by Laura Bates
For Grace
DAY 1
A flaming sock.
It seems like such a ridiculous thing. But that’s what Hayley is looking at as she lies flat on her back, staring at the bright, blue sky. A smouldering gym sock, twirling in slow motion, trailing a smudge of smoke as it floats gently down towards her.
Hayley tries hard to swallow but there is something wrong with her throat, with her eyes. She can’t move her arms or her legs. She isn’t meant to be here – this isn’t right. Concentrate, Hayley. You aren’t here, you can’t be. You’re on a plane. Think back.
* * *
Bing
The seatbelt signs were turned off and Brian was first out of his seat, lumbering down the aisle towards the bathroom next to the cockpit. The back of his neck looked even paler than usual beneath his ruddy curls, freckles standing out like a smattering of fawn paint drops flicked off a brush.
‘Actually, Brian, please take your seat for a moment.’ Coach Erickson ushered him back towards the rest of the team. Hayley saw Brian’s eyes bulge a little. Was it just the artificial overhead lights or did he look faintly green?
‘I really need to get in there, coach,’ Brian mumbled, gesturing towards the bathroom door.
‘This will just take a moment, son.’ Coach Erickson grinned, clapping his weathered hands to attract everyone’s attention. Brian collapsed reluctantly into a free seat, cradling his stomach with his hands.
Erickson ran a hand through his thinning hair. Greying now, but the same floppy cut he’d sported since the grainy photos in the school trophy cabinet that showed him lifting the all-state high-school basketball championship cup forty years before. His face had leathered since; decades of working outdoors sending tiny red thread veins criss-crossing his nose so he looked permanently flushed with enthusiasm.
From her seat over the wing, Hayley twisted to look towards the back of the small private plane. May and Jessa were fast asleep, their backs pressed together, knees drawn up. May’s glossy black hair spilling forward over a blanket clutched in her arms, Jessa’s long, plump twists hanging over May’s chest as her head lolled back onto her best friend’s shoulder. Across the aisle, Shannon was looking out of the window, her back poker straight, one foot automatically rotating and pointing through a complicated series of flexibility exercises.
The boys looked vaguely disinterested. Jason was lounging back in his seat with his legs stretched out across the aisle, playing a game on his phone. Elliot was sitting a little way apart, as always, bent over a sketchbook, his eyes flicking up and down at the other kids as his hand moved quickly back and forth across the page. Brian looked like he was focusing all his energy on keeping his mouth closed.
‘Guys, I need your attention for a second.’ Slight irritation flashed across the usually placid face of the coach. He put his fingers in his mouth and let out a shrill whistle so that all eyes swivelled towards him. May and Jessa reluctantly disentangled themselves, yawning.
‘Jeez, you lot. Do we need to talk about what happened last night?’ There was a sudden silence, the air practically crackling. Jason shot a glance towards Shannon, who continued to look doggedly out of the window. Hayley thought she saw Jessa jerk as she sat up straighter. Elliot’s hand froze on the page.
Erickson gave a sly smile. ‘Oh ho, you think a coach doesn’t know what happens on the last night of tour? You think this was my first rodeo?’
Brian convulsed slightly and started fumbling in the seat pocket in front of him for a sick bag. Hayley watched curiously as May leaned towards Jessa and whispered loudly, ‘Where did you go last night? I lost you halfway through the party…’
Erickson beamed and waved his hand dismissively. ‘Hell, you can all relax. What goes on tour stays on tour and all that. I know about the last night “rave”.’ He sketched quote marks in the air with his fingers, and Hayley cringed for him as his shirt rode up a little, exposing a hint of late middle-age spread. She’d never seen anyone look less like they knew the details of what happened at a ‘rave’.
‘I just wanted to tell you all how proud I am of you,’ Erickson went on, smiling at them. ‘I know not all of you are here, but I’ve already said a few words to the players who went back on the other flight. Of course, we’re very grateful to the Angel family for extending the use of their company planes.’ He nodded towards Jason who grinned and tipped a small bag of salted peanuts into his mouth.
