by Floating Boy
I tell the nurse (who clearly isn’t my imaginary big sis) that I feel a little weird. No kidding, right? Even though she’s sitting, I can tell she’s tall and thin. I can’t really see her face with the surgical mask on, but she’s probably as old as my mother, and she has hair blacker than my Chuck Taylors, so probably a dye-job.
The nurse tells me that I was given a prescription dose of Valium earlier, to keep me relaxed and let me sleep, and I have another prescription that’ll be filled tomorrow. Then she turns her head away and coughs into the mask, and keeps her head turned even after the cough is over, like she’s recovering from it.
And . . . prescription? Where there’s one, there’ll be more. Specifically, the zombie pills that have been hanging over my head for months. I mean, there was serious talk of heavy-duty, mind-numbing drugs back in the spring, when school wasn’t going great, wasn’t going at all, really, when getting out of bed wasn’t really a thing I could consider. But thankfully Mom and Dad resisted then. Now, with a fresh new hospitalization incident to add to the list, maybe they’ll feel like they have no choice but to push me out into the pharmaceutical wastelands.
And now I remember slipping off the ladder while climbing down from the tower. And I did slip, I didn’t just let go. To all of them, it probably looked like I was giving up. I’m guessing they think the worst.
I wasn’t as high up as I thought, but still high enough to make an impact on the two firemen dudes who caught me. More like I fell into them and without a lot of style. Then there was the yelling and screaming from everyone else, and hands carrying me to the ambulance, like I was crowd surfing, and then a bee-sting needle in my arm, and now this room and this nurse who coughs and looks like she should be the one in the bed, not me.
There’s a lot of movement and people telling other people what to do out in the hallway. The nurse tells me not to worry about anything. But she can’t stop me from worrying about where Liv might be right now, and if Terry’s gravity problems have popped up again, and if he’s inside or outside.
I ask where Mom and Dad are. I’m surprised Mom isn’t here with her own stethoscope, taking my pulse every minute. The nurse peels off my blood pressure cuff and whispers that my parents are okay but aren’t feeling so well. Resting comfortably with IVs is a phrase that comes out next. Then she points at the curtain.
So, great. Mom and Dad came in as patient visitors, but stayed to be patients. Then where’s Terry? And everyone else?
Liv?
I say it out loud and the nurse pats the top of my hand, agreeing with me, I think. Sharing the sentiment. Adults are so perceptive.
She leaves after taking my temp and coughing into her mask some more. Isn’t a nurse coughing on a patient against the law or some sort of oath?
I wait a few minutes to make sure the nurse isn’t coming right back with a tray stacked with ginormous pills and needles, and I listen for Mom and Dad to say something. I squeak out a quiet “Mom?” as a test. All’s quiet behind the curtain. I can’t say the same for out in the hallway. Hard shoes pounding on the linoleum out there, and screaming phones, and other electronic blips and beeps.
I swing my legs out of the bed and onto the floor. Holy floating cow, the floor is cold, and that helps keeps things clear in my head, as clear as they can be. I stand slowly, afraid I’ll fall down, afraid I might trip some secret alarm wire they’ve got me hooked to, but I think I’m clean. Nothing on me or attached to me, and the same goes for the breezy hospital gown not being tied in the back.
I shuffle past the door and to a locker under the TV hanging down from the ceiling. That thing is so old it has knobs. The locker throws a hissy fit when I open it. I wait for the rushing feet in the hallway to burst back into the room, but none of them are for me.
I put on my tee and cut-off jeans. My mom’s cell is in the front left pocket, and, better yet, most of its five pounds must be battery: it’s still got a decent charge. I check the messages: there are ten R u OK?s and six call mes from Liv. I text her back.
Me: here, at the hospital
Liv, back at me faster than it actually takes a cell signal to travel: u okay? leave?
Me: mostly. I want 2 leav. where are u?
Liv: meet Marcus in the lot. give him 10.
