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Helen’s own eyes narrowed. She stepped smoothly between George and Frank and pressed a quarter into George’s hand.

Up close, the plane, made of wood and cable, seemed like nothing that ought to fly.

“It looks like a toy,” George immediately regretted saying.

“Best toy I ever played with. Never underestimate a Jenny. They’re stronger than they look.

I’m Florence,” the pilot said as she shook George’s hand.

Florence looked like someone who ought to be sunning herself poolside in Hollywood, not bundling her beautiful wavy hair into a leather helmet. “Climb on up.”

The mechanic set a stepladder next to the wing.

George stepped up and craned her head to see inside the rear cockpit.

It had a polished wooden dash pocked with black gauges.

In the center, a compass held pride of place.

Some of the other gauges were self-explanatory: altitude, airspeed. Others mysterious.

“What’s a Victometer?” asked George.

“That’s my tach,” said the pilot. “Place your right foot here. You’re climbing in the front.”

“What’s a tach?” George surprised herself by asking. “And what’s that one just above it? And that one over to the right? Do you steer with that stick?”

Florence guided George into the front cockpit.

It had no instruments, except for a baseball bat–looking stick, just like the one in the rear cockpit.

George wanted nothing more than to try it out.

She folded her hands in her lap and surveyed the crowd until she spotted Helen.

Helen fluttered her eyelids as Frank whispered something in her ear.

It must have been very loud over there, because Helen stood on tiptoe and tilted her head, as if to catch every word.

Florence fired up the Jenny, and then it was loud in the plane too.

The engine whined and roared, making George tingle from her toes to her scalp.

“Keep your mouth closed till we’re off the ground,” yelled the pilot as she maneuvered the plane across the field. “Unless you want bugs in your teeth.”

George, afraid of saying something else stupid, had planned to keep her mouth shut anyway.

She was grateful for the helmet that kept her hair from blowing across her face, and for the goggles that allowed her to keep her eyes open as they sped into the wind.

Her stomach lurched only a little as the wheels left the ground.

The Jenny lifted, dipped slightly back toward the earth, then went up, up, up until George couldn’t help it: she had to bare her teeth in an enormous smile, bugs be damned.

The sky above her was blue and cloudless.

Below her lay the patchwork quilt of northern Oklahoma.

Red and brown earth with hints of green and more quicksilver lakes than she would have imagined.

She watched the shadow of the plane as it moved across the red dirt far below them, waving her arm and grinning as her shadow did the same.

Her chest hummed with the vibrations of the motor; she felt like she had a chorus inside her, holding a long, low note in unison.

Her face and arms stung, raw in the wind, sharply defined.

“You don’t know where you begin and end,” Adele used to say when, in the midst of her childhood growth spurts, George knocked over furniture and stumbled into doorjambs.

Well, today she knew. Up in the air, the wind picking out her outline against the sky, she knew exactly where she began and ended.

“I can tell you like it up here,” Florence yelled. “I better introduce you to Stu when we land.”

George didn’t want to land. Ever.

“Stick around,” said Florence as George reluctantly climbed down, dazed and glassy eyed.

George viewed the string of people lined up for flights with dismay. There was no way Helen would wait until all of them got their fifteen minutes in the air. Here she came now, marching toward the plane, Frank still in tow.

A florid, paunchy man ignored Florence’s instructions about where to put his feet as he climbed into the plane. His wife urged him to reconsider, but he just set his mouth in a grim line and clung to the wing.

Finally, a man in a coverall emerged from the hangar and strode toward the Jenny.

“Sir,” he said. “You just climb on back down and start again, now.” Hearing a male voice freed the paunchy man to obey, and at last he made it into the plane.

Then the man in the coverall clasped Florence’s waist, spun her around, and gave her a long kiss. “Hello, darlin!”

“Stu! About time you showed your face. Hey, this is ... Miss? What’s your name again?”

“Georgeanne Ector.” She pretended not to notice Helen’s alarmed expression.

“Miss Ector needs flying lessons. I told her you might be able to help her out.”

Frank whistled long and low. Helen looked as if she might explode.

“Well, I do love to help a young lady out.” Stu winked at George.

