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Uncle Jake returned on foot and opened up the main door of the plane. They climbed inside and he actually let her sit in the copilot’s seat. Way cool! He started up the engines and went through another set of preflight checks, calling out things as he did them, one by one, though usually not stopping to explain what it was he was talking about this time. Soon, he declared his checklist complete and he spent a moment talking on his headset thingy to one of the controllers in the airport’s tower. Chase was not wearing a headset—Uncle Jake had offered her one but she did not want to mess up her hair before she met Celia Valdez—so she did not hear the tower guy’s responses to him. Jake pushed the two levers between the seats forward and they began to move. There were no other planes moving around right now so it did not take them long to get to the turn that led onto the runway. Uncle Jake went throughout another checklist—setting flaps, verifying something called trim (which made her giggle a little—trim meant doing it, something that she had never done before but which she and her girlfriends talked about endlessly) and a few numbers preceded by V’s. At last, he pushed the throttles up again and turned onto the runway so they were facing down it, directly on the centerline. He throttled back down and brought them to a stop.

“You ready to go?” he asked her.

“Let’s do it!” she said enthusiastically. She had found that she quite liked flying, especially in Uncle Jake’s plane, and that taking off was her favorite part.

“Okay,” he said. “Why don’t you help me out then? Put your hand on those throttle levers and slowly push them forward until I tell you to stop.”

“Really?” she asked, her enthusiasm kicking up a few notches.

“Really,” he said. “Just be sure that you advance them together at the same pace. Nice and slow, keep them together.”

She nervously reached out and put her left hand on the two side-by-side levers. They were not very big and she could grasp both of them easily. She pushed forward, surprised at how much force she had to use to get them to move. As they moved forward, the sound of the engines began to get louder and the plane began to move forward, slowly at first but quickly picking up speed.

“That’s good there,” Uncle Jake told her. “Thanks for the help.”

“Anytime,” she said with a smile.

They left the ground about fifteen seconds later, passing over the perimeter fence for the airport and climbing higher and higher into the sky. Uncle Jake flipped up a lever and the landing gear came up. He flipped another lever (“flaps to zero,” he said as he did so) and there was a whine of machinery from behind them and she felt the now-familiar sensation of falling as the nose came down a bit and they began to pick up speed. The town of Oceano, with the sand dunes they had ridden on yesterday and the bright blue ocean beyond was now visible in front of them. She thought she could actually see the cliff where Uncle Jake and Aunt Laura lived for a brief moment before they passed over the water and turned to the left.

They climbed to twelve thousand feet. Uncle Jake showed her the altimeter and taught her how to read it. It was easy when you saw how it worked. Just like an old-fashioned clock. The scenery was amazing as they flew. From up here in the front, she could see everything! Uncle Jake pointed out the sights as they came into view. There were the coastal mountains, and the city of Santa Maria, and then Oxnard—mere suburbs that were each more than twice the size of Pocatello. Off to her right, she could see the Channel Islands, and boats and ships down in the water looking like tiny little toys with V-shaped wakes stretching behind them opposite of their direction of travel. Far in front of them, beyond another set of mountains, was a brownish-gray haze. He told her that was the Los Angeles basin and the smog layer it was famous for.

As they descended over that last mountain range and over the huge expanse of houses, buildings, and freeways that was Los Angeles, she began to feel nervous again. Celia Valdez is down there! And I’m going to meet her as soon as we land! Oh my God! Can I do this? Do I have a choice at this point?

Once again, Uncle Jake picked up on this. Even though the cockpit was supposed to be sterile at the moment, he reassured her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “She really is nice. Much nicer than me.”

They touched down smoothly at the same airport they had left from two days ago. Uncle Jake drove the plane off the runway and followed a series of taxiways until he came to an area where a whole bunch of planes were parked and there was a large building adjacent. He pulled into a spot near the building and shut down the engines.

“We have arrived,” he told her. “And Celia is here. That’s her car parked over there.”

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