Erickson cleared his throat. ‘Now, I know the off-season prep tour isn’t the be all and end all of tournaments, but it’s an important lead-in to our main season and you all showed up and gave it your all. Ladies—’ he tipped an imaginary hat to the back of the plane, ‘your enthusiasm and athleticism were outstanding as always. A team is nothing without its cheerleaders. And guys… well, what can I say? Not many of you know this, but this is actually my very last tour. I’ll be retiring at the end of the next semester.’
Hayley watched Coach Erickson carefully, her chin resting on a cupped hand. Were his eyes getting a little misty? Erickson was a ‘drop and gimme twenty’ kind of coach; the sort of old-school educator who’d never owned a cell phone and believed there was no problem in life that couldn’t be solved by a brisk run and a hot shower. She began to reach for her notebook. That was a good line. There’d be a tribute in the school paper, maybe even a piece in the local press. ‘Drop and gimme twenty coach comes to the end of his last lap.’ She should get that down before she forg—
It happened so suddenly it was like a light going out. One second, Erickson was talking, his back to the cockpit door, the students staring at him from several rows away. The next, everything moved at once. The chairs dropped out from underneath them as if they’d been snatched away by an invisible hand. The windows that should have been to the left and right were suddenly on the ceiling, then spinning round to appear beneath her. Backpacks, drinks cans, plastic food trays, shoes, paper cups, phones, magazines – everything was whizzing through the air like the inside of a snow globe, flying debris smashing into elbows and scratching faces. Limbs crashed and tangled into each other, spines bowed, heads whipped helplessly from side to side.
The noise was deafening. A crunching, screeching shriek of grinding metal; the roar of machinery; the din of alarms all blaring at once. And over the top of it, screaming and screaming.
There wasn’t time to think. No time to wonder what was happening, to process or brace, or react. There was only sensation. The lurching, roiling lightness in the stomach. The clench of panicked eyes scrunched closed and sharp scratches sparking hot and angry against the face and forearms. A strange sort of emptiness in the brain, like air pushing against the inside of your skull. No pain, not yet. Then darkness.
* * *
And, presumably some time later, a flaming sock. Floating down towards Hayley as she lies on her back, unable to move.
There isn’t any sound. It’s like watching a TV screen with the mute button on. The sock drifts in and out of focus. Hayley blinks and it has fallen away somewhere else, the screen all blue again. Then a shadow passes over it and she thinks, ludicrously, that the signal has gone, but then her eyes begin to sting and she realises it is smoke.
When it hits the back of her throat, it’s like the world has been turned back on. She chokes and starts to retch, acrid fumes thickening in the roof of her mouth, her eyes streaming. She vomits, her head twisting automatically to the side. She finds that she can move and that her whole body is throbbing with pain.
The shock feels like a heavy blanket, weighing down every limb, clouding the air around her, making it almost impossible to see. Slowly, Hayley raises her head, her neck screaming in protest. She lifts a hand to shield her eyes from the white glare of the sun and registers, distantly, as if she were looking at someone
else’s fingers, that there is a deep wound across the back of her wrist, that her skin is streaked with something black and sticky, that one of her fingernails is ripped and half hanging off. The hand is shaking.
There is sand everywhere. Grittiness in her eyes, between her teeth. Granules between her fingers, prickling the backs of her knees.
In the years afterwards, when Hayley thinks back to that afternoon, she will only ever be able to see it in snatches, like photographs laid out in a line. Moments and sensations: jumbled and out of order, some so vivid she can taste them, others so alien she doesn’t know if they really happened at all.
Black skin a metre away, streaked with red. Jessa. A jam-like sticky goo on the side of her arm, every muscle in Hayley’s body straining not to look at it.
A twisted carcass of metal, unrecognisable. Wires hanging like streamers. Little fires crackling with sparks.
Bodies scattered in the sand. Some moving. Some not.
Shannon’s narrow, sheet-white face inches from hers, shaking her shoulders lightly, asking Hayley something, the sound distorted like she’s underwater.
Relief like a liquid gush when Shannon moves to Jessa, puts two long fingers in the hollow under her chin and says: ‘There’s a pulse.’