“Does he ever,” said Florence. “You let me know if he tries to get too helpful.”

George giggled. The airfield, she already understood, was its own universe. One where certain customs and rules were looser. She felt herself loosening, felt like she had just come home.

“Mother, guess what?”

“Good afternoon to you too.”

“Hello, Mother,” said George. She was supposed to ask how her mother’s day had been, and then Adele would ask about hers, but today she couldn’t wait. “I’ve decided something. I don’t want a car for my birthday.”

Adele had been talking about getting her a car for nearly a year.

A car of her own would be fun to tinker with, George supposed, but she was already allowed to tinker with her parents’ car.

Also—and she could never ever admit this to anyone because it was a spoiled way of thinking—the notion of owning a car bored her.

Lately, almost everything bored her. Nothing merited her time and attention.

She felt antsy and unsettled. She’d confessed these feelings to Helen and had been relieved to learn that her best friend felt this way too.

She wasn’t the only one being a moper—something Adele could not abide.

Adele’s expression indicated that she was far from surprised by the news that George didn’t want a car.

“We’ve been over this, Georgeanne. A car is independence.

For you and for me. I can’t be driving you all over creation these next few years, and, believe it or not, you will actually want to leave this house someday. ”

Independence was a big theme with George’s mother.

She was always telling stories—others told them too—about what an independent young woman she’d been.

George knew she disappointed her mother in this regard.

She wasn’t bold. She didn’t flout convention.

When Helen successfully lobbied the school board for permission to take science with the boys rather than homemaking with the girls, suddenly Adele turned into Helen’s biggest fan.

She constantly talked about Helen’s willingness to fight for what she wanted, Helen’s refusal to settle for less than.

Helen, Helen, Helen. George pointed out that Helen didn’t care a fig about science—she just wanted to be the only girl in a roomful of boys.

“Be that as it may,” said Adele, “she wanted something , and she went out and got it.”

Despite her boredom, George did want things.

She wanted to take apart and reassemble the engine of her grandfather’s Ford.

She wanted to go out to the derricks with her father and the engineers and look over the machinery.

Her parents forbade both of these things.

The Ford was on its last legs. The engineers would find her distracting.

But now—now she wanted something that she thought might make her mother happy.

“I do want to leave the house,” said George. “I want,” she said, delighting in how surprised her mother was about to be, “an airplane.”

Her mother stared at her. “A what?”

George’s confidence faltered. “An airplane,” she said, softer this time. Her mother gazed at the ceiling and frowned, no doubt remembering the bicycle that George had refused to ride. She had to make her see that this was different. “We saw a barnstormer today. Her name is Florence, and—”

“The barnstormer was a woman?”

“Yes.”

“Here in Garfield County. A woman barnstormer.”

“Yes!” Adele, who had always encouraged her to do anything boys did, was clearly skeptical about the idea of a female pilot. “She took me up in her plane. It’s a Jenny—”

“Look, George, I know you don’t want a car, but this is a little much, expecting me to believe—”

“It’s true! I bet she’s still at the airfield.

Let’s go! I’ll introduce you. She could take you up in her plane.

” She wasn’t even certain Florence would remember her.

Florence probably saw fifty starstruck girls a week.

But the dream that had revved her pulse all afternoon was stalling out in the face of Adele’s disbelief.

“Please,” George urged, tugging at her mother’s sleeve. “Please, Mother. Come meet her.”

The crowd at the airfield had thinned as folks headed home for supper. On the field, the mechanic hefted the Airplane Rides $3 sign and carried it into the hangar.

“Georgeanne Ector, did you pay three dollars for an airplane ride?”

“Yes.” She didn’t regret one penny of it. She only regretted that they’d arrived too late. The Jenny was nowhere to be seen. What if Florence had flown off to do a show somewhere else?

“Maybe she’s in the hangar,” said George, but she doubted it. Florence was such a force; George was certain she’d sense it if she were nearby. Something buzzed in the distance—a dot on the horizon, growing larger as it approached. The buzzing built to a roar as the small plane descended.

The Jenny taxied to a stop, and a young man climbed down from the front cockpit. “That’s not a woman,” said Adele.

“The pilot sits in back,” said George.