by Floating Boy
I don’t know, I’m being melodramatic, maybe. Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Liv and Marcus give in to my plan.
We make the boys turn around so Liv and I can switch t-shirts. As we’re swapping, Marcus says, “Yeah, we’re totally not watching you take off your shirts.”
Liv whisper-yells, “Pervs!” and Floating Boy laughs or coughs, I can’t tell which with my back turned.
Since Liv’s wearing obvious white sweats (that, yes, say “PINK” on the butt), we switch pants, too. I totally love seeing her in my zombie tee. And now I’m in a green t-shirt that’s way too tight near my armpits and shoulders.
Marcus and Floating Boy switch shirts, too. They’re built like each other, but Marcus doesn’t seem all that thrilled to be swapping out his DC gear for the plain gray.
So now, in the dark, Liv looks like me in the zombie tee. Marcus kinda looks like Floating Boy. Hopefully the crazies will think the pelican boxers are Floating Boy’s shorts. It’s what all the sinful kids are wearing this summer.
Liv says to Marcus, “Take off from here, and do this quick.” Then she punches my shoulder, something she’s never done before. Ever. It makes me love her all over again. “You bring Terry back to us at the mill, okay?”
I say, “Yeah, the mill.”
She looks at Floating Boy, waiting for his answer. It has to be the right one, I think, or she’s going to nip this operation in the bud.
“I promise?” he says, and gives her a crack of a smile.
It’s enough for Liv. She and Marcus jump up into the air, kind of shrug for traction, and stay there. She uses her arms more than Marcus does. He uses his legs and feet, looking like he’s on a skateboard. They float up and then over the front lawn.
The Claremonts explode again: more yelling and threats and bobbing children on strings, one of them slipping up too high. His string is untied, so I almost scream out for him, Claremont or not, and blow our cover. At the absolute last possible moment, though, one of the other floating Claremont babies reaches out and grabs his tether. Not to save his cousin, but just to chew on the string.
“All right,” I say to Floating Boy. “Follow me.”
I don’t let him offer to carry me down to the ground. I climb down the roof the hard way: hanging over the edge again, then falling. Floating Boy does the same. He lands heavier than I do, and kind of grunts about it.
“Gravity sucks, yeah?” I say, then run to the garage, but of course I can’t open the overhead door without electricity. So it’s off to the back entrance, through the kitchen.
There’s a lone lit candle on the kitchen table. I take it with me into the garage. The candle’s better than nothing, but just barely. Luckily, all the summer stuff is just tossed into the back corner, and I find what I want: an inner tube.
“Ever go tubing?” I say over my shoulder.
16.
The thing about running with someone who can fly—when you’re holding hands—is that your steps, sometimes they’re not steps at all. They’re more like bounds. And our bounds are twenty feet apart.
We cut back toward the river and angle through Liv’s neighborhood. The inner tube is hooked under my other arm, and we’re still holding each other’s hand as we clear a parked car, long-ways. This shouldn’t be fun, right? I mean, Terry’s been kidnapped by a mad scientist guy and we’re jumping cars in the middle of quarantine night.
The night sky above us is crisscrossed with spotlights. Some are from the ground, from those lights in the back of military trucks, and some are from the air, attached to helicopters.
And more lights, too. Parents are out with whatever flashlights they can scrounge, poking them up into the sky. Their lights are all trembly because the parents keep having to hunch over to cough.
In one yard we run through, there’s a bonfire. The parents are draped in quilts beside it, moving across the ground like turtles. And they’re . . . spreading aluminum foil over the grass?
Before I can ask, we’re over the fence, over two fences at once, and I get it: the foil is reflective. They can’t find their floated-away kids in the sky, so they’re trying to make it so their kids can find them.
I hold tighter onto Floating Boy’s hand. I use every last soccer muscle I have to push our hops even farther, until finally Floating Boy has to sling his leash out from his sleeve and snag a tree top. We swing out on it, him hugging me now, and the water of the river is right below us. We’re angling over to the bridge. Always the bridge, which is the center of our Ipswich universe. I find the ground first and pull him down beside me.
Above us and around us, maybe a thousand feet up, parachutes pop open and the soldiers have blinking orange lights strapped to them. The soldiers—they’re falling down from the clouds, maybe trying to collect as many kids as they can on the way down. The kid we’re trying to save, though, he’s not in the sky.
There are sirens and shouts in the distance, the sounds of everything falling apart. “This isn’t good anymore,” I say, hooking my head back to town.
“I should have just stayed in the cabin, stayed with Barron,” he says a few steps later.
I don’t know what to tell him, how to answer him.
“This goes the right way?” Floating Boy says, leaning over to study the black glass of the water. He sounds his usual fake-unsure.
“Middleton and to Barron’s,” I say, tracking down the river. It’s a slick black ribbon, a completely different thing at night. “You remember the river being there, don’t you? It was on the map.”
He doesn’t say anything. He sags and slumps his shoulders, eyes on the bridge instead of me.
I say, “The night you left, you followed the river up to the mill, didn’t you?”
He looks up at me, opens his mouth to say something but stops. He nods his head yes, then says, “I’m not running away anymore, am I?”
