Fourteen
I DID NOT spend the rest of that night reading more comments.
That kiss from Hutch turned out to be the exact encouragement I needed to stay in the real world. The funny thing about the internet is that it’s basically a collective hallucination. If you don’t join in, it doesn’t exist. I mean, it does … but in another very real way, it doesn’t.
Now that I had passed my SWET test, I had real-world things to do.
Like flying in a Coast Guard rescue helicopter.
Take that , internet.
The morning of the flight, I chose “pinkie” for my beauty list, much to Beanie’s head-shaking disapproval.
“It’s like you’re not even trying,” Beanie said.
But I doubled down and texted her a photo.
I’ll tell you something: my admiration for that pinkie was sincere. The proportions were great. The nail shape was elegant. The knuckles were… cute? Everything about that little digit, once I started paying attention, met with my approval. And, now that I was defending my choice to Beanie, I couldn’t help but notice that I also admired my ring finger and my pointer.
“That’s a three-fer,” I declared. “Stop complaining.”
“What about your middle finger?” Beanie challenged then, like it was being snubbed. Then: “What about your thumb ?”
I wasn’t sure why my middle finger hadn’t made the cut, but the thumb was easy. “My thumb is a little stubby.”
“That’s your homework right there,” Beanie said then.
“Homework?” I said, like What is this, school?
“Find something to admire about that thumb,” Beanie said, “and add it to the list.”
So that’s what I did while I waited in the Starlite parking lot for Hutch to pick me up. I felt strangely nervous to see him again after all the sharing and night bicycling and… smooching… and so I hyperfixated on that thumb.
This homework was hard. What is there to admire about a thumb?
It was a little stubby. That was just a fact. What was I supposed to do, lie to myself?
And yet, I also agreed with Beanie. I couldn’t let that negativity stand.
The Gottmans said the magic ratio was five to one: for every one negative interaction between partners, it took five positive ones to cancel it out.
So I forced myself to list five things I admired about my thumb.
Obviously, the nail was the headliner. A well-proportioned blend of rounded and square. I appreciated the little crescent moon of the nail bed, now that I thought about it. I enjoyed the way it tapered in between the knuckle and the base of my hand. How many was that? Two more to go. What else? The stripes of my knuckle wrinkles? Nicely arched? Okay, now I was reaching. But it counted. I turned my thumb around to look at the pad of it. Smooth and soft.
Done .
I texted Beanie my list of five things with a GIF of a cartoon thumb. Then, with great seriousness, I kissed the knuckle and said to my thumb , “I should never have called you stubby . You are stubby, but you’re also many other beautiful things,” just as Hutch was pulling up in his truck.
We’d deal with the middle finger later.
Did Hutch see me kiss my thumb?
We’ll never know.
Because even before I’d opened the door, I could see his usual frown was different today.
It wasn’t the earnest, concerned, lovable frown I was used to.
This frown was… sharper? Darker? Harder?
I didn’t know how to read it. Was he irritated? Vexed? Enraged about something?
After that life-changing kiss from the night before, I’d assumed things would be a little different… but in a good way . I’m not sure I was expecting another kiss , but a warm smile, if nothing else.
But instead… as I climbed in, I got nothing except that frown.
No warmth. No camaraderie. No unspoken intimacy.
No eye contact, that was for sure.
There he was, in his Coast Guard–issued navy-blue T-shirt and shorts, with his hands on the wheel, his eyes straight ahead, and a cartoon scribble of angst above his head.
So, no: I did not regale him with a funny little anecdote about kissing my own thumb.
Instead, I laid low.
“Hey there,” I said, buckling up. “Good morning.”
Hutch gave a no-eye-contact nod and got us going.
“First flight today,” I said, testing out the conversational waters.
Another nod.
“Thanks again so much for all your… kindness yesterday,” I said then.
“Of course,” Hutch said, more whisper than voice, sounding oddly formal.
“I’m not sure what I would’ve done without you.”
Yet another nod. Then some breathing.
Thumb forgotten, we drove for a few minutes in silence. More minutes— many more—of silence than we’d ever let happen before. I suddenly remembered Cole saying that Hutch was not a talker.
Finally, I said, “Is everything—okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” Hutch said.
