The Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn't Fly

by Floating Boy

  The third row of bookmarks is just spillover from the second. But the bottom one, the newest one—click, click—is for some message board. The freak-o bulletin-board crazies have been dissecting the “Birthday Party Hoax” vid starring everyone’s favorite balloon man. The thread also has all these links to other supposedly flying people. Most of the vids are shaky and low-res—something Liv and me could make over lunch.

  After a few more posts, it’s gnomes in the bushes, people with wings at ATMs, slouchy guys with rabbit heads and like, this was the final word; one link that just says “Cowabunga.” Yeah, when you start going Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the conversation’s over.

  This isn’t to say I don’t click. It’s a trick page, too: every time you try to hover over the cow-icon, it moves away, always ahead. A stupid game. Wunderbar.

  Because this isn’t my first time on the Internet, I just hold the control button down, and I’m able to arrow right over the cow. It turns over on its back, eyes X’d out, and it squirts milk up from its udders. Cute and gross. Double wunderbar.

  I fold the screen down and look to make sure Terry isn’t spying over my shoulder, but he’s asleep up there somehow. I watch him and try to figure what’s the best thing to do here—take a picture, post it to Dad’s thread? (like it wouldn’t look fake)—and then there’s a noise from the laptop.

  I unfold that dead cow. Clicking it let me through to the hidden video.

  Like the rest, it’s grainy and shaky, and I can hear two guys talking behind it, one of them at the side of the frame sometimes. They’re just walking through some field way out in nowhere. No, no: they’re sneaking up on a cow! To tip it over? The world’s full of Logans, I guess.

  And now the two Logans are daring each other. Finally, there’s a camera exchange, and then the one dude I haven’t seen yet starts to creep out to the cow. And—I wouldn’t have seen it except for somebody edited the video and circled the cow’s mouth with a yellow highlighter—this cow, it’s not eating like I thought it was. It’s been throwing up the whole time. A thin line of vomit pours out of its mouth.

  And then the world changes for these two Logans.

  The former cameraman darts out, shirtless, balancing a beer—at least I think it’s beer—and just before he’s there, just before he’s going to plant his hand on that cow’s rump, the cow looks around at him, swishes its tail once, and lifts off the ground.

  The Logans aren’t saying anything now. The camera dude tracks the mooing cow up into the sky until it’s just a blurry dot, and then comes back down to his friend, standing there with his beer all poured down his pants leg.

  At least I think it’s beer.

  The way Terry finally floats back down is like a leaf. I don’t catch him so much as guide him. And then I look in on my parents—it’s four o’clock, guys?

  I can’t sit around and do nothing all day. So, of course, I climb out my bedroom window and onto the roof with a brush and a can of reflective paint. A little redecoration?

  The can of reflective curb-paint is a failed business idea of Dad’s. The garage is filled with serious leftovers. I paint a big, white-bright circle on the shingles, taking up more than half the slightly slanted roof, the section that faces the street. I’m sure the neighbors will groove on it.

  The rest of the afternoon melts away with me sitting in the middle of my bat-signal, all paint-splattered and waiting with my mom’s embarrassing phone in my hand. Still nothing from Liv.

  I hang out on the roof and have a look around the neighborhood, and the look, it’s weird. There are no lawn mowers buzzing? No grilles smoking? And—and where are all the cars? Mary, Last Girl in the World, stands up from her reflective surface and scans the horizon for Godzilla.

  There are a few people out there: kids at a pool, and some other kids playing basketball in their driveways. But you can’t make a summer Sunday late afternoon in the burbs from that, can you? Where’s the kickball games, dog walking, and all kinds of sad stuff that’s supposed to be going on without me? At least give me one divorced mom desperately tanning in her backyard, right?

  Something’s off. Everybody has—what?—gone to the movies? I start over and take what I can see section by section. And then, just barely, I see that there’s two arms waving at me, waving at me from all the way at the top of our tripod-monster water tower.

  Him.

  Him him.

