Junior Year Box Set

I winced at the thought of hitting the plane. My guess was that might be fatal.

“Then there’s the chance of a flat spin, or uncontrollable spinning. If you haven’t trained on how to stop that, you’ll have a problem deploying your parachute. There’s another issue called a burble, a vortex in the parachute deployment area; and twists, a spinning parachute. If your parachute malfunctions, you have to deal with all that extra material you’ll have from both the parachute and your wingsuit. Finally, you have to depressurize the wings prior to parachute deployment. Part of doing that is slowing down. Wingsuit jumps can hit speeds in the 220-mile-per-hour zone. If you’re going that fast, you very well might rip your parachute. You seem like great kids, and I would hate to see you hurt, so I can’t allow you to try the wingsuits,” Don said.

What Don didn’t realize was that to Brook and me, what he just described made us want to do it even more. I heard we could fly through the air at 220 miles per hour. Maybe I’d get a suit with a Superman logo on my chest. I’d also seen the videos of BASE jumps with wingsuits. I got a little hard at the thought of screaming just over the trees as I flew down the side of a mountain. I think if we had any mountains nearby, Brook and I would have hurtled off one by now.

Don then showed us the wingboard. It resembled a miniature stealth fighter. It was eight feet wide and had small winglets on the end of the wings to decrease drag, according to Don. In the center was a place for what looked like a snowboard. It would disconnect from the wingboard when you decided to use your parachute.

The wingboard would be attached to the back of an airplane by a towrope, much like water skiing. The only difference was that about eight feet before it hooked to the board there was another towrope that was attached to a handle. This was what we would hang onto for stability. It also had a button we would push to release the snowboard-like device from the wingboard.

Don pulled out a tablet and showed us a video of the tests they’d done. The only part that made me nervous was the takeoff. Unlike everything we had done up to this point, where we leaped out of the plane, with the wingboard you took off behind the plane like a glider. It looked an awful lot like trying to ride a skateboard, tied to a car, and going 60 miles per hour. Don explained our speed at takeoff would be 55 knots (60–65 mph), and then as we climbed, we would reach speeds of 80–90 knots (about 90–110 mph). Once we were at cruising altitude, we would be steady at 100–140 knots (115–150 mph). When we jumped off the wingboard, we would need to bleed off speed before we used our parachute.

It was that part, bleeding off speed, that he needed to teach us. The plan was for a tandem jump with a dual skysurfing board. That way Don could control the jump, and we would get a feel for it. Then we would do a couple of jumps solo, but Don would be with us in case we got into trouble.

All went well until the last jump. Brook glanced over at me with a mischievous grin, then pointed her board down and took off like a shot. A split second later, I did the same, except I tucked so I could gain even more speed. Brook glanced back to see if I had followed her, and was surprised when I came screaming past her. We heard Don call us bad names over the radio, but the chase was on.

That was when I decided to show off and did a barrel roll. Brook, not to be outdone, tried to do a loop. The only problem was that when she raised the nose of her skysurfing board, it started to bleed off her speed, and she effectively stalled out. I filed that away as a good lesson and thought it sucked to be her. I knew Devin would love this because of how much it resembled snowboarding. The only problem was that it was way too short of a jump. My altimeter gave me a warning noise to tell me I had gotten too low. I tipped the nose of the board up and then deployed the chute. I couldn’t wait to see the footage my GoCam had picked up.

Landing was not fun. The stupid board skimmed across the ground, and the chute got caught in a breeze. I ended up doing a face-plant. It seems that snow was much more forgiving when you did that, to my chagrin. I would have to edit that part out.

◊◊◊

We’d just pulled out of the parking lot when Brook reached for my shorts. She pulled them down, grasped Mr. Happy, and checked him out.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I wanted to see if you had any signs,” she said cryptically.

“I think if you need a sign, he’s standing up and begging,” I suggested.

“Not that sign.”

“I didn’t get a 666 tattoo for the sign of the beast, but we might discuss it if you want me to get one,” I teased.

Brook was busy examining my member and ignoring my smart comments. Then I realized what she wanted to know.

“You’ve had all your shots, right?” I asked.