Skyjacked Read online

  Brandon heard Emily curse Cassie for being a lunatic. Tim, always Cassie’s cheerleader, howled his approval. Brandon felt both ways: He was angry with Cassie and admired her at the same time. He understood why she had a habit of daring fate.

  It was just how she was wired.

  Brandon’s father had been the same way. He’d told Brandon that sometimes you had to do the things that scared you. If you died in that pursuit, so be it, just as long as you died with a pure heart. Mr. Singh had been ranked one of the top trauma surgeons in New York when he volunteered for a tour of duty with Doctors Without Borders—a mission advertised as extremely dangerous. He was at work on a patient, the death report said, when a friendly fire airstrike mistakenly blew up the mobile hospital on the Iraq-Syria border.

  Cassie’s chute was a paraglider. She steered it dangerously close to the sharp-edged rubble that lined the canyon wall.

  Cassie liked to tease Death a little too much, Brandon thought, but what could he do to change that? They’d been friends too long for him not to know she was on a mission of her own: to live each moment like it could be the last. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad way to live.

  Cassie was about to crash into the rocks when she veered toward the water and a gentle waist-high landing.

  * * *

  They met up with Cassie two hours later along the riverbank. Emily kept proclaiming how furious she was with Cassie—for five minutes. Trying to stay mad at Cassie Ando was impossible. Her smile was ridiculous, huge and a little lopsided with a dimple in her left cheek, and before you knew it you were grinning too.

  The hike back to camp was noisy with everybody gabbing away—everybody except the new kid, Jay. Brandon liked him and his quiet way. He patted Jay’s shoulder. Jay flinched.

  “How you doing after Cass’s little joke back there?” Brandon said.

  “Some joke.”

  “Seriously, Cassafras, I’ll never stop being mad at you,” Emily said.

  “I apologized how many times now, Em? And you’re gonna hold a grudge? Not likely.”

  “You could have killed Brandon and Jay.”

  “Notice how she omits me,” Tim said. “Friends, I know who I am, and no way was I going out there on that slackline, not even if my mom was dangling. All I have to do is live to twenty-two, and my trust fund opens wide.”

  “My hero,” Em said.

  Brandon understood where Tim was coming from. He didn’t admire Tim’s taking the easy way out, but taking insane risks was, well, insane.

  Jay’s phone rang.

  “So much for getting back to nature,” Emily said. “The phone companies even have the so-called remote areas of the parks covered, lest we miss any Snaps of somebody making herself look like a cat.”

  “It’s my mom,” Jay said. He fell back to talk with her. They’d checked in with each other twice a day since the beginning of the trip. With Jay away, Mrs. Rhee’d had to walk home alone from her health aid shift that ended at midnight.

  Brandon wondered what that would be like, having to stay up late to walk your mom home and then waking up at five to deliver store circulars before school.

  Cassie nudged Brandon to give Jay some privacy.

  “I probably would’ve snapped the slackline anyway,” Tim said. He was laughing.

  “It isn’t funny,” Em said. She hung back to wait for Jay.

  EMILY

  12:11 p.m. MT

  Crabbe’s Fork, Idaho

  Jay finished his call and fell into step with Emily as they headed toward camp a bit behind the others.

  “You’ve had a pretty bad time this week, I think,” Emily said.

  “Nah, it’s been great,” Jay said a little too cheerfully, too quickly, the way you do when you’re trying to fake your way through an awkward conversation, hoping the other person won’t press you for more, like What was your favorite part of the trip? “It’s just that I feel a little weird being out of the city. But thank you for inviting me and all.”

  “I’d say we’re not really like this, but we are. Crazy, I mean. Annoying.”

  “Nah,” Jay said.

  “Nah,” she teased.

  “Seriously, I appreciate how nice you’ve been and everything. I mean it: I had a good time.”

  “Wow, you are a spectacularly terrible liar.”

  He actually cracked a smile, and then it was gone, but whoa, she’d gotten him to grin! Mostly he brooded, and that was okay too. His brooding was authentic. He wasn’t trying to look like a cool loner, like a lot of boys at Hartwell did. He actually was a cool loner.

