The Kill by Lisa Jane Smith, now you can read online.
The flight attendant started toward them, and the back of Jenny's neck began to prickle. Her little fingers tingled.
Be casual, she told herself. Be calm.
But her heart began to pound as the flight attendant reached their row. She was dressed in navy blue with cream accents and looked rather military. Her face was pleasant but authoritative, like an alert teacher.
Don't look at her. Look out the window.
Jenny wedged her fingernails into the bottom of the plastic trim around the oval window and stared at the darkness outside. She could feel Michael beside her, his teddy-bear-shaped body rigid with tension. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Audrey in the aisle seat, her burnished copper head bent over the in-flight magazine. The flight attendant was blocking the view of Dee across the aisle.
Please let her go away, Jenny thought. Please, anything, why is she standing there so long?
Any minute now Michael was going to break into hysterical giggles-or, worse, a hysterical confession. Without moving a muscle, Jenny silently willed him to stay quiet. The flight attendant had to go away. She couldn't just keep standing there.
She did. It became clear that she wasn't just stopping casually, a little rest on the route from the galley. She was looking at them, looking at each of them in turn. A grave, searching look.
We're debate club students, flying to the finals. Our chaperon got sick, but we're meeting a new one in Pittsburgh. We're debate club students, flying to the finals. Our chaperon got sick, but...
The flight attendant leaned toward Jenny.
Oh, my God, I'm going to be sick.
Audrey stayed frozen over her magazine, spiky lashes motionless on her camellia-pale cheek. Michael stopped breathing.
Calm, calm, calm, calm ...
"Is it you," the flight attendant said, "who ordered the fruit plate?"
Jenny's mind swooped into a nosedive and stalled. For a terrible second she thought she was going to go ahead and babble out the excuse she'd been practicing. Then she licked the dry roof of her mouth and whispered, "No. It's her-across the aisle there."
The flight attendant backed up and turned. Dee, with one long leg folded so she could tuck her toe into the little pouch on the back of the seat in front of her, lifted her eyes from her Gameboy and smiled.
Except for the Gameboy and the army fatigue jacket she was wearing, she looked exactly like Nefertiti. Even her smile was regal.
"Fruit plate," the flight attendant said. "Seat eighteen-D. Lovely, got it." The next moment she was gone.
"You and your damned, damned fruit plates," Jenny hissed across the aisle. And to Michael: "For God's sake, Michael, breathe!"
Michael let out his breath with a whoosh.
"What could they do to us, anyway?" Audrey said. She was still looking at her magazine, and she spoke without moving her lips, her voice barely audible above the deep roar of the 757's engines. "Throw us off? We're six miles up."
"Don't remind me," Jenny said to the window as Michael began to describe to Audrey, in hushed detail, exactly what he imagined they could do with four runaways in Pittsburgh.
Runaways. I'm a runaway, Jenny thought wonderingly. It was such an unlikely thing for her, Jenny Thornton, to be.
In the darkened window she could see her own face-or part of it. A girl with forest-green eyes, dark as pine needles, and eyebrows that were straight, like two decisive brush strokes. Hair the color of honey in sunlight.
Jenny looked past the ghostly reflection to the black clouds outside the plane. Now that the stewardess danger had passed, all she had to worry about was dying.
She really hated heights.
What was strange was that even though she was scared, she was also excited. The way people get excited when an emergency, a natural disaster, happens. When all normal rules are suspended, and ordinary things that used to be important suddenly become meaningless.
Like school. Like her parents' approval. Like being a good girl.
All blown when she ran away. And her parents wouldn't even understand why, because the note Jenny had left them had said almost nothing. I'm going somewhere and I hope I'll come back. I love you. This is something I have to do.
I'm sorry. IOU $600.00.