by Floating Boy
I text Liv: can u sneak out l8r?
Liv doesn’t text me back. At all.
I’m trying not to be a paranoid android, but no text from Liv means she still doesn’t believe me about the party, and now with the Terry floating thing, I’ve totally freaked her out. Or maybe she’s gone out with Marcus Abelson and the rest of them. Or just Marcus, and they’re sitting around, talking in stupid, fake British accents about crazy me.
I’m texting Liv again when my parents are dropped off by their bowling team partners. I’m all in my head and not feeling very verbal when Mom and Dad walk in and say, “How’d it go?” They’re a few drinks past tipsy. I can smell it.
Like a ghost, I follow Mom into Terry’s room. I’ve tied his left ankle to the bedpost with the belt from a hideous purple terrycloth robe I’ve worn approximately never.
After feeling Terry’s forehead (she seems more expert about it than I was) and proclaiming him better, Mom leads me into the hall and asks how much reading I got done.
I shrug, playing dumb. She’s too buzzed to care. I don’t tell her that Aunt Beth called. That’s not to say I’m not 100 percent sure Aunt Beth won’t call back, or that Mom won’t find Terry’s ankle tied to the bed, or that she won’t find him floating above the bed.
There’s only so much I can control. That’s what the people in lab coats all tell me, anyway, and according to cartoons, listening to people in lab coats never leads to disaster.
So she goes to bed and Dad’s already there, snoring. It’s like they want me to sneak down to the river and to the bridge.
Yeah, I’m going to the bridge because floating boy graffiti artists always return to their tagged bridges, right? And because the balloon man will be there in a canoe, with a brush and a mop handle, erasing this evidence, too?
All of it connects and make sense to me until I’m actually there.
It’s way dark out here and I should’ve told Liv where I was sneaking out to. If something happens to me and the cops dig through Liv’s texts, the only place they’ll know to look is “out.” Out could be anywhere, yeah? Out could even be where I am now: down by the river, near the bridge, but not on it or even under it. More like off to the side of the road and hiding behind a tree.
Reason: There’s a group of soon-to-be seniors drinking beer and jumping off the bridge like morons. How does someone drink and jump like a moron? It’s so totally easy and they demonstrate how perfectly. One of the morons is Logan Stoddard, captain of the football team. He whistled at me in the hallways and called me fresh meat all season long, all year long, and I heard he was saying stuff about me being a prospect, and that when I lose my baby fat I’d be first string. Liv offered to kick him in the junk for me. She’d do it, too, because she’s Liv.
So, Logan, he’s completely vomitous and he’s standing on the bridge railing, getting ready to do some half-assed gainer or double-jerk flip into the water. It’d be a shame if he jumped and somehow missed the river and face-planted into the muck. Just saying.
I was so lost inside my head on my sneak over here, I didn’t hear them on the bridge until I was too close to do anything but dive into the bushes. Now I can’t leave until they leave. I want to text Liv, but I’m afraid the phone glow might give me away.
Screw it, I’m behind the tree and they won’t be looking down here, and I can block the phone glow with my hands because that always works, right? Cupping Light in Your Hands should be the name of my new band, and I’ll be the lead singer with the—
“Hi.” It comes from the woods behind me, over my shoulder.
I lose it and try to crawl-jump-run away but smack face-first into the tree I’m hiding behind. I drop my phone and let out a short little yelp of a scream. I think it’s a short scream. Maybe it lasts an hour or two. I spin around and look through the leaves and find . . . him.
Hidden in the bushes, branches form a tight ring around his face. His eyes are open wide, like he’s scared, too. It’s the same kind of look he had when he jumped out of the Claremonts’ tree and just started going up.
His lips say “Sorry” but I don’t hear him. I can’t hear anything over the bass drum in my chest.
Then he says, “You dropped your phone,” and reaches it out to me. My phone has some grass pasted onto it, the whole package in his palm like a bug he just caught. His hand and arm are long and thin like he’s extending me a tree branch instead of his arm.