  I’m out of breath from coming hand-over-hand up the blazing hot ladder. The metal clangs, groans and, just for effect, shakes. I didn’t know metal ladders would do that, and it shouldn’t be doing that this high up, which is what, fifty feet or so above the hard, hard ground. You really have to want to be up here. The sun has just about set by the time I finish climbing.

  “Mary,” Floating Boy says. He’s sitting on the waffle-metal catwalk part of the bulb of the tower, so his legs can dangle down through the railing, over all that space. His feet are treading air and he’s wearing the same tee and shorts from the other night. He holds up the leash he’s got himself tied to the railing with.

  “You’re the one who can float, right? And you’re making me climb crazy death ladders?”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry. Your roof, I thought it’d be too—” He pauses and shrugs.

  “Conspicuous?” Liv hates it when I’m obnoxious with vocabulary. But she’s not here and she’s still not answering my texts.

  “Um, if that means too out in the open.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m sorry I never made it to the mill yesterday.” I almost say sorry I stood you up, but that would’ve been too weird. Maybe. But it’s what I think of: him in the mill alone, waiting, the floor all swept or whatever, and then me never knocking on the humongous Frankenstein door. “Things got complicated with Terry.”

  “It’s okay,” he says.

  I sit down beside him and dangle my legs out like his, even though it gives me a hollow feeling in my chest.

  “I saw a cow float away,” I say, and add, “on-line.” Then, because I’m not awkward enough already, I say, “The computer. I mean, you know?”

  “Huh,” he says, and maybe he’s smiling a bit, it’s hard to tell. “The cows.”

  I’m not sure what kind of answer this is supposed to be. “All right,” I say. “I’ve got some questions. Scratch that. I’ve got a lot of questions.”

  He looks over at me for a second through his bangs. It’s a good look. It’s almost enough for me to forget how high up we are.

  “Okay?”

  “So, where do you go to school?” I ask.

  “You want to know how I do it,” he answers anyway.

  I shrug and nod: bingo.

  “You and him both,” he says. “I mean, he knows, but still. It’s always been him still trying to figure me out.”

  “Barron?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He stole my phone,” I say, then add a quick rundown of my afternoon with Liv and her sister’s car and dicky dirts and guns and bridges and hospitals. Everything, yeah.

  He doesn’t say anything and it’s almost like I’m speaking code. I don’t know, maybe I’m too much for him. His quiet is making me nervous. “So what’s this Barron guy to you?” I say at last. “Is he your father? Crazy uncle? Flying coach?”

  “I never knew my parents,” he says, and he’s definitely not looking at me now. “Everybody down there knows their parents, right?” He laughs through his nose, at himself, I think. “For a while I used to think I was a robot. That Barron had, like, made me from spare parts or something. From extra pieces of real people.”

  “Is that why you danced like that? To see?”

  “Danced like what?”

  “Your robot dance,” I say and hang my arm down loose from the elbow, showing him. “It’s an easy test. You’ve either got it or you don’t.”

  “Hard-wired or not . . .” he tags on, getting it. “It’s just—until a few mo
nths ago, I wasn’t even sure what state this was. All that mattered was my room. Whenever he’d leave I’d be in there for hours by myself.” He pauses and I don’t say anything because what do you say to something that’s as horrible as that?

  He suddenly blurts out, “Every month or so, for as long as I can remember, he gave me my shots. I kinda even looked forward to it, I think.”

  “Shots? Like needles and special secret serum or whatever?”

  “Yeah. And now I know he was lying to me the whole time, too. He always said I needed my shots or I’d get real sick and I wouldn’t make it. And he said I couldn’t go outside, that it wasn’t safe for me, or anyone else. And—he had me write everything down in a log for him.”

  After a few awkward moments of not saying anything, and letting our dangling legs knock into each other for a little while, I give him a pseudo-confession, just to get him talking again. I say, “Sometimes I wish I didn’t know my parents.” I cross my arms over the lower of the two crossrails and rest my chin there.

  “Maybe I didn’t have any,” he says. “I mean, if I was, like, made—”

  I punch his shoulder. “But you’re a real boy, Pinocchio.”

  “Pinocchio?”

  “I was just—”

  “You know, he says my name is Timothy, and sometimes, it’s what he calls me. But then he’ll call me by other names, a whole bunch of other names, other boys, all the kids he tested before me, I think. So, it’s like I don’t even have a real name.”

  I try to remember all the names he scratched out under the bridge. There are too many. But I remember Timothy was the only one not scratched out.

  “He told me that when I was little-little, I was just sort of abandoned, like the rest of them. It would explain some of this, wouldn’t it? How nobody misses me?”

  I say, “I’m sorry,” because what else is there? Then, when he goes quiet and it feels like there needs to be something else to say, I try this: “Hey. What does it feel like?”

  He shrugs like he’s bored with the question. “I don’t know. It feels like me.”

  “And now my little brother . . . Why is Terry floating now?”

  “Was Barron his doctor, too?”

  “What? No. Barron was just the gingerbread-balloon man to us.”

  “So he never? Even when your brother was born in the hospital?”

  “Floating doesn’t run in my family. This didn’t start until the party,” I say. “Until you showed up. No offense.”

  “No, it’s my fault. I don’t know why or how, but I know it is. I left. I was gone. I suppose Barron needed somebody else, then. He must’ve gotten to Terry somehow. I’m sorry. It’s—it’s just because he’s so young, I think. . . .” and he just trails off, like he’s not sure what he’s talking about.

  “What do you mean? Why does his being so young matter?”

  “The shots and floating. It doesn’t work out too good for adults. Barron told me once that, so far, grown-ups only get the bad parts from the shots.”

  “What bad parts?”

  “I don’t know what the bad parts are. He never said.” He shrugs and shakes his head. Then he adds, “I actually stopped floating a few months ago. At the beginning of the summer. It happened a few days after another one of the shots. But I felt so different a few days after. Barron seemed so happy about my not-floating. He let me outside more and everything.”

  “How long did the not-floating last?”

  “A while. A month or so, I guess. It was cool but I also missed that floating feeling too, you know? It lasted until after the next shot, and I was floating again, back to the way I’d always remembered being. He gave me that other shot only a few days before I left. ”

  “Before you escaped, you mean?”

  He says, “Yeah. Hey, but your brother . . . I’m thinking if I went back to Barron then he might let your brother go.”

  My head spins with everything he’s telling me about the shots and floating and not floating. “Wait. What? No, he doesn’t have my brother.” I chinpoint down to my house, the one with the glowy roof that was supposed to be his landing pad.

  “And he’s like me?”

  “No. Terry can’t control it.”

  “You get better at it—took me a while, but I can mostly go where I want to now. But you can’t always control it.” To show me, he lets go of the railing and bobs up about eight inches. He’s been faking normalness for the past I-don’t-know-how-many-minutes.

  He says, “I don’t know, floating is kind of like an emotion. You think you can control it, and you can sometimes, but . . . it’s not like that at all? It’s like how you can throw a ball to a dog, and he’ll get it. Um, that’s what dogs do, right?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “So you throw it once, the dog gets it, you throw it again, and the dog gets it again, but you’re not in control, not really? The dog’s playing with you, it’s not you playing with the dog. One of these times the dog’s going to see some better ball and just keep running, and you can’t whistle him back, and then the people in the van take him to dog jail.”

  I almost smile here because what he knows about dogs sounds like it’s all from kid movies. “Listen,” I say, kind of taking the side of his hand in mine—not romantic, I swear, and more about holding him down—“you don’t have to go back to—” but right at that moment, the rhinestone phone in my front pocket doesn’t just buzz or burr, it plays that old and embarrassing theme song to Titanic, the one Mom always sings with her arms outstretched.

