The Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn't Fly

by Floating Boy

  “Then Terry—he’s gone,” I say.

  “Like me,” Floating Boy says.

  “You don’t remember anything?” Liv says again.

  “It’s hard. Hard to remember,” he says, each word getting quieter until there’s none left.

  At which point Logan barrels down, clipping Marcus on the shoulder, knocking him into Floating Boy. “My bad, my bad!” Logan calls back, his feet already pushing off the edge, back into the big, floaty wrestling match in the sky.

  “We can’t think here,” I say. “Can’t even talk.”

  Marcus just glares at Logan. Liv holds onto his left arm with both hands, like she’s keeping him there. “Where to?” she says.

  “Can’t we just float around and look for a—a cabin, right?” I say to Floating Boy, but the hopelessness of that idea is already in my voice.

  He nods. Then he shrugs so I know it’s a not-sure nod.

  Liv takes my hand. “We’re gone,” she says, and pulls me to the rickety door.

  When I look back to make sure Floating Boy’s coming, too, that he knows he’s a part of us now—that we need him—he’s gone. He stepped off the edge of the mill to get down to the car. I hope.

  And don’t worry, just because all the other kids are jumping off the edge of the old mill, that doesn’t mean I’m going to do it, too.

  13.

  Where we end up is the coffee shop.

  Correction: the deserted coffee shop.

  When nobody ever comes to the counter, Liv finally opens the cooler, brings us back four cold frappuccinos. The frosty air swirls up when we twist the metal caps off.

  Floating Boy takes a sip, coughs it back up, tries to catch it with his hand. It drips through his fingers.

  “Not chocolate milk, is it?” Liv says.

  “That was—so gross.”

  Speaking of gross, Liv and Marcus blow their noses at the same time, then giggle. Marcus smiles, shrugs, and pushes a napkin across the table to Floating Boy. He wipes his hands, and when he thinks no one is looking, he wipes his tongue, too.

  “Awesome,” I say.

  He sticks said tongue out at me.

  We lean over the map Marcus produced from who-knows-where. It’s a map of all of Massachusetts. Yes, it’s hopeless.

  “Where you were, did it snow there in the winter?” Liv asks.

  Floating Boy nods and shrugs. A shrug nod.

  “Could you hear anything?” Marcus asks.

  “Radio!” I say, sitting up. “What stations did you listen to?”

  “Stations?” Floating Boy says back.

  “News, at least?” Liv asks.

  “Nobody listens to the news,” Marcus says, sitting back from the table.

  “Or reads papers?” I try, and now I’m the one with the statement-questions.

  Floating Boy shakes his head no.

  When the sirens come on—“Fire truck,” Marcus says, able to tell a difference, I guess—we all look out the window. Maybe there’s a fire truck somewhere, but what rumbles by is some big, green army truck, the kind with a round tent on the back and filled with all these grim-faced soldiers. They’re grim-eyed, anyway. The rest of their faces are hidden behind gas masks.

  “My dad’s going to kill me,” Marcus says.

  Nobody disagrees, though Floating Boy’s eyes ratchet up a little, like he’s worried, like he thinks Marcus might be serious.

  “Listen,” Liv says then. “Storms with blackouts aren’t every week, are they?”

  “A month ago,” Floating Boy says. “Ish.”

  “Exactly. All we have to do is—is look up the wind patterns or cloud direction or whatever. And—and how long were you up there that night?”

  He says, “It wasn’t a straight line, though. It was like—just swirling. I thought I was dead. Like I was a leaf that dreamed of being a kid, but had woken up, you know?”

  Liv repeats her question, “Yo, how long were you up there? For two hours? One hour?”

  “Hour and a half?” he tries.

  “Are you like, always floating? I mean, how long can it last?” Marcus says then.

  “No. Not always. But when I am, I don’t know. Hour and a half,” Floating Boy says again.

  Which means either Logan and his crew are getting a surprise right about now or Floating Boy’s seriously guessing here, or both. But it’s better than nothing. I do remember the storm in late July that knocked the power out. I slept through it, and only woke up when Mom was screaming about the power and something about a stupid blinking alarm clock.

