Her parachute slowed her down, softened her descent enough that it felt like being cradled more than falling. And the view of the ocean drawing nearer felt a little mesmerizing. By the time her whole body landed in the water, she’d forgotten to panic.

Suddenly she was underwater, her ears clogged, her vision cloudy, her body dragged down by the weight of everything she was tied to. Her parachute darkened the ocean above her. She managed to get herself free from it and then twisted and turned, looking for the light of the sky. Soon she found it, just to her left, the sunshine diffused across the surface. She swam for it.

When she broke out into the air, she gasped and choked on the water. But when the breath rushed into her lungs, she wondered if anything had ever felt so good as breathing.

She inflated the raft and then managed to throw one leg over the side of it.

She dragged herself onto the raft swiftly, her back soon resting against the bottom, feeling the current of the ocean. She coughed up the salt water in her nose and her throat. She pushed her hair out of her face.

And then she looked up at the clouds, raised her hand in a thumbs-up, and smiled.

My God, she thought, what else can I do?

When the T-38 assignments came in, Joan was grateful to find out she’d be flying with Hank.

He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a Texas accent. He’d come out of Top Gun, the naval flight school in San Diego, so he and Joan shared some of the same Southern California references. Breakfast burritos, fruit trees, how cold the Pacific was. Joan also liked his sunglasses. He wore dark-tinted aviators that made him look like a movie star.

“Come on, girl,” he said to her as they got in the jet. “Let’s go fly a plane.”

“All right, boy, let’s go,” she said.

He laughed as they got in. That was another thing she liked about him: he laughed at women’s jokes.

Joan fit tight into the backseat, the weight of her helmet and harness already bearing down on her before he’d shot them into the sky. She could swear they were perpendicular to the Earth. She tried not to focus on how sick she felt in her belly as they reached higher and higher. She did her best to ignore the force of the air in her ears. She closed her eyes, trying to ward off the intensity of the headache. It reminded her of riding the Round Up as a kid when the carnival came to town, fighting the centrifugal acceleration flattening her body.

It reached a fever pitch, and she was not sure she could withstand the pressure.