Everything didn’t seem fine. But who was I to say?
Something was going on. Did he regret the kiss? Did he regret telling me about his parents? Or had he—god forbid—gone on the internet after he got home, read all those posts, decided that all those mean assholes were right about me after all—and shifted sides?
It wasn’t impossible.
The internet did seem to have a knack for persuasion.
Whatever was happening, it wasn’t good.
I spent the rest of the drive trying to get him talking—about anything —but never getting past the two-word answers. Or getting any eye contact. And when we arrived at the air station, he made himself scarce pretty fast. So I went around getting B-roll shots of the hangar. I didn’t see him again until the meeting for the preflight check, where he walked in, avoided my eyes, and took a seat across the room.
Like, at the mathematically farthest point from where I was.
Maybe this was just how he was during missions? I’d never flown with him before. Maybe I was just seeing the all-business Hutch?
In one of our interviews, Hutch had explained to me the concept of a flight bubble —a mindset that crew members got into before any sortie, where the flight itself had their full attention.
Maybe that’s where Hutch had gone, mentally? Inside his flight bubble?
I’d have to work on mine.
Because this flight did not exactly have my full attention.
The meeting started with a discussion of whether the morning fog was impacting visibility too much to fly—concluding that no, it was within a safe range. Next, there were check-in questions with each member of the crew about their readiness. I’d read that everything in aviation starts and ends with a checklist—and that was definitely true now.
As the meeting progressed, my worries about Hutch gave way to other worries. Specifically to one particular, much more primal worry. Because this meeting had no choice but to end in the moment I’d been dreading from the start. The moment when I’d have to stand up and announce my weight to the room.
No getting out of it now.
Had you forgotten that I’d have to do that before this flight?
Because I sure hadn’t.
The silent drive with Hutch had distracted me for a minute, but once we were in the conference room, there was no way out.
As the meeting wore on, the dread grew. By the end, I had a significant tied-to-the-train-tracks feeling.
But here’s something you might not know about the US Coast Guard. It’s not the same crew flying every sortie. The crews change depending on days and schedules. Procedures are standardized so that everybody can work with everybody, and this makes it easy to come together in emergencies and work with different people.
Today, we had a pilot named Mira, a copilot named Noah, a flight mechanic named Vanessa, and Hutch.
Plus me. And my camera.
During the meeting, I’d decided to announce my weight together with the camera’s, thinking I could imply with my voice that the camera was exceptionally heavy. I liked the obfuscation of this plan. The plausible deniability. Anything was possible in this scenario! I could be a waif for all they knew. A waif carrying a Mack Truck of a camera.
It would have to do.
Maybe I wasn’t scared of the helicopter at all. Maybe I was just scared of the meeting about the helicopter .
But I guess I got lucky.
It turned out, we did not all have to announce our weights out loud in that meeting. All those numbers would happen later, in the equipment room. So this nightmare scenario I’d been fearing for weeks of having to stand up in a room full of cool people and announce some number that would randomly define my value as a person … just didn’t happen.
Isn’t that how it always is?
The thing you’re afraid of is never the thing you should be afraid of.
Instead, in the equipment room, as we got our flight helmets—which were blue and sparkly, like bowling balls—the pilot, Mira, took me quietly aside to a scale in the corner. Just an ordinary scale. And just the two of us, alone.
“I just need to get your number,” she said, lifting up a clipboard.
“Oh,” I said. Then, “That’s it?”
Mira nodded. “That’s it.”
Relief bloomed in my chest. “I’m not going to look, if that’s okay.”
“That’s totally fine,” Mira said, woman-to-woman.
I stepped on, and then she looked down, and then she wrote a random number on her clipboard, and… that was that. All that buildup for a beautiful kind of nothing.
Next, she said, “And the camera is—?”
“Twenty-two pounds,” I said. Honest, this time.
She wrote that down, too.
“You don’t need to weigh the camera?”
“Not really.”
“Is that because people only lie about their body weight?”
Mira nodded. “Yep. When people self-report in their distress calls, we always add another ten percent.”
“I would’ve been truthful,” I said. Or as truthful as a person fully guessing could be.
“I sense that about you,” Mira said.