We turn away from each other and look at the water. I haul the inner tube up onto the stonewall railing.
He points and says, “And, I’m really exhausted. And—” kind of biting his lip.
“Don’t worry,” I tell him, “I can swim for both of us. My grandparents were mermaids.”
He looks back to the apocalypse happening in town, finally steps up onto the stone railing. Then he slips over the edge and hardly even makes a splash.
I Frisbee the tube a few feet ahead of where he went down, sit up on the stone myself, and fall backwards, into this.
Because he swims in the sky, not the normal way, I make Floating Boy take the donut hole part of the tube. I hook my arm over the side and paddle along next to it. The current’s got us, though, so mostly I’m just paddling to stay warm.
And then, in a quiet bend of the river I don’t remember from the road, I look over and—
“You’re fizzing,” I say.
He is. All around him, the water’s like the top of a soda you just filled at the fountain. He draws his arms in tight, like he can stop it.
“Sorry,” he says. “You mean everybody . . . doesn’t?”
I smile, look at the river ahead of us. Floating Boy is morphing into The Kid Made From Baking Soda.
“I should really call you something normal,” I tell him. “As in a name. Maybe Timothy . . . but you’re not, are you?”
“Normal?” he says.
“Norm,” I try. No. If my dad had friends, one of them would be named Norm.
He looks behind him like someone’s there, following and listening. He says, “It doesn’t matter what he called me.”
“How come?”
“Because that’s not who I am?” he says.
“Who are you, then?”
Before he can give me another statement-quest-ion, the current spins the tube so that I drag behind for a bit, and I say, “How about Skywalker? That’d be cool.”
“Nah, it’s too . . . something. What about Lorenzo?”
<
br /> I splash him with water. “Cloudboy,” I say, taunting him. “Or Sir Floats-a-lot.”
“Leadfoot,” he says back to me, about me, completely in rhythm, and I’m able to hold the smile on my face, but I’m aware of all the muscles involved.
“Balloonhead,” I kind of trail off, the enthusiasm gone, and then it’s quiet for a few minutes. Not the good kind. Not for me, anyway.
“Are we still in your town?” he asks, cueing into the much-needed subject change.
“I don’t know,” I say.
It’s a good idea, I think, what we’re doing—he’s tired, and when everybody’s looking up, you sneak past where they’re not looking—but I guess I thought there were going to be signs or something, telling us where to get out. Unless he says stop here, we could float to the ocean, right?
At least—and I definitely get some points for this, even if it’s pure accident—my mom’s dinosaur of a bedazzled cell phone is still in my pants pockets, the pants that are on Liv and not on me. Liv is styling in my cut-offs right about now.
“Can you, you know?” I say over the black hump of the inner tube.
“Float?” Floating Boy asks back.
“Maybe you’d recognize something, I mean. From up there.”
He closes his eyes, opens his hands, but no, nothing.
“It’s the water, right?”
“No, I’m just tired. And hungry.”
Behind us, something splashes. A turtle ducking down for a midnight snack, maybe. I kind of want to go down there with it and be somewhere I can only see five inches in front of my face, and just feel along. It would be so simple.
I kick for maybe half a mile, trying to keep us to the middle of the current. We wash up against a bank, like I missed a turn. The trees are too thick around us to see much. Ipswich is somewhere back upriver, all small, dark, and lost.
“I can make it there myself,” I say at last. “If you don’t . . . you know.”
That he doesn’t answer is his answer.
“It’s my brother, I mean,” I add.
Floating Boy nods, but it’s less a nod than a gulp. He’s trying not to cry.
I pretend not to be noticing this.
He lowers his head for a long time then angles it all the way back, just staring up into the sky, I think. “I know who, who the first Skywalker was. The first one of me.”
“You’re the only one of you,” I tell him.
“No, there’s been a bunch,” he says, and his eyes flash into mine. The way they’re heavy with all that he’s holding back, I can tell he knows what Barron is but he kind of loves him anyway.
“He’s not your dad,” I say.
“Then who is?”
“It doesn’t—not him, okay? He’s evil, right? Keeping you prisoner? Poking you with needles? Kidnapping little kids from their own houses? Lying to the six o’clock news?”
“That’s so bad?”
“Okay, but the first three.”
“No, no, you’re right. The things he does. But. He doesn’t think I know.”
“About Skywalker One?”
“His name was Seth.”
“Seth? What kind of evil name is—?”
“Seth Barron.”
Oh.
“This last year, before I—he stopped locking my door. Would let me go outside and everything.” He laughs a bit, remembering the next part: “He tried to play football with me once. He mowed this, like, I don’t know, this square out by the cabin, and we . . . it was so stupid. Took him all day to cut the grass to how he wanted.”
“And you loved it.”
He’s crying now.
I take his hand. I say, “My dad can’t throw a football. If the aliens came down, said all they needed from him was one perfect pass to spare us, then yeah, zorp, we’re space dust. Human race, over.”
“Zorp?”
“It’s a scientific term.”
We laugh at this like we’re supposed to.
When we’re done, he says, “Sorry I didn’t tell you all this before. I just . . . didn’t know how to say it, or what I was doing, really.”
“His son?” I ask. “He experimented on his own son?”
“In his desk, he still has pictures.”
“And he . . . ?” I ask, lifting my hand up to the sky.
“Barron was—he had some contract with the government. To develop this vaccine, or virus, whatever the shots are, I don’t know. But either he quit or they shut him down when it kept not working right. He used to grumble and complain about the ‘stupid army’ all the time. He tried the shots on himself first, just got real sick. Something about kids, he says. It works on them the best. Or only. Or we’re a side effect. It doesn’t make complete sense.”
“Was his son, like, kidnapped, too?”
“Seth, he was—Barron says he was like me. He could control it. They lived at the base. But then, when he left and wanted to take Seth with him—”
“No.”
“They wouldn’t let Seth go. They wanted to keep studying him.”
“That’s what Barron says.” I hope my distrust of the not-so-good Mr. Barron is as clear as a punch in the face.
“Yeah, that’s what he says. And Barron says he doesn’t know if they’ve moved Seth to another base or not. So, with me, and I guess with all the other ones before me, whatever happened to them, what he wants to do is make, like, a trade? He wants to show how I’m a better test subject, a better case to study. But he hasn’t made the trade yet. I think he . . . he keeps, like, forgetting—”
“That you’re not him.”
“Right. I almost went back a thousand times that first day. But I didn’t. And I made myself believe that I just found the mill. That I didn’t follow the river.”
After a while, I finally say it: “It doesn’t make him a good guy. You know that, right?”
“I know,” he says, standing, kind of bouncing on his toes, testing the air. “What does that make me, though? Either I ran away, left him with nothing, or I got a whole town sick.”
“No. It’s not your fault. It’s Barron’s. Don’t forget that, okay? And the army’s, too. That’s why they’re there. To clean up their own mess.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh, yeah. And you have to say it, and say it right. Say it like you really believe that this isn’t your fault.”
He smiles and doesn’t say anything. So much for my pep talk.
Then he says, out of the blue, “Hey, I want to come watch you play soccer.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, you know, I’ve never seen a game before. And—I bet you’re really good? I mean, I bet you’re really good.”
“I don’t score goals or anything. I’m defense. A sweeper.”
“Sounds cool. Are sweepers the most impor-tant?”
“That’s me,” I say, “Ms. Important,” and he splashes me.
He’s floating again. His feet are a few inches above the water. I take his hand, keeping him there, and I see past him, in the trees, a pair of green eyes. I fall back and pull him down with me.
“What?” he hisses.
“Night vision,” I say, showing my own eyes.
We peek above the top of the dry grass, and there’s green eyes blinking everywhere now. It’s a wall of soldiers! With goggles on!
“They found us,” I say, tugging at his hand, pulling us back to the water, and Floating Boy, what he does seems to be the bravest and stupidest thing I’ve ever seen: he stands and faces all these glowing eyes.
“They did,” he says, smiling, and pulls himself up.
“What are you doing?” I hiss at him. I half-hide behind him, ready to slip under the surface like the fish I am, but then one of the soldiers kind of whips his head side to side like it’s big and heavy. And he moos.
The rest of the soldiers fall in, and they’re mooing,
too. They step out of the trees and the mud sucks at their heavy hooves.
“This is it,” Floating Boy says, looking past the trees at the shape of the land, this now-obvious bend in the river.
The soldiers are cows. Or the cows are cows. And there’s a Rocking Y on one of them. The cows brush past us on each side, splashing into the river, wading out for the cooler part of the water, I guess.
“Hey! We found it!” I say, and step ahead and around, holding both Floating Boy’s hands now like this is a dance. Together we wade through the tall grass, hopefully up to wherever Terry is.
17.
The sky is quiet and clear of floaters and parachuters and copters. For once, right?
We’re through the field of tall grass, and past the rusty barbed-wire fence that I can’t believe keeps those cows penned in, even when they’re not in Float Mode. Then we disappear into a dark thicket of pine trees. Their dead needles are soft under our feet. We don’t make a lot of noise. At least, none that I can hear over my own pounding heart.
And then Barron’s house just sort of unfolds from behind the trees. With the cloudless sky and bright moonlight, the place has this weird, faded glow-in-the-dark-t-shirt look. It’s an L-shaped ranch, with dark-colored shingles big enough to be scales on Godzilla. The roof is covered in satellite dishes. Barron’s brown car is parked on the far side of the house.
Seeing the car sends me ducking behind a tree. It’s an instinct: my caveman ancestors have always feared the old brown car. I remind myself that the car is good news. The car has to mean Barron is still here and so is Terry. Brownie the mobile and the dirt-patch driveway are underneath a lit up window. It’s the only window that isn’t dark.
“His office,” Floating Boy says about the one yellowy window.
We don’t move right away, hanging out long enough for me to imagine us taking a wrong step and being caught in snares, nets falling from the sky, or booby traps that spit poison darts or fire or a pack of underfed flying-monkey-Rottweilers.
“Let’s go,” Floating Boy says at last, latching onto my hand so we can do our creep routine up to the front door. It’s thick and wooden, with dents and scratches.