  I shut it off fast and read Liv’s text out loud: “marymarymary.” It’s code for trouble. The same way “911” means emergency, our names three times to each other is drop-everything-save-me.

  “Liv,” I say and look past the phone out over our neighborhood and to her house. It’s already past kind-of-dusky out, but up here her house looks just the same as ever.

  “There,” Floating Boy says. He’s standing and unhooking his tether.

  I stand with him and feel the dizziness of this many feet up. I have to clutch the rail to keep from spilling over.

  “I don’t—” I say, but then I do. There’s a small light winking at us from the sky, about the same level up as we are, and out over our neighborhood. The small light is attached to a shadowy figure.

  “Liv?” The light is Liv’s cell phone. The figure is Liv. She’s floating. I can just make out her outline.

  “No,” Floating Boy says and stuffs the leash into the cargo pocket of his pants. “Stay here.” He turns to be sure I will stay, like I have a choice. He’s looking at me when he steps over the rail onto some pad of air and doesn’t fall.

  “I mean, just wait,” he says, then grabs the rail, tucks his legs around to get the soles of his feet between his hands, and exactly like pushing off for the backstroke, he dives away into the night air, toward Liv.

  All right. So now Liv’s floating, too? Everyone except me. I’m the opposite of Typhoid Mary. I’m the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly. I’m the one who’s going to be all anxietied out on the ground while everybody else floats away.

  Maybe if I could just close my eyes and step out there into all that nothing, then that pad of air would be there to catch me. Even just thinking about it gets me that sinking feeling in my stomach, in the base of my jaw. But I do think about it.

  So Liv is floating with him. I guess I’ll go hang out with Marcus, then. We’re both grounded anyway, right? Ha!

  Yeah, ha, ha, ha.

  Without letting go of the top rail, I make my way back to the ladder then swing my legs over for the long haul down. My feet feel heavier than normal. I get only about ten rungs away from the top when there’s the very distinct sound of sirens.

  My automatic response: clamp onto the sidebars of the ladder and pull myself close.

  Did the police follow floating-Liv here? Did a nosey neighbor (or my sick Mom?) call them because we w
ere up on the tower? Is someone falling? Is the ladder coming loose? Is the water tower falling over from my weight? Seriously, why are the police here?

  And oh, hey, there’s Marcus’s dad, his crackly voice trying to soothe me, but bullhorns don’t soothe. Don’t they learn that in training? And now the fire truck. Of course a fire truck, so everybody can know, so I can have this, too, to drag through the halls of my high school career.

  All of which is to say: anxiety attack. Seconds or hours pass and I’m still barnacled to the ladder. I open one hand just to see if I can, and it works, and I turn to wave to Marcus’s dad and the firemen, to tell them it’s all right, they can all go home and take their flashing lights with them, that I can take it from here. But then, with my hand out and ready to do all that important waving, I see what’s parked just two doors down from my house, and nobody's looking that way but me.

  Barron’s brown sedan. Its driver’s side door is open.

  And then my other hand slips off the railing.

  10.

  I’m awake and asleep at the same time, and for a long time. I can’t open my eyes, but it feels white and bright, so I don’t really want to open my eyes anyway. I dream about rivers filled with guns and a cow jumping over the water tower.

  There’s talking and coughing, but those busy people-noises are muffled.

  Then there’s pressure on my upper arm. Something is squeezing it, and it’s this big squeeze that opens my eyes. A nurse dressed in white and wearing a white face mask is taking my blood pressure.

  I twitch, and it kind of jumpstarts my head, and then things click together: I’m in a hospital room. I’m sitting up in bed, white sheet pulled over me, left foot sticking out of the covers because that’s the way I sleep (or go unconscious!), no matter what. To my right, there’s a thin blue curtain cutting the room in half, like I’m giving the silent treatment to the person I’m sharing the room with. When I was a little kid, I used to imagine sharing my bedroom with the big sister I never had: she was cool but we’d fight and divvy up the bedroom with duct tape so no one could go on the other’s side.