  Liv gets up and paces. She comes back this time with chocolate and pretzels.

  “We’ll pay,” she says in response to my glare.

  The four of us can’t keep our hands out of those bags.

  “How far can a person drift in an hour and a half?” Liv says, drawing a big oval around Ipswich. So now we’re down to a quarter of Massachusetts. Great.

  I haul my laptop up and give the cord to Marcus. He finds an outlet.

  “Wireless is up,” I inform them, waggling my fingers in the air to show that, even without adults around, we still have the ’net. It’s not the end of the world yet.

  “Search, I don’t know, last month,” Liv says. “Big storm.”

  “I don’t even remember it,” Marcus says on his way to the bathroom.

  “Lots of lightning,” Floating Boy chimes in.

  The news stations don’t archive their old weather footage, do they? A few clicks and the answer is a fat no. Why would they? Everybody wants to know what tomorrow’s going to be like, not what yesterday was like.

  I change the search to “blackout.” There are fewer returns, but they’re all about famous blackouts. And German metal bands. And political stuff.

  I pull the screen closed halfway and look up just in time to see Marcus coming back. Walking on the ceiling, his smile is so big.

  “Thought you were grounded?” Liv says, reaching up to brush his fingertips.

  Marcus shrugs, and his next step goes through the ceiling tile, his leg going in up to the thigh.

  “We’ll pay for that, too,” Liv says, looking down now.

  “Hey, um,” Floating Boy says then.

  He’s got the laptop unfolded and the useless browser is all frozen. It’s not his fault. If there’s a toolbar or gadget to add on, my dad’s added it on. I’m surprised the thing even works. I kill the browser. Behind it is the desktop.

  “Just click here—” I say, but Floating Boy’s leaning in now. We go to the paranormal directory I found earlier. “Yeah, you’ll like that,” I add, and click through for him. We get to the cow icon that’s impossible to click on. I click on it.

  “What is it?” Marcus says, behind us now but upside down, like a bat.

  “Where milk comes from,” Liv says, her thighs suddenly pressing against the bottom of the glass table, gravity reversing for her, too.

  The video, it’s starting. The beer drinkers do their ninja thing to sneak up on this totally unsuspecting cow. The cow—surprise, surprise—throws up the whole time, and then it looks around, lifts off.

  Marcus wows his mouth out, impressed, and Floating Boy smiles, too.

  “The cows,” he says. “Oh yeah.”

  “What?” I say.

  “Barron sometimes tests on cows, like to process it or grow it or something? I don’t know. But they catch it too fast, keep flying away. I had to go out with him once, and help catch them.”

  “You’ve seen these cows,” Liv says to him, barely keeping herself at the table.

  “They were fun,” he says. “There was like a . . . like a herd, I guess. A big group of them. They’re really—Barron called them ideal subjects?”

  “Mary,” Liv says, taking me by the wrist, using me as ballast—thanks. “He saw these cows.”

  “Yeah?” I say.

 
“Don’t they put marks on cows?” she says then.

  “They still do that?” Marcus calls down from his perch.

  “Tattoos, yeah,” I say. “What do they call them, ‘brands?’ I don’t know.”

  “Doesn’t that, like, burn them or something?” Marcus asks, unable to get over that part of it.

  I pull the laptop back. Liv is behind me now, holding on, her legs floating up behind her. We go frame-by-frame through the video, until there’s some kind of mark on the cow’s rump.

  “Ouch,” Marcus says. “Now just flip it.”

  “Flip it?”

  “Here,” he says, and we pass the laptop up—this is the freakiest coffee shop ever—and Marcus does his keystroke magic, all in about three seconds. Then he turns the laptop back around and holds it down to us.

  He’s made the screen into a negative of itself, zoomed in and, with the dark light, the light dark, the cow brand is so obvious now: a “Y” with curved skis on. Or a one-legged person skiing. And very happy about it.

