by Floating Boy
Floating Boy turns the handle, and that creaky sound, it’s exactly