We Regret to Inform You

by Ariel Kaplan

  “I know I don’t. Oh! There’s a Groupon.”

  “You are not going skydiving with a Groupon. That’s not a good idea.”

  “It’s 30% off!” I said, bookmarking the site.

  “There are some things worth paying full price for,” he said, pulling the phone out of my hands. “You don’t get a cut-rate brain surgeon. Or jump out of a cut-rate airplane.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “They have three and a half stars on Yelp.”

  He took me by the shoulders, but before he could say anything, I said, “Please don’t ask me not to do this.”

  “That’s a double negative.”

  “Nate,” I said. “Please.”

  He pulled me into a hug. I said, “You don’t have to come.”

  “Of course I’m coming,” he said. “Someone has to drive you. And pick up your remains afterward.”

  * * *

  —

  We got to the Loudoun Skydiving Center an hour later, which had last-minute openings since it was Monday. I handed the guy at the front desk my ID, fifty-five dollars of babysitting money left over from spring break, and my phone (so he could scan the Groupon), and then he handed me a clipboard with the world’s longest release form.

  I read the list of various things the LSC would not be legally responsible for: death, dismemberment, paralysis. Oddly enough, there was a line in there that they were not responsible for any bad outcomes due to “malicious intent.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked the desk guy. “Like, if someone pushes me out of the plane without a parachute?”

  “It’s just a standard disclaimer.”

  “Does that often come up? Malicious intent?”

  “We’ve never had anyone die,” he said. “Mostly the worst that happens is some puking. Did you bring a change of clothes?”

  “Uh,” I said. “No.”

  “Try not to puke,” Nate said.

  “You too,” I answered.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I’m here. I’m being supportive. If you puke on yourself, I’ll get you some paper towels. If you become dismembered, I’ll find your missing limbs and help you get them reattached. But I am not jumping out of a freaking airplane.”

  “But—”

  “Mischa, my entire sense of well-being is predicated on the fact that I have become very good at enforcing my boundaries. I do not want to jump out of a plane. Therefore, I will not do it.”

  I smiled, even though I didn’t much like the idea of going up in the plane by myself. “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  While we were waiting to watch the safety video, I pulled out my phone, which had six texts from Leo, which I instantly deleted, plus one from Jim, which I kept but didn’t read, and one from Emily that said, Are you really sure you want to give up on this?

  Yes, I answered.

  Do you really have mono? she asked.

  I’m at the doctor’s right now, I said.

  No you’re not.

  A woman walked in from the next room, and the man at the desk handed her the clipboard with my information tacked to it. “Miss Abrama…ah…ah…,” she said, looking over my paperwork.

  “Abramavicius,” I said. “That’s me.”

  “I’m your partner,” she said with a grin.

  I’d signed up for the tandem jump because you don’t have to do any training. There’s just a five-minute safety video, kind of like what you watch before you play laser tag. Then you go up in a plane, someone who knows what they’re doing hooks herself up to you, and you get shoved out the door at eight thousand feet. It’s basically idiot-proof; you don’t even pull your own parachute cord.

  My partner was a woman who looked like she was around fifty. Her hair was about a third gray and tied around her head in a braid like Heidi. She had blue eyes and a really bad sunburn.

  “Jill Shoenborn,” she said, shaking my hand. “I’ll be pulling your cord today.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve never lost anyone yet. You’re probably the youngest jumper I’ve ever had, though. Shouldn’t you be at school?”

  “Uh,” I said. “That’s a very long and complicated story.”

  She chortled. “Of course it is. Just don’t tell me, please. If the truancy officer comes poking around, I don’t want to have to lie. Anyway. I think you’re the last one this morning, so we’re going to go watch the safety video; then off we go!”

  I followed her into a little dark room, where two men in their forties were clutching each other’s hands and looking nauseated.

  “You don’t have to jump,” one of them said to the other.

  “I want to,” he said. “That was the deal.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t think you’d really do it.”

  I went and sat down next to them. Nate, who was not planning on jumping out of anything, hovered by the door.

  “Have you done this before?” I asked the first guy, who looked slightly less like he was going to puke.

  “Nope,” he said. “This is my post-chemo adventure. This one agreed to go with me back when he thought I might die.”

  “Don’t tell her that!” To me, the second guy said, “I never thought he was going to die.”

  “So why are you jumping?” the first man asked me. “Daredevil? Lost a bet?”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing like that. It just…” I thought about the real reason, because I hadn’t really considered it too carefully before.

  When I was around ten, I got out of bed one night because I couldn’t sleep. I found my mother downstairs watching some special on PBS; I have no idea what it was about, but there were a bunch of skydivers jumping out of a plane holding hands in a ring, and while they fell through the air, Pachelbel’s Canon played in the background. They were over the mountains, and you could see this whole landscape beyond them, while they just floated together like a team of synchronized swimmers barreling toward the earth. “Can I do that?” I’d whispered.

