Just Fly Away

by Andrew McCarthy

  “Excuse me,” I called out. The old man turned and looked toward me as if no one had ever stopped him on his front lawn before. He seemed totally confused by what was happening—not scared or anything, just completely surprised anyone would call out to him like I had. I was standing next to my bike in the gutter. Since I was pretty positive this was the wrong place, it was easy to use the speech I’d prepared. I stepped toward him.

  “I’m selling subscriptions for National Geographic Kids magazine and I wonder if you might like to purchase one for the child in your home.” I smiled. I thought the smile was a nice touch.

  “There are no kids here, young lady,” he said, and he sort of smiled back at me. It was one of those old-person smiles when their face doesn’t fully cooperate anymore. “My kids are all grown up and have kids older than you.” He actually had a very nice, gentle voice, which, given the way that he had looked at me at first, surprised me.

  “Oh well,” I chirped, keeping up the happy saleswoman act. “That’s a shame. I must be on my way to look for another home with children.” I hopped on my bike.

  “There are three kids next door.” The old man pointed to the house next to his. There was a soccer ball in the front yard sitting by the bushes, in case I needed proof.

  “I’m afraid they’re not on my list,” I shouted over my shoulder as I started to pedal away. Only after I was halfway down the block did it occur to me that it was a good thing he didn’t have children, since I didn’t have a magazine or clipboard or anything else to make it look like I was a genuine salesperson.

  The next afternoon I decided to flip a coin about which house on the list to go to next. It was an odd thing to do, given that I had never flipped a coin to decide anything in my life. But I pulled out a quarter, rested it between my bent thumb and forefinger, and sent it up into the air with a flick of my digit. I decided to let it land on the ground instead of catching it—I didn’t want to interfere in any way with what the fates decided. It was tails, so I skipped the second address and went right to number three on the list: 28 Beachwood Place, unit 2B. The unit 2B part was interesting, since there were very few apartment buildings in my town. In fact, I knew no one who lived in an apartment building. The idea of it began to fascinate me. What must it be like to hear your neighbors through the walls, or meet them in the hallway, or open those tiny metal mailboxes by the front door of the building? What happened when you got a large package?

  I began to get a very clear image of what the place looked like. But, of course—and by this point I should have known—like all my other premonitions regarding this Thomas person, the image in my mind of his place was completely incorrect.

  In reality, the building was part of a complex of three rather small, two-story buildings with a mini–parking lot next to each. From across the street, it looked like there were six buzzers on the front door of number 28. The whole street looked kind of new. It was a really short block that dead-ended in a big circle to turn around in when you came down the street by accident, which was the only reason you would come down it unless you lived in one of these three small apartment buildings or if you were looking for an eight-year-old boy who happened to be related to you.

  On the side of the street where I was standing, there were no houses, only a small park with some big trees. What made it a park instead of just a field were the three benches spread out at even intervals. The one I sat on was directly across from number 28.

  Another startling fact about this address was that it was exactly six blocks from my own home. Six blocks, and I had never been down this street. I had never even known it existed.

  I began to get that feeling between my shoulder blades, the one that makes me so uncomfortable, so I figured I was probably in the right spot. I didn’t have to wait long for proof. The second car to turn down the block made a right into the small parking lot across the street from me. It was a dark green SUV. Not one of those huge, horrible ones; it was actually pretty cute. A sandy-haired woman who looked a little younger than my mom got out of the driver’s seat. Her face was pleasant enough from where I sat, not a beauty or anything, just rather normal. My mother was much prettier. The woman opened the back door and a boy, about eight years old, popped out. There was no lightning bolt or even a shiver down my spine like the other times when I thought I saw him; it was just a kid with dark wavy hair. He was kind of skinny, but not too skinny. He wore blue jeans and a red T-shirt and sneakers. Typical boy’s clothes, no big deal. I couldn’t hear every word, since I was in the park across the street, but you could tell he was in the middle of talking about some TV show or video game or something. His mother was listening, in that parent way of not really listening but occasionally going “uh-huh” and “oh” and things like that. They walked toward the building, she got out her keys, and they went in. The door closed behind them.

  I didn’t know what to do next. There was nothing to do. I didn’t feel like going home, so I just sat there. A bird, a sparrow I think, landed on the grass not too far away and started pecking at stuff that only birds can see. Then another one of the same kind of bird landed nearby and started doing the same. You could tell they were together, even though they didn’t even look at each other. I never really spent a lot of time watching birds, but it was actually fascinating seeing them snap their little beaks down into the grass and then yank their heads back up. They’d take a few jerky steps and do it again. They seemed content. It seemed like a good life.

  Just then the front door of number 28 opened again and the kid I’d seen came out with a skateboard. He dropped it on the sidewalk with a bang and hopped on it. With his right foot, he pushed off and went zipping down the street toward the turnaround. He went all the way around and then started to come back up the sidewalk on my side. It was odd that there was a sidewalk on my side of the street since there were no houses, but maybe they had been planning to build them on both sides and just ran out of money and so they stuck in a few benches and decided to call it a park. In any event, the kid came up the block in my direction. Pushing off and then coasting, pushing off, then coasting. It looked like he was enjoying himself well enough. He didn’t notice me as he passed. When he got to the end of the street, where it ran into Prospect Avenue, which was a much busier road, he turned around and came back.