“Thank you,” I said. Then I added, “You are now the only person on earth who knows that number. Including me.”
“Am I?” Mira asked. “Wow. I’ve already forgotten it.”
And because she was a pilot in the US military, and because I didn’t know if it was allowed… I didn’t hug her right then.
But I wanted to.
HELICOPTERS ARE SO loud that pilots have to communicate through headphones and mics. If you ever see a movie with people in a helicopter just talking to each other normally , go ahead and call it: false.
You can talk in a helicopter, but you have to shout.
Helicopters are so loud, in fact, that in addition to wearing flight helmets with noise-canceling headphones in them, crews put foam earplugs in, too. It’s that noisy.
That’s one big problem for pilots: hearing loss. Also back pain from all the sitting and vibrations. And neck problems from the heavy helmets and the night-vision goggles.
It all takes a toll.
But my personal toll on this flight turned out to be smaller than I’d feared.
They let me wear my civilian clothes, for one, which was a relief. I just wore my trusty black jeans and T-shirt and sneakers with an orange safety flight vest.
Not the worst look in the world.
The helicopter was already waiting outside the hangar by the time I emerged with my gear, and I looked over to see Hutch coming out of the men’s locker room in his swim ensemble—which was, in essence, a black wet suit with black swim shoes.
Which made him look distinctly superhero-esque.
He also carried a pack with other gear, a bright yellow swim helmet with an attached snorkel and goggles, and a set of long black fins and green safety gloves.
I stopped walking at the sight of him.
I just froze for a second—totally starstruck. He really was a rescue swimmer. This was what he wore to jump out of helicopters. Into the open ocean. To save people’s lives.
This man, right here, who had kissed me by the ocean at sunset yesterday .
The memory overtook me for a second—before reality elbowed its way back in.
I was standing right between Hutch and the helicopter he was striding toward, so it wasn’t crazy to think that he might join up with me to walk together. Or wave hello. Or acknowledge my existence.
But he did not.
I watched him walk right past me, like I wasn’t even there.
Seriously. What the hell?
But I guess that was a question for after work.
Now, as the rest of the crew walked out toward the waiting helicopter, Mira, the pilot, fell into step next to me and said, “If you feel nauseated in the air, let us know.”
Her flight bubble didn’t preclude acknowledging my existence.
“Nauseated?” I asked.
“You’ll probably be fine. But it’s a different feeling from what you’re used to on planes. So keep your eyes on the horizon. And if you start to feel sick, say something. There are things we can do to help with that. But if you throw up, the flight crew will have a lot of cleaning to do.”
Don’t throw up. “Got it.”
“You ate some breakfast today, yes?” Mira asked then.
“Yes,” I lied.
“You’ll be fine.”
As we arrived at the helicopter, still as majestic and orange as ever, Mira and the rest of the crew started visual checks of the equipment and Hutch appeared beside me.
“Did you eat breakfast today?” he asked, looking straight ahead, like we were spies trading secrets.
I shook my head. “I was too nervous to eat.”
Hutch nodded, like Thought so , and then he pulled an energy bar out of a zipper pouch on his flight vest. “Take this.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“More snacks where that came from,” he said, patting his vest and still sounding as all business as a person talking about snacks can.
Huh.
IT WAS JUST supposed to be a training mission. Crews fly training missions on every overnight shift to keep their hours up and stay in practice. But not long after we’d lifted off, just as I was trying to decide if I was nauseated or not, a call came from Sector for a fishing boat in distress with one soul on board.
I wondered if there was any other branch of the military that referred to people as “souls.” I’d have to google that later.
The training mission turned into a rescue pretty fast.
The two pilots were up front, and the flight mechanic was in a seat behind them on a track that slid side to side so she could work from either door of the aircraft, and I was in the back—buckled into Hutch’s usual seat. Hutch, for his part, sat on the gray-painted metal floor, beside the rescue basket that was folded and stowed in the back.
I guess we had room for one more person. But it would be snug.
It’s not the flying of the helicopter that’s disorienting—it’s the hovering . You really do have to find the horizon line to keep your bearings. Hutch kept glancing at me—worried I might barf, no doubt. But there would be no vomiting. Not today. As a point of pride.
I’d implode before I let that happen.
