Into Thin Air by Caroline Leavitt

of lunar insects. He told her he thought time travel was probably possible, and he’d be the first one to volunteer to go into the future. “What about you?” he said. Without hesitating Lee said firmly, “I’d go to the past.”
    It was ridiculously easy to make him happy. All she had to do was smile at him or thread her fingers into his. She didn’t plan on the way he sometimes jammed into her thoughts. She could be doing the dinner dishes and then she’d suddenly think his name, his face would float into her mind. She didn’t want to need him; she didn’t like the way her stomach folded in upon itself when she couldn’t find him at school or when he didn’t call. And she didn’t like the way he needed her.
    She began seeing Tony again, breaking dates with Jim to whiz about town on the back of a motorcycle. “That boy again,” Frank said. “What, do you mean, that boy?” Lee said. Frank made her come out on the front lawn, where he showed her the tire marks from Tony’s bike, greasy black slashes in the green yard.
    Lee came home at one and two in the morning; she skipped classes and came to the dinner table with her eyes lined in frosted lilac, her lips streaked with a startling red. On her left arm she had a silver bracelet she had taken from a Woolworth’s down the street. She hadn’t told Frank she had been warned never to come back there, that a man had grabbed her arm just as she was leaving. All he had had to do was get her to take off her boot, where the bracelet was hidden, but he just made her empty her purse on a table in the back. “Don’t come back,” he told her. But sometimes Lee did, and always she left with a pair of glass earrings, or a chiffon scarf, or a packet of sewing needles she didn’t even want. She’d come home and then make herself baths so hot, she was certain it would burn the restlessness right out of her.
    One night Lee stayed out with Tony until three in the morning drinking rum and Cokes from a plaid thermos bottle. “I love you,” Tony said, making Lee laugh so much, it angered him. “What, what’s the matter?” he said fiercely. “You think that’s funny?” He drove her home speechless with fury.
    When Jim called to ask her out, when he mentioned how happy he was to be with her, she sniped at him. “Hah, you think that’s happy,” she said. She planned to talk to him, to let him know he couldn’t own her, That night he drove to the lake, the air so clear and cold, it seemed to freeze the light around them. “I have a surprise for you,” he said. For one moment she was afraid that he was going to take the clumsy gold ring from his finger and drop it into her palm. She curled her fingers inward, she folded her arms about her. Instead, though, he got out of the car. “Just wait,” he said, She pulled down the rearview mirror and blinked at her reflection in the mirror. “Okay,” he said, getting back in, holding up a slim glass bottle.
    â€œChampagne,” he said. “Château de Top Thrift.” He gave her the bottle and opened up the glove compartment and took out two glasses, wrapped in lavender tissue paper. “Waterford crystal,” he said, handing one glass to Lee, “courtesy of my mother,” He opened the champagne with a pop, ceremoniously pouring her a glass. Gamely Lee took a sip. Metal in her mouth. An edge of tin. “Wait, wait,” he said, pouring himself a glass and clinking it against hers. “To us,” he said. “Happy days,” said Lee.
    He kept pouring the two of them wine, and at first he just watched her as she sipped. The champagne tasted flat. She couldn’t drink any more of it without feeling ill. Jim poured wine into her empty glass. He was drinking more than she was, downing each glass with a glad, exaggerated sigh.
    He listed toward her, touching the