I ask her where she is again, and who’s she with, but she’s ignoring her phone-hand now. Or maybe she only stopped flying with Floating Boy long enough to shoot off a few texts and now she’s back in the air, giggling, her non-soccer legs not getting in the way of anything way up there. I’ll try not to obsess on that.
It’ll probably take me ten minutes at least to find a way out of here, if that’s even something I can pull off. I peek behind the curtain. Mom and Dad have their own beds like in old sitcoms, and both are totally zonked. Dad’s fully reclined and on his side. Mom looks like a vampire with hands properly folded on her chest. She looks really old all of a sudden.
I slide over and whisper in Mom’s ear, ask her where Terry is. She stirs but doesn’t open her eyes. I say it again and she says, “Home with Beth Anne”—which is what you call Aunt Beth when she’s your sister—and she sounds surprisingly fine about it.
I say, “Go back to sleep, Mom.”
She mumbles something with a parental order in it, so I fake-mumble something back then sneak to the other side of the curtain where the room is empty. I take out Mom’s phone to call the house and ask about Terry, but Liv hits me with another text.
Liv: Marcus is there but sayz u not so much.
Me: Where?
Liv: in the DDonuts lot across from the hospital. hurry?
Me: down in 2
Why won’t he meet me in the hospital lot?
This would all be easier if someone, I don’t know, would just float up to my hospital window, break the unbreakable glass and glide me out of here. . . .
I stick my head into the hallway and there’s no one sitting next to my door, not even a chair. There are doctors and nurses running up and down the hallway, all of them wearing white masks. Orderlies push occupied gurneys around and leave them parallel parked in the hallway. Everyone is coughing and talking. A couple of guys in army fatigues speedwalk past my room. They’re wearing masks, too, with a camo print on the crinkly paper.
Now I’m scared, and kind of want my own mask. I duck back inside the room and find a stash in the cabinets. I put it on and my breathing is Darth Vader loud.
Okay. I take a few deep breaths that are supposed to clear my head, then double-knot my sneaker laces because it’s the only thing I can think to do before tip-toeing out into the hallway.
The chaos has intensified, with more runners and shouters, more abandoned patients on gurneys. I think my bio teacher, Ms. Looney, the one with her right leg three inches longer than her left, is on the gurney across from me. All the patients look like they’re Mom and Dad’s age or older. Sick adults are multiplying like cells under a microscope in one of those scary outbreak movies.
I sidestep away from the nurse’s station, hopefully not toward some restricted area. I follow the winding hallway and I pass way more army guys, then to the elevator where another mess of army guys is waiting and talking loudly into their masks, speaking some weird language of abbreviations I don’t understand.
I slip past them and to the stairs. I jog down the three flights, my face sweating in the mask, and I’m in the emergency room/lobby that’s flooded with coughing, sneezing adults.
I put my head down and march out the front double doors, which are propped open and guarded. I can’t stop, so I don’t. I get a few steps past and one of the guards shouts after me, something about where I’m going. I don’t know, so it’s easy for me to turn around quickly, walk backwards, wave and point at the lot, like I’m just going there for my toothbrush or my blanket, or I just need to duck behind this group of parked-but-still-wailing ambulances . . . and then I’m into the full parking lot, ducking between car
s parked on the curbs and cement islands.
I look over my shoulder. No army guys.
At the back of the lot I cut through a small patch of woods, ditch my mask, then loop around on Main Street to the Dunkin’ Donuts. There’s Liv’s sis’s car sitting by itself, and Marcus behind the wheel.
He’s looking at me, but it’s like he doesn’t see me. I wave my arms fast enough to helicopter around his car. He absently pushes open the passenger door and I drop myself in.
“What’s going on over there?” he says, and points at the hospital. Two army jeeps are blocking off the road right next to the emergency entrance.
“Everyone’s sick. Some kind of flu, maybe. My parents are still in there.”
Marcus hasn’t moved, hasn’t started the car. He sneezes. Great, he has it too, yeah? He doesn’t seem as sick as everyone else in the hospital though.
