#Tears dry on their own zip share full#

“Unfortunately, we’re oversold on this flight,” she says. Then, just as they’re about to start boarding, the gate agent comes on the loudspeaker and makes an announcement. After all, these planes all came from somewhere else. “There’ll be something to drink on the plane,” their mother says.ĭalton thinks that might actually be true. “I’m thirsty,” Sarah says, but Dalton has already noticed that the concessions they passed all had NO WATER signs up. Finally they make it through security with just five minutes until boarding starts. The humorless TSA guy lets them get into the slow-moving crawl to the metal detector, which has issues with his facial rings. The security guy double takes on Dalton’s passport, because his hair is brown in the photo, but now it’s bleached blond. Their mom sighs, too stressed to continue humoring her, so Dalton looks at the boards, and takes up the slack.

“Yes, honey,” their mom responds absently. “A lot a people are going on vacation,” Dalton’s seven-year-old sister, Sarah, says. The TSA checkpoint is a madhouse, which never happens here. As they make their way to the terminal, Dalton notes all the cars circling, like it’s a huge game of musical chairs, with no chairs left. They get one of the last remaining spaces at the far end of the last lot. The parking situation at John Wayne is the first indication that there’s going to be turbulence up ahead. What should be a fifteen-minute ride takes almost an hour.

The trip to the airport is bumper-to-bumper. “Last three tickets,” she told them triumphantly. Within minutes of the Tap-Out, his mom had gone online and bought three overpriced tickets on Alaska Air-one of the few airlines that flies nonstop to Portland on a plane that you didn’t have to get out and push. “You understand this is not about your father and me getting back together,” she tells Dalton and his sister, but for kids of divorce, hope springs eternal. Anyway, when the marriage went south, his dad went north. “He won’t make you do that,” Dalton tells her, but she doesn’t seem too sure.Ī few years back, Dalton’s mom had left him for a loser with nice pecs and a soul patch, who she subsequently kicked to the curb a year later. “If your dad won’t put me up, I’ll be happy to stay in a hotel,” she says. Today, however, it’s not just the two of them traveling north. “They oughta call it John Glenn instead of John Wayne,” Dalton once said-because taking off from there was the closest most people would ever get to blasting off into space.ĭalton and his younger sister are regular flyers, visiting their dad, who lives up in Portland, a few times a year-Christmas, Easter, most of the summer, and every other Thanksgiving.

The plane then coasts out over the back bay, Balboa Island, and the Newport Peninsula before the pilot pushes the engines back to full and resumes the climb-out. Basically, the plane powers up on the runway with its brakes on, then accelerates at full force into a ridiculously steep takeoff, followed ten seconds later by a sudden leveling off and throttling down of the engines, which sounds, to the uninitiated, like engine failure, causing at least one person on every flight to gasp, or even scream in panic. They call it a “modified noise abatement takeoff,” and it was specifically implemented to spare Newport Beach millionaires from having to deal with airport noise. Excerptĭalton loves the way planes take off from John Wayne Airport. And when her parents don’t return and her life-and the life of her brother-is threatened, Alyssa has to make impossible choices if she’s going to survive. Suddenly, Alyssa’s quiet suburban street spirals into a warzone of desperation neighbors and families turned against each other on the hunt for water. Everyone’s lives have become an endless list of don’ts: don’t water the lawn, don’t fill up your pool, don’t take long showers. The drought-or the Tap-Out, as everyone calls it-has been going on for a while now. When the California drought escalates to catastrophic proportions, one teen is forced to make life and death decisions for her family in this harrowing story of survival from New York Times bestselling author Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman. “No one does doom like Neal Shusterman.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “The Shustermans challenge readers.” - School Library Journal (starred review) “The palpable desperation that pervades the plot…feels true, giving it a chilling air of inevitability.” - Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The authors do not hold back.” - Booklist (starred review)

#Tears dry on their own zip share full#