The Fiche List

Chapter Five

30. Go skydiving

   I felt sick. My stomach had decided to rebel against my decision to do this and was on the rampage in there. That whole one mind, body and spirit thing was a sham. It should be one mind, one brain, one heart, one spirit, one soul, and singular body parts not all lumped together as a plural-singular thing. Which doesn’t even make sense. You can’t have a plural singular. It’s an oxymoron. Which just confirms my entire point. My stomach lurched again and I clutched it tighter. Ugh, this was the pits. Why I had to do this in the first place sucked. Freaking Sean had to go and put skydiving on the list when he KNOWS I hate planes. The big ones weren’t so bad… some of them were practically flying houses! But the little ones freaked me out. It was like putting your life in the hands of a homemade chairlift held together with string and sticky-tape above a ravine full of broken glass. You just don’t do it.

   The certain death-trap started off, making me jerk around and grip the edge of my seat even tighter. 

“You ok, Fiche?” Lea shouted at me over the noise of the engine. 

I glowered at her. Really? Was she really asking me that?

Sean laughed. He was enjoying this way too much. I glowered at him, too. No need to be stingy. I could share my heart-felt love with both of them.

The plane made onto the runway and began picking up speed. 

My heart rate rose with every second, until the urge to scream grabbed me. My knuckles were beyond white at this point.

“Breathe, in and out, slowly. Focus on that,” Stefanie told me. She was the lady tandem diving with me. Jeremy and Ellie were diving with Sean and Lea, respectively, and they’d strapped the camera to Sean to capture this terrifying event. 

I wanted to hit her for sounding so calm, but at the same time I took her advice and decided to be glad she was calm because we would surely die if both of us were panicking as we plummeted back to earth. I managed to nod my head at her. She patted my shoulder reassuringly.

“Every single person I’ve done this with for the first time felt like you, honey, so don’t worry about it.”

That… kind of made me feel better? I didn’t have time to process it anyway, because we were airborne. I stared in horror at the floor, hoping like mad the mechanics that built this thing knew what the hell they were doing. 

“Breathe, honey, breathe. Focus on your breathing, remember?” 

Oh yeah. Right. In and out. In and out.

“How many times have you done this?” I blurted out.

She chuckled. “Enough to know I should’ve been born as a bird. I spend more time in free fall then I do with my feet on the ground.”

‘How’ and ‘why’ came to mind…

“And you’ve never broken anything?”

“That’s why I’m diving with you, honey.”

I frowned. She hadn’t technically answered my question…

   After five torturous minutes passed, the pilot told us he was coming around over the drop zone, and the three people to whom we entrusted our lives stood up and prepared us for the jump. We were all going at the same time- I wouldn’t allow it to be any other way- and so our tandem teams all got in position.

Where I could now see solid ground stretched out thirteen thousand feet below me like a giant green patchwork blanket, because it was a perfectly clear day on Which. To. Die.