The Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn't Fly

by Floating Boy

  And then the cell phone in my pocket rings. It’s not just on loud, it’s on whatever setting is six bumps above that—a measure of how old my mom is or how insane she is about maybe missing a call.

  And the ring tone, it’s “Wind Beneath My Wings.” Wunderbar.

  Everyone yells at me in whispers to shut the phone off. I wiggle and squirm on Floating Boy’s back, trying to hold him, the directions, and the flashlight with one hand, and dig in my pocket for the phone with the other. I get the phone out, its rhinestone skin catching on every fabric of denim possible, and what the caller ID says, it’s MARY. A picture of me from second grade smiles up from the ancient screen.

  I’m calling my own phone. No. I’m calling my mother’s phone. With my phone. No, no—my stolen-by-Barron phone is calling my mother’s phone.

  I answer, “It’s me, it’s me.” Everyone shushes me again, Liv yanks on my bungee, cinching my waist, and I lose my breath.

  On the other end all I hear is some fuzz, muffled noises, and there’s someone coughing, like really hacking up a lung. Oh my god, Barron has leg-dialed me with my own phone!

  I look around to everyone and nod my head at the phone like they’re supposed to know what that means. I adjust myself on Floating Boy’s back and press the phone against my ear. And I hear it, soft and in the background. There’s crying. Terry!

  I scream, “Terry! Terry!” into the phone before even thinking.

  Liv and everyone else yell at me again, this time in their outdoor voices, nothing whispery or secret about it. We all waver and bobble in the air like we’re hitting turbulence, only I know it’s me. I’m the turbulence.

  It sounds like something is knocking up against the phone, then the line goes clear. There’s that hiss of open space, of not-in-a-pocket, and Terry is louder. His crying is the worst thing I’ve ever heard, and then it cuts out right as a hot white light flashes on, blinding me. I’m thinking that something finally broke in my head, some sort of circuit breaker flipped. I bury my face into Floating Boy’s back.

  “They see us!” Marcus yells, twisting around in the air to point.

  I squint at the road block down below and we’re caught in one of the heavy-duty spotlights at the roadblock. Maybe they think we’re giant moths and we’ll just fly right into their bug zapper.

  Someone down there with a thick, angry, and official voice gets on the megaphone, a bullhorn, whatever they call it. He says that we are not to pass over the roadblock, we are to turn around, or we’ll be grounded by force. He repeats his message.

  From right beside my head, then, Liv’s cell phone snaps a picture of what must look like the sun.

  “I got you!” she yells down to the voice, then bicycles her legs. I don’t know if she’s been acting like our rudder this whole time or not, but we start to slowly turn away. I think Marcus might be whimpering. We all hear helicopter blades whomping in the distance, and Floating Boy kicks his legs like Liv and windmills his arms.

  “Can’t get near helicopters,” he says. “Not those. They’ll suck us right up.”

  I say, “Let’s just land. Maybe we can talk to them. Maybe they’ll help us.”

  Yeah, I’ll be able to convince the army, the National Guard, and the President that some evil genius/mad scientist has my brother in some secret shack in the woods, and that they don’t have to take the clearly contagious Floating Boy—the one with no ID and no parents—they don’t have to take him and the rest of us to the secret base they closed in Salisbury. What’ll happen is they’ll give us numbers and file us away with the rest of the secrets.

  Marcus suddenly dips below me, and drags Liv lower with him. More of a dive than a dip, really. The bungee around my waist pulls fast and tight, turning me, pulling me.

  I lose some of my grip on my ride’s shoulders and I drop the flashlight and directions. Crud. More crud: I slide down Floating Boy’s back and try to hook my arms around his waist, and now we all drop with Marcus. The roadblock spotlight follows the bouncing ball that is us.

  We lose half our altitude and become the piñata people. They might be able to hit us with a really long stick. Now Marcus and I are both dangling as Floating Boy has us each by one hand. Liv is attached to Marcus, the other cord still wrapped around her wrist.

  She yells, “What’s happening?” struggling to hold Marcus up, to hold us all up. She goes lower, hooks her arms under Marcus’s armpits and around his chest. Floating Boy reaches down and does the same for me.

  There’s more shouting from below. Boots running on the pavement and following us. Men in green suits carrying black guns. We’re only twenty feet above the ground.

  I say, “I’m so sorry, guys, I’m so . . .” and I start to untie the cord around my waist, so I’m not connected to Liv anymore.

  “Mary!”

  Next I’ll pry Floating Boy’s fingers apart. I’ll be okay from this height. Then they can float away and be safe. And I’ll fall, like always. And then I’ll run, and lead the army dudes in the opposite direction of Middleton and Terry.

  “Mary! Stop it!” Liv says.

  “Just let me go!” I yell to her.

  As she’s winding up to tell me no at serious volume, there’s a loud, glass-shattering pop, and the spotlight flares up even brighter than it was before. Then it just fizzles down to black.

  My first thought is that Liv zinged her cell down into the glass. But no, she’d chew her hand off first because she has two of those.

  The way we all flinch from the sound, too, it twists us into a slow, corkscrew spin. Everything is dark. I hold my breath, and I hold Floating Boy’s hands against my chest.

  “I don’t—” I start to say, except now there’s this lonesome figure below us. It’s waving a stick at us.

  Marcus says, “Is that? Logan?”

  And his shotgun, yes. What’s he doing? Oh, gross, does he think we’re all like his buds now because of the bridge and now the mill? How is he here? He must’ve seen us ditch the car on the mill road and followed us, stalked us. Totally something he’d do.

  But now, now he’s not sneaking around anymore. He’s running away, waving at us, and yelling at the soldiers behind him, something about how they have to get out of his town, which again, is so totally Logan. I guess there’s something to be said for being dependably predictable.

  Logan’s run turns into a take-off, up into the air, floating in an opposite direction from us. Our corkscrew has taken us away from Main Street. We’re floating parallel to it, on a side street.

  We’re low enough to the ground that the downtown rows of two-family houses protect us from the view of the roadblock. No one seems to be headed our way. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men are going after Logan now.

  But. Those helicopter noises are still there in the distance, the quickly approaching distance if that makes sense.

  “So what do we do now?” Marcus asks.

  15.

  The wind blows. It kicks our collective butts all over downtown Ipswich. Marcus still isn’t floating. He’s taking deep breaths, holding them in, then letting them out fast and inhaling again, trying to fill himself up with floaty air, maybe. I don’t think him panicking and hyperventilating is going to put him back into balloon mode.

  Not that I know anything about it, but I want to tell him that it’s probably like how in the dark you can see something if you look right beside it, right? Maybe that’s how floating works: don’t think about floating, just think about where you want to go instead. Maybe my overthinking the floating is the reason why I’m not. If I stopped thinking could I be like everyone else? Is that what normal is, just walking around with an empty head?

  What we need to do is land, regroup, re-plan, re-everything, but—big surprise—there’s a small crew of national guards below, shuffling along, waiting for us to come down. Their coughs and sneezes echo through the weirdly empty downtown and up to us. At lea
st they haven’t aimed their guns at us yet. It’s easier for us to barely stay afloat when they’re not trying to put holes in us.

  “They’re talking about us,” Marcus says, miming their walkie-talkies.

  “That’s not nice,” Liv says in her Brit accent. She giggles and we sink lower.

  “Crap,” Marcus says, perfectly.

  Floating Boy has gone all quiet on us. He’s breathing heavy under the strain of carrying all of us. He hasn’t said anything to Marcus about how he can start floating again, about whatever trick there has to be. Is he mad at us? I don’t know. It feels like it’s a don’t-bother-me-I’m-thinking kind of quiet.

  And then it’s me who gets the bright idea. I nudge Marcus in the ribs with a pointy elbow, and say, “Ballast.”

  “What’d you call me?”

  “Get lighter, dumbass.” I kick off my Chuck Taylors. They’re made of canvas so they probably don’t weigh too much, but every little bit, right? I don’t watch their sad fall down to the street.

  Marcus has on big clunker basketball sneakers, and even though he’s as skinny as a strand of spaghetti, his feet have to be like size thousand or something. Each shoe probably weighs five pounds.

  He looks at me like I’m asking him to cut off a finger. “I need these—they cost a lot of money. My dad—”

  I elbow him in the ribs again, harder this time, and it’s totally something Liv would do. “You’d rather fall?” I say.

  Those cement shoes slide off his feet, and I swear I feel us rise in the air a bit. His big rubber-soled sneakers twirl down to the pavement and hardly bounce when they hit. The army guys duck, cover, and grumble something official into their walkie-talkies.

  “You know, that actually helps,” Liv says. “I can feel it.”

  I don’t have much else on me I can ditch. I let my keys go. The key chain itself is a thick pewter metal soccer ball. Plus there’s my house key, a key to the back of the garage, a little bronze key to luggage I never lock, some other random key that I found but don’t know what it goes to, and a USB flash drive with all the unfinished homework of spring.

  “You wearing tighties or boxers, big boy?” Liv says to Marcus.

  “What?”

  “Your jeans have to be like fifty pounds, not even counting the belt and the chain wallet.”

  “I’m not—”

  “It’s an emergency! Every little bit helps. Even Mare’s keys made you both feel a little lighter.”

  She’s totally lying, but he loses the pants anyway. They fall like a bag of rocks, and we bob up at least ten feet. We laugh, but more out of surprise that he actually did it.

  “Are those pelicans?” I ask about the small white birds on his blue boxers.

  “Shut up.”

  Floating Boy laughs in my ear. It’s a good laugh. And I know it sounds totally stupid, but it makes me feel lighter.

  Marcus mumbles something about him thinking he can feel his float coming back. We bob up a little higher. Then Liv tells us to look. Or she’s yelling it, really, and yelling it as I’m seeing it, too.

  It happens so fast, I’m not sure it’s possible that I can actually see it happening, but looking past downtown, into the surrounding burbs, the lights are going out, and the darkness that replaces all those street lamps and houselights, it rolls at us like a shock wave. All the lights around us go out, and we’re in the dark.

  We all yell at once, asking who can see what, and I scream, thinking I see my legs about to smash into the chimney of some building, but they don’t and I don’t.

  The helicopter sounds are a lot closer now somehow and, I mean—how could they sneak up on us like that? We’re moving and spinning in the dark, and it’s all so disorienting. Over there, I can see them now: two helicopters with searchlights, and they’re gaining on us.

  “We gotta go,” Floating Boy says.

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere. Anywhere.”

  We pick up speed, and I know that Floating Boy is pushing us, driving us, somehow. With the blackout, there’s more stars than I’ve ever seen around here, and the half-moon, it puts us in a weird white light that makes everything seem like it’s moving slower. We stop spinning and gain some sort of direction. We even pick up speed, but there’s no way it’s going to be enough. The helicopters are closing in on us.

  “We should land,” Marcus says, even though he’s floating again, mostly on his own, even if he doesn’t trust it as much as before. He grabs my arm, trying to help pull the dead weight that I am.

  Liv says, “No, not yet.”

  We’re through downtown, and flying over Rt. 133, heading away from the mill, back toward my neighborhood.

  “Why not?”

  “She’s right,” I say. “If we land now, they’ll grab us. Aim for—aim for the water tower, all right? Then we’ll go all low and lose them in the woods near the river.”

  And, of course, it’s now while we’re floating away for our lives, I get another fab idea. Thinking must be easier when you’re fifty feet up and don’t have shoes. Now I think I know how we can find Barron’s shack, even without the handy dandy map.

  When we’re almost to the tower, one helicopter buzzes to our left and swoops away, but the other one passes above us. It probably clears us by a hundred feet, but I can still feel the heat from its engine. The blast of rotor wind sends us careening away from the water tower and toward the neighborhood. My neighborhood. And yeah, there’s one house with a landing strip. A house that has reflective paint all bright and shiny on its roof. Who would do something like that?

