It was a birthday party, to the extent people still had birthday parties, and they were all drunk off their asses, and they were all going to go skydiving. The lady of honor, twenty-one-year-old Kristen, and a couple friends, had planned it a few months ago, in a haze of college-student enthusiasm, and damn if they weren’t going to stick to their plans. 

Lane wasn’t drunk. Not because he didn’t do that kind of thing, because he definitely did, with as much youthful vigor as the others, but because he was the designated driver. He had drawn the role out of a hat. He was driving Mark’s-- or was it Zeke’s-- or was it Alexandra’s-- third- or fourth-hand van, which was sizable enough to hold the eleven of them, if barely, and with quite a lot of squishing and ignoring seatbelt laws. Lane was the only one of his group who liked being the designated driver, and for a completely pathetic reason: it gave him a purpose in the group, even just for the night, and even if most of them wouldn’t remember who it was that chauffeured them home the next morning. 

He was used to feeling lost among them, and aimless. Lane thought all of the others must have been brimming with self-confidence and self-importance and grandiose plans for the future. He knew this wasn’t true, but he thought it anyway. He figured himself the only one on Earth who didn’t know what he was doing, or why he was supposed to do it, or even why he was there in the first place, despite the incredible amount of books and movies and melancholy journal entries about that very thing. They were all faking it.

(Though by now, after his girlfriend broke up with him last month because he was Too Self Possessed, he was beginning to realize that he might have been a bit wrong about that, and despite how it appeared, other humans had emotions too. A noticeable development, but too late to get Maddie back. He hated himself then. This was another misdemeanor, because he was twenty, and nearly every twenty-year-old in the world was this selfish. If you’re twenty and you think you’re not, congratulations, you must be the only one in the world who…)

Lane had warned them against drinking too much, but only half-heartedly, because he didn’t want to ruin the fun. He thought a reasonable person would have waited until the skydiving was over, or gone and rescheduled it, or not planned to go skydiving in the first place, because who the hell actually wanted to go skydiving? But they were drunk, and they were acting like drunk people acted. It doesn’t need to be explained any further than that. 

Lane had driven the van over to the Local Skydiving Place a few miles below the speed limit in futile hopes that they would miss their scheduled time and avoid what was certainly to be the most terrifying experience of his adult life. But to his chagrin, they arrived a fashionable ten minutes early, even with him driving a couple extra loops around the parking lot. The eleven of them ran through the sliding doors and up to the front desk, Lane hoping the whole time that someone would call them out on their inebriation or say that there had been a scheduling mistake and, oh no, they would have to reschedule to the very day that Lane would have to take a plane back home. But they were ushered by with smiles.

Somehow, by humanity’s ever-present tendency to destroy itself by any means possible, ten tipsy college students, and one who was not tipsy but still incredibly nervous, managed to act normal enough during the arduously long instruction period to be permitted to step foot on the disconcertingly old-looking plane. They had all went through pages and pages of waivers and terms and conditions where they asked, are you sure, are you absolutely certain that you want to do this? Completely sure? Because, just a reminder, we here at the Local Skydiving Place take absolutely no responsibility in the very unlikely occasion of your bloody, painful death because you really should have listened more carefully to the instructors? Okay, your funeral. And then another page or two of credit card verification, which Kristen filled out for each of them with all the confidence of a millionaire’s daughter who knew that if they did die, she could certainly afford the legal fees to sue the skydiving people, thank you very much.

It had been nearly two hours of instruction and waivers before the plane left the ground. It was the sort of thing that, to someone who was inordinately excited to go skydiving, would have seemed positively endless. To Lane, it seemed a very quick five minutes.

The plane rose at an alarming rate and he watched the safety of the ground drift further and further away. Just when Lane thought that that was it, they were high enough, they couldn’t possibly want to go any higher, up they went, and the higher they were the more he was feeling like he was walking a very long plank off the edge of a pirate ship, with his hands tied together and weights knotted around his ankles. Except the pirates were all assuring him calmly that it would all be all right, and he should really try to enjoy the drowning while it lasted, because it really was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and maybe he could try counting the tropical fish on the way down?

