by Sarah Ellis
He turned and met Lynn’s eye. It was just a split second.
“You?”
“You?”
End of silent conversation.
Two surprises. One was seeing somebody from the citizen world here. Two was realizing that Dreadlocks must have noticed her at school. Lynn was so sure that she was invisible to everyone except the safe-girl pod.
There was a little collective inhale from the crowd.
Lynn laced her fingers behind her head and looked up. At the edge of the top of the building there was a movement, a bit of scurrying. Then a small figure with a silver head appeared against the night-gray sky, a crisp paper cutout of a body.
Lynn grew wings and flew up to stand beside him. Her stomach tilted. Was it like the high board times one hundred, or was it like nothing else?
“Look …” said Blossom, and then she gasped. The figure disappeared and then came flying off the top of the building. There was a second — an hour? — of freefall before a white rectangular parachute popped open. It seemed to hang there motionless, gently swaying. As it got closer it appeared to speed up, falling directly toward the fountain, but at the last second it slid sideways. The figure landed and somersaulted to his feet.
Fossick sank to the ground. The ghost people cheered and whooped. The jumper pulled off his helmet and turned into Tron. Everybody slapped his hands. He slipped out of his harness and the crew scurried around, gathering up lines and fabric.
“Come on,” said Blossom, laughing and tugging at Fossick. “Get up. Here he comes.”
Tron bounded across the plaza. “There was an eagle. Did you see it? Up there. Up there you are looking down on the birds.” He jumped up and down, electric with energy, gulping air. Then he picked up Blossom and began to twirl her. He propped her up, doubled over with laughter and turned to Lynn. There was a split second’s hesitation and then he scooped her up and launched her as well.
There was a memory. Somebody strong had twirled her once, long ago, before she had the words for total joy.
Lynn stopped whirling but the world kept on. Blossom caught one arm and Tron caught the other and they all leaned on one another.
“Hey!” A loud voice came from the direction of the fountain and they turned toward it. There was a flash of light.
Tron swore softly and pulled up his hood.
A beat-up Volkswagen bug came toward them across the plaza. It pulled up beside them, and a grinning, pierced Goth girl leaned out the window.
“Need a ride?”
The crew stuffed the parachute into the trunk, fist-bumped Tron and slipped away into the night.
The family piled into the car, with Fossick, Lynn and Blossom squished into the back seat.
“Seatbelts fastened, everybody?” Goth girl laughed.
“I’m good,” said Tron, belting up and pulling his helmet over his hood. “Sure wouldn’t want to do anything dangerous!”
They swerved across the plaza, around the fountain, across the sidewalk and bumped down the curb onto the street.
“I love this,” said the driver. “Off-road!”
The rain began as they headed toward the Lingerlands, a mist on the windshield that accelerated into a downpour.
Goth girl dropped them at the parking lot nearest the cottage and waved goodbye. Tron ran down the path and did a backflip off the wall beside the metal door.
Inside, Larch was awake and snipping, Artdog asleep on his feet. The tale was told.
“Somebody took a picture of the three of us,” said Blossom.
“Does that mean you will be famous?” said Larch.
“No,” said Tron. “They don’t know who we are. We’ll be famous and secret both. So. What are we going to do now?”
Now? It was after 4 a.m. Lynn played it cool.
Fossick yawned.
“Fos! No yawning! Let’s keep living! I know. It’s perfect weather for skimming. I bet Lynn is good. Come on, everybody. You, too, Larchy.”
“Larch doesn’t know about that,” said Larch, flapping. “This might not work well.”
Blossom took his hand. “You can try or not try. You can be the audience.”
“Larch can be that,” said Larch.
Tron rolled a large plastic disc out from behind the work bench and they all headed out.
The rain was a deluge, hissing and bouncing, silver needles shining through the lights that ringed the reservoir, which was one flat smooth cement pad as big as a playing field. Water covered the pad, like a large shallow lake pocked with raindrops.
Glasses were impossible. Lynn took them off and stowed them in her pocket.
“Hey, ho, the wind and the rain,” said Fossick.
“It’s perfect,” said Tron. He threw the disc across the water like skipping a stone. Then he ran after it — huge, splashing Tronstrides — and jumped onto the disc. He went skidding along, water spraying out behind him. Then he skimmed it toward Lynn.
“Run with it and jump. Don’t think.”
“Do it,” said Blossom.
Somehow Lynn’s legs knew how. She raced along on the slippery world, arms out, rain in her naked face. It felt like she could skim across the reservoir, across the Lingerlands, through the silver rain, off the edge of the world.
Tron and Blossom and Lynn took turns. Larch and Artdog were the perfect audience, applauding and barking Bravo! after each run. Fossick gave it one go and did a spectacular arm-and-leg-flailing fall. He lay on his back, proclaiming, “The roof of the chamber with golden cherubims is fretted, from this day to the ending of the world.”
And then, in a second, it went from glorious to cold. They were wet through and through. Lynn felt as though her bone marrow was soggy.
Inside the cottage everyone dripped and laughed and shook themselves, following the example of Artdog.
