The Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn't Fly

by Floating Boy

  “You know, like in science class? Static electricity? Come on, it’s a joke, Liv.”

  I know I should be listening for Mom’s footsteps and panicking about my soon-to-be AWOLness, but I’m not. What I am is all told-you-so. I grab Terry by the robe belt still tied to his ankle and pull him down a little until there’s a foot of space between him and the ceiling, so Liv can see there’s nothing up my sleeve, no wires above him, then I let him go.

  He bobs back up quick, and bumps his head on the plaster. He giggles and says, “Again!”

  “Believe me now?” I say to Liv, watching her watch him.

  She wraps her arms around her chest like she has to hold something. I wonder if she notices the wonderful tire-smell in the room.

  “No, way—” Liv whispers, darting into the middle of the room, arms held out basket-style, like she’s getting ready to catch a giant ostrich egg.

  Terry floats down off the ceiling in tight little circles, airplaning his dinos the whole trip down. He lands on the bed, then whines and scrambles to his knees, lifting those extinct lizards over his head.

  I butterfly around the room and make sure all the windows are latched. I say, “We gotta go, girl.”

  “Where?”

  “To meet up with him.”

  “Who him?”

  “Him him.”

  “Him him?”

  “The one you thought I was lying about. From my cousin’s party?”

  “Oh. The one who, who really can . . .”

  The rest of her sentence is on the ceiling above us. I don’t make her say it out loud. I’m not even sure she could yet. Wait till I tell her about last night.

  I usher Liv to the door as best I can, then I crouch in front of Terry, give him the big sis pep talk about staying in the house, not answering the door, going to wake Mom if anything scary happens.

  It’s hard to know if he’s listening and what, if any of it, he really understands. So I untie his ankle and tell him that if he’s good he can watch TV in my room, cool?

  He nearly knocks Liv over, rocketing past her and down the hall. I get there just in time to see his last two steps before he makes the corner into my room. His little socked feet aren’t touching the carpet. Literally, actually: he’s running on air and getting used to it. His hand flashes out and hooks on the edge around my door, and he slingshots in.

  “God,” Liv says.

  “I know,” I tell her, and push her away from the wall.

  Then together we check the locks on my two windows, and we’re about to step out, leave him alone for who knows how long, when Liv darts back in, hefts this two-hundred dollar purple-and-white geode down from my middle shelf. My dad got it for me when I was in third grade and was doing the rock-unit from our Earth Sciences book. He got me a rock instead of jewelry or ice cream. I’d never tell anybody, but it’s maybe my most favorite thing. And it’s perfect, too: Terry’s always been reaching for it.

  Liv settles the heavy rock onto his lap. I start Little Bear for him, and when Liv comes into the hall I take her hand, and she’s just as quiet as I am on the stairs until she sneezes three times. They’re full-on, open-mouth, look-how-loud-I-can-sneeze sneezes too.

  I glare at her at hard as I can.

  Liv shrugs and whispers, “Sorry. Summer cold.”

  I don’t see Marcus sitting in the front seat until I’m hauling the door open.

  “Nice dicky dirt,” he says in his British vampire voice.

  “What?” I flash my eyes over the top of the car to Liv.

  “Shirt,” Liv says, doing her head back and forth to show that dicky dirt and shirt are the same in some other, way stupider universe.

  “Glad you brought him,” I tell her. “That’s kind of exactly what I asked you to do.”

  “It’s a zombie,” Marcus says and he traces his fingers over my tee’s decal.

  I push his hand away. “Seriously?”

  Liv ducks down into her sis’s ancient, green M&M-color Ford Taurus. What she’s doing really is hiding. Great. And her maybe-boyfriend’s fingers are waggling out to my shirt again. I kick him in the thigh and that ends the waggling.

  I rub my eyes and study the small little square of my bedroom window. Be safe, I whisper in my head to Terry.

  “Well?” Liv says, and then she sneezes again

  “Move over, bacon. You get to sit next to Sneezy,” I say to Marcus, and before he can resist I’m in, scooting him over into the middle of the bench seat. Yeah, a bench seat: serious proof of how old this car is. I mean, are bench seats even legal anymore?