  “You’ll need somebody to look out for you when school starts,” she said. “You know, to keep you from falling in with the wrong crowd.”

  “A wrong crowd at Hartwell? Like anybody there’s gonna throw away their ticket to Princeton?”

  “Well, I’m appointing myself your guardian,” she said.

  “Yeah? Okay, I guess it can’t hurt. Thanks, Emily.”

  That was the first time he’d said her name. It sounded nice the way he said it, softly.

  Sweaty from the hike, Emily felt a tingle in the skin on her arms.

  * * *

  When they got back to camp, Jay joined Brandon and Tim as they started to pack up the boys’ tent. Cassie pulled Emily into the girls’. “He’s totally into you,” Cass said. “And you’re into him.”

  “Cassafras, as I believe your actions have proved this morning and yet again, you are certifiable. We are one hundred percent completely and only friends.”

  “You’re falling in love with him. You just don’t know it yet. But I think Tim does. As we were walking back, he kept looking over his shoulder to see where you and Jay were. He was a little gloomy there.”

  “He’s such a baby. But he’s my baby, be sure of that.”

  “Whatever you say, Em,” Cassie said.

  Reeva, the kids’ chaperone and one of Cassie’s dad’s security team, leaned into the tent. “We should get a move on if we want to make that flight,” she said.

  “Thanks, Reeva,” Emily said.

  After Reeva left, Cassie frowned.

  “You’ve had bad vibes on her the whole week,” Emily said. “What’s up with you?”

  “She makes me uneasy. She’s cold.”

  “She’s new, right? Give her a chance. She’s just being professional.”

  They got to work with the others, packing up camp. Reeva helped tuck the gear into the back of one of the SUV limos. Tim pointed to the gun strapped into a low profile holster at the small of Reeva’s back. “No way I could take a shot with that before we head off, like at a tree or something?” he said.

  “No way,” Reeva said with a relaxed smile.

  “Tim, seriously, you really think Reeva can let you play around with her gun?” Emily said. “Besides, why would you want to shoot a poor tree?”

  “A rock, then,” Tim said. “Look at her now. Emmers of the rolling eyes. Relax. It’s just I’ve never shot a gun before. Reeva, you ever worry someone’s gonna come up from behind and grab it?”

  Reeva’s smile seemed forced now. “Let’s get the rest of the gear in here ASAP, before we’re late for the airport.”

  “I think they’ll wait for us,” Tim said. “That’s how it goes when you have your own plane.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t have to be jerks about it and mess up the flight schedules for everybody else,” Emily said. “You know, the other planes carrying people who aren’t you.”

  Jay came up with the last of the packs.

  “So, Jay, you’re gonna miss this place, huh?” Reeva said.

  Jay looked toward the canyon, the one he might have died in if Cassie hadn’t fallen just as he was going out onto the slackline without a safety cuff to help Brandon. “It was … interesting,” he said.

  “Did you check in with your mom?” Reeva said.

  “Yeah, thanks, you?”

  Reeva nodded, and there it was again, that forced smile. Her mom had early onset Parkinson’
s disease. Emily found out about that one when Reeva had to take a call in the limo, on the way out to Crabbe’s Fork. Reeva was one of her mother’s primary caretakers.

  Emily couldn’t understand why Cassie didn’t like Reeva. She’d come on the trip even though it clearly meant having to find someone to take care of her mom. She’d been laid back too. She didn’t insist on going along on the last hike with the group after Cassie asked her if she wouldn’t mind staying back at the camp. Emily had thought that was so rude, to exclude Reeva. But then Emily didn’t know that Cassie planned to cartwheel off the slackline. Reeva never would have let her get away with that, and Reeva was the only one who had any control over Cassie.

  Being friends with Cassie was always exciting, but it could be a job too. Like now, did she have to be giving Reeva a dirty look? Emily pushed Cassie toward the SUV.

  Jay got the door for Reeva and then held it for Emily, but she was riding in the other limo with Tim.