Lane quickly volunteered to go last, because whatever people said about getting the worst part over with, he wasn’t feeling particularly brave. He watched the others, strapped securely to someone else who would do the vast majority of the work, jump out of the plane with varying degrees of nausea. He listened idly to a heated discussion that Alexandra and Lily were having over the differences between bungee jumping and skydiving--

“No, like, isn’t it the same thing as skydiving just with a rope?”
“But it’s not like you’re doing it off a plane, right? It’s like off an edge of a cliff.”

“No, it’s not. It’s higher than that, right? The whole fun part is that you’re, like, in the middle of the air, and everything, and held by only a rope.”

“No, it’s off a cliff. My uncle did it.”
“But there’s a rope.”

“I know there’s a rope. I never said there wasn’t. I just said it’s not off a plane.”

“I didn’t say it was off a plane. I just said higher than a cliff.”

“Cliffs are high.”
“I know cliffs are high. I said it was higher.”

“They don’t do bungee jumping off planes.”

“I never said it was off a plane.”

Then their conversation was interrupted, because Alexandra was jumping off the side of a plane. Her scream faded and then stopped. Lane imagined a splat. 

When the time came for him to be strapped into his partner, a worryingly confident thirty-something man whose name he immediately forgot, the fear was so overwhelming that Lane began to dissociate a bit and started feeling rather like it was something happening to someone else. He wondered if this was what an out-of-body experience was supposed to feel like. The suit was uncomfortably tight, and the helmet was pressing a painful bruise on his forehead, and he wasn’t too wild about being firmly strapped to the stomach of another man, either. The wind was blowing loudly enough that when his partner shouted something at him, he wasn’t entirely certain if it was “Ready?” or some bit of information that he absolutely needed to know, lest he die immediately. But whatever it was, it was too late for Lane then, because his partner was jumping off the edge of the plane, and he really had no other option but to be dragged helplessly along with him, and suddenly he was thinking that maybe he should have gotten drunk after all.

The first thing he felt, even before the icy cold wind reached to drag him down, was a jolt somewhere around his waist, but it drifted away before Lane could process it, or wonder what it was. He squeezed his eyes shut against the bitter air. He was finding it difficult to remember any of what he had learned in the instruction session, and hoped his partner was on his game. All he knew, then, was the wind, rushing up at him, surrounding him on all sides.

There was something wrong about that, the wind bit. It kept nagging at him. Lane knew it, but he wasn’t able to quite grasp it; it kept slipping away, just out of his reach. He grabbed at it, wildly, and then he realized.

The wind was surrounding him on all sides.

It was difficult to form coherent thoughts so high up, but he managed one: Oh, no.

There’s the kind of fear where you’re free-falling off the edge of a plane, thousands of feet from the rapidly approaching ground, placing your life in the hands of a thirty-something nameless man, fearing for your death. 

There’s also the kind of fear where you’re free-falling off the edge of a plane, thousands of feet from the rapidly approaching ground, realizing that you are no longer attached to said thirty-something nameless man, and that you’re now rocketing towards the ground without any kind of protection, knowing with inevitable certainty that you are going to die.

Two theories make sense, in this situation, about what had happened:

Firstly, that it was a mistake, pure and simple. Given, a mistake of the immense, life-threatening variety, a mistake that was getting someone sent to jail or at least sued for a ridiculous amount, but a mistake nonetheless. There are some obvious flaws in theory No. 1, namely that a mistake like this was the kind of thing that never happened. They had secured the two men together it in ten different places with ten different clips and hooks and locks and ropes, and they had managed, somehow, to mess each and every single one of them up. The instructor-- whose name was Brian-- was now falling alone, wondering where the hell the kid he was supposed to be guiding had gone. He had been skydiving for a long time, so he was more practiced in forming thoughts even as the earth was rushing up towards him, and he thought: I am so getting fired for this.