Lynn looked at them standing in a line. Tron leaned against Fossick for balance while he peeled off his socks. His slick wet hair was as black as a crow. Fossick’s beard was jeweled with raindrops. Blossom was wringing out her hair with one end of a bath towel while Larch mopped his face with the other. Artdog figure-eighted around everyone’s feet, catching drops.
A family, wet and weird.
After an exchange of goodnights, Blossom and Lynn retreated through one of the doors to a cubby just big enough for one mattress. Blossom offered a selection of T-shirts in a range of colors, sizes and styles. Lynn chose a huge pink Run-for-the-Cure offering and stripped off her wet clothes.
Blossom pulled two thick knitted blankets from a shelf. They were in rainbow stripes, wild with color.
“You can use the one I made or the one Tron made.”
“You know how to knit?”
“We all know. Yarn is an easy find. You just take sweaters apart. Tron makes other sweaters sometimes. Well, he used to. Mostly I just like to make blankets and scarves.”
They wrapped themselves in the blankets, settled down on the mattress and reviewed everything that had happened, Catmodicum treading from one to the other with hard little feet.
Blossom sighed. “It couldn’t be better. A friend here at the cottage and Tron back. I thought he might go off with Debbie.”
“Debbie?”
“You know, the one with the car.”
“She’s called Debbie? She looks like a Raven or a Belladonna or something.”
“No. She’s just Debbie. She might be his girlfriend. He doesn’t say anything. But, anyway, he came home with us. Maybe all he needs to be happy is to go jump off a building now and again. This is my best night ever.”
There was a quiet knock at the door. It swung open and there was Larch, in a kind of nightshirt and a tie.
“Larch has a question.”
“Ask away,” said Blossom.
“Is the visitor going to stay here forever?”
<
br /> “No. She is only here for now. This is called a sleepover. Right, Lynn?”
“Right.”
“Sleep over what?”
“Sleep over night.”
“Oh.” The door swung closed.
Blossom turned out the light. “I wonder if Artdog could learn to skim?”
“I’ll bet he could. I’ve seen YouTube videos of dogs skateboarding. We should go to the library and watch them. There’s this funny one of a pit bull at a beach somewhere in Australia … Blossom?”
Asleep.
Lynn punched her pillow into a good shape. The blankets were a bit scratchy so she folded herself completely inside her T-shirt. She peered into the complete darkness. Eyes opened or closed, it made no difference. She wasn’t one bit tired.
Will the visitor stay forever? What if it was that easy? What if you could just invent your family, your home, your life?
Suddenly, Catmodicum oophed onto Lynn’s chest and with her came a big idea, big and simple.
You could. You could call Sunday Wednesday. Be awake and living at 3 a.m. Use T-shirts instead of sheets. Eat lettuce like an apple. Blow your nose on socks.
Take four unrelated people and make a family.
THIRTEEN
Large Hadron Collider
The night of two hours’ sleep caught up with Lynn in science, the last class of the day. The world seemed to lose its glue. The bracelet on her wrist, her pen, the clouds in the sky, Gabor Unger’s twitchy leg sticking out in the aisle — all these things were separate, with no connection to anything else.
Her greatest desire in life, the one thing that would make her totally and completely happy, would be to slip off her glasses, put her head down on her desk and just go to sleep. Some self-delusional part of her argued that maybe nobody would notice.
Whap! Lynn’s head whiplashed back. How long had she been asleep? Mr. Moran seemed to be talking about the same thing, the Large Hadron Collider. Could she lean her cheek on her hand and her elbow on her desk or could she balance her head so perfectly on her neck and she could just close her eyes and rest them …
Mr. Moran’s voice seemed to be coming from far away. Another world, perhaps. “The collision of opposing particle beams …”
Sleep. Pillows, horizontality, being watched over by angels in gauzy gowns. Floating down out of the sky under a white parachute …
Blaaaaat! The torture was over, and Mr. Moran was shooing them out of the room.
The locker opened first time, the bus was waiting, the traffic was light. All the universe was in harmony to get Lynn home so that she could flake out on her bed and sleep.
She rested her face against the cool of the bus window.
Bed. Sleep. Steps away.
≈≈≈
It was not to be.
“That is my jacket. Just where have you been?”
Shakti was sitting at the kitchen table with the laptop open in front of her.
Lynn shrugged off the jacket.
“What? Sorry, I didn’t think you’d mind if I borrowed it.”
Shakti spun the screen toward Lynn.
“Is this you?”
There they were. The three of them, Tron flanked by Blossom and her.
They looked bad. Tron was like an angry space alien, Blossom looked like some way-too-young street kid, and Lynn looked like somebody blurry in a police line-up.
In fact, they all looked criminal.
How could they look like that, like zombies, when they had been so happy? Was there some Photoshop option called Delete Joy?
The caption said, Unidentified base jumper minutes after his latest escapade.
Escapade! Tron would hate that.
“It is you, isn’t it?” Shakti was breathing loudly through her nose. “I recognized the jacket. It’s one of a kind. And it wasn’t in the closet.”
