Skyjacked, page 14
“I know,” she said. Her lips curled into that killer smile.
I looked at John. He checked his Timex.
“John doesn’t say much,” Estefania said.
“Stef, run on up to the pool and dive to the bottom,” Driana said. “We’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.”
“Come surfing with us,” JoJo said.
Neither of us had ever touched a surfboard. “We have to sell this stuff before it melts,” John said.
“When you’re done,” JoJo said. “Please, I want to thank you for the ice creams.”
“He doesn’t want to trample your gift,” Stef said.
“We go out later,” JoJo said, ignoring Stef. “When the beach empties and there aren’t any little kids in the water.”
“They don’t know how to surf. Right, John?” Stef extended her long, tanned leg to kick a little sand at John.
JoJo didn’t seem to mind that his girlfriend was flirting with another guy. “I’ll teach you,” he said. “It’s a flying dream, except it tastes salty. You don’t have to be afraid of us. We’re the nice kind of rich people.”
“No, we’re not,” Stef said.
“Nicer than the rest of the people here,” JoJo said.
Stef put her hand to her mouth to whisper to John, except she shouted so everybody at Sully’s would have to hear her. “They don’t like us because Dri is brown.” She pronounced her cousin’s name like dream without the m. “Thank God we have more money than they do.”
JoJo laughed; Driana rolled her eyes. Stef’s assessment might have been right though. Take away the tans, that beach in front of Sully’s was Mayflower, top deck.
“Meet us in an hour,” JoJo said.
“They won’t come.” Stef pouted. “Dri, make John come. I’ll be devastated if he doesn’t.” She looked genuinely sad.
John frowned. “Matt, let’s go.”
“Thanks anyway,” I said.
A kid a few chairs down called to us. He couldn’t have been ten. “Over here,” he commanded. I felt like a dog that had been caught stealing table food. The kid wanted me to keep the change though.
Driana jogged up and pressed something into my hand. “Tuesday night,” she said. “Party at my house. Please come, okay?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“You’re sad,” she said. “I like sad boys.”
Her sand-castle partner called out to her. She sprinted past him and dove into a collapsing wave. She’d written her address and “Come play with me” on a gum wrapper. She signed it Dri. “Is that a smiley face or a cross-eyed heart?” I said.
“Chuck it,” John said.
“She’s too pretty for me, right?”
“Too rich.”
I watched her swim. The sky was clear, except for way out there, where the clouds were stacking up.
With thanks to …
Scott Smith, Elizabeth Hill, Angie Smith-Hill, and Annie Kim, for their friendship;
Jodi, Alec, David, Emily, Bess, Lizette, Antonio, Josh, Yaffa, Morgan, the West brothers, and all the Scholastic angels, for their kindness;
Jeff Smith, for taking the time to speak with me and for his many years of service as a US Air Force and private jet pilot; Trevor Hoest, a fantastic pilot, also a fantastic nephew;
My amazing and amazingly generous editors: the fabulous Becky Shapiro Herrick, for getting it started; my pal Nan Mercado, superheroine and one of the nicest people I’ve ever known, for seeing it through; the absolutely awesome Erin Black for being totally nuts about adventure stories, not to mention dogs; and the spectacular Jody Corbett for bringing it home.
Paul Griffin is the critically acclaimed author of many novels, including Ten Mile River, The Orange Houses, Stay with Me, Burning Blue, and Adrift, as well as the middle grade novels When Friendship Followed Me Home and Saving Marty. Paul lives in Manhattan with his family. He can be found online at paulgriffinstories.com.
Copyright © 2019 by Paul Griffin
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Griffin, Paul, 1966- author.
Title: Skyjacked / Paul Griffin.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Scholastic Press, 2019. |
Summary: Five teenagers from the elite Hartwell Academy are on their way back to New York from an end-of-summer camping trip in Idaho when they realize that something has gone wrong; one of them has become violently ill, and their private plane has apparently been hijacked and is headed in the wrong direction—and even if they can somehow break into the cockpit and manage to overpower the hijacker, they have no idea how to fly the plane, much less land it.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018053889 (print) | LCCN 2018059150 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781338048032 (ebook) | ISBN 9781338047417 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Hijacking of aircraft—Juvenile fiction. | Survival—Juvenile fiction. | Interpersonal relations—Juvenile fiction. | Adventure stories. |
CYAC: Hijacking of aircraft—Fiction. | Survival—Fiction. |
Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. |
GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | LCGFT: Action and adventure fiction. |
Thrillers (Fiction)
Classification: LCC PZ7.G8813594 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.G8813594 Sk 2019 (print) |
DDC 813.6 [Fic]—dc23
First edition, August 2019
Cover art © 2019 by Larry Rostant
Cover design by Yaffa Jaskoll
e-ISBN 978-1-338-04803-2
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
Paul Griffin, Skyjacked