  “Give that to me,” Liv says, and burrows into the web. She doesn’t find a brand decoder ring but does find pages with all of them listed.

  “Rocking Y,” Floating Boy says just before Liv does, and after that it’s like we’re running downhill. Turns out Rocking Y is the brand of an old milk farm just over in Middleton.

  I take the laptop, tab us over to some satellite views, go terrain instead of map, and it only takes ten minutes of scrolling the cursor across the hills. It’s there, right near where the Ipswich River goes into a big bend, at the best zoom the military will let us have.

  Floating Boy stands up and pushes back from the table hard. What we’re zoomed in on is the roof of this one lost little cabin, way out in nowhere.

  “That’s it,” I say, pegging the coordinates, then zooming out for some roads that might be close and writing them down, too.

  “I—I can’t,” Floating Boy says.

  Liv is just looking at him. None of us knows what to say or how to fix this.

  “He’ll—he’ll keep me there again.”

  “We won’t let him,” I say, closing the laptop. “I promise.”

  “Well then?” Marcus says. He drifts down to the ground beside Liv, who’s got her arm hooked under the coffee counter, trying to snag one more cinnamon bun, I guess.

  “Middleton,” I say, tucking the laptop under my arm, whipping the cord to myself. “Terry.”

  14.

  We’re in the car again. Girls in front, boys in back.

  I’m riding shotgun, but not with any sort of shotgun, definitely not Logan’s. Instead, I have coffee shop leaflets and flyers in my hands, the ones with scrawled out directions to Barron’s shack. Or shed.

  Liv pumps Floating Boy for more info on the why and how of him, and of how he and they are all floating. Of course, he only can speak for him, which is less confusing than it sounds. He tells her what he told me up on the water tower. He tells her about Barron and the shots, how it’s supposed to be different for some people, how the adults only get the “bad parts.” That’s me finger-quoting bad parts. I still don’t know what the bad parts could be, but it has to be something to do with my sick parents and everyone else’s sick parents in the hospital, yeah?

  Liv goes quiet, and I think for the first time, she’s worried about her own floaty self, about what she’s going to do about this.

  Marcus says, “Hey, Twitter is, like, freaking about everyone getting sick in Ipswich. And there’s some army base—didn’t even know it was there, near Salsbury—under weird lockdown.” Marcus disappears into his smartphone (the one he has to be grounded from), then adds, “They’re saying webstreamed police scanners in the area are down, too. Awesome.”

  “That’s not awesome,” I tell him.

  Liv breaks in and asks, “How come Mare can’t—how come she hasn’t, you know, caught the floating like the rest of us?” She says it like she’s sorry she has to ask it, knows on some level it’ll make me feel bad, but she’d stop being Liv if she didn’t say the thing that everybody’s thinking.

  Floating Boy says, “Don’t know. Mr. Barron just told me once that other kids had, um, a different reaction. Not everyone floats.”

  Liv reaches across the bench seat and squeezes my hand. It feels like pity. Then Marcus asks her to keep both hands on the wheel, maybe? So, yeah, everything’s good and fine with our big rescue mission, at least until we get to the edge of town. Remember that green army truck we saw go past? Maybe it’s not the same one, but it looks the same. It’s there now, parked in the middle of the street. A big green roadblock, the ditch all chewed up in front of and behind it. Soldiers park like Liv, I guess.

  There are soldiers and guns, marshmallow suits and portable floodlights, and a big sign on the wooden horse thing—red and white, not green. It says QUARANTINE.

  As in us: we’re quarantined.

  For maybe thirty seconds, there’s a standoff of sorts. We don’t say anything to each other, just stare, like if we stare long enough, the roadblock soldiers will blink and let us through. But then we remember we’re just kids, that they have guns and orders, so Liv backs up carefully, legally, respectfully even.

  Marcus whistles out the window, making the backing-up sound big trucks make. He’s always so helpful. We head back toward town, toward we-don’t-know-where-we’re-going-yet, but well under the speed limit.

  “So?” Liv says. “Can’t say this doesn’t suck.”