  Tim was inside already, playing a game on his phone—a game for little kids. The player was an ogre who had to pick flowers from a field and give them to a fairy princess. If the ogre gave her pretty enough flowers, she turned him into a duke or something.

  “My prince,” she said. “You’re so cute.”

  “Sure,” Tim said. He looked over his shoulder toward the other limo, at Jay.

  “Hey,” she said, turning his head so he had to look at her. “I was just trying to include him. Starting at a new school has to be scary enough, but especially before sophomore year, when everybody knows everybody else already, right?”

  “No, I know,” Tim said. “He’s okay. He is. It’s just, I feel a little …”

  “A little what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look.” She pointed to his phone screen. The princess surveyed the flowers the ogre had brought her. A dialogue bubble popped up over the ogre’s head: DO YOU LIKE MY FLOWERS?

  The princess looked sad. I’M AFRAID THEY’RE NOT PRETTY ENOUGH. YOU’LL JUST HAVE TO KEEP TRYING.

  TIM

  5:49 p.m. MT

  Hollow Brim, southeast Idaho, near the Utah-Wyoming border

  The driver nodded to Tim by way of the rearview mirror. “You’re a sophomore, you said? In college?”

  “High school,” Tim said.

  “Big for your age.”

  Tim smiled politely, but he’d been hearing that one for as long as he could remember.

  “You get the chance to play any sports out there in New York City?” the driver said.

  “Football.”

  “Yup, I figured. Gonna play for the NFL, then?”

  “You bet,” Tim said, but he didn’t know what he wanted to do. His dad had it all figured out, though. Harvard for college, never mind that with Tim’s grades he didn’t deserve to go there. But when Dad gives a school four million dollars, they overlook a few bad marks. After the Big H he’d go work for his father’s company, selling financial instruments, whatever those were. Yes, Tim Cuddy was set for life. So then why was he … what? He felt off-kilter.

  “I went to the top of the Empire State Building once,” the limousine driver said. The SUV cruised past the entrance to the municipal airport, toward the smaller terminal where the private planes waited.

  “Amazing up there on the observation deck, right?” Tim said, doing his best to sound friendly despite his down mood. Normally he wouldn’t have minded that the driver wanted to make conversation, but Cassie’s ballerina routine on the slackline had shaken Tim. He’d frozen when Brandon hadn’t. Then Jay had to get in there, ready to step out, no safety cuff even, making Tim look so much worse.

  “You must go up there all the time, living in the city and all.”

  “Now and again,” Tim said. He’d actually never been to the top of the Empire State Building.

  “You ever worry they’re going to do it again?” the driver said. “Knock down another skyscraper? On the TV they were saying an attack is imminent.”

  Tim nodded, but they were always saying an attack was imminent, and it never happened, at least not to you or anybody you knew anyway. He opened the window, hoping the noise of the highway would be enough of a hint that he wasn’t up for a conversation about terrorism right now.

  The blast of air woke Em. She settled back into the nook between Tim’s arm and his massive chest. “The guy on TV said we’re up into the red alert now,” the driver said. “No, I wouldn’t want to be visiting that Empire State Building today.”

  * * *

  Tim loved flying in Cassie’s dad’s plane. There weren’t any security lines at the private airport terminal, and skycaps took care of your carry-on bags. Tim noticed Jay was shaking a little as he handed over his bag.

  “You’re acting like this is your first time getting onto a plane,” he said.

  “Second,” Jay said.

  “You serious? The trip out here, that was your first time?”

  “I almost lost it when we hit the turbulence.”

  “Turbulence?” Tim said a little too gleefully. “Relax, Jay-dawg, the weather’s perfect the whole way back. I checked.”

  “I saw thunderstorms in the south.”

  “We’re not going that way. It’s due east for us, clear skies straight through to New York.”

  They met up with Brandon on the other side of security. The cart filled with the camping gear had been wheeled up to the belly of Cassie’s dad’s private jet and left unattended. The boys loaded the gear into the luggage bay until the skycap ran up.

  “I’ve got this, gentlemen,” she said. “Head on into the plane now, please.”