I kind of stab my hand out for the phone, and at that exact moment (I h8 my life), it lights up and rings. Before I can tell him that I know that muted ringtone (filename: “Footsteps of Doom”), before I can tell him that anybody who actually knows me wouldn’t dream of actually calling, would only be texting at this time of night, he answers.
“Pretty girl’s phone.” He smiles quick, but it melts away like he’s as unsure of what he’s doing as I am.
Anyway, yeah. There’s a guy answering my phone at midnight, my bed at home obviously empty. So not optimal.
I hold my gimme-gimme-gimme hand out and he gives me the phone. “Mom,” I say, my voice exactly as normal as can be, like I’m waiting for her to pick me up at soccer practice.
“Who is he?” Mom says back. She’s not tipsy anymore.
I breathe in, then out, and make angry, you-screwed-up eyes at Floating Boy. I say, “Marcus, Liv’s boyfriend.”
“She has a boyfriend?”
“Him and Liv were fighting. She’s real upset. I didn’t want to wake you up.”
“So you’re over—”
“It’s just two blocks, Mom. Chill.”
“Chill? Mary, it’s the middle of the night. I’m not supposed to be having to deal with this with you yet. We had no idea, we—” She cuts her own self off, her hand cupping the phone the way she does, probably. She’s in don’t-wake-Terry-up mode, which is a mode I want her to be stuck in.
“It’s not like I went out drinking, okay?” I say, which is a low blow, maybe. Then I fake-cup my voice and add, “And, I mean, Marcus—it’s him and Liv, not him and me.”
Mom says, “So I can call Olivia’s house to confirm you’re there?”
“It’ll wake her mom.”
“I wouldn’t mind being woken up for this.”
Like I can argue without coming off as totally guilty. “Just don’t ring too loud?” I say—ha—and Mom hangs up. I’m texting Liv before there’s even a dial tone. I feel Floating Boy watching me and my amazing blur of thumbs.
Six seconds later—I know Liv sleeps with her phone in her hand, under her pillow—I’m covered. Liv will smear the make-up she left on, fake a fight that just ended, and open her bedroom window.
Liv texts: you and M just left. It’s all good.
For this, she can talk British at me all she wants, forever.
I finally look up from all this damage control. He’s just standing there, waiting.
“That was my mom. I—uh—have to be home, like, before now,” I say.
“Sorry,” he says.
I shrug it away like the cool girl I’m not. He doesn’t know any better.
I’m going to say something really clever like, “So do you, um, live here?” but then I remember Logan and the losers. They must’ve heard my scream-and-crash, and then me talking on the phone.
I take a peek around our tree. Logan and some other meathead are walking down the street, away from the bridge, toward us. They’re dripping wet, laughing and whispering, knocking into each other on purpose. So hateable.
I pivot behind the tree, keep the bark to my back, hold my finger up to my lips in the international be quiet sign, and hope we can’t be seen from the street. Floating Boy sinks deeper into the brush but I still see his eyes, which have somehow gone wider than before.
Logan and the other kid, stupid as they are, just walk by. They’re shouting at the surrounding trees and bushes, threatening the “homos” spying on them, promising to kic
k their ass (shouldn’t that be asses, not, you know, a giant collective ass?) and other typically caveman insults. They’ve walked past our spot, though, which is a good thing.
Not such a good thing: Floating Boy’s eyes are going up. Not rolling into the back of his head like he’s having a seizure or something, I mean his eyes are literally going up. They’re rising and so must be the rest of his body. I mean, if his eyes break the laws of physics, then it totally makes sense that the rest of him has to, too. He rips through the bushes upward, and louder than is exactly helpful.
Logan shouts WTF and their footsteps pound back up the street, toward us.
Thin branches hook into Floating Boy’s t-shirt and shorts and socks, but they’re not strong enough to hold him. He shoots up, knocks into a thick branch from my trusty tree, and he kind of bends around it like he’s stuck, turning himself into a human question mark.