  “Hey, hey,” Marcus barks, holding his hands up. The drink gripped between his legs scoots with him and is magically not spilling. “Wait, I can’t—” he tries to get out, but I hip check him back down, then Liv peels away from the curb in typical Liv fashion.

  To show Liv I still don’t appreciate the company, I nab the cup from Marcus and take a long drink—orange soda, what is he, eight years old?—without even wiping the straw clean.

  “So you should’ve seen Mary’s little brother,” Liv says to Marcus. She’s all leaned forward on the wheel, kind of hugging it. It’s her adult driving pose. I’ve seen her practice it in the garage. We were taking turns, actually.

  I say, “No, he shouldn’t have. Really.”

  “But—”

  “Seen what? That thing with the nose again?” Marcus says and holds his ready-to-inflate fingers up to his nose like he’s going to mime a snot bubble.

  “It’s nothing,” I say. “He was eating chocolate. It was all over his face. It was Funniest Home Videos cute.”

  Liv looks at me like she doesn’t understand what I’m saying. I get that look a lot. She says, “Yeah, really light chocolate. The kind that floats right off your tongue.” She takes a corner too wide, sending Marcus smooshing into me.

  Where we are eventually is downtown, kind of, because Liv can’t help herself and has to show off. We do a slow drive-by of Fat Burger. Some Logan look-alikes yell at us, or at Liv’s sister’s car because big sis is supposed to be at basketball camp for another two days, not, you know, cruising Fat Burger. Liv sticks her hand out the window and waves back.

  “You know them?” Marcus asks, not looking back of course.

  “They’re just,” Liv says, doing her fingers in the air, her hands all rich-girl, like she doesn’t have enough time in the day for all the boys she knows.

  “Just what?” Marcus says.

  Liv smiles and checks her rearview—for what I don’t know since all she can see is Marcus’s face in the mirror because, you know, he’s sitting right in front of it—and squeals the car around, across a thousand lanes. This is exactly what I asked for, right? Yes, wunderbar. Thirty painful seconds later we’re second in line at the Fat Burger drive-through.

  “We don’t have time for this, Liv,” I say.

  “Sure we do. My treat,” she says to both of us, or mostly to Marcus.

  Marcus. Why’s he here again? She and him are so annoying together. It’d never be like that between me and Floating Boy. You know, just hypothetically speaking. We’d never go bowling on Tuesday nights. We’d spend our weekends tracking down hot-air balloon festivals. We’d wait for them all to lift up off the ground and get up into the clouds, then we’d sneak up and just suddenly be inside their basket, asking for a bottled water or something equally wise-ass.

  Part of me is up in that balloon already. My head’s out the car window so I can scan the sky, see every little blip up there, every bird, every—

  “Liv,” I say and reach across Marcus. She spills her dollars and change into the floorboard.

  “What, Mare?”

  “Hey,” Marcus says and lifts his chin, pointing at the open drive-through window.

  Without making a sound—we’ve been doing this since third grade when Mrs. Boutin put us on opposite sides of the room because, according
to her, we talked more than we breathed—I mouth up there in the sky for Liv.

  Liv pushes her sunglasses up high on her head so she can look up, and then she smiles in a nervous kind of way. It’s Floating Boy. Not a flock of birds in the shape of a boy. He’s so high up that he’s just a shape but it’s him. It’s gotta be him.

  “Mare,” she says, smiling all the way now, and somehow forgetting her foot’s supposed to be on the brake the whole time, here. We jerk forward to the drive-through window, the space miraculously empty.

  I say again, “Forget it, Liv. Let’s go. Seriously.”

  “Relax.” Liv clomps back on the brake, the tires chirp, and it’s a perfect, face-on-dashboard stop. She smiles, so totally impressed with herself, and then a siren blips behind us, and flashing blue lights.

  Marcus is all scared pale from looking behind us, and saying, “Nononono,” unlike Liv, who’s just paralyzed.

  Great. Just great. “Sunglasses,” I whisper, like the sunglasses are so going to fool the police into believing her big sis’s license is actually Liv’s. She nods and lowers her face into them. Her hands are shaking.

