Such a Rush Read Online Free PDF

your friend. The plane wants to fly.”
    “If it has gas,” I said dryly.
    “The gas is going to get the engine up to fifty-five knots—sixty-three miles an hour—but that’s all we need. Once we have air moving that fast over and under the wing, the shape of the wing creates lift. The airplane is an amazing invention. Watch.”
    He faced forward. The engine moaned. We were racing down the runway before I realized it was too late to bail out.
    “I’m not doing anything,” he said. Sure enough, his hands were off the steering wheel, fingers splayed, as we drew even with the Simon Air Agriculture hangar and rose into the air. “Lift. It’s all in the way this fantastic machine is constructed.”
    We shot over the trees at the end of the runway and kept rising. I hadn’t realized how vast the forest was, unbroken in that direction as far as I could see. The plane slowly banked, and we circled back over the airport. I’d never realized how long my walk was from the airport office to the trailer park. I had thought it was fairly short because there were no trees or buildings marking my place beyond the last hangar, but the flat grass was deceiving. It was a long way.
    Then we buzzed the trailer park. The directions of the roads and the narrow spaces between the trailers seemed different as I looked down on them. But this eagle’s-eye view was the true view, I realized. The view I’d had my whole life, at trailer level—that was the disorienting perspective. I was able to pick out my own trailer because of the position of the long metal roof in relation to the dark palm tree next to mybedroom window, which was taller than the trees around it. And the next second, when the plane had gained more altitude, I could see the ocean.
    “Oh my God!” My own voice was loud enough in my headphones to hurt my ears. I had forgotten about the Chuck Yeager person who always spoke calmly. I thought Mr. Hall might reprimand me, but he just chuckled as I stared out the window.
    Heaven Beach was, after all, a beach town. Other residents went to the ocean every day. I had known the ocean was there. I just didn’t get to see it very often. It might as well have been a million miles away from the trailer instead of two. And now, there it was, rising to meet the sky, dark blue crossed with white waves. I could see whole waves, crawling in slow motion toward the shore.
    “Now you take the yoke,” Mr. Hall said.
    Yoke. Not steering wheel. Lifting my head from the window, I put my hands on the grips and squeezed. My fingers trembled.
    “You won’t kill us,” he assured me. “My controls double yours, remember? If you make a mistake, I’ll pull us out. Just do what I say, and you’ll be flying. First, for safety, we have to make sure only one of us is trying to fly this thing at a time. I’m transferring control to you. I say, ‘Your airplane.’ You say, ‘My airplane.’”
    “My airplane,” I whispered.
    “Press your right foot pedal—gently first, to get the feel of it. That will turn us.”
    I did what he said. The plane veered away from the beach. I was flying. I was seeing everything for the first time and maybe the last. All of it at once was overwhelming. I stole a look back over my shoulder at the ocean, fascinated by this beautifulpiece of the Earth that everyone else enjoyed and that was so close to where I lived, yet completely out of my reach.
    We flew— I flew—over the high school, and the discount store out on the highway. They looked exactly alike, just a flat black roof, a huge rectangle with smaller squares hanging off here and there for the gym or the garden department, and silver cubes of industrial air conditioners on top. I wouldn’t have been able to tell the school and the store apart if it hadn’t been for their huge signs out front, which from the air were tiny.
    Since Mr. Hall had told me to head back inland, I’d been afraid the flight was about to end. But now he instructed me to point the