Free Flight #116 Is Down by Caroline B. Cooney

a magazine could have escaped being crushed, let alone a human. Then he saw that the passenger had not escaped being crushed. It was a boy, his own age or a little younger. That could be me, thought Patrick. The boy caught Patrick’s hand. The fingers were so bony: Patrick felt as if a skeleton were clenching his hand, a person already dead and buried.
    “Help is coming,” said Patrick. “We’ll have you out in a jiffy.”
    But there was going to be no “jiffy” here. Getting this kid out would be a terrible job. They’d have to peel back entire plane walls.
    I wished for this, Patrick Farquhar thought. I drove around half an hour ago and wished that a really decent emergency would happen. “I’m Patrick,” he managed to say. “What’s your name?”
    “Daniel.”
    “I’ll get somebody down here right away, Daniel,” said Patrick, thinking. Yeah, like who? Where are they? What are they doing?
    He knew what they were doing. They were still driving from their homes to get to the rescue vehicles; rescue vehicles with full crews were still driving around the twisting narrow roads, trying to find the driveway in the dark.
    “Hang in there,” said Patrick cheerily, as if the boy had a choice; as if the boy had been thinking of watching a little TV instead.
    But he could not stay. There was nothing he could do for Daniel. He had to go to somebody he could actually move to safety.
    Daniel’s hand tightened, keeping him there.
    Patrick removed his hand anyway. He thought he had never done anything so cruel, so cold. He was careful not to look into the boy’s eyes, because if he did, he could never sleep again. He was abandoning this kid. Patrick was almost sorry he had asked Daniel’s name. It was better not to have a name if you were going to walk away.
    It was called triage. The art of helping people who could be helped, and the terrible moral decision of walking away from those who could not.
    Patrick said, “I’ll be back.”
    Saturday: 5:50 P.M.
    Teddie decided not to look at her leg again.
    She also decided not to use her ears again.
    The screams all around her were so horrible, like nothing she had ever heard before. Like a hundred nightmares, in which everybody woke up screaming, wanting their Mommy.
    Teddie buried her face in Bear and sobbed. “I want my Mommy, too.”
    She opened her hand and peeked to be sure she still had her quarter.
    The Band-Aids were flapping, attached on only one side. They were not catching the blood that covered her hand. Teddie hated blood. She wiped it off on Bear, but that was a terrible decision; now she could not bury her face in him; he was ruined.
    The quarter was gone.
    “My quarter,” said Teddie. “I can’t call Mommy.”
    She called Mommy anyway. “Mommy!” sobbed Teddie. “Mommy, come and get me!”
    A woman moved an entire plane seat off Teddie, which helped a lot, but the woman did not stay to help. Teddie tried to run after her, but she couldn’t move. “Mommy, come and get me!” Teddie shrieked over and over.
    It was not Mommy who came. It was a big man. He said, “Let’s get you inside where it’s warm, okay?”
    “Okay,” said Teddie. Then when he touched her, she screamed again, “Mommy! Mommy!”
    “Where does it hurt?” said the man.
    Teddie said, “I dropped my quarter.”
    “I’ll get you another one,” said the man. He was kneeling, and then his hands were under her and he was picking her up, infant-style, so she sagged like a hammock across his arms. It hurt her so much that she screamed “Mommy!” over and over and over.
    “It’s okay,” said the man. It did not reassure Teddie that the man was crying now. “It’s okay,” he said, though it obviously wasn’t.
    He fell down on the ice, and she screamed again, reliving the entire crash in the few inches of this second fall. She turned Bear around to a clean side and stuck her face back into Bear.
    “Sorry,” the man said to her, “I’ll slow down. What’s your