zippers secured. You want earplugs—or at least good flying music—because the air screams as it rips by.
Every time I tumbled, I jumped in place, changing my orientation, pointing my head to match the velocity vector. At these speeds the slightest movement of hand or leg, the crook of an elbow, the turn of the head, sends you spinning, and tumbling. You hold yourself semirigid. The more you relax, the more drag you have, but you can’t stay stiff as a board for too long, it’s exhausting.
You slow as you rise, but since you’re not rising straight up, you don’t come to a complete horizontal stop. There’s a moment when you feel yourself hang at the top of the parabola and then you’re falling again. At this time, I arch to a facedown free-fall position, then “cup” my arms and hands close to my body, steering. I’m tracking and, usually, I move a meter forward for every meter I fall.
I covered the length of the park in seconds, crossing the top of Manhattan, and then into the Bronx. I could see Long Island Sound to my right, a dark stretch between the lighted shores.
I had a GPS with a preset waypoint on my wrist and I would tweak the direction of my jumps. I was nervous about letting myself drop too far on the other end of the parabola, so I found myself rising higher and higher.
I knew I had to stay well above 854 feet, the highest hill anywhere near this route, but I soon found myself whistling along at five thousand feet and freezing my tuchus off.
It was exhilarating but tiring.
I’d checked the driving distance online, and between Manhattan and Northampton was 157 miles of highway, but as the crow flies (or the Cent plummets) it was 126. But I was getting cold and the roar of the wind wore at me.
I endured. After all, I’d only have to do it once—for this location anyway.
The Connecticut River Valley and the I-91 corridor were easy to make out, but the GPS told me I was a bit south and that the mass of lights I’d pinned my hopes on was Holyoke, not Northampton. I followed the highway north.
Three more jumps and I was over Northampton, adjusting my speed until I stopped dead five thousand feet above a cluster of athletic fields by Paradise Pond, my chosen waypoint.
Gravity took over and I fell, face down, my eyes flicking back and forth from the altimeter readout to the green grass below.
At a thousand feet I killed my downward velocity, then dropped again, never letting myself drop more than three seconds before stopping my downward velocity again.
At thirty feet, I jumped to the ground and fell over.
* * *
I thought I was just tired. The passage through the air had been like being pummeled with socks filled with dirt, and my body was stiff from the wind and stiff from holding low-drag positions for extended periods of time. Still, when I came down into the kitchen after returning to the cabin, Mom took one look at my face and said, “What happened?”
I blinked. “Huh?”
“You looked angry just then. Did your father do something?”
I shook my head. Angry?
Then I remembered the hand pawing across my front and the hips pushing at me.
“You are angry about something.”
I nodded. “This guy grabbed me from behind in Central Park and groped me.”
Mom’s eyes widened and she looked closer at me, up and down. “Are you all right?”
I touched the top of my head. “Bit of a bump here.”
“He hit you?”
I shook my head. “I jumped up, like I do. Took him fifteen feet in the air, but my head—” I bumped my own chin from below with my fist. “—hit his jaw.”
“What happened to him?”
“Broke his jaw, or dislocated it. He was unconscious when I left. I called the police on his phone and backed off until they found him.”
“You could have just jumped away,” Mom said. “The other kind of jump.”
“He had his arm across my throat,” I said. “He might have come with me.” I sighed. “I didn’t even think about it, really. Just happened. At