  Like in a horror movie, the police officer’s footsteps get closer, closer. Then: “Well, well, well,” he says and leans down to look inside at the three little chickens we are. Because he’s not our dad, me and Liv just stare straight forward.

  Because he is Marcus’s dad, Marcus turns his lips into a giant squiggle, chews on his straw, and says, “Hey. Yeah.”

  Everybody in the Fat Burger patio is leaning over the rail and making faces. So yeah, I totally remember putting this in the text I sent to Liv this morning: Besides finding Floating Boy who can long-shot-maybe help my brother not float, any chance we could almost crash into Fat Burger and then maybe get arrested, too?

  “This how it is now?” It’s Marcus’s dad. Officer Marcus’s-dad. He’s squatted by Liv’s door, to see us better.

  “How what is?” Marcus repeats back to his dad.

  “The guy goes in the middle?”

  “I get car sick if I’m in the middle,” I try saying, but my voice is weak and nobody’s listening to me. I’m feeling panicky, but it’s a normal kind of panic, one that I can handle. I think.

  I’m still tracking Floating Boy a thousand impossible feet up and wishing we were up there instead of here.

  I look at Liv and in my head I’m screaming Liv, do something loud enough she should totally hear me. Liv’s eyes are the dots under question marks. And then—this has always been the plan—I see her hand start to pull her sis’s license from the ashtray, except what we never planned on was knowing the officer.

  “Liv Jackson, is it?” Marcus’s dad says back to us.

  She nods and gulps, pulls away from the ashtray and puts her hands back on ten and two on the wheel.

  Marcus’s dad smiles and it’s obvious he knows exactly what grade she’s in. “So, is your sister going to take us to finals again this year?” he asks.

  “I didn’t want to!” Liv blurts out then and starts in with some tears. Real or fake is hard to tell with her. “Her brother, Mary’s Terry, he’s—he’s—”

  “Sick,” I interrupt. “Ginger ale. We needed some ginger ale for him, sir.”

  Marcus’s dad smiles and is obviously loving this. “Nice of your sister to let you take her car while she’s at camp.”

  Liv nods yes. Yes, her sister is very, very nice. “She’s good this year,” she adds, finally answering him about the state finals.

  “All right,” Marcus’s dad says, finger-shooting Liv. “I’m going to hold you to that, check?”

  Liv does more nodding. It’s too much and too fast.

  He says, “Would you girls mind driving Marcus back on your way home? He has a bunch of chores he was supposed to do yesterday.”

  Marcus nods his head. His eyes go wet at the corners and this is bigger than just today for him.

  Liv says, “Yes, sir. Of course.”

  “Thank you. You drive safe now.” He walks away, lets us go. We breathe. We remember that we can breathe.

  Liv tries starting the car that’s already running and everybody at the patio rail grimaces with the grinding noise. Then she, being Liv, hits the gas too hard and squeals us forward, right out of the drive-through. No ginger ale for anyone.

  We dump Marcus off on his street. He lifts a sad hand to us, sneezes a sneeze that bends him in half, then gets his skateboard from its hiding place and sulks the long way up to his house.

  “Well,” Liv says.

  “Well, what?” I say back to her.

  She nods down to the directions written on my hand. The directions to the old mill.

  I say, “I don’t know.” I’d lost sight of Floating Boy after the close call with Marcus’s dad and we booked it out of Fat Burger. “Maybe?”

  “To the mill!” She pulls away from the curb. “Is he cute?”

  “What? Yeah. Sure, I guess.”

  Liv laughs at me. I probably deserve it. She says, “Catalogue or TV?”

  “Movie,” I say.

  “Harry Potter?”

  “Skywalker,” I say, and we’re moving again, but a lot more carefully and slowly. The whole ride, we scour the sky above Ipswich looking for a shadow, a shape, hoping we see him. I say, just because somebody always needs to, “You don’t really look like your sis at all, you know.”

  “Mare,” she says, her face gone slack or serious, her voice dropping through the floorboards. My stomach drops down there, too.