The weirdest sensation of hysterical laughter somewhere deep in her chest, as she watches Shannon bending over Jessa, and a sing-song voice in her head intones ‘A head cheerleader never cracks under pressure.’
Stumbling to her feet, a clean, hot pain flashes through Hayley’s ankle and she drops to the ground again.
Elliot is sitting up, spitting into the sand. He looks at her, nodding mutely and waves her past with a blood-streaked hand as she crawls from body to body, the sand burning grazes into her knees.
Sobs, shuddering, screaming sobs grind into Hayley’s ears like someone scraping the inside of her head with a metal spoon. She wants them to stop so she can think, so she can breathe. She isn’t here, she’s on a plane. She is meant to be on a plane.
May sits up slowly, the side of her face deeply grazed. Her pupils are like lagoons. Jessa’s body shakes and convulses as she screams, her arm sticking out at the wrong angle, black oil running down it and mixing with blood and torn skin.
One day, when she thinks back, Hayley will remember how her girl-scout first-aid training flashed into her mind as she knelt next to Jessa. How strange it felt to remember a smiling first-aider in mint green overalls, a blue plastic dummy on the floor.
Brain numb. Clogged, claggy cotton wool. Something about breathing? And circulation? ABC? Or ACE? But that smooth, clinical blue plastic had looked nothing like this. It wasn’t meant to be ugly and dirty, sand and blood and a mess like congealed treacle. It was meant to be clean and pleasant. Time for mistakes and starting over and asking for tips. Do I put my hands here or here? How many breaths again? Comforting, firm hands on top of hers, mint overalls swishing.
Someone says they need to set Jessa’s arm and holds Jessa down. Elliot pulls, like ripping at a butcher’s carcass. Hayley feels useless, standing there trying to remember her girl scout acronyms. She holds Jessa’s other hand instead, letting her grip hard, painfully squeezing sand into open cuts.
Even years later, she will know that the noises Jessa made then caused Hayley to vomit again and again onto her own feet. But her brain won’t let her remember them.
Time moves strangely. She knows they are on a beach. She knows that the front of the plane is missing, that there is no sign of Coach Erickson or the pilot. She can’t remember how she knows this or who told her. The pain in her ankle throbs and rages and she can’t walk very far. Sometimes she looks down and sees, in surprise, that her arms and legs are shaking.
She doesn’t know how long it is before Jason staggers out of the line of trees along the top of the beach, dragging Brian’s motionless body.
‘He’s alive,’ he says, grimly, pre-empting the unasked question on all of their faces.
Jason lets Brian slump limply to the floor and runs to Shannon, wraps her in his arms, stroking her long, curly dark hair like a child. ‘My baby.’ he murmurs. Seeing the two of them entwined like that makes Hayley feel terrifyingly alone. But there’s a stiffness in Shannon’s back. Her arms hang at her sides and she doesn’t return the embrace.
* * *
Time jumps forward again.
Hayley is sitting at the base of a palm where the beach meets the treeline, rough bark reassuringly solid behind her back. A few metres to her right, in the shade of another tree, Jessa is lying, mercifully asleep, her head in May’s lap. May is stroking the baby hairs on Jessa’s forehead with the tips of her fingers. Jessa usually gels them flat but they’ve started to curl wispily at the root in the humid air. It makes her look younger, more vulnerable somehow. Jason puts his hands under Brian’s armpits, heaving him over to lie next to Jessa.
Palm trees with shiny, rubbery leaves that Hayley doesn’t recognise and thick bushes spread behind them in a dense tangle. The beach stretches out uninterrupted to left and right like a smooth slick of butter. The smouldering wreck of the plane is hunched, gargoyle-esque, 20 feet away, its wing forced deep into the sand. Elliot encouraged them to get away from it, in case there was a fuel explosion, but the flames have died down. It isn’t the whole plane, but a torn-off hunk, one wing and the tube of its body, the tail ripped and twisted to one side. There is no sign of the nose or the front third of the plane. The beach is strewn with parts as if the carcass of the plane has been ravaged by scavengers, trailing its innards across the sand. Ripped seat cushions dribbling foam stuffing, metal panels and glass shards littering the beach. A piece of tasteful beige carpet flaps listlessly in the breeze.