  Just before he ducked into the jet, Tim looked back.

  The skycap had opened one of the tent cases. A TSA officer with a bomb-sniffing dog came to check it, but the dog didn’t find anything of interest.

  CASSIE

  6:52 p.m. MT

  Hollow Brim, Idaho

  Cassie cruised the airport gift shop. She knew she’d blown it with her stunt out on the slackline. She’d meant to scare everybody—mission accomplished there—but who would have thought Brandon would go out to try and save her?

  Well, anybody who knew Brandon, and who knew him better than Cassie?

  Friends since pre-K, they’d been through a lot together: her parents’ divorce, his father’s death, his mother’s depression. Brandon had been all in for a career as a doctor, the kind who’d work in an underserved area, just like his dad. Now Brand just took it day by day, made few plans, no promises. He made an exception to the no-promises rule when it came to the one thing that really mattered to him: friendship. He’d always been there for Cassie, and she repaid him by dragging him out onto that stupid slackline?

  And she felt really bad about Jay. He was so sweet, holding doors and making sure everybody else had taken from the communal dinner pot before he dug in.

  What if Jay had come out onto the line and fallen? What would his mother do then?

  Cassie thumbed a climbing magazine. She was feeling really blue, and she couldn’t let the others see her this way. She had to be Happy Casserole, the one who makes you laugh so hard you cry.

  Poor Tim really had been crying. His face was the last thing she saw before she jerked her hand free from Brandon’s and let herself fall. Of course, later Tim had played the whole thing off with, “No way was I going out there,” a riff on his go-to self-serving rich kid routine, which seemed less outrageous and even less funny as the years went by. Sometimes he seemed to act like a jerk to spite himself, to make people not like him. Why? she used to wonder. Lately she’d begun to understand. You look for other people to feel about you the way you feel about yourself, to confirm your growing understanding that, despite all your money, your opportunities, you’re lost. Being rich put you in some serious danger of becoming a drone.

  Cassie Ando wasn’t going that route. She was going to live hard and fast, and die young if it came to that. She wasn’t suicidal, but after what happened to Brandon’s dad, she
knew that there were no guarantees. You didn’t get any points for hitting all the right marks, for making your parents happy, for living the life they lived. Her father worked so hard she rarely saw him. When she did, he looked dazed and somehow on edge at the same time, afraid to slow down enough to take in a moment with his daughter, as if he really should be working, growing the stupid company for her to run someday.

  Well, no way was she working for Ando Chemical Inc.

  She was more likely to work against the company, maybe as a lawyer representing people whose air had been polluted thanks to the lobbyists the chemical companies hired to jam their agendas through Congress. She hadn’t figured out how to tell her dad this yet, but he must have known. How could he not after she formed an environmental activism group in school last year?

  Her mom was just as crazed, sitting on who knew how many boards of directors for this nonprofit and that charity. She ran around so much, the only time she could grab a meal with Cassie was outside the apartment, at whatever restaurant happened to be closest to Mom’s next appointment. Yet Cassie didn’t dare complain because she had gobs of money. The poor-little-rich-girl routine and the self-pity thing in general were beyond off-putting.

  Em came up and slung her arm over Cassie’s shoulder, gazing around the gift shop with her. “You okay?”

  “Totally,” Cassie said.

  “Not,” Em said.

  “Look.” Cassie pointed to a stuffed Appaloosa horse, Idaho’s state animal. “For Tony,” she said.

  “He’ll love it, especially the rhinestone tiara.”

  Over Em’s shoulder, on TV, a most wanted terrorist promised to unleash bedlam.

  * * *

  “Howdy, neighhhhbor.” Cassie leaned the horse’s head into the cockpit and made a whinnying sound. Em had come along to say hi to Tony.

  Tony looked up from the flight-programming screen and scratched the horse’s forehead. “Does she prefer apples or carrots?” He had both in the Tupperware he kept near the control panel. He was a health food nut.

  “She prefers you.” Cassie handed the horse to Tony.

  “Aw, Cass, that’s really sweet,” Tony said. “Thank you. My goddaughter will love it.”