There’s no way he’s leaving me here by myself. I grab his hand, hard, and he grabs back. I pull him over, closer to the trunk above me. His hand is warm and I’m surprised by how much he’s pulling up on me. It stretches my arm out and there’s an ache deep in my shoulder. My toes want to lift off the ground. I dig around blindly with my feet and find a loose root to kick my toes under.
There’s that same tire-smell as before with Terry, only stronger. It makes me a little dizzy.
Floating Boy works to pivot his body upside down so that he’s standing on the underside of a branch. If I look up, I look at him. He looks like I should feel, which is scared. But I’m not, or I am, but it’s different somehow.
Logan and his toadie start their search right in front of our tree, the river water still dripping off their clothes. If Logan gets any closer, I’ll use my starting-sweeper leg and give him Liv’s kick in the junk.
They’ve lost some of their brain-dead tough-guy act now that they’re here. They whisper stuff about it being deer or beavers or an owl, and they kind of run through the local animal kingdom, probably hoping one or the other will say, let’s go back.
Floating Boy’s feet slip out from under the branch, then, and he pulls me up, hard. My arm feels like it’s going to rip out of my socket, but I don’t let go. He scrabbles his feet under the branch again.
Logan and jerk-partner scream and run away toward the bridge, laughing and shouting about something big up in the trees. A real yearbook moment.
“They’re gone,” I say, and my words drift up to him, hopefully.
He nods. And now I’m thinking him floating isn’t something he can totally control. It’s only a guess, but I don’t think he wanted to float out of our hiding spot right exactly when he did.
Okay, a test. I loosen my grip on his hand. I want to see what he’ll do and what it is he wants me to do. I mean, how long does he want me to hold him down here?
He gives me this totally confused look. I tell him I’m switching hands because my arm is getting tired. We manage the swap without him bobbing off into the night sky.
What we’re doing doesn’t seem like much of a plan. We can’t stay here all night just switching hands. What about Terry? And it looks like I’m getting home later and later, and Mom’s probably still up, sitting and staring at the front door like a watchdog.
Luckily, it’s not too long before Logan and his gang’s night ends predictably. Him walking up and down the street yelling and swearing didn’t win over the neighborhood. A cruiser with blue lights flashing, no siren, comes up the street nice and slow. The guys throw their beers into the river and stand in a dummy line along the bridge railing.
Two cops get out and a quick meeting above the river ends with the boys somehow being allowed to drive home. Then I remember Logan’s dad is a city councilman or some local powdered-wig kind of thing. And then I remember I hate Logan even more.
So, everybody drives away. Now it’s just me and Floating Boy alone in the bushes together. I look up and shrug, or shrug as much as I can with one arm all stretched out like I’m Elastic Girl.
I take a deep breath through my nose. I can’t help it; that tire-smell is addictive. Hope I’m not too obvious. I mean, it’d be weird for him to realize that I’m sitting here inhaling him.
“I’m in big trouble because you answered the phone, you know,” I tell him. I try to have it come out all jokey and not serious. Fail.
“Oh, I didn’t mean—that was really dumb, I guess. I mean, I was really dumb.” He ducks his head behind some leaves.
“It’s okay, no worries.” So he floats and he’s sensitive. Not sure I’m all that crazy about either.
“Um, hey, don’t you have to be, I don’t know, somewhere?” he says down to me. He asks it like he’s afraid what my answer will be.
After a few moments of working out what he’s really asking—it’s not every day you get asked what he’s asking me—I smile.
If this trip home doesn’t kill me, then Mom definitely will.
5.
I make it only as high as the tree branch before crying out. Him holding my hands and wrists and me dangling like a kite tail is killing my shoulders.
He puts me down butt-first on the tree branch. I say, “This isn’t going to work,” and rub my shoulders. “I’m a soccer player. Massive upper body strength isn’t really my thing, you know?”
“All right. How about a piggyback ride?”
“You can control this?”