  My mom had shut off the TV. “Over my dead body,” she’d said.

  After I’d gone back to bed, I’d thought about those skydivers. What was the air like when you were falling through it so fast? Could you breathe it? Did it have a taste?

  I knew there wasn’t going to be any stirring classical music playing, but I still wanted to know. And, okay, I also wanted to know what it would feel like to have my mother tell me not to do something and then to do it anyway.

  “It seemed like a good idea,” I answered. “Also, I had a Groupon.”

  They chuckled. “And your beau?” Guy One asked, nodding toward Nate. “He’s not jumping?”

  “He didn’t think it seemed like a good idea.”

  “Sensible kid,” Guy Two said.

  “I said you didn’t have to jump.”

  “And I said I promised.”

  Then the front-desk guy came in and started the video, which showed the process and gave some warnings, like don’t try to fight off your partner when they’re harnessing you in, otherwise you might fall out of the plane without a parachute, and that would be bad. Mostly, it seemed like my job was not to screw things up for my partner, who was the person doing the actual jump.

  “So basically,” I said to Jill, “you do the work, and I just hang on like a barnacle.”

  Jill seemed to like that analogy. “Okay, little barnacle,” she said, clapping me on the back. “Let’s go find our ride.”

  Nate walked us out on his way to the landing area, which was a field next to the airstrip, where we would land and then have sandwiches, because our jump fee included lunch.

  “I love you,” he said fiercely. “Don’t get smushed.”

  “I love you,” I said. “Technically, I think I’d get crunched, not smus
hed. On account of my skeletal structure.”

  He kissed the spot between my eyebrows. “You say the sweetest things.”

  “Ah,” said Guy One. “Young love.”

  * * *

  —

  I huddled next to my fellow jumpers—who turned out to be called Bob and Matt—on the plane. Matt was staring straight ahead with wide-eyed alarm. “I changed my mind,” he said. “I’m not this supportive.”

  I was also feeling, suddenly, like maybe this was not my best idea. The sky was rushing past us in a blur. I looked at Jill and said, “What happens if we don’t jump?”

  “You’ll jump,” she said. She was toward the front of the plane, along with Bob’s and Matt’s co-jumpers, whose names I’d already forgotten. “Everyone always does.”

  “Not everyone,” I said. “There must be some people who chicken out.”

  “I have a 100% success rate,” she said. “Everyone jumps, and everyone lives.”

  “Lives?” Matt repeated. “As in, does not die? As in, that was a thing we should have talked about before we signed up for this?”

  Bob said, “I told you, you don’t have to jump!”

  “Maybe there’s a compromise,” Matt said. “Like parasailing. Or we could go jump up and down on a trampoline.”

  “Barnacle!” Jill called. “We’re up first!”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. Okay.”

  I sat very, very still while she hooked my back to her front. Then they opened the door.

  It was suddenly very, very loud and windy, and I was very aware that there was a hole in the plane, and that seemed like a really bad thing.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t know.”

  “Sit on the edge here,” Jill said. “Then just keep leaning forward until you’re out.”

  “Out?” I repeated. “Out?”

  She put her mouth right by my ear. “I believe you can do this.”

  I sat down on the edge and leaned forward just the tiniest amount. I was about to turn around and ask Jill if someone else could go first when she gave me the tiniest little push with her chest. And then I was hurtling face-first toward the earth.

  My next thought was something like this: [insert primal scream here]

  After that it was more like: I AM GOING TO DIE.

  And then: I am going to throw up, and then die.

  And then: I should probably open my eyes.

  The wind was almost solid against my face, and behind me I could feel Jill’s heartbeat hammering against my back. It was like looking out an airplane window, except without the airplane (or the window). Underneath me the ground was cut up into square pastures and blocky forests, with tiny farmhouses in between. The air was cold and moving fast enough that it felt like I was eating it instead of breathing it, like I was moving through frigid water.

  Then I felt Jill tap me on the shoulder, which I knew meant she was going to open the chute. I heard the parachute fly open, and we jerked up into the air, and then we slowed way, way down. The air wasn’t as cold. The incredible whooshing sound that filled my head cut off, and it was just silent.

  Then I looked out instead of down, and it seemed to me that I could actually see the curvature of the horizon. I thought, Huh, the world really is round. And of course it’s not like I didn’t know that. We all know. We’ve seen pictures. But somehow seeing it was something different. I was low enough now to see cars on the highway, with little tiny people inside them, driving to and fro, like little ants moving things around. I realized that I, too, am a tiny ant. I live on this marble-shaped planet with seven billion other ants, and every one of us is convinced that our problems, our lives, are somehow eternal and insurmountable, but look! You go up a mile or two, you look out at the horizon, and you can see what all our struggles are worth. They have exactly as much meaning as we give them, and not one bit more.