I start shaking in my seat. International body language for let’s go! let’s go!
He says, “My parents are sick, too. It’s how I, you know, snuck out. Should I go back home?”
“I—I don’t know. Maybe? Are you sick, too?”
“Don’t think so. Feel a little weird, but okay, I guess.”
“Good enough for me. Let’s go then.”
He starts the car. “Have you seen Liv yet? What she can do?”
“Not up close.”
He nods like I’m offering deep wisdom, the kind you find in a fortune cookie.
“Marcus?”
“Yeah?” He’s clearly spooked by the scene at the hospital.
“Thanks for getting me. But, can we, like, go now? And quick, before the army dudes want some donuts or something?”
“Yeah, okay.” He shifts into drive and starts a slow roll. “I’m going to go home after I drop you off, I think.”
Home. Right. Home is where Terry and Aunt Beth are supposed to be. I take out Mom’s cell and call home. No one answers.
Marcus drives away from the roadblock and the hospital, puttering along at below the speed limit. He’s probably driven even less than Liv has and is only behind the wheel because she made him. And by making him, I mean she probably kicked or punched him over the phone.
I’m still vibrating in my seat, trying to psychically goose the speed up, until I can’t stand it anymore. “Hey, leadfoot,” I say a couple of minutes into it, just real casual. “Think we can swing by my house first? Real quick, only be a minute, in and out, promise.”
The reason I don’t look at him when I say this is that’s it not so easy to lie to your friends.
11.
Because the front window of Liv’s sister’s car is down, I stick my head out like I’m a dog. Is this what it’s like, flying? Just giving yourself over to the rush, not worrying about falling, even though you’ve got to come down somehow?
That’s not what I’m supposed to be thinking, though. The wind-blast is supposed to be clearing the cobwebs from my head. But it’s still scary. Most of that’s due to Marcus, taking all the turns wide, and I’m not talking safe-wide, or even grandma-wide, I’m talking geometrically wide, paranoid-wide, stop-me-Officer-this-isn’t-my-car-and-I-don’t-have-a-license-anyway wide. The front bumper whispers against three telephone poles, and he just misses flattening some hunched-over coughing dude in a Smart Car.
What’s even more scary is that dude in his Smart Car, his is the only car we see the whole ride. The streets are empty. It’s a ghost town. No packs of kids wandering the sidewalks. No dog-walkers, bikers, joggers, porch-sitters, or lookie-loos.
We turn right onto my street and the left side of the car goes up on a curb. I’ve never driven before—how hard can it be, though, right? I mean, I’ve played videogames with steering wheels. I’m seriously considering reaching across, opening Marcus’s door, hip-checking him out, watching this pretty little skaterboy roll, and taking the wheel, taking my shot at keeping it between the lines, but somehow we’re at my house already.
There are two cars in my driveway and two more parked out front. No sign of any bad-guy brown cars. The big green SUV is Aunt Beth’s. She’s more interested in saving souls and lugging around her kid cantina than saving the planet.
Marcus makes a crooked line with Liv’s sis’s car at the end of the driveway, boxing everyone in. He says, “Whose are all the cars?”
“Them.”
“Them?”
“The Claremonts’.” I wasn’t expecting all these cars, just Aunt Beth’s. She brought company, must be making this into a revival or something. Maybe they’re all inside holding hands, performing some sort of exorcism on the house, trying to clean it. Good luck with that, guys. Don’t forget under the fridge.
“I’ll stay here,” Marcus says. “You’re in and out, right?” He looks around, probably waiting for his cop-dad to pop out from the back seat like some never-dead slasher from a cheesy horror flick.
I leak out of the car and guide the door shut. When I’m halfway across the lawn, Liv texts me.
Liv: why so slow?
I stop and look up. Can she see me? Is she up there with Floating Boy, texting and laughing, laughing and texting? And flying? The signal’s got to be crystal up there.
Liv: u should be at the mill already. like before now
Me: soon. home checkmark terry first.
Liv: hurry scurry
I creep up to the side door, smooth out the permanent wrinkles in my zombie tee, like that’s going to help me with the Claremonts, then it’s through the door and into the house. Kitchen lights are on but no one’s in there, and the chairs are gone from the table. All kinds of voices are coming from the living room, and I get a hospital hallway flashback. Only these voices are hushed, in unison. Praying, naturally.
“Hello? It’s me. Mary,” I call out, throwing my voice around the corner, and hoping I don’t find them all wearing robes, hands on Terry, dousing him with holy water.
I make the turn Marcus-wide. Aunt Beth is in the middle of the couch. Pigtails on a woman her age is just so wrong. On her right side is an old woman, her mother-in-law, I think—some shrivelly version of a mother-in-law anyway—but I can’t be sure without an album, a family tree, and my own mom to park-ranger me through. Her face is all scrunched up like she thinks pigtails suck, too.
On the other side of Aunt Beth is a squat older guy with fire-hose veins bulging from his brown-bag neck. Sitting in kitchen chairs, forming a weird kind of Stonehenge circle with the couch, are three men and another woman.
The men look like the kind who belong to one of those clubs for old men, where everyone wears stupid little hats and hates everything. The woman is the youngest and might be Aunt Beth’s sister-in-law. It’s weird because she kind of looks a little like a younger version of Aunt Beth, but no pigtails. Her eyes go moon-big on me. They all have Bibles in their laps.
Before I can ask about Terry, the one with the crazy-wide, laser-beam eyes says, “Where is he?” She coughs, sneezes, and wipes her face on the back of her long black sleeves. So nasty.
“Terry?” I say, and my insides crumble all over again.
The circle pipes in with everyone talking at once, everyone coughing and leaking snot out of their blotchy faces; everyone sick, a delirious kind of sick. They all ask the same basic question:
“Where is the boy?”
“Who is he?”
“The boy!”
“You best be not hiding him, girl.”
“Protecting him.”
“He’s to blame.”
“For everything.”
I hold my don’t-shoot hands up and say, “Whoa, whoa. I’m just here to see—”
Aunt Beth interrupts. “Mary, we’re talking about the boy who came, uninvited I might add, to my Jack’s party.” She pauses to unleash her own chest-rattling cough, and then tries to give me an everything-is-peaches smile. It looks like a cross-out of a smile instead.
“What, why would I—”
The circle chimes in again:
“The one who flew away.”
“The one who performed a blasphemy in front of us.”
“All of us.”
“He is to blame for this.”
“For Jack.”
“For Terry.”
“For everyone.”
“He’s a plague.”
“A pestilence.”
As Twilight Zone as their unified weirdness is, I’m getting pissed. I mean, hey, this is my house, right? This is my living room. “Everyone be quiet!” I yell, my hands curled into Mom-fists by my hips.
The Claremonts stop, clearly shocked at my outburst. Score one for the home team.
Aunt Beth’s smile is gone. I can feel bad for her because her Jack is like Terry who is like Liv who is like . . . She says, “Your mother told me you’ve seen the boy since the party, multiple times.”
Thanks, Mom. “I’m trying to help him. He’s trying to help me. To help Terry.”
“Well, we want to help him, too, Mary,” she says, adding my name at the end like its own meaningful little punctuation mark. “Please let us help him. Tell us where he is.”
“I—I don’t know.” I look around the circle and can tell that’s not good enough. Like I might be stoned to death, or buried under an avalanche of their Bibles if I don’t give more. “I saw him on top of the water tower last night,” I finally say. “And I climbed up and then fell off and landed in the hospital. You tell me how I’m supposed to know where he is right now.” I’m getting more pissed and it feels good. Unless the more-pissed feeling is just fear with some extra hot sauce on it.
Aunt Beth’s sis-in-law, in her phlegmiest voice, says, “She’s lying.”
Vein-man agrees, but he’s coughing too much to do more than just nod.