“I kind of, like, I do it a lot, I guess?”
“Float? Or control where you go?”
“Both?” he says, squinting his whole face up in the least confidence-inspiring way.
“Says the guy who blasted off from the party.” Still, I say, “But you can get me there?”
“To your house?”
“Just my street’ll be good enough.”
He hovers in front of me like, yeah, he does do this a lot.
I rope my arms around his neck and shoulders in the most un-girlfriendy way possible. Which isn’t very. His skinny-looking shoulders feel not-so-skinny. His skin feels warm, and I feel warm, and, okay, it’s nice, maybe too nice, like there’s too much nice happening at once.
I go with it, and press myself into his back. We don’t say anything and he shoves away from the tree. I come off the branch, and instead of falling I clamp my legs around his thighs.
He laughs and says, “Wow, soccer player, huh?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing, just—uh—you have strong legs?”
His question-statements will drive me crazy quicker than Liv’s British-flag mouth.
And then we’re away from the tree and above the street. Flying—or floating, really—it’s not what you expect. It’s better and worse.
It’s better because it’s like I’m slipping right up and out of all that weight that has been wrapped around my chest since the spring. So yeah, we’re Peter Pan and whatsherface, Wendy.
It’s worse because it’s terrifying. We bob and dip in the air like a lost boat on the ocean. He grunts and twists, trying to find some sort of stable position that isn’t there. My stomach is in my toes.
“Hold on,” he says. Kid Obvious to the rescue.
I giggle nervously, and he does too. We’re above the river now, its surface like wet concrete we could write our initials in.
“We can steer?” he says like a question. Again.
I groan and he leans forward, going almost horizontal. He takes his hands off my forearms and holds them out like plane wings. I laugh again, into the back of his head, but only because if I don’t laugh I might start screaming instead.
He sways and rolls me gently toward the right. My legs clamp tighter, and we turn and dip in that general direction. So, I guess I’m the ballast or counterweight like those sandbags on hot-air balloons, or something equally non-flattering.
“You have to show me where to go,” he says.
I nod but can’
t talk just yet.
We’re kind of treading air, not really flying now. My weight must be enough to keep him from getting too high. Still, we’re three stories up, maybe more. It’s cooler up here, and I get goosebumps all over. My arms and legs are tired but I don’t care. This is worth it.
Below is another world. A police cruiser, maybe the one from the bridge, creeps into a convenience store parking lot. A train way out at the other edge of town races through the dark. The stars are all around us. They feel so close.
I bury my face into his neck and look off to the right, along one of his plane wing-arms, which he twists and turns, palm up then palm down, which I think has to be a superstition or something because it’s got zero aerodynamics going on.
And then one of those twisting and steering hands is suddenly gone and goes fumbling in his cargo pocket down by my leg. I shift and turn to look and we lose balance and spin in the air, two, three full turns. It’s like trying to stay on a rolling log, an invisible rolling log, and the hamster wheel that is us stops turning with my back to the ground, face to the black night sky. The pull and fall are beneath me now, and they both weigh so much. I’m so not giggling anymore.
“Sorry! Sorry!” he says, and wiggles and waves his arms. We drop hard for a horrible moment, but then we catch the right wave again and roll back to how we were.
“Um, don’t do that again,” I tell him.
He was digging in his pocket for a flashlight, and has it in his hand now. “Wires,” he says and points the light ahead of us. They’re the high-tension kind that had everybody writing letters to the paper (about how all us kids would get brain cancer from them!) when I was in fifth grade.
I manage to blurt out a “There!” and point to what I think is my street, or at least Liv’s.
He swings and arm-pivots for a course correction that somehow actually works, and there’s another whiff of that tire-smell. We float a totally safe three or four feet over the wires—I hear them humming—and into my neighborhood.
“There?” he calls down.
I nod, and then remember that he can’t really see me nod. I tell him yes, but I’m not that sure. I mean, that’s my street, but this is a whole new view for me. We have that many streetlights? Since when?