  “Hey,” I shouted as he was passing. I had no intention of doing this—it just came out.

  He looked up, startled, and stumbled off his skateboard. He put his foot on it to keep it from rolling away.

  “Oh,” he said. “Hi.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Thomas,” he said. “What’s yours?”

  “My name is Lucy,” I told him. That name didn’t seem to mean anything to him, so I stood up, got on my bike, and rode the six blocks home.

  10

  It was a fairly hot summer. The sprinkler was on a lot in the front yard. Some days, before I walked over to Maxine and Simon’s house, I would just stroll slowly right through it. I’d always be dry by the time I got to their place. If I wasn’t heading over there, I generally hung out in my room. It’s not like I had a whole host of better choices. The last people I wanted to see were my father and, to a lesser degree, my mother. Julie had basically vanished from the face of the earth. I couldn’t remember the last time I heard her say two words.

  One day I was thoroughly bored, so for no reason at all, I started to shift some of my furniture around by shoving the dresser to the other side of the room beside the desk, which then had to be moved to where the dresser used to be so that things wouldn’t be too off balance. It looked kind of strange since the mirror that used to be over the dresser was now above the desk, but since I couldn’t get the nail out of the wall to move it, I just left it there.

  I had a bookcase beside the desk. Once I started going through it I realized that no one must have cleared off the shelves since I was little. There were books dating back to elementary school. There was even a cardboard book a
bout the letters of the alphabet falling from a coconut tree. I don’t think I had ever read it; it must have been Julie’s and somehow, as with many things, her junk ended up cluttering my world. There was another book I hadn’t thought of in years, but one my mom and dad used to read to me a lot. It was a large book, very Japanese, with great paintings inside, about an old farmer. I kept that one, but brought the alphabet book and a couple dozen others down to the living room and dumped them on the bookshelf there.

  Since I was in the cleaning-out mood I kept going. The next thing to go was the picture of flowers in a vase above the bed. I probably should have thrown it out, but I don’t believe in destroying art, no matter how lame it might be, so I put it in the garage.

  I cleaned out my desk, which looked neat on top but was a jumble of papers and junk inside the drawer. For some reason there were all these paper clips scattered around inside. Does anyone even use paper clips anymore? I will bet you that the next generation of kids will not even know what a paper clip is. Out they went.

  Next I attacked my dresser and closet. I got a big green garbage bag, the kind my dad uses to throw junk in when he cleans the yard. Then I decided to get rid of every piece of clothing I owned that had any brown in it. That added up to quite a lot of clothes. At first I put aside things that I liked a lot, but that pile started to get pretty big, so in one move I chucked it all in together. When I was done, the bag was bulging.

  I was going to ask my mother to take it to the Goodwill place, but I didn’t want her or my father involved in my life. Then I remembered this dumpster-type clothing donation bin in the corner of the parking lot at the train station. I hoisted the bag up on my shoulder and marched out the front door. I felt a bit like Santa Claus walking down the street, but the bag got pretty heavy pretty fast, and soon I was stopping every twenty feet to rest. By the time I got the five blocks to the train station downtown, my shoulders and arms were killing me. The big bin had a door with a hinge on it and a sign indicating how to deposit the clothes inside. The door looked heavy, but it just slid open with no effort at all. I hoisted the clothes one last time and dumped everything in. I could hear them hit the bottom of the bin. Either someone had just collected all the donations, or no one in my town was helping the poor. By that time, I was all sweaty. I reached into my pocket to see if I had enough money for a smoothie and found a few dollars and a bunch of coins.

  Instead of going across the street to Juice Dream, I walked up to the train station. I went right through the waiting room—it had that musty train station smell—and out to the platform. There were two sets of tracks—one that took trains into the city, and another that carried them farther into the wilds of Jersey. I looked up and down in each direction. Off to my right, I thought I could see a train coming from very far away. No one was around, so I hopped down onto the stones and took a coin from my pocket, a penny, and I laid it on the nearest track. I started to step away and then I grabbed another coin from my pocket, a dime. The train was getting closer and I put the dime down next to the penny. I went to climb back up onto the platform. It was higher than I thought and I got scared for a second, but my fear gave me strength and up I went.

  This trick with the coins was something that my dad had taught me when I was little. We did it a few times, till my mother got wind of it. You’ve never heard anyone so angry in your life.

  “Are you out of your mind, Michael?” Her face was purple.

  “What?”

  “What are you thinking, she’s a child. You could have been killed.”

  My dad didn’t say anything, but you could tell he didn’t think it was that big a deal, which just made my mother even angrier. But we never flattened coins again.