The second theory is more tricky, and it speaks not of sabotage, or human error, or someone angling to kill a gangly twenty-year-old college student. It speaks, more widely, of fate, and destiny, and what the universe wanted to happen, and how maybe sometimes, even with all the clips and hooks and locks and ropes in the world, some things are unavoidable.

You decide. 

Perhaps you’re willing to believe that the universe wanted Lane to look down, and up, and at the figures far below him, and realize he was flying. 

He knew it right away. There was no deliberation on whether it was a freak gust of wind, or the others were simply falling faster than he, or perhaps whether he had already died and this was a postmortem hallucination. Instantly Lane began to ridicule every book he had ever read where the main character watched magic flow from their fingertips and asked, Is this really happening? Is it real? This wasn’t a dream. The fact was, Lane was rising in the air, quickly, against gravity and against the wind and against everything he ever knew, and it was true, because what else could it be? His first thought was that it all felt right to him, like the last puzzle piece had clicked into place, like this was what he had been missing all along, like he had held in wings that were just now unfolding, though there were no wings, just the wind.

It was bitterly cold, and the wind was fierce, but Lane was not afraid. He knew this was all of his doing. There was no supernatural force holding him up, and the wind was not breaking his fall. He started descending, gradually: it was easy, like something he had known how to do his whole life. It happened at less than a thought. The fields, divided into neat squares of yellow and green, passed beneath him. 

Far below him, in a small town, Mrs. Richards was sitting on her rocking chair on the front porch. In winter, she liked to knit, but it was April already, if a chilly one, so she was just sitting there, staring out at her serene street and into the carefully manicured lawns of the neighbors. (She would have brought her iPad out-- it was a big one, bigger than the phone her daughter had bought her, with a protective case even though she never dropped things-- but she knew the neighborhood was declining these days, and she was certain that somebody would try to steal it.) Her grandson said that sitting there doing nothing made her look old, but Mrs. Richards had been called worse things. She still would have spanked him if he were her child, but her daughter was part of a different generation, and according to her that kind of behavior was unacceptable these days. Instead she sat him down and had a talk with him about sensitivity. Mrs. Richards didn’t know what that was supposed to do.

Squinting her eyes against the sun, she looked up into the sky and saw a tiny black dot. Mrs. Richards was quite proud of this; her hearing was going those days, but her eyesight was as sharp as ever. She thought it must be a balloon some poor child had let go of, but it was moving closer, and rather quickly, too. Perhaps a plane, or even a helicopter, but then it was closer, and it looked almost like a person-- no, it was definitely a person. 

Mrs. Richards immediately began to panic. Her thoughts went to something about people being dropped down from the heavens, but she couldn’t remember if it was from a movie she had seen or the Bible. Oh, dear. She thought, unpleasantly, of someone being squished on the pavement, and all the blood and skin bits that would go everywhere. Oh, dear. 

Mrs. Richards saw, as he neared-- she thought it was a boy, at least, because his hair was rather short, though you never knew with the kind of haircuts girls were getting those days-- that he was wearing an odd kind of blue and black jumpsuit, and a quite bulky one, too. The kind of fashion young people said was stylish was odd as it was, but she had never seen something like that. And now that he was so close, he really wasn’t falling that quickly, more gliding gently towards the street, his arms outstretched. That was it-- there had been a skydiving place opened up the next town over, Mrs. Richards had seen advertisements for it when she was driving to visit her son. Her memory was sharp for eighty-one and a half. It was funny, though, she didn’t see a parachute. And she thought they must have touched down in some field out in the middle of nowhere, not in the middle of a town where people could be driving, for God’s sake. He was lucky that everyone was at work. 

His descent slowed as he approached the ground, then he touched down right in front of her house, gently, stumbling a bit and then stopping. He looked around with wonder at the houses surrounding him, as if he were an alien visiting Earth for the first time. 

