Micah said softly, "We're okay, sir. Everybody's okay."
Vane nodded, once, still unable to speak, and walked out into the rain.
Chapter 27: The Boy in the Cheap Jacket
By morning, Micah's face was on every television in the Memphis airport, and he hid from them in a small airline lounge with the blinds half drawn.
He had slept three hours in a chair. Someone from Meridian Air had brought him a clean T-shirt, but he had kept his jacket on over it, because Walter's green notebook was in the pocket and he was not letting that jacket out of his sight. His phone buzzed so often the cord trembled against the table leg.
"Don't read the comments," Grace Kim said, setting a cup of hot chocolate in front of him. She had a bandage on her forehead now and moved like every muscle hurt. "Eat something first. That's an order from the lead flight attendant."
"Yes, ma'am," Micah said.
On the muted television, a banner crawled across the screen: BOY IN THE CHEAP JACKET SAVES FLIGHT 417. A photograph of him filled the corner — taken as he came down the jet bridge steps, rain-soaked, blinking, a purple-crayon napkin still folded in his hand.
Micah stared at it. "They keep saying I saved the plane," he said. "I didn't. Not by myself. Not even mostly."
Grace sat down across from him. "Then tell them that. Every chance you get. But Micah — don't say you did nothing. I was there."
The airline people came at nine, kind and careful, with a lawyer who smiled too much and a woman named Ms. Calloway from Meridian's safety office who did not smile at all, which Micah liked better. They asked him to walk through the night from the beginning: when he had raised his hand, what Vasquez had told him to do, what he had touched.
"Did Captain Vasquez — sorry, First Officer Vasquez — did she instruct you on each task?" Ms. Calloway asked, pen ready.
"Every task," Micah said. "She was flying the plane the whole time. I was her second pair of hands, that's all. Her right wrist was broken, she couldn't reach everything, so she told me and I did it exactly how she said. And Mr. Reyes in Memphis talked us down. And Dr. Nair kept Captain Mercer alive. And Grace — Ms. Kim — kept the cabin calm. If any one of them isn't there, we don't land. That's the truth of it."
Ms. Calloway wrote for a long time. "You understand, some people will still call you a hero."
"Then they're missing most of the crew," Micah said, and felt his ears go hot, but he didn't take it back.
They let reporters into a press room at noon, and Micah stood behind a table with more microphones than he had ever seen, wishing the floor would arrange an escape. His jacket, dried now, hung crooked on his shoulders.
"Micah, how did a fifteen-year-old know how to land a jet?" a reporter called.
"I didn't land it," Micah said. "First Officer Vasquez landed it, with her left hand and my hands helping, exactly where she put them. I just know checklists because of Sky Lab. It's a little centre in Jackson, where kids like me learn on an old simulator. Mr. Joe Abernathy runs it. He gave me thousands of hours and never charged my family a cent. If you want to write about somebody, write about him. And Dr. Priya Nair, in row eight. Captain Mercer is alive because of her."
That afternoon, the cameras found Joe Abernathy in Jackson, standing in front of Sky Lab's corrugated door with his cap in his hands, looking thoroughly embarrassed.
Micah watched it live on the lounge television, hot chocolate forgotten.
"That boy?" Joe said to the reporter, and cleared his throat. "That boy showed up at age twelve with library books under his arm and asked if the simulator had a checklist for engine failure. I said, son, it has forty-one checklists, and he said, good, we'll do them in order." Joe shook his head slowly. "Folks think last night was a miracle. It wasn't. It was three years of Tuesdays. Micah did his homework ten thousand times so that on the one night it counted, his hands already knew."
Micah looked at the floor for a while.
"Mr. Joe's gonna fuss at me for crying on television," he said at last.
"You weren't on television," Grace said gently. "He was."
"Same thing," Micah said, and laughed a little, and wiped his eyes with the sleeve of the cheap jacket the whole country was suddenly talking about — the jacket his mother had picked out at the thrift store on Ellis Avenue and hemmed herself at their kitchen table.
He took out his phone, and under the table, where no camera could see, he typed a message to Tanya Lawson at the hospital, the same one he had sent three times already, because she was still in pre-op and someone was reading them to her: