by Floating Boy
How could I have messed this all up so badly? Is there anyone else as messed up as me?
My robot hand palms the cell up and there’s M0M on the display, the zero-vowel not as funny as it used to be. I rub my eyes with the other hand to try and fix my head and my life, and then, like it’s just reached through some crack in the day, some opening between my world and some other, colder one, there’s this hand on my shoulder. It’s crackly and old. It’s a zombie hand. It’s my future, reaching back for me.
“What?” I say, my chest hitching, and look up into the old man’s face.
Mister, Mister, Mister . . .
Mr. Barron.
Hello.
7.
I can’t catch my breath. I feel-hear each thrum and thrush of mud-thick blood in my neck. This is how it starts: an anxiety attack. “Attack” makes me the victim, the docs say, but their word “episode” makes it sound like a television show I can supposedly choose to turn off. Yeah, right.
My phone is still vibrating in my hand like it’s trying so hard to shake free from me.
“Nice to see you again, young lady,” Mr. Barron says.
Looking up at him would almost be easier if he had mad-scientist kind of eyes. But his eyes aren’t all Stranger-Danger. He looks as lost and desperate as I am. Whatever Floating Boy is to this guy, he doesn’t have him anymore, right? So it’s got to hurt.
Inside me, everything’s amping up, and at the same time I’m breaking into sharp pieces. I’m trying to hug them all to me but there’s so many. This is exactly what my classes in the spring felt like: serious internal trauma while sitting at my desk in geometry. Nobody around me knowing there was anything wrong. Same exterior, melted-down interior. Welcome to my life.
“Go away . . .”
He says, “May I?” and plucks the cell phone from my hand. He straightens his arm out to read the screen, then holds it between us and hits the answer key.
On the other end, Mom is hysterical, completely losing it. “Mary? Where are you? It’s Terry! Terry—he’s floating! What did you feed him? He’s—Terry, T, baby, come down—”
Barron taps the phone off with his spidery index finger, a neat little move for a citizen as senior as he is. “Mom sure sounds upset, doesn’t she?” he says. He pockets my phone, not making any kind of evil production out of the theft. The phone is just another thing that’s his now. He adds, “Very, very interesting. A little brother that floats. He and I should meet, don’t you think?”
The whole time he’s looking past me into deep-thought land. Then he steps over to Liv’s sister’s car, snakes an arm through the driver’s open window, and stands back into the heat with a tinkling handful of keys.
He says, “You don’t look like you’re in any condition to be driving,” then tosses the keys into the brush.
I can’t say or do anything. My stomach is a bird wing. I’m taking too many breaths at once. Is this how it feels right before you float? It can’t be because it’s the worst feeling in the world.
And there’s screaming now. But it’s not from me, I’m pretty sure. It’s a howling siren, but a siren that’s making words?
It’s Liv. She’s screaming my name.
She runs toward me, not in slow motion but that’s how my head processes it. Behind her is a wet Logan and his teen-boy mob. They’re chasing her, but she’s not running from them, she’s running to me.
Logan’s voice goes real time, then. He yells something about her having to find his shotgun, collector’s-item-this and his-dad-is-going-to-kill-him-that. If I wasn’t looking at them all sideways—I’m lying down in the dirt? Is that why the grass is so tall?—I’d laugh at how five-year-old he sounds.
I crane my head around to Mr. Barron to make sure he can see Liv, too, impossible, wonderful Liv, charging right at him faster than she can even run. All I see is his brown sedan just a little farther down the road put-puttering away.
I’m alone, and then—blink, blink—I’m back in Liv’s car with a brain-busting headache, and she’s shaking me, asking me where the keys are.
“Mary, think!” Liv is suddenly at full volume.
I flinch away, then pull her close to me. “Aren’t they mad at you?” I ask, meaning Logan and his crew who are tromping all over the road behind the car, looking for the keys like they might have fallen out while we were driving.
Liv says, “You were passed out, Mare, and your breathing was all wrong. God, don’t do that.”
I say, “I’m fine,” I think, but now I’m watching a movie in my head. It’s Mr. Barron doing an evil-cartoon tiptoe down the hall of my house to Terry’s bedroom.
I open my mouth. The words come slow, but they come out: “In the bushes.”
“What?”
“The keys. They’re in the bushes.”
Liv looks around wildly, tells the guys to check the grass and bushes along the road, and then says to me, “Why? Why would you do—”
“Wasn’t me,” I say, my tone all about how she won’t believe me. “It was him.”
“Him him?”
“Not him him. Not Floating Boy. It was his—it was Mr. Barron. He’s an old man, drives a brown car. Didn’t you see him? And that was his balloon up there, in the wires. His gingerbread—”
Someone outside the car yells, “Found them!” There’s an approaching jingle of metal on metal and the keys are back in Liv’s hand. She says, “Thank God,” blows kisses in every direction, then jams the key into the ignition. “We’re taking you to the hospital, girl.”
“No, he . . . he already . . .” I say, touching all my pockets for the phone that isn’t there.
“Already what?” Liv says with some new concern in her voice.
“He took my phone, too.” I say, and then: “It’s Terry. Barron’s going to get him. He wants Terry, Liv. Because he’s floating, too, remember? I know you saw that.”
“Mare. You need—”
“No, we have to go get Terry before he does!”
She twists the car key, destination unknown. The engine grinds, squeals, grinds some more, our faces squinch up from the sounds, and the car doesn’t even come close to starting. Probably from the way Liv ground on it at Fat Burger. I’d be laggy, too. I am laggy.
Liv takes out her cell phone. I snatch it from her and call home. It rings four times before Dad and his goofy “Nobody’s Home” sung to Beethoven’s Fifth picks up. When I try Mom’s cell, it goes straight to her no-frills voicemail message.
Liv wants her phone back and is yanking on my arm to get it. “Wait,” I say, “we need someone to go—what about Marcus?”
Liv reaches over and holds the second speed-dial key down in an obvious way that says that’s what she was trying to do anyway.
When Marcus picks up, I’m already saying his name.
“Um, Mary?”
“Terry,” I say, “you’ve got to, my brother—”
“Why are you calling on—” he starts.
“My brother, Marcus. And we’re stuck. At the bridge. You need, you, you need—”
Liv pulls the phone away from my stuttermouth. “You need to get to Mary’s house, cool? As in now. As in no matter what. You gotta check on her brother, okay? I don’t care what your dad . . . just, I don’t know how, it doesn’t matter how. Run, skateboard, teleport, buy a kangaroo from the kangaroo stand, just do it. . . . Are you even listening? We can’t. My sister’s car—listen, do I need to call somebody else here?” She pauses, listens, and grabs my hand, then says, “Yeah, yeah, for real. Three-alarm here. I don’t have time to—”
Logan’s head hovers outside of my passenger window. It’s a creepy hovering head. He says, “She okay?”
“Just go,” Liv says to Marcus, then flashes her eyes across to me, to Logan standing there dripping, dripping with no gun, thank you. But he is still hateably who he is.
Logan says, “We have a little p
roblem, girls.”
8.
The problem turns out to be that Logan won’t let his friend Charlie (or Churlie, or whatever he calls himself) work on Liv’s sister’s car until real-and-true rescue efforts are being made for the gun. Like that’s a fair trade.
Of all the places I ever expected to find myself, standing with Logan and his crew of tools on the bridge in the middle of a hot afternoon has got to be the most last one.
Liv is doing her dolphin impersonation in the river below us when it should be me looking for the gun. Liv couldn’t even go to the deep end of the pool without floaters until seventh grade—her big secret. If I weren’t Mom’s little soccer star, maybe I’d be on the swim team instead, winning state by now, with scholarships lining up. Water is the best place for me, I think. All that pressure from all around, it equalizes me somehow.
And I would be down in the river, too, except when I stepped out of my shoes to go gun-diving, Liv latched onto me and my still-shaking arms. Logan laughed at me. They both said something like you’re kidding, right? though Logan’s version had more swears. It doesn’t make sense to them that I can go from catatonic to okay in the space of ten minutes. Not that it makes sense to me either.
Instead of diving for firearms, then, I keep calling Mom and she keeps not picking up. In her defense, I am using Liv’s phone, so she can’t know it’s me. Or maybe she’s somewhere without a signal. Or maybe Mr. Barron stole her phone, too, and he’s at my house with the whole family tied up. Maybe—
Liv yells at us from the river. I lean over and Logan of all people is right there, ready to grab me, to save me, whatever. Below us, Liv is treading water. Little Miss Drowned Seal, her hair is all matted and hanging in her face so she can’t see what she’s holding. It’s not a gun. It’s a waterlogged branch trailing moss and river trash, and—is that a condom? Seriously?
Logan’s crew explodes into laughter. I blush and kind of hate myself for it. Liv sighs with her whole face, looks to me to make sure I’m okay, then dives back down again.
Then finally, a text from Marcus dings in on Liv’s phone. It says: no brother. It could mean a thousand things, none of them good, so now I’m so worried I can’t even feel my own face.
I must be leaning or swaying too far over the bridge railing because Logan drops a thick hand on my arm again.
I should free-kick Logan somewhere below the belt. I say, “Listen, I’m not—” but then Liv’s sister’s car revs to life behind us.
The crew on the bridge whoops and hollers. Logan says, “You all right now?” like I’ve become this injured bird he’s found and trying to take care of, and it’s weird and I hate it.
I call Marcus. He answers after a hundred redials and is breathing hard into the phone. He must be on his skateboard. He says, “What what what? I needed to be back home five minutes ago. I’m so toast.”
“What do you mean ‘no brother’?”
“Oh, yeah. He wasn’t home, nobody was home. But hey, I just talked to your neighbor, Nosy Nelly—”
“Rita,” I correct.
“Right. Rita Rumor said the ambulance took Terry out, your parents followed, big parade.”
“You were going to tell me that when exactly?”
“When I got home. I know. Sorry, but my dad is probably already back home, and—I gotta go. Have Liv call me later, yeah?”
So: no Barron. Terry being hauled away in an ambulance with Mom probably freaking out and still wearing her crazy-lady robe isn’t exactly great news, but still, I smile.
Liv climbs up the bank and onto the bridge, dripping and out of breath. She’s holding a muddy stick across her waist. Water leaks out of its end. Then she flexes her right hand and there’s a mini-explosion at the end of the stick. In a swirl of boyflesh, Logan and crew all hit the deck, their fingertips digging into the blacktop. I guess she found his gun.
Liv laughs at herself. “Oh my god, I didn’t mean to do that, I swear,” she says, but I know better. Her Dad has made her go to the firing range with him since she was nine, even though she always says that she hates-hates-hates it. “You drop this?” she says to Logan. “Still works, I guess.” She holds it out to him—or down to him, since now he’s hugging the pavement.
Logan gets up, his knees skinned and bleeding. He looks at Liv a little different, a little better. He takes the gun, cocks some part of it open, and more water trickles out.
Behind us, Charlie or Churlie revs the car again, clearly trying to be part of the fun.
I grab Liv’s arm and pull her along because she’d stand here all day and bask in the glory of her insane moment if I let her. “Come on. We gotta go.”
“Where?”
“Hospital. I talked to Marcus.”
Hospital is a magic word. It gets us in the car and finally off the bridge. On the way, I tell her everything Marcus said, including him being toast.
Liv says, “I kind of like toast.” We swing by my house, just to double-check, but, when we see Mom’s car is gone, we don’t stop. Liv cuts through the side streets and fearlessly plows through intersections in her sister’s car.
At the hospital, Liv parks in the ambulance lane, and I’m still so spacey she pulls me across the bench seat and out her own door. And just at the exact moment when the electronic eye of the sliding doors registers us as humans and swishes those doors open, I look behind us, down into the long slope of the main parking lot.
And I think I see a brown sedan. Waiting.
9.