  “What do they think is wrong with—what do they think we have?” Marcus says, casting around for answer. “Do you think they’ve blocked, I don’t know, everything?”

  “Kind of what quarantine means,” I tell him.

  Liv goes off on a wild-goose plan, saying Marcus should ask his dad to police-escort us out of town. Marcus then goes off about her being some kind of effing crazy, that his dad is sick and can’t move, like everyone else. Then Liv, mad now that her plan is being blasted, starts saying stuff to get Marcus going, saying he should go home and swipe his dad’s police radio and badge so we can fake our way through the roadblock.

  In the middle of this, Floating Boy kind of shrugs and says, “We could maybe, like, fly there?” It makes Marcus and Liv go quiet. My heart soars and my stomach drops at the idea of flying with him again.

  “I just started,” Marcus says. “Don’t think I can control it so good.”

  Liv says, “What are they going to do, shoot us?”

  “Um, yeah. They’ve got guns and stuff,” says Marcus.

  “They won’t shoot at kids.” Then she holds her phone out, backwards to take a picture. “Especially if we’re taking pics and posting them on the net.”

  Floating Boy doesn’t say anything, even after Liv cuts the wheel hard, announces that we gotta ditch the car. She says ditch. She means park. I hope.

  We’re not that far away from the mill so we backtrack. Liv parks in a little weed-filled dip, totally not full of broken beer bottle glass, I’m sure. We don’t go all the way back to the mill lot because we don’t want Logan and his chimps seeing us, following us, doing anything in our general area.

  Marcus gets out and immediately starts floating up. He holds onto the doorframe and says, “I don’t know what I’m doing. What if I, you know, don’t stop going up?”

  My feet feel heavy on the dirt road. “You won’t,” I tell him. Because I’m an authority on the subject and all.

  Liv shuts the trunk. I didn’t even see her go back there. She has bungee-cord ties in her hands. “Better than nothing, right?”

  Liv ties our waists together, using two cords and weaving them through our belt loops. She has one extra cord she ties to Marcus, leaving him with a tail, or a leash, and she wraps the other end around her wrist.

  I can feel Liv getting lighter next to me. Marcus is already floating above us. Floating Boy gives me his flashlight and says, “You’re in charge of di
rections. Piggyback again?”

  Piggyback again, yeah. I go all dizzy for a second. This isn’t going to work and I think they know that, but we’re going to do it, anyway. Just because we’re trying doesn’t make me feel any better. I say, “All right, let’s go.”

  Our take-off has to look like clowns falling up into the sky. Like the sun, calling all its shadows home. I’m holding onto Floating Boy’s neck, the directions, and a flashlight all at the same time. Liv bumps into Floating Boy and me on his back. Marcus tugs at us from above, and we’re just kind of lumbering along, a tangle of balloons, forty feet above downtown Ipswich.

  Marcus and Liv share cute British banter, the kind people not dating find puke worthy. Floating Boy asks if we’re going the right way. I say yes, even though I’m not entirely sure.

  There are so many ways for this to fail. I can’t read the street signs from up this high, and the written directions give me only the fuzziest sense of where we need to go in Middleton. It’s not like we can just head sort of southwest, as the crow flies, like any of us are crow experts. As dumb as it sounds, we need to follow roads.

  I’m banking on us getting somewhat close to Barron’s place and then Floating Boy taking over, remembering how to get there, even though he says he can’t.

  I can’t help but think about how they can control their flying. And I think about Terry being able to float down the hallway and into my room, and maybe it’s an innate thing they suddenly just get, like riding a bike. Now that the normal folks are all becoming floaty freaks, I’m the new freak. Up in the air with them, I’ve never felt heavier.

  The roadblock is up ahead. I shut off my flashlight and tell everyone to shut up. Liv catches my eye, takes her cell phone out, itchy finger on the picture button.

  We veer left over a grove of trees, off the road but probably not far enough off the road. I can still see the roadblock and army dudes and their guns. I try to shift my weight left, to steer us all away. It doesn’t work. I don’t have that kind of control.