Instead, as soon as I had my sea legs, so to speak, I focused on filming. I got interior shots of the cabin, the water below, the crew, and the equipment.
Because the pilots were up front, piloting, and because Hutch apparently didn’t want to talk to me, the job of explaining what was going on fell to the flight mechanic, Vanessa. “When we reach the scene,” she said, talking through the helmet mic and headphones, “we’ll descend to fifteen feet above the highest crest, and then Hutch will deploy into the water. Once he’s out, and we’ve lowered whatever equipment he needs—the basket or the sling—we can strap you into the gunner’s belt so you can lean out and get some good shots.”
“Lean out”—I clarified—“of the helicopter?”
“Sure,” Vanessa said. “You can go full Titanic .” She put her arms out like Kate Winslet on a prow.
“Cool,” I said. I looked out at the ocean to mask the abject terror in my eyes. Then I asked, “And when you say Hutch will deploy , do you mean jump ?”
“More or less,” Vanessa said, coming over to me now, helping me unbuckle the five-point seat harness and tightening the gunner’s belt—which attached to a cable—around my waist. Then she positioned me in a spot where I wouldn’t be in anyone’s way, but where I could get the shot of Hutch dropping into the water.
I hadn’t been thinking about today as particularly windy, but when we got to the scene, I was shocked to see how big the wave swells were. The sky suddenly seemed grayer and stormier, too. As I got my camera ready, I felt a shadow of worry.
Was dropping Hutch into the ocean right now a good idea?
Deploying is more dangerous than it sounds. The helicopter can only—safely—get so low to the water. Fifteen feet above the highest crest is the limit. That’s the ideal span for jumping, but of course, there’s a reason they call waves rollers . They move and undulate and can shift in seconds. A swimmer can deploy for what should be a fifteen-foot drop to the top of the swell, and the water can shift so fast that before he hits the surface, it’s forty feet—or more.
“That’ll knock the wind out of ya,” Hutch had explained during one of our interviews.
“Can forty feet kill you?”
“I mean,” Hutch had said, “it’s gonna hurt. That’s for sure. And you’ll probably get a garage sale.”
“A what?”
“It’s when the water smacks you so hard you lose all your equipment—your snorkel and your goggles and your fins.”
“I’m guessing it’s not good to lose your fins.”
“Correct. It’s bad.”
“How bad?”
Hutch thought about it. “Your fins are your power and your control. So you don’t want to lose that. Especially in a stormy ocean.”
Was the ocean below us stormy?
It definitely seemed a little worked up about something.
It was astonishing how calm everybody was. I could hear the crew talking through the headsets. The pilots were serenely discussing procedures and positioning. The flight mechanic was adjusting equipment in the back. And Hutch was waiting in position for the moment when he would drop himself into the ocean.
For me, this was utterly surreal.
For these guys, it was just another day at the office.
Below us, there was a small fishing boat on its side. It had been knocked over by one of these enormous waves. A survivor bobbed in the water close by with an orange life jacket on.
The pilots positioned us over him, and the wind from our rotor rippled the water, making it spray. Hutch had switched his flight helmet out for his yellow swim helmet and put his fins on over his swim shoes. As we hovered in position, Vanessa opened the door and slid it back, and Hutch moved toward the opening, dropping his feet over the side.
“Is it scary?” I had asked him, back in that same interview. “Jumping out of helicopters?”
“Nah,” Hutch had said—a light in his eyes confirming his words. “It’s fun.”
“But there are so many ways you could die,” I said.
“If you’re a person who thinks about it that way,” Hutch said, “you wouldn’t be here. You’d never have made it through swim school.”
It was pretty clear before, and possibly extra clear now, that I never would have made it through swim school. Even just watching Hutch sit there gave me a dropped-stomach feeling.
And then he did exactly the thing my stomach was afraid of.
He shoved off and went over.
I got a very cool shot. Splash and all.
As soon as Hutch was in the water, he was swimming in the direction of the survivor—pumping his arms and shoulders hard in a type of swimming he called sprinting . I zoomed in close and watched him work through the spray. He reached the soul, as they called him, and within a few minutes, Hutch was giving the signal for a basket. Vanessa lowered it down and I filmed that, too. As the basket descended, Hutch clamped the survivor into a cross-chest carry to maneuver closer to meet it.
