Altitude Adjustment

Chapter 1

Jonas

“Hey, Brooklynn?” I called out, hovering in her bedroom doorway.

“You hungry?” She was hunched over her desk, typing away on her laptop, and made no indication that she heard me.

She was in full-on writing mode—pieces of hair sticking up every which way from her extra-messy messy bun, chunky glasses covering half of her lightly freckled face, and hands flying across the keys.

“Brooklyyyyyyynn,” I repeated, louder. “Food? Yes? You want some?”

She held up one finger without turning her head in my direction, and then continued typing.

Brooklynn worked from home as a freelance writer, same as me, although I could only do it on the side because I didn’t net enough income from just that—yet.

I hoped one day to be able to write full-time.

For now, I also bartended at The Runaway Acorn, an underground bar in downtown Raleigh.

I wasn’t exactly putting my English degree to good use there, but it paid the bills and often left my mornings and afternoons free to write.

Or to be a general nuisance, like today.

I stepped into the room and grabbed a pair of clean socks from Brooklynn’s laundry basket, and then lobbed them at her head.

They ricocheted off her bun and plopped down behind her.

She grabbed the sock missile while swiveling around in her desk chair and launched it back at me.

I threw an arm up to block my face, and the socks bounced off it and managed to land right back in the basket.

My mouth stretched into a wide grin, and she rolled her eyes and spun around to face her laptop.

It was a typical afternoon for us, being the extremely mature twenty-three-year-olds that we were.

I’d been going back and forth between our bedrooms, trying to pack for our upcoming trip, but mostly just being an annoying distraction for Brooklynn while she tried to finish up a gig writing a blog post that was due before we left.

I considered it one of my duties as her best friend to get on her nerves, and she frequently paid me back in kind.

I really needed to finish packing. But why do right now what I could put off until the very last minute? We were leaving for vacation in the morning, and I’d likely end up forgetting at least a few things. Such was life as a procrastinator.

Anyway, I’d given up my half-assed attempt at convincing myself to be productive when my stomach rumbled.

“It’s snack-o’clock. Don’t ignore me,” I joked.

Brooklynn turned around to face me again and crossed her arms. Her ancient desk chair made a loud squaaaaawk as she tilted back in it.

“Listen here, Vanhoff,” she taunted, peering down the top of her square tortoiseshell computer glasses at me.

“If I miss my deadline, I’m coming for you. I know where you live.”

We’d been sharing this apartment in North Raleigh ever since we graduated from State.

Brooklynn and I had been best friends for well over a decade, though.

My dad had gotten transferred from Ohio to North Carolina the summer before third grade, and we’d ended up moving next door to the Kennedys.

The first evening in our new home, I’d gone into the backyard to play in the treehouse after dinner, and there was this little girl with long blonde pigtails, hoisting a plastic bucket around the small stone water feature in the nearby sitting area.

Suspicious croaking sounds had come from the bucket.

“Whatcha doing?” I’d asked her. “Catchin’ frogs,” she’d replied, still rooting around in the small rocks and decorative grasses.

Then she’d looked up and caught my eye. There’d been a glimmer of mischief in hers that drew me in.

“I’m gonna put ’em in my brother’s bed. Payback,” she’d added.

Having a sibling myself—a bossy know-it-all of an older sister—I’d been well-versed in the finer points of sibling rivalry and pranks, and plopped down beside her to help. The rest, as they said, was history.

“You look just like your mama, sitting there glaring like that.”

Brooklynn gasped and stood, clutching her chest with both hands. “Shots fired. Retaliation incoming in three…two…”

“Okay, okay.” I held my palms up in surrender.

She had a cotton-candy exterior with her long hair streaked with pink and lavender and her baby-blue eyes.

But inside, she was full of piss and vinegar, as her dad always said, and would enthusiastically come for me if warranted. “I’ll leave you alone.”

She pulled her shoulders back to loosen them. “Ehh, I guess I need a break anyway. I’ve reached zombie mode from staring at this screen for too long.” She strode out of her room and down the hall with me trailing along after her.