  Floating Boy says, “We’re going.”

  I’m sure in his head it makes sense for us to land there: the helicopter shot us way off course, away from the water tower, and we have to land before the helicopters come back for us, and landing where we can actually see where we’re landing is a definite bonus. But he doesn’t know about the—about the Claremont complication, let’s call it.

  I say, “No, not there! Anywhere else, anywhere!”

  Too late. Floating Boy shifts his weight, holds me lower, and we twist down toward my roof, falling fast. Those painted shingles rush at us and I lift my legs, trying to get into the emergency crash landing position they tell you about on planes, or movies about planes.

  The second before the last second, Floating Boy pulls back, slowing us down, and my feet skid on the roof. I’m the landing gear and I’m only wearing socks. But I land standing—okay: stumbling—and so do they.

  “We can’t stay here,” I say as soon as I can breathe again. Everyone looks at me like I’m crazy. Each of them is bent at the waist, hands on knees, looking like spent marathoners.

  “Give us a sec,” Liv says. “That wasn’t easy, you know?”

  No, I don’t know. And I hate her a little bit for saying that, even if it is true.

  “Fine, but we can’t stay. The helicopters will come back. Army dudes, too. And worse, the Claremonts might still be here.”

  Marcus straightens up. “Oh, yeah. You think those crazies are still here?”

  I make a sssh face, scramble to my window, and press the side of my face against the screen. I can hear people yelling and scrambling inside the dark house. Hopefully they’re loud enough that they didn’t hear us crater into the roof, and are stumbling around looking for candles and flashlights.

  “Come on, let’s go,” I say.

  I slide-step down to the edge of the roof, and up pops my little cousin Jake. He has a rope around his chest. The knot is fat, maybe triple and quadruple tied.

  Another kid pops up next to him. She’s a little older, maybe Terry’s age. She’s one of the tadpoles I had to watch in the kiddie pool at Jake’s party. She has a flashlight in her hand and shines it in my face.

  “Mommy, Mommy, on the roof!” she starts in, and her voice—the girl has trumpets for lungs.

  More kids on strings pop up n
ext to the roof. Two of them have green glow sticks, and it makes them look like aliens.

  Liv pulls up next to me. “What the what?”

  It’s the Claremonts. There are more of them, if that’s possible. They’re gathered in the front yard and they have their children tethered to them. And all of them, they’re just coughing and sniffling and swaying, and I can’t help but think of zombies again. That they’re not a congregation, they’re a horde.

  Then they see Floating Boy behind me, and for an instant they’re all healed. No more sniffling, no coughing.

  “Him!” one of them shouts, right in time with the countdown in my head.

  The rest of them shout in agreement. They press up against the house, their kids on strings getting tangled. The tall ones grab the gutters and try to pull themselves up after us, but thankfully my dad used the wrong kind of nails or something: the gutters peel off and get tangled in the kid strings.

  The four of us retreat, climbing up the roof, past my window, to the roof’s peak. The other three grab me, wrap their arms around me, getting ready to fly me somewhere else, but I hear the helicopter circling back toward the bull’s-eye that is my roof.

  And we’re not going anywhere, either. Whatever it is that allows Liv and them enough float to pull me up into the sky, it’s all been used up. Their arms and legs are shaking. They can’t carry me anymore. And I don’t want to be carried anymore.

  “Hey, hey. No, guys, listen. New plan.”

  I tell them. They listen. Liv and Marcus try to interrupt. They throw a bunch of Mares and buts at me, and stuff like:

  “No way.”

  “We’re coming, too.”

  “It won’t work.”

  Then Floating Boy says, “I think she’s right.” The way he says it, it makes them stop arguing with me. And it makes me think that he knows more than he’s been telling us.

  I think Liv gets the same vibe, too. She looks at Floating Boy like she wants to smack him. It’s a weird moment, and it feels like everything is changing again.