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ghostly, vaporous skyscrapers. The smile was gone. He knew she must be worrying about her mom, and whatever emergency had called her to this godforsaken armpit of the universe.
When he reached six thousand feet, Jim leveled the plane and settled back for the short flight to Skin Island, hoping that in doing so, he wasn’t making a terrible mistake.

THREE
SOPHIE
S ophie’s heart beat as rapidly as the propeller of the plane, as if it might saw right through her ribs and burst from her chest. She didn’t know which was stronger: her worry about her mother or her excitement to finally see the mysterious island which had stolen her mother from her. Her nails, which she’d had manicured just a week ago, were now bitten short, and she dug them into the denim of her jeans. As the plane clawed its way through the clouds, she had to force herself not to grind her teeth together, a habit various dentists had scolded her for on countless visits.
    I’m going to Skin Island.
It hardly felt real.
But the plane around her certainly felt real; it jolted and  shuddered worse than a subway train. When it bucked suddenly, throwing her against the seat belt, she reached out and grabbed Jim’s arm, her stomach and heart tangled in her throat.
    “You okay?” His voice was muffled in her ears, the headset  transmitting so much static she winced.
    “Fine.” She let go of his arm, embarrassed by her jumpiness. He had only one hand on the yoke, and the other rested lightly on a knob on the center console. His amber eyes studied her sidelong from behind his dark aviators, and his lips quirked into a half smile.
“Scared of flying?” he asked. “We used to go up all the time with my dad, remember?”
“Not scared,” she replied quickly. “It’s just been a while since I was in such a small plane. I forgot how bumpy—ah!” The Cessna tilted to the right, and she clamped her teeth onto her lower lip and slammed a hand into the window to steady herself. Jim laughed.
“You’re doing great!” he shouted.
“I should have known you’d end up here,” she said. “You loved this when we were kids.”
He laughed again, and the knot of nerves in Sophie’s stomach slowly relaxed. There was something soothing in his easy confidence, the way his eyes lit up as the plane gained altitude. Compared to this Jim, the one she’d spoken to on the ground had been half asleep. She found herself staring at the line of his jaw, the way the corners of his lips continually twitched as if he were always on the verge of a smile. His thick, dark hair crested over his forehead in an unruly wave, and she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to attack it with a pair of scissors or run her fingers through it. She was intrigued and a bit shy of this grown-up Jim, unsure of how much of the boy she’d once known still remained.
Realizing she was staring a bit too long, Sophie turned away and stared through the windshield. Above them stretched a ceiling of clouds, bending away to the horizon. She felt a flutter of claustrophobia in her gut—a strange feeling, considering I’m surrounded by the whole of the sky—and to distract herself, she reached out and ran a finger over the yoke in front of her, wondering how it worked. She gripped it with both hands and tried to imagine what it would be like to fly the plane. A string of white beads hung from the ceiling; they swayed with every movement of the plane. On each bead was carved a word in a language Sophie did not recognize. She reached up and took them in her fingers, running her thumb over the delicate letters. “What does it say?”
Jim glanced at the beads. For a moment he didn’t reply, and she peeked behind his sunglasses to see his eyes had a faraway look. “It’s a Chamorrita poem.”
Chamorrita. The call and response poetry sung by the Chamorro people, who were Guam’s original inhabitants.
She remembered sitting on Ginya’s lap as she sat on the porch with the other Chamorro