The basket reached the surface and disappeared under the water. Hutch grabbed its wire and helped the survivor get positioned inside. When Hutch gave the signal, Vanessa raised the basket with the survivor inside. The winch for the hoisting cable was on a hinged metal arm, and when the survivor reached the right height, Vanessa rotated the arm to bring the basket inside the cabin. Hutch was next. She lowered a clip to him, he attached it to his harness, and she raised him up, too.
The survivor was a fifty-something guy in a Hawaiian shirt—looking very much like he hadn’t anticipated that his day might end up this way. He didn’t have any visible injuries that I could see, but he was definitely wide-eyed, like his brain was still trying to catch up to what was happening. Hutch got him settled, and the pilots got us moving to return to base, and I put my camera away.
For something so extraordinary, they really made it look easy.
Just another life-saving sortie, I guess.
But maybe not for everyone. I snuck a glance at the survivor just before we landed, and saw that he was crying.
BACK AT THE hangar, before Hutch headed off to the locker room to clean up, I stopped him and said, “Do they always cry like that?”
Hutch turned and met my eyes for the first time all day—that sad frown of his back in full force. “People do a lot of strange things.”
I felt like that was supposed to mean something.
Enough was enough.
“Did I do something wrong?” I asked.
Hutch considered how to answer before he sighed and said, “No. I’m the one who was wrong.”
“Wrong about what?” I said, a tinge of frustration in my voice.
Hutch looked down, then back up. “I talked to Cole on the phone last night. For the first time in a year.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’ve wanted to talk to him for so long. But it wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for. A full year of no contact, and now his only topic was you.”
“Me?” I asked.
Hutch nodded. “He told me all about you.”
From the way he said it, that didn’t sound good.
But what would Cole have even said? He barely knew me.
Hutch went on. “He asked me to do your ‘Day in the Life’ project—and he told me why.”
Had Cole told him about Sullivan? Was this why Hutch had been so angry all day? Because Cole was using Hutch’s good-heartedness against him—and now he was helping me against his will? Had Cole said Hutch was the only person who could save my job? Did Hutch think I was in on it, too?
“No, no,” I protested. “You don’t have to—”
“I said yes,” Hutch said, with a shrug. “Of course I said yes.”
“But you really have a good reason for not—”
“It’s fine. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter,” I countered.
“That phone call,” Hutch said then, “shifted my perspective.”
“I don’t need you to do this for me,” I said.
“But Cole does,” Hutch said.
I let out a slow breath.
“And if he needs this, then I’m doing it. That’s all there is to it.”
“But—”
“Let’s get it done, though,” Hutch said. “I have tomorrow off.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Why not, right? The sooner the better.”
Was I ready to do this tomorrow? Did I even want to? “I really don’t think—”
But Hutch cut me off. “It’s not up to you.”
I shook my head. “Everything about this feels wrong.”
Hutch let out a bitter half laugh. “No argument here.”
“You realize what the project is, right?” Was I trying to talk him out of it? “I stay at your house for twenty-four hours and I film everything you do.”
Hutch gave me a look. “Everything?”
“Everything that’s filmable. I’m not, like, following you into the bathroom.”
Hutch shrugged. “It’s not that different from what you’re already doing here.”
“But here , it’s professional—and there , it’s personal. It’s you brushing your teeth and eating Cheerios. Putting on your pajamas. Doing dishes. Answering the phone. It’s intimate.”
At those words, Hutch looked slightly miserable. “Even more reason to get it over with.”
“I don’t want to make you do this,” I said. “What if I just… refuse?”
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because then I’m in more trouble with Cole,” Hutch said. “And I’m already in enough trouble with Cole.”
I felt so indignant. Nothing happening here was any of Cole’s business, and he was butting in where he absolutely did not belong. But, of course, it was also all Cole’s business. It was his brother, his aunt, his transferred assignment. I was only here—had only even met Hutch—because of Cole and all of his complicated motivations. Whatever they were.
“Is there no way out of it?” I asked.
Hutch just frowned into my eyes for what felt like an eternity. Then, as if our fates had already been sealed, he said, “I’ll text you my address.”