Lynn nodded and clicked a link. Some streaming video called CityEye. A grainy, jumpy clip showed the descent. It was there, the glory of it.
“Was that last night?”
Lynn nodded and pressed Replay.
“So where have you been? I’ve just been on the phone with Kas’s mother. First she’d heard of any sleepover.”
Triangulation. It was over.
Lynn pulled her gaze from the leaping, bounding, flying magic boy and focused on her mother.
“I was perfectly safe. With friends.”
“What friends? Do I know these friends? Sneaking off in the middle of the night? What were you thinking?”
The edge between night and morning. Why something like base jumping, which was splendid and did no harm to anyone, got you into trouble. How squirrels ran up trees. How tall buildings were human trees. How the city seemed to breathe slower in the early morning. How having a brother would mean knowing a boy the way Blossom knew Tron and Larch, to know a boy without all that … stuff. That’s what I was thinking.
Lynn shrugged.
“Lynn. Talk to me. I need to know. I’ve been so worried ever since I saw this news clip.”
“I went downtown by subway at 2 a.m. Everything was over by three. I went back to the friends’ place, got some sleep, had a good breakfast and was at school for choir practice, as usual, at 8:30.” Breakfast had been good. Toast with hummus, oranges, olives and tea.
“But how do you know this boy? And who’s the other girl in the photo?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I promised.”
The doorbell rang and Shakti left the room.
“Jean!”
There was a mumbled conversation in the front hall. Oh, no. Shakti had called in reinforcements. This was going to be so embarrassing.
“Hi, kiddo.” She kissed Lynn on the top of the head and pulled up a chair.
“Hey, Jean. Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“The tax problems of the Save Our Streams action group can wait another day. First important question. Is there coffee?”
Shakti bustled around grinding and measuring and wafting muddled concern at Lynn like a suffocating fog.
“Nobody is more sympathetic than me about teen rebellion. I know how hard it can be to confide in adults. When I was your age I had a boyfriend that my parents …”
Blah, blah, etcetera, blah. Teen rebellion. The very words made Lynn squirm. Of course Shakti had had a bad boyfriend. Of course she would think this was about a bad boyfriend. She would be over the moon if this was about a bad boyfriend.
“Right,” said Jean once she had her coffee. “You can’t tell us who these people are. Fair enough. Let’s see what you can tell us. Is Shakti right? Is this about a boyfriend?”
“No!”
“Are drugs involved?”
Why did adults, even normal ones like Jean, always think about drugs?
“No.”
“Bigger than a breadbox, smaller than a house?”
“Huh?”
Jean laughed. “Sorry, I suddenly felt like we were playing Twenty Questions. Look, Lynn. You can’t do this. You can’t lie to your mom and stay out all night and not let her know where you are. You see that, right?”
“I guess. Yeah.”
“If I’ve got the story right, you have promised not to divulge the identity of these people, these friends. Did you make that promise to protect them?”
“Yes.”
“Are they doing something immoral?”
“No.”
“Illegal?”
Living in the cottage, was that illegal? Probably. One of those crimes of being. No lingering. No loitering. No looming.
What about rescuing a baby from a dumpster?
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, you were clear on the immoral question, so let’s let that go. What do
you think, Shakti?”
Shakti nodded.
Jean continued. “The important thing is, are you in trouble of any sort?”
It was so the opposite of trouble. “No. Well, only with you guys.”
Jean smiled. “Is there more coffee? Actually, is there a cookie or something? I missed lunch.”
Coffee was renewed. Cookies were found.
“Okay, gals. I’ve got a proposal. I think we can trust that if Lynn says she’s not in trouble then she’s not. She is, after all, the sanest thirteen-year-old on the planet.”
Lynn’s heart leapt northward. Maybe it was all just going to blow over.
“Therefore, Shakti, if you give her your word that you’ll respect her secret, you can reasonably insist that she tell you her story.”
Oh. Not off the hook. It had been a promise, a solemn vow. Could she expand the circle of knowing to include her mother? Maybe it could be not so much a promise broken as a promise expanded.
But then she thought of the Underlanders, the four of them backlit in their tubeworld, skimming in the rain, showing off their rainbow nails.
“I just can’t.”
Shakti reached across the table and put her hand on Lynn’s arm.
“Was it some kind of prank, Sixer? Or a dare?”
A prank? What kind of a word was prank? The jump was not a prank. It was an act of bravery and joy. It was a work of art.
Then it came to Lynn. Shakti had no idea who she was. In Shakti’s eyes she was the well-behaved, ordinary and slightly disappointing offspring of an oh-so-cool mother. She had heard her say it to Jean: “Sometimes I think she’s a throwback to my mother.” It was time to scrape that tone out of her voice.
“All right. But this is serious. You can’t tell anyone. You just can’t.”
“No, no, of course not. Absolutely.”
“I think it’s time for me to go and look around the garden,” said Jean.
Looking around the garden was Jean-code for a cigarette.
It wasn’t easy to tell the story. The toffee, a concert in the rain, finding day, a boy with dandelion hair, toilet-paper art, the cottage, the Underlanders, the trapline, the underground sleepover. It just sounded so unlikely.