Mrs. Richards looked at the boy warily. She didn’t know what kind of heathens chose to go and jump out of a plane. “Hello,” she said. “Are you one of those skydivers? I’ve heard about you. I’d have thought you’d have some other place to land, though.”

He didn’t reply. Mrs. Richards just thought he was being rude, but really, the boy was thinking: Shouldn’t there be reporters there to ask him questions about what he would do as a superhuman? Shouldn’t there be government officials there to do morally questionable tests on his DNA? Where were the crowds? There was a simple answer to that question, and it was that the crowds were up in helicopters far above him, scouring the mountains for his body, or at least his splattered remains. 

“Excuse me?” Mrs. Richards said. “I asked, are you one of those skydivers?”

Lane looked up, apparently realizing for the first time that there was someone else there. “Are you seeing this?” he asked her. “Like, am I here right now? Was all of that real?”

Mrs. Richards furrowed her eyebrows. “I don’t know what you’re going on about,” she told him. She thought he must be unhinged. 

“Listen, ma’am,” Lane said to her. “What’s your name? You’ve just witnessed a historic moment. You really have. You’ll never forget this.”

Mrs. Richards nodded nervously and watched him walk off, not a moment too soon. After he left, she stood up and walked inside as quickly as she could for an octogenarian. She had had quite enough nonsense for today.

“Right, well, then what’s your explanation for it?” 

The reporter paused. “The common belief is that there was a strong wind blowing over the area at that time-”

“There wasn’t,” Lane insisted. “And it was only me. Everyone else fell like they should have. It was only me.”

“Experts say such winds can be highly concentrated,” the reporter said, and shifted in her seat. Lane felt bad for her. Her makeup was plastered into a garish mask which made her look much older than she appeared, which really couldn’t have been more than thirty. “Ahem. Do you really believe, Mr. Daniels, that you flew that day, of your own accord?” She smiled sympathetically at the camera, exposing lipstick on her teeth, like, get a load of this kid, right?

“It makes sense,” Lane said, almost pleading. He knew how he looked. It did not, in fact, make sense. “I’m not injured, am I? How am I supposed to fall ten thousand feet and come out without a scratch?”

“There are many theories,” the reporter said kindly, and changed the subject. “Are you planning on taking legal action, Mr. Daniels?”

That was the first interview. After a couple more in the same vein, he started saying, “Yeah, I imagine it was a freak gust of wind,” and “I really don’t know how I got out of the whole thing unscathed, I feel so lucky…”

It wasn’t what he had expected. There were interviews, and newspaper articles, though not as many and as prestigious as he had thought there would be, and all his family fussed over him without stopping for the next few weeks, but whenever Lane insisted to them that no, he really had flown, they would laugh and pat him on the shoulder and go off with some nonsense about freak wind gusts, and how really it should have been impossible for him to survive, but that was the weather for you these days, wasn’t it?

Because if he really could fly, couldn’t he do it right then, take a running start and jump and soar into the rafters of the local news station? Lane tried to explain that it didn’t work like that, or at least he thought it didn’t. He was a bit fuzzy about how the whole thing worked. He was “still figuring it out,” he told the reporters. They all thought it was the funniest thing in the world. 

He couldn’t prove it, that was just the thing. Lane couldn’t fly. His powers had been stripped from him, rudely, by some maleficent god, and he was earthbound again. 

And he couldn’t get the damn idea out of his mind. Even three months after the fact, when school was out for the summer and he was back at home, and everyone else had more or less forgotten about it, he would sit there in his room, willing himself to fly, wanting it more than he had ever wanted anything before. When he dreamed, he dreamed of soaring high above a mountain range, and he couldn’t imagine how he had ever forgotten how, it was so easy, easier than walking, easier than anything. Lane spent his lazy summer evenings jumping off chairs around the house, hoping that in one of his jumps the spirit would catch him again and he wouldn’t come down.