In the distance, beyond the wreckage, is a shimmering swipe of pale, golden turquoise that must be sea, though the tide is so far out that Hayley can’t make out where the water ends and the cloudless sky begins. The chances of them landing on an island rather than plunging into the sea were infinitesimally small, Hayley realises. Lucky. An odd way to look at it – but they are.
‘I shouldn’t be here,’ Hayley says, to no one in particular, a stream of giggles burbling suddenly and unstoppably out of her. It seems hopelessly, ridiculously funny. Things like this do not happen to Hayley Larkin – everything in her life is perfect, controlled and calculated down to the very last detail. Or at least that’s what it looks like from the outside. She wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for the unwelcome revelation from her guidance counsellor that even being on track for valedictorian and maintaining a flawless GPA wasn’t enough to guarantee admission to an Ivy League college, without diverse extra curriculars to boost her application.
Her head feels light, somehow, as if there’s too much air inside her skull, and she can’t keep hold of her thoughts. Suddenly she’s back in that drab, airless office, its grey walls closing in on her even as her feet sink gently into the sand.
She expects the appointment be a formality, a check-in on her excellent progress, a pat on the back. She is on track for Princeton or Harvard, she has ticked every box. A major in English with a stint on the college paper, then internships at the New York Times or the Washington Post in her junior year and a position as a cub reporter at a local outlet when she graduates. She has it all planned out. So it’s a shock when Mr Curtis looks at her file and frowns. ‘Right now, on paper, you look like a very… solitary candidate. What you need is something that shouts team player!’
She hopefully suggests debate club and reminds Mr Curtis she is already editor of the Oak Ridge Tribune, but he frowns and gently suggests something ‘a little further from your comfort zone… less academic.’ ‘It needn’t be long term,’ he adds, catching her expression of dismay as she mentally tries to work out how she will cram anything else into her already packed schedule. ‘It might even be fun… what’s the worst that could happen?’
And suddenly she is on a windy field one Monday at recess, tugging her cycling shorts out of her crotch and trying to re
member to smile while she high-kicks her way awkwardly through her audition routine.
Which (thanks to two drop-outs and a nasty bout of strep throat) lets her scrape into the bottom of the cheerleading tour squad. Which, in turn, leads her here. To this beach. And suddenly she is back on it, this beach covered in vomit and blood and twisted metal.
Hayley Larkin does not belong on this beach.
The strange thing is that she cannot seem to move. Distantly, she is aware of activity around her. Shannon is moving purposefully from Brian to Jessa, gently lifting their wrists to check pulses, bending down low to feel their breath on her cheek. Jason has wrapped a wet basketball jersey around his face as a makeshift smoke mask and is diving in and out of the plane’s wreckage, pulling out anything that looks like it might be useful or edible and piling it high on the beach. With the sun shining on his muscular, lightly tanned arms and swept-back blond quiff, he looks like something out of a superhero movie.
I always thought I would be the unlikely superhero, Hayley thinks, vaguely, as she feels the sand prickle the backs of her thighs. Sure, she might be the weakest link in the squad, the last one to be invited to social events, more likely to attend prom as a student reporter than somebody’s date. But she’s always somehow believed when it came down to it, when ‘real life’ started, she’d show them all. She’d secretly pictured herself one day becoming the front-page story instead of the person who wrote it. Graciously accepting her Pulitzer for blowing a sex trafficking ring or a corruption scandal wide open, while the cheerleaders, weirdly still in their teens, stood by, mouths open, pom poms hanging limply. She’d daydreamed it, in the long, tedious hours sitting in hotel rooms on the tour, pretending to be glad to have the time to study while she listened to the other girls shrieking with laughter as they watched re-runs of Married at First Sight on cable.
Yet still she cannot move. She wants to sit here with the solid tree against her back for as long as it takes until things don’t feel like they are spinning out of control any more.