Sunday morning has never been about church for us. Or, as my dad puts it: one family reunion a year’s more than enough. Amen, Dad. The last time we went to church, which was more than a year ago, the Claremonts were on us like piranhas in their outdated Sunday finest, or, I guess, on us like the Claremonts they are: asking if we wanted to be caught up on the sermons (“Did you know we have a podcast?”), asking if we were coming back next week, even asking me if I was going to go to the Safe Friday Dance-Offs (“clean” music, appropriate clothes, no “suggestive dance moves,” and room enough between the boy dancer and the girl dancer for the Holy Spirit).
So, the morning after sitting most of the night by Terry’s hospital bed, surprise, we don’t go to church, even though I guess there is stuff to be thankful for: no floating was documented—no anything was documented. One of the docs did try to decipher the “funky smell” note on the paramedic’s write-up. I’m pretty sure our family is on the Child Protective Services watch list now. Solely because of the public menace of Mom’s robe. But at least they let us bring Terry home.
After all of that, we just sleep in, and then sleep in some more. We’re, like, going for the record, I mean. Take two sick parents, add a weekend to that, and no one’s opening the refrigerator until the crack of two in the afternoon.
Terry and I eat cartoon cereal and yeah, we’re so normal I want to giggle. I don’t even think about my stolen cell phone until Little Bear is on again. I haven’t told Mom yet about the snatched phone, which seems like the right thing to do for both of us.
I sneak into my parents’ cave of a bedroom—seriously, they should consider opening a window someday—and ease my mom’s dinosaur of a phone from her purse. It’s bedazzled, crusted with plastic rhinestones. Yeah, she’s, like, twelve. What scares me is that the genes that made her do that, they must be in me somewhere.
I almost make it back out, I’m sort of half-out already, when Dad sits up. He still has his sleep mask on, the one with wide-open eyes stitched into it. So weird. And then it gets worse: he cranks his head over, like he’s looking at me with those fake eyes. His floppy comb-over is plastered to his forehead with fever.
“Mary Ellen?” my mom mumbles, her voice all creaky. “That you, hon? What are you doing?”
Ellen isn’t my real middle name. It’s just what Mom told me she’d originally meant to name me. She said something about it being timeless, classic, stylish. Like a
rhinestoned cell phone.
“Nothing,” I tell her, and because she’s not all-the-way awake, she buys it, and rolls back over.
I escape, finally. Thank you. I pull their door shut and sit in the hall, my forearms propped on my knees, my thumbs already buzzing a message at Liv. This takes longer on the rhinestone-dino phone because each number is three letters and I don’t know how she can even function in the normal world with a phone like this.
I wait for one minute. No answer. I repeat my message six times. Is Liv grounded, too, now? And, if so, what kind of surgery would it take to physically remove her phone from her hand? And wouldn’t a medical feat like that be televised?
I pocket Mom’s phone on the chance that Liv is climbing up Marcus’s trellis or something, with his dad patrolling the grounds, pistol drawn, face all scowly.
When I pass back through the living room, of course Terry is on the ceiling again with his blanket. Little Bear is still on. I don’t even think he realizes he’s not on the couch anymore.
Instead of pulling him down, I haul the family laptop out and park myself on the couch right under him. Then I reconsider—he’s not in complete bladder control yet—and take the chair instead. And of course I have to get up all over again for the power cord because I’m the only person in the house who knows how to charge a battery.
My plan is to throw up a big net, just search “floating” and, I don’t know, “floating in Ipswich, Massachusetts”—no, no: Barron—but before I open the browser, I can’t resist trolling through Dad’s bookmarks and web history. I’m not spying, I swear. If he’s stupid enough to leave them right on the desktop then it’s practically an invitation.
First up: a whole full row of classified ads, job postings. He’s all over the place there, from car washers to vice principals. I’m starting to get worried about him.
The second row is his more private bookmarks, his usual stuff: UFOs, Bigfoot sightings, a house that’s there for some people, not for others. If only he could get paid for lurking these sites. If there’s a newslist and it’s paranormal or conspiracy-related, he’s not only on it, he’s a moderator. Ugh, he’s using his real IP address and everything. Poor Dad. I mean, in his day there weren’t even more than three channels on the TV.