  My tummy fluttered from the height and the fall and the realization that there was no ground underneath me. The soles of my feet tingled like they were missing the feeling of dirt and gravity. I didn’t feel like I was flying, not really. What I felt was very small, and very insignificant, and very free. All my problems were down on the ground, and I was up here. And maybe I could leave some part of myself up in the atmosphere, above all my piddling little problems, and it could look down at me from time to time and laugh at my foolish little ant-self.

  The ground was starting to draw close, and I remembered that I was supposed to land with loose legs and run, to keep from falling on my face. I bicycled my legs a few steps and fell over with an “oof.”

  Jill unclipped us, and I sat up next to her.

  “So?” she prompted.

  But I was looking up at the sky I’d fallen through. Bob and Matt were a few hundred feet up, floating the rest of the way to the ground with their co-jumpers.

  “I don’t know,” I said, because I wasn’t sure what to say.

  “That’s okay,” she said. She patted me on the shoulder and went off to help Bob out of his harness because he’d landed and seemed to be tangled up in his ropes.

  Matt turned to Bob and said, “Never get cancer again.”

  Bob said, “I promise,” and then they both laughed, because it was such a stupid, ridiculous, heartfelt promise, and they hugged and then went off to the picnic table behind us to drink sparkling cider and eat sandwiches.

  From a few feet away a voice said, “It’s very blue.”

  I looked over toward Nate, who lay on the grass nearby and was also looking up at the sky. “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Small,” I said. “And big.”

  * * *

  —

  It took a long time to drive home from the airstrip. “It’s so quiet out here,” I said, craning my neck to look out the window at the acres and acres of open space as we drove by.

  “I used to go up to camp in Pennsylvania when I was a kid,” Nate said. He drove with one hand on the steering wheel and the other resting on my knee, with a kind of casual possessiveness that thrilled me. “It was like this there.”

  “Was this in middle school?” I asked.

  “Elementary,” he said. “I stopped going after sixth grade.”

  “Soccer?”

  “Yeah. Oh, and math tutoring.” He laughed dryly. “I got a C− in algebra in seventh grade and had to take it over again in the summer.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s not exactly something I brag about.”

  I leaned back against the door so I could look out the window again. “Nate,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  He smiled at the road. “You can still come with me. I didn’t just make that offer because I wanted you to put your tongue in my ear.”

  “I know you didn’t,” I said. “It just seems kind of like an act of desperation.”

  I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed, and then realized that maybe that had been kind of a mean thing to say. “It’s not desperate,” he said, “to make yourself happy.”

  “I know that,” I said, lacing my fingers through his. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just, going from being Mischa the student to Mischa the girlfriend doesn’t seem like it’s going to solve my problem.”

  “The problem where someone hacked your transcript and screwed you over?”

  “Not that problem,” I said. “I meant the other problem. Where I’ve defined my whole life around this one little pinprick of my personality. I need to be more than that. I’m just not sure how.”

  “Mischa,” he said. “You’ve always been more than a pinprick.” He signaled right and started moving over onto the shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Pulling over.”

  “I figured that part out. What’s wrong?”


  He pulled the car over and put the hazard lights on. “What’s wrong is that I can’t kiss you and drive at the same time,” he said. “Not without dying, anyway.”

  He put his arms around me and hauled me into his lap so that I was jammed between his body and the steering wheel, which caused me to honk the horn with my butt. His hands traced up and down my thighs. I said, “You mentioned something about kissing me.”

  “I did mention that,” he said. And then he did.

  When I got home that evening, my mother was ankle-deep in a bottle of vermouth.

  Now, three-dollar-mojito-guy (aka my father) notwithstanding, my mother doesn’t drink. That bottle of vermouth has probably been in the pantry since the Clinton administration. She has a glass of champagne every year at the office Christmas party, and a glass of red wine every Valentine’s Day (why, I don’t know). But beyond that, the only alcohol in the house is used for cooking.

  So I was surprised to find that she was actually pretty drunk.

  “Mom?” I asked. Which was the shortened version of Why are you potted at five in the afternoon on a Monday?

  “Mischa,” she said. “I thought you were going to Nate’s after school.”

  “I was. I did,” I said. “I mean, I was with Nate, but I’m home now.”

  She set her tumbler of liquor down on the kitchen table, where she had a TV dinner and a notepad and a pen in front of her. Upon closer examination, I saw that she’d written a list of names, marked up with crosshatches and asterisks.

  “Are you making a list?” I asked.

  “I am making a list.”

  “Of?”

  “Contacts.”

  “Contacts. Like, men? Like, for a date?”

  “No. Not for a date.” Her eyes were not entirely focused, like she was half in the room with me and half someplace else. Drunklandia, I guessed. “For a job.”

  I sat down. “For a job.”

  “Yes. It seems I have been furloughed.”

  “Furloughed? That’s like when they make you take vacation and then don’t pay you for it. Right?”

  “That’s a furlough,” she said. “Ten points for Gryffindor.” She finished the rest of her drink.