Years of the Bus

22- A Jump

“You are all crazy. You’re insane. I’m going to have to drive the bus all the way back home alone and then I’ll have to explain to everyone why I’m the only one who made it back alive,” Grace ranted as we all started getting fitted for our sky diving suits. “This is insane.”

“Baby,” Cory laughed at his frantic girlfriend. “Calm down, we’ll be fine. People do this all of the time.”

“And people die from it!” She exclaimed. “The bungee jumping was scary but this… this is basically suicide. You’re all stupid!”

“We’ll be fine, Gracie,” I assured her with a small laugh. It was kind of funny to see her freaking out about something that she wasn’t even taking part in. She tended to be a drama queen sometimes about some things and us going sky diving just so happened to be one of those things that she deemed freak out worthy. “We only have like, a week left on the bus before we go back to the real world, so we have to enjoy it while we can.”

“She’s right,” Baker agreed with me with that huge grin on her face that she’d had since our date night thing happened a few days ago. It was a ‘I can’t believe the world is such a beautiful place’ kind of grin and it was because of her new relationship with Gaige that was actually a real relationship now and they held hands and kissed a lot and both of them haven’t stopped smiling at all, which was just so adorable. “It’s not that big of a deal.”

“Not a big deal?” Grace yelped. “You are going to plummet from the sky. You are going to jump out of an airplane that is in the sky, how is that not a big deal somebody please explain that to me?”

“We’ll have parachutes,” Logan assured her with an amused laugh, obviously thinking her reaction to this was as amusing as I did. “Why are you all of the sudden freaking out though? You’ve known that we were going to do this for a while, you know.”

“I thought you guys were going to chicken out of it!” She explained hysterically.

“We’re not all as wimpy as you are,” Rosa teased her as the sky diver guys (they introduced themselves but I already forgot their names) announced that we were all fastened up and ready to go. They’d already given us our class about how to do everything and how to pull the parachute, so when they said that we were ready to go, I started to feel my chest start to pound inside of my throat. We really didn’t have to do anything though because we’d each be jumping with one of the instructor people so we didn’t have to worry about the pulling of the parachute or anything like that, we just had to learn it in case of an emergency, which wasn’t very comforting but I kept telling myself that they knew what they were doing.

“Now you’re scared?” Kenton wondered from beside me as we all started going towards the plane. They were only taking half of us up at a time but I wanted to be on the first ride because I knew that if I waited for the second round, I’d probably chicken out.

“I’m just a little scared,” I defended, taking his hand in mine. We were all wearing these clunky baby blue jump suits with the straps riding up our thighs and waist and shoulders. There were fancy hooks on the back of them so that they hooked (very securely, said the instructor) to the instructor that we’d jump with.

“Are you going to wimp out?” Erin asked me with raised eyebrows, twirling her wind goggles on one of her fingers.

I rolled my eyes at her. “I am not going to wimp out, Erin, I think it’s understandable to be just a little bit nervous right before you’re about to jump out of an airborne plane.”

“Just remember to blow chunks,” Turner piped from where he was walking with his arm around his girlfriend, who looked to be turning green as we left the sky diving building and went towards the small plane that was going to take us up into the sky. “Because I want to take your money.”