Trent Reedy - Stealing Air

He kicked Spitfire faster, then stomped her tail to jump her up, grinding her trucks along the edge of a steel rail. He didn’t kick off right on the dismount, though, and had to jump clear and come to a running stop. Stupid. That was an easy trick. Skating was the last thing in his life that wasn’t messed up, and he was messing up every trick he tried that morning.

“I was hoping I’d find you here.”

Wendy stood at the edge of the skate park, her skateboard leaning against her leg. She put down her backpack and took off her white jacket. She had on a sleeveless flower-print shirt with wide straps over the shoulders and lace at the bottom. Brian hooked his upside-down board with his toe and flipped it back onto its wheels. He usually found clothes boring, but somehow he always seemed to notice what Wendy wore.

He hopped on Spitfire and rolled around in a tight circle. Wendy dropped her skateboard to the cement and rolled in an opposite arc. They skated around and around, facing each other.

“How did you know I was down here?”

“The other day you skated past my street on the way to school,” Wendy said with a grin. “You couldn’t have been coming from your house. I asked myself where you might have been, then I took a guess and rolled down here to find out if I was right.”

“Yeah, but why?” Brian kicked his skateboard out of the circle they’d been running, guiding Spitfire in a gentle curve toward the stairs to the half-pipe.

Wendy skated after him. “Because one thing Frankie will absolutely not do is wake up really early to follow me.” She joined him up on the half-pipe deck. “And you looked kind of down in church yesterday.”

On any other day Brian would have felt almost dizzy if a beautiful girl like Wendy had come all the way to the skate park to find him. “Sorry,” he said. “A lot on my mind.”

“Anything I can help you with?”

“Not unless you can help me fly.”

She elbowed him lightly. “I thought you were best at that.”

Brian put his back truck over the lip at the edge of the ramp and looked down into the half-pipe. “I keep trying to get a high enough jump make a complete 360. I can never quite get enough air.” He stomped the front of his board down hard and dove into the drop. Transition. Flat. Transition. Up! He cleared the other side and cranked Spitfire around in the air. He put the wheels back on the ramp and rolled back toward Wendy. In the air again, he tried to twist around for the 360 but wasn’t fast enough.

His wheels hit the ramp and he felt the board slow down just a little from the drag. He bent his legs to shoot up the other side and soared into in the air, twisting Spitfire in a half spin. Nothing slowed him up here — no gravity, no drag, just flying.

That was it!

He landed backward, skating for a while, but then waxing out in the flat bottom.

“Are you okay?” Wendy called down to him. “You almost had it!”

Brian’s knees and elbow hurt, but he stood up with a smile. “I’ve got it! Everything is going to be great!”

The flyer couldn’t get into the air because the engine didn’t have enough power to overcome the drag and reach takeoff speed. But what if it wasn’t slowed down by rolling along on the runway? What if there was a way to get rid of that drag force?

They both skated around the park for a while longer before heading off to school. A plan was coming together in Brian’s mind. It was totally crazy. The odds were still stacked against them. But it just might work.

Brian spent most of that day waiting for his chance to get back to the Eagle’s Nest. He only had to put up with a couple body checks from Frankie — more minutes off his time spent with Wendy. At least the idiot hadn’t figured out that he skated with her that morning. When the class was dismissed for lunch, Brian stayed at his desk as he did most days, sketching out his plan, until Ms. Gilbert kicked him out of the room. When he finally made his way to the cafeteria, he didn’t even bother with the lunch line, but simply took his pencil and notebook to an empty table and kept working.

That afternoon Brian was the first one out of the school. He stopped on the way to the Eagle’s Nest to buy a bag of cheese puffs and three Mountain Dews. Hopefully the soda would help smooth things over a little after his outburst yesterday — that, and the new plan.

At the Eagle’s Nest, Brian admired the flyer. Her streamlined wings and tail. The engine that was now mostly back together. She looked good, and she was going to fly. Soon.

Max came up out of the tunnel. “Brian, I didn’t expect you to be here.” He wouldn’t meet Brian’s eyes.

“Alex coming?”

Max nodded. “I talked to him on the street out front. He’s going to get his iPod speakers, and then he’ll be right over.”

Brian put his bag on the east wall workbench, taking out his notebook. He saw the dent he’d made in cardboard Captain Kirk’s chest.

“I’m very sorry for not telling you sooner about the stolen Plastisteel,” Max said. “I should never have stolen it in the first place. I just thought my parents might be impressed if I could show them a working flyer.”

Alex came up into the workshop. “Oh,” he said when he saw Brian. “What did I miss?”

“Max,” said Brian, “you shouldn’t have stolen the Plastisteel, but Alex was right yesterday. We’re all in this together now. We have to get this flyer airborne so we can impress Mrs. Douglas and get her to, well, basically save Synthtech.”

Brian was about to go on, but Max held up his hand to speak. “I might have improved the engine capacity by a very small amount, but there’s only so much I can do without more Plastisteel. I don’t believe the engine has enough power to overcome the drag.”

That was exactly what Brian had hoped he would say.

“Bingo,” he said. “What if I told you there’s a way to eliminate all ground drag on takeoff?”

“That’s impossible, right?” Alex said. “I mean, they’re skateboards, not hoverboards. You’re going to have some resistance from the wheels on the runway.”

“We’re not going to take off from a runway.” He rolled out his drawing. It showed the flyer hanging by three cables from a giant balloon. A close-up sketch in the corner detailed the steel ring-and-pin release system that would attach the cables to the flyer.

“You propose to lift the flyer into the air?” Max said.

“Yeah,” said Brian. “We fill our balloon with helium and hoist the flyer really, really high. Then we start the engine in the air. The flyer won’t have any problem building up speed since it’ll already be off the ground.”

“We’ll never be fast enough,” Alex said. “The balloon will be a giant parachute.”

“Once we top out our speed and we’re dragging the balloon, we release the cables.”

“But your lack of forward velocity would then put the flyer into a rapid descent,” Max said.

“Big deal,” Brian said. “We’d be high up, and we’d be level. I just dip the nose forward a little and then level off. She’d come out of the fall and be flying under her own power with hundreds of feet to spare.”

Alex looked from Max to Brian and back again. “You seriously think this could work? Where do we even get a giant balloon?”

“This Saturday night, Mr. Pineeda is having a Pig-Out Contest where the prize is Mr. Piggly himself,” said Brian. “All you have to do is finish a Big Porker sandwich and some Pig Tails. I may not look like a big eater, but I can pack food away. I’m going to win that balloon.” Brian had taken first place in a hot-dog eating contest back in Seattle, devouring eight disgusting school dogs in one lunch period. He was older now, and this was actually good food. He could win this.