  I follow where she’s looking, mostly expecting Marcus’s dad, lights flashing, or maybe even my mom in her robe, on a scooter with the hair of her Marge Simpson slippers dragging.

  It’s so much worse.

  We were looking too high, the whole way over to dropping Marcus off. We’re near Bradley Palmer State Park, to our left, a couple hundred yards away across the big field of grass and trees next to the Ipswich River, and there! Near the bridge Floating Boy is trapped on the high-tension wires. He’s spasming, flailing, kicking, hooked by a rope or something, and I remember his joke about me having rope and it’s even more not-funny.

  “No,” I say and lock eyes with Liv, and then she doesn’t care about Marcus’s dad or anybody with a siren anymore. She hits the gas so hard the car explodes forward and Liv almost dumps us into the field.

  We leave one guy honking as our two-wheeled left turn almost wipes him out. My window is down, and I’m halfway out, just about sitting on top of my door, trying to see through the trees, watching the Floating Boy blur, dangling off the end of the rope with the sun right behind him. He’s not even trying to pull himself in. Is he giving up? Already electrified? I can’t tell and I’m not blinking and I’m trying not to lose it, but I can feel it all building into an avalanche inside me.

  We’re almost there but I shriek “Faster!” like Liv’s not already. The car surges forward and the trees and their branches whip past. My cell is ringing and vibrating in my pocket. It’s “Footsteps of Doom” but I can’t answer, Mom, not now.

  Just a couple hundred feet from the bridge and being under him—to what? catch him?—Liv slams on the brakes. I jolt forward hard, fall part way out of the window, then grab onto the side-view mirror and catch myself.

  Before I can even touch my forehead where it’s hurting, Liv’s out of the car and running. That doesn’t do it justice, though. Liv. She’s doing her own version of flying.

  I had no idea she could move like that. But then I see why. It’s Logan and his crew. They’re on the bridge again. The same one they were chased away from last night. They’re all bunched together at the bridge railing.

  I pivot and slide out of the car window, landing on shaky legs. “Liv!” I call with every last little bit of my voice, and then Logan angles something up higher than all their heads, and all I can do is fall to my knees, and cover my mouth.

  It’s a shotgun. It
’s pointed up and starting an invisible dotted line between him and Floating Boy, who’s trapped and whipping in the wind up there.

  The high-tension wires are humming, filling my head. Logan’s crew cheers him on. I open my mouth to scream but then Liv—and I know I’ll owe her forever for this—she’s there, slamming through all of them like they’re mannequins, getting to Logan just a moment after he fired, after that distinct little firecracker pop.

  Liv’s taller but doesn’t weigh as much as me, and doesn’t play soccer, doesn’t play anything, really, but still, you don’t want to make her mad. She rams her shoulder into Logan with everything she has and it’s enough to send him over the bridge railing, into the river. The gun, too, but it doesn’t matter. She was too late. She ran faster than any human ever, and still, he got the shot off.

  My chest tightens and I can barely breathe. I look up to Floating Boy and there’s just a shirt up there now, ragged at the end of the rope. A shirt made of—wait a minute, foil? One by one, the pieces come together in my head. Logan got the shot off. His aim was on, or whatever gun-people say to mean he hit what he wanted to hit. And when he hit it, it—it popped. It, not him.

  It’s one of those big gingerbread-man balloons, hanging limply from the caught string. Its unpainted insides twinkle sunlight down across all of us.

  The sound of Logan yelling from somewhere in the river becomes real. The other guys are falling-on-the-bridge laughing.

  I hold myself up with the side-view mirror. I can’t get my legs under me yet and just collapse again. All the emotions of the last five minutes are tangled inside me, so I’m laughing and crying, hating myself, loving Liv, and wishing hard for—for I’m not even sure what.

  And then, because Mom’s radar tells her there’s no better time, my cell’s all “Footsteps of Doom” again in my pocket. I don’t even mind. My robot hand tries to take the phone out to tell Mom everything.

  Except before I can get the phone out to answer, a folded up piece of paper falls out onto the street.

  It’s the note. The one I wrote for Mom all about Terry and its detailed how-to and what-to-avoid instructions for his floating. Somehow I forgot to leave it for her.