all awed by airplanes, and only kept from complete and utter boredom by the fact that I was sitting in my car, alone, with Porter. Porter who, when something out on the tarmac especially excited him, would lean way into my personal space to get a better look.

  I still hadn’t talked to Porter like I had planned. The whole ride over here had been spent with him giving directions and me following them. And now that we were alone, and not driving, Porter kept pointing out the windshield and exclaiming, “Look, that’s a 737!” Or, “Airbus 319!” And then he would explain, in what can only be described as excruciating, textbook-grade detail, every minute fact that I never cared to know about passenger aircraft.

  Apparently Porter loved planes, and this is how I found myself parked outside the Trenton-Mercer Airport watching airplanes taxi, take off, and land on a day and at a time when I should have been subjected to the torture of listening to Bella Blake bullshit her way through answering questions about a book she never read.

  Outside, one of the really big planes was making a turn and preparing to take off. The roar from the engines increased until I could feel the vibrations in my seat. “So . . . planes?” I tried to get Porter’s attention just as the jumbo jet accelerated down its concrete path and rotated up into the gray sky above. When it was a few hundred feet off the ground, Porter, who was leaning forward and resting his right arm over Vader’s dash, turned his head and looked directly into my eyes.

  “Yeah. Stupid, right?”

  Only there was nothing in either his tone or his expression that made me think, for even one second, that Porter actually did think this was stupid. He was testing me, waiting for me to make fun of all this, waiting for the chance to have a reason to write me off.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think it’s stupid.” I tried to keep my eyes level with his—it was hard. Not because I was lying—I really didn’t think his love of planes was dumb—but because looking directly into Porter’s bottomless blue eyes while they were aimed directly at me was making my heart hammer hard against my chest. There were only a couple feet separating us, and the confines of Vader’s interior pressed me even closer to Porter, physically, emotionally, as if my life had been barreling toward this inevitable moment, alone in my car, with this mystery of a boy I hardly knew but felt compelled to untangle.

  The one person I had promised my mother I would keep my distance from.

  “I am guessing this has something to do with your grandfather’s old flight manual?”

  He didn’t say anything, and after several seconds he shrugged and nodded in a way that let me know I’d hit a nerve. He returned his gaze to the tarmac, but I could see his mind was concentrating on what I’d just said.

  “You never knew him?”

  “No.” He sat back against my passenger seat. “Only stories, stuff my mom told me.”

  “Why didn’t you ever meet him?” I asked.

  Porter turned his head toward the window. Seconds ticked by. I started to think that Porter was probably not going to answer. “You know, it’s none of my business anyway. I’m so—”

  “They fought.” He turned from the window, his eyes boring into mine. “My mom and her dad. They fought . . . a lot, I guess. The last time they ever spoke was the day she left her parents’ house.” His head dropped forward, and I watched as he now stared into his lap. “But I think she missed him; that’s why she’d tell me those stories about him from when she was a kid. About cities, and airplanes, and china cups on saucers . . . about trips they went on, as a family when she was young, with beaches, and cobblestone stre
ets, and buildings that reached up into the sky. I guess she just never figured out how to tell him . . . and then it was too late. The day she got that letter. We had moved so many times, and I guess nobody knew how to get in touch with her. That letter had been forwarded three times and had been looking for my mother for three weeks before it finally ended up in our mailbox. Paige, my sister, was just a baby then, and my mother almost dropped her when she fell to her knees. She was sorry,” he whispered. “She kept saying that over and over: ‘I’m so sorry, Daddy . . . you were right.’” Porter looked up into my eyes, “Too late, though.”

  “Why did they fight?”

  “Lots of things, I think. She never said exactly . . . stuff from when she was younger, stuff she did. I could guess some of it . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  He did know, but he didn’t want to tell me.

  “So, the planes make you feel closer to the grandfather you never knew?”

  Porter swung his gaze back to me, his brow was furrowed like he was trying to figure out what I was talking about. “No. But . . . it’s what I would like to do. At least, it’s what I think I would like to do. I’ve read that entire manual, cover to cover. I learn what I can online . . . and watching planes, they’re amazing.”

  I smiled and laughed. “I’ve never thought of planes as amazing. More like a necessary evil. All those people crammed into single biohazard tube. I’ve never flown anywhere and not gotten sick.”

  “You’ve been on a plane?”

  “Sure,” I shrugged. “Tons of times. My mom has family in Colorado and Arizona. We’ve been on trips to Mexico, England, Canada . . . well, lots of places, really.” I stopped laughing. Porter was looking at me with an intense interest, like I just said I’d been on safari in Africa, not a flight to Phoenix. “Wait . . . so you’ve never been on a plane?”

  Porter shook his head.

  “But you want to be a pilot?”