It was July, the middle of the day when both his parents were at work, when Lane stood on top of their shed, no more than ten feet off the ground, and took whatever he remembered from going to church as a child and put it into an overenthusiastic prayer. Then, in case the Christians had been wrong about that whole thing, he put his hands down and said out loud, “Please, let me fly.” He felt silly saying it. When Lane was eight, and jumped off the couch with a fistful of balloons hoping it would take him to the ceiling, he said the same thing. But things were different now. 

Lane took a running start, to the extent that he could on a five by eight-foot shed, and leapt into the garden. When his parents got home, he explained his broken wrist as a bicycle accident. He hadn’t really expected that one to work, anyway. He knew-- maybe he always knew-- that if he was going to get this damn superpower figured out, he would have to aim higher. 

The opportunity presented itself at a house-- well, apartment-- party that September, when school had started again and more than one person had introduced themselves to Lane with, “Hey, aren’t you that guy who fell out of a plane?” (It didn’t seem very elegant when you put it like that.) The apartment in question was a tall one, twenty-two floors, in a neighborhood surrounded by other equally bougie complexes. It was a relatively quiet party compared to those of the years before. They were seniors in college by then, and most of them had just started to realize how terrifyingly close the real world was. People had begun to start calming down, focusing on work, thinking about the future. Besides, they could all legally drink by then, so it had lost some of its novelty. They all felt almost like real adults, or at least people playing at being real adults, drinking wine, playing music almost low enough not to bother the neighbors. Lane stood there, feeling terribly alone, thinking he was the only person in the world who felt so insignificant, and hating himself for feeling that way. 

When, halfway through the night, the host proposed going up to the roof, it almost seemed too perfect, almost like fate, almost like it was supposed to happen that way all along.

Lane felt the elevator rocket upwards and his stomach dropped, but he wasn’t scared. He walked, as if in a dream, to the edge of the roof, listening to the sounds of the party behind him: music, voices, laughter. He stood there for a minute and looked out at the night sky, the smattering of tall apartment buildings which trailed off into suburban two-story houses which trailed off into nothingness and trees. He wanted to take his time. He didn’t want to rush it.

“Hi, Lane,” came a voice behind him. He turned.

“Hi,” Lane hedged. It was a girl, dark brown hair down to her shoulders, eyes that looked black in the darkness. He recognized the face, but her name escaped him. 

“Olivia,” she reminded him. “I was in your Econ class last year.”

“Oh, right. Yeah, sorry. Hi.”

“You should really know everyone’s names by now,” she teased. 

Lane forced a laugh. “Yeah. Uh, just distracted, I guess. Thinking about things.”

“Yeah? What things?”

“I dunno. Just things.”

“Yeah,” she said brightly. “It’s crazy. Last year here, huh?”

“Yeah. Crazy.”

“What are you going to do after?”
“No idea. You?”

“Child psychologist,” Olivia said without hesitation. “On to grad school for me. You don’t know at all? What’s your major, at least?”

“Business.” It had been a bit of a split-second decision for Lane. After two years of languishing in “Undecided” territory, the board had basically forced him to choose, and his guidance counselor had presented business as a good option for someone who was passionate about virtually nothing. He was okay at math, and taking orders, and spreadsheeting, so he took it.
“Sounds boring.”
“Yeah. It is.”

They stood in silence for a while. “You know, you’re always so quiet.”

“I get that a lot.”

Another silence, then-- “Well, I should go. Um.”

Lane gave a little awkward wave and watched her walk away. Then he climbed over the railing, onto the very edge of the roof. He grabbed onto one of the bars and let his body dangle, precariously, over the street, staring into the traffic below and the city lights beyond him. He kicked a foot off the side, imagining an invisible platform in the air. His heart beat quickly, but he was not afraid. 

“Lane, what the f*ck?” The voice was from far behind him. “What are you doing?” He felt the weight of eyes on him, and someone else yelled, “get back from there, man!” Footsteps.

Lane imagined the voices dissipating in the fall air, imagined all the people and the lights disappearing until it was only him and the sky.

He hung there for a moment, then he jumped, and listened to the wind.