We’d lucked out by getting a corner apartment with a lot of windows.

Sunlight shone in the kitchen as we entered, glancing off the stainless-steel appliances and the white cabinets, and making the little high-top table in the corner with the vase of yellow and pink roses extra bright and cheerful.

This was one of my favorite rooms in the apartment.

I didn’t even really know how to cook; I just loved the atmosphere.

After washing our hands, Brooklynn grabbed a package of Oreos and the peanut butter from the pantry, while I snagged two coffee mugs, a plate, a butter knife, and the carton of almond milk from the fridge.

We met at the table and slid onto stools facing each other.

She carefully twisted apart eight of the cookies and laid them on the plate while I poured each of us a cup of milk.

I then spread a layer of peanut butter over the cream on four of the cookies.

The final step, other than eating, was to place the other four cookies with cream on them on top of the peanut-buttered cookies.

We each took two of the triple-layer masterpieces and split up the remaining plain cookie halves.

We’d had this process down pat since elementary school.

Phoenix, the eldest Kennedy sibling at twenty-six—and the receiver of all those bed frogs back in the day—used to tease us about our snack methods when we were younger until he’d once swiped one and realized how genius we were.

“Oh, wait. Almost forgot,” I said, reaching over to the Bluetooth speaker we kept on the nearby windowsill.

After switching it on, I pulled up one of our shared playlists on my phone.

Brooklynn nodded approvingly at my selection.

“Now, we eat.” We tapped our cookies together in cheers, then dove in without another word.

Our highly nutritious snack disappeared faster than Arnie, the building super, anytime we had something that needed fixing. Brooklynn wiped her mouth on a napkin and smiled softly at me. “So, what’s up?” she asked. “You seem unsettled or something.”

I skipped the next song on the playlist because I wasn’t in the mood for country, and then pushed my phone aside. “Not unsettled,” I said, thinking through her question. “Disorganized? Maybe. Unprepared? Definitely.”

Brooklynn’s brows dipped down, and she frowned.

“Is this about the trip? I can help you finish packing if you want. You need to recharge just as much as I do, even if it’s a bit of a working vacation for you because of the article research.

” She pressed her forearms against the tabletop and leaned in.

“You’re not bailing on me again, are you? ”

Every spring and summer, her family spent a week or two at their vacation home, a gorgeous million-dollar house with a stunning view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, about ten minutes outside of Asheville.

I’d tagged along on each of those trips with them at Brooklynn’s insistence since fifth grade.

This past spring, however, I’d declined the invite, citing my great-aunt Celia and great-uncle Robert’s fiftieth wedding anniversary party as the reason.

Brooklynn had accepted the excuse with a raised eyebrow but no pushback.

I did have a great-aunt Celia and a great-uncle Robert, and they had been throwing a fiftieth-anniversary party, but I’d originally had no intentions of joining my parents at it.

Spending several hours trapped in a musty church basement with a bunch of cheek-pinching relatives was not my idea of a good time.

But at that moment, I’d been more concerned about saving face than saving my face.

My cowardice was to blame for the three hours of photo slideshows and cheek torture I’d had to endure, along with the gallons of perfume and cologne fumes I’d inhaled that I was sure must have scarred my lungs.

When this summer’s trip came around, I’d once again hemmed and hawed when Brooklynn invited me.

They were planning to spend at least a few days of their vacation doing day hikes through the mountains.

I’d known that the smart thing would be for me to go because it was the perfect activity for an article I needed to write, but I’d dreaded the idea of setting foot there lately.

“Earth to Jonas,” Brooklynn teased.

“Sorry. Um, no, I’m not bailing…”

“But…?” she prompted me.

“But…” My brain scrambled to come up with an answer.

I didn’t want to get into the main reason why I’d initially planned on not going.

Too awkward. So, I focused on the other totally-valid-but-hadn’t-stopped-me-before reason.

“I haven’t successfully completed any hikes without some sort of incident since…

well, ever.” I sawed my top teeth back and forth along my bottom lip.

“Do you think it was stupid of me to suggest this article?”