Paper Planes Back Home

BOARDING . THREE

The two clouds now hover beside each other closely, as though they are only one entity, just with two occupants. Skylar is sitting under his tree, watching Gianna read the messages on her paper planes and seal them together neatly afterward. So far, she's completed the base of her ride—"I think I'll go with a plane too"—and now she's moving on with the wings. As far as he can see, she's doing a pretty good job, but though he feels genuinely happy that her departure is nearing, he is also a tad apprehensive about being alone again.

He opens a conversation, and Gianna is only too happy to oblige. So far, Skylar has learned several things about his new friend: that she came to the big city under a scholarship and that she graduated with a degree in Fine Arts and was able to find a job as a pre-school teacher over a year ago. She hadn't planned to be a teacher, though, but she needed to earn some money because she and Aaron struggled with expenses.

He was surprised when she revealed a "plot twist," however:

"But you know, even if I didn't have a scholarship, I still would have been able to go to our university."

Her family is pretty well off, she said, as they own a huge food business in South Korea that only experienced a decline over the past two years. "To be honest, I ran away from home."

"Why?"

"I wanted to experience something more out of life, I guess?" she said with a shrug. "Growing up, I felt like my parents had already planned my whole life, as well as my brother's. I suppose when I was younger, it was fine. I had everything I wanted right at the tips of my fingers..."

"And then you got bored."

She smiled at him. "Exactly."

"Ah."

"Skylar..."

His gaze shifts from her hands to her face. "Yeah?"

"Earlier, you mentioned that there are planes stronger than the others...that's why you told me to put them on the base of Jesse's plane, so it's sturdier," Gianna says, holding a paper plane in her hand that's torn. "Do you know why some tear apart quickly and some don't?"

"Somewhat," he replies with an uncertain tilt of the head. "That old man I told you about, he had a lot of paper planes, remember?"

She nods and sits on her cloud, resting for a while.

"He was pretty stocky, and it frustrated him when he tore the bottom of his ride as soon as he stepped on it. Had to do it all over again."

"How did he know what to use the next time, then?" Gianna's head tilts to the side in curiosity. What if in the middle of her journey back, she tears through her ride too? What will happen to her? To her...soul, if that's merely what she is right now?

"Well...he started tearing a lot of planes, and there were those that he could never tear up, not even a bit," Skylar relates with a smile that Gianna could only describe as wistful. "When he opened them up to read, all of them turned out to be from his wife."

Gianna looks at the torn paper plane in her hand and unfolds it. Although she initially thought the writing was unfamiliar, she realizes now who had sent this.

Ricky.

"After seeing that, only one thing stayed with me: The stronger the love, the stronger the plane," Skylar concludes, still thinking of old Sam and his paper planes. "It's why I keep on wishing Jeannie would send me some," he adds. "I know her planes would be stronger than anyone else's."

She raises her head and holds her tongue, afraid that the question bubbling in her throat would hurt him. Instead, she composes words of consolation in her head, but even those she keeps from escaping her lips. They would sound insincere, she thinks.