  The train came roaring past without slowing. Dust and dirt swirled and then everything was very still after the violence of the train. I looked around to see if anyone was looking and then I jumped back down onto the tracks. My penny and dime were still there, but now they were flattened, spread into oblong shapes. I picked them up and they had almost no weight. I tossed one in the air and caught it. It was so light, it was actually harder to catch than before, as if there was less gravity or something.

  Down the track a ways were some kids. Boys. Four of them. And one of them with long hair and skinny arms was looking my way. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but then when he kind of waved, very low and casual, I knew it was Simon.

  I began to wander down the track in his direction, not as if I was headed there, but just moseying. The boys started down the embankment. They disappeared into the scrub between some buildings. I had never really considered Simon hanging out with other kids before. He seemed like such a loner.

  I kept going in the same direction I had been traveling and about a minute later Simon popped back up onto the tracks. He looked once over his shoulder toward where the other kids had disappeared, and then he began to drift toward me.

  I had never seen him outside of his house, and it was awkward for a minute or two as we stood around. He put one foot up on the railroad track.

  “Watch out you don’t get run over,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He nodded, and sort of looked over his shoulder.

  “Look at this,” I said, and held out my flattened coins.

  “What are they?” he asked.

  “Haven’t you ever flattened pennies?” I asked him.

  “Not really,” he said.

  I explained all about how it was done, which, let’s face it, wasn’t very complicated. Simon nodded his head.

  “Feel them,” I said. “They’re really light, which is weird, isn’t it?” And I dropped them into the palm of his hand.

  He kind of raised and lowered his hand a few times, as if he were really taking in the lack of weight.

  “Cool,” he said.

  We heard a train coming from the other direction and scrambled over to the side and down the embankment. As we were settling into position with our chins just above the stones on the track level, Simon jumped up and slipped a little as he rushed up to the track. He plunged his hand into his pocket and stuck a coin on the rail. The train was closing in a lot faster than he probably thought it would. The whistle screamed.

  “Hurry!” I called out to him.

  Simon leaped out of the way, back toward me. He landed on the edge of the embankment, his elbows scraped on the stones. I saw him grimace, and he scrunched up close to me as the train roared past. My heart was pounding, the ground shook, and I could feel his breath on the side of my face.

  Once the train was gone, we both started to laugh. The air was filled with dirt and flying dust, and we got up, rubbing our eyes. Simon walked back over to the track and retrieved his coin.

  “Very cool,” he said.

  “That was a pretty close call,” I said to him.

  He shrugged. It was as if the shrug had been invented for his rubbery body.

  “Let me see it,” I said.

  He held the coin out toward me and I took it. It was a penny, stretched out the way mine was, except for a tiny little extra tail on the end, kind of like a teardrop.

  “You can have it,” he said.

  “No, it’s yours.” I handed it back.

  I couldn’t tell if he was disappointed I didn’t take it.

  “Actually,” I said, “I’ll take it. I mean, if you still want to give it to me.”

  Simon shrugged. “Sure,” he said. He handed it to me—our fingers touched.

  I put it in with my others.

  “Thanks,” I told him.

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  We walked down the embankment, back in the direction of our houses.

  Before long, it started to rain. I hadn’t noticed it getting cloudy. Simon did not have an umbrella, and needless to say, neither did I. I don’t think I have ever carried an umbrella in my life. I’ve always just gotten wet and soggy. But in this particular case, it not only didn’t matter, it just made things better. We were completely soaked within a f
ew minutes. When I looked over at Simon, his hair was all stringy and hanging down over his beautiful face. His brow was scrunched up. He must have felt me looking at him, because he turned to me—then he smiled. It was his big goofy smile. It was in that instant that I knew I was in love with Simon. I smiled back and we kept walking.

  At the next corner we had to stop to let a car pass, and when we stepped out into the street our hands just came together—our fingers wrapped around each other’s. After a while, we started to swing our hands back and forth, just a little bit with our walking; then we swung them really far forward and back, up and down; then all the way around in a giant circle. Then we started laughing. The rain kept coming down. We could not have gotten any more wet. It was without question the happiest moment of my life. When we finally got to the corner where I would turn off toward my house, we stopped. I looked up into his eyes.

  “See you tomorrow,” he said.

  “See ya tomorrow.”

  He leaned down to kiss me, right there on the street corner, in public.

  11

  Most mornings I woke up pretty happy, then after a few seconds it would hit me. Thomas. A weight would press down hard on my chest and it would be difficult to breathe for a few seconds until I got used to its being there for another day. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it so much if I hadn’t had the happiness with Simon in my life.

  I’d never had a true boyfriend before, and having a really tall guy for the first one was spoiling me for life. I realized that right away. There was just something about the fact that he was so far up from the ground. It made me feel safe.

  I had read something in one of Maxine’s beauty magazines that people decide their type by the time they’re two years old. So, if as an infant you had a babysitter you liked a lot who had blond hair, you would grow up to be attracted to blonds. If I had been speaking to my parents I might have asked if I had known any tall skinny guys when I was little.