Uncrashable Dakota Read Free

clanked on deck. To distract himself from the secret little smudge of dirt that darkened his thoughts, Hollis was keeping a tally of the old society ladies who insisted upon treating him like the cutest baby in the world. So far he’d endured eleven head pats, seven cheek pinches, and three nightmarish kisses. Now, instead of merely being damp, his clothes were infused with the clashing odors of mothballs and lavender.
    “Rob,” he said with relief as the two Castors appeared beside him. At fourteen, Rob stood an inch or two taller than Hollis. Since the day they met nearly three years ago, Rob had always been the heavier one, until a bout of influenza that kept him bedridden on their last voyage aboard the airship Secret Wish had left him gaunt and hollow-eyed. Although he’d been fully recovered for several weeks, his former stockiness seemed to have deserted him for good. Equal parts dapper and shabby, he wore a finely tailored pinstripe suit like his father and a beat-up peaked cap that he hid when he slept so Hollis’s mother couldn’t dispose of it.
    “How are the celebrities?” Rob leaned in close. “Pungent, it seems.”
    “And never ending. The Countess of Rothes tried to peck off my face.”
    “How terrible for you. Heavy lies the crown, eh?”
    “I wouldn’t know.”
    A pair of yelping Pekingese bounced daintily onboard, their leashes attached to the gloved fist of a fierce-looking old maid trailed by a coterie of pursers bearing luggage. With maniacal insistence, the animals demanded the attention of Hollis’s mother and stepfather.
    “Did you hear about our class schedule?” Rob asked.
    “I assumed it would be the usual.”
    “It is. Except it starts today.”
    Hollis’s plastered-on smile wavered. “What do you mean, today?”
    “I mean today as in these waking hours we’re currently occupying.”
    “We’ve never had classes on launch day before.”
    “The Pea’s exercising her authority to hit us where it hurts. She’s been cozying up to Captain Quincy.”
    The Pea was Miss Betzengraf, who favored green wool dresses too tight for her short, plump figure. She traveled with the aeronautical families, charged with maintaining a normal schedule of lessons amidst the constant chaos of embarking and disembarking, sky-docking and sky-crossing. A few of their classmates insisted that she was a gypsy from Romania who was constantly placing ancient curses upon her two least favorite students, Hollis Dakota and Rob Castor.
    “You know,” Hollis said, his mother’s most recent lecture fresh in his mind, “I think we should try a little harder. Go to some of the classes, at least.”
    Rob shot him a squinty sidelong glance, then nodded solemnly. He removed his cap—first undoing the chin strap that kept it from blowing off his head—and held it across his heart. “You speak the sky’s honest truth, Dakota. We haven’t been fair to Miss Betzengraf. We haven’t been fair to our parents. And most of all—”
    “I’m not joking. People are starting to take stock of my behavior.”
    Now Hollis was quoting his mother directly. Rob arranged his face into a droopy mask of sadness and regret, wiped an invisible tear from his eye, and flung it down to the deck with a dramatic flourish. “We haven’t been fair to ourselves .”
    There was a riot of blue and gold as an army of porters rushed past with luggage carts and began dismantling a teetering pile of trunks and boxes dragged aboard by five weary attendants. The dogs transferred their affections to a peacock-feathered handbag. Hollis’s mother and stepfather stiffened their postures. She straightened her dress while he smoothed his necktie.
    “Behold,” Rob whispered. “His lordship and the lady Sir Edmund Juniper!”
    The Junipers appeared in the shadow of their suitcase mountain. Edmund Juniper was the fourth-richest man in the world and was dressed, as always, like the avid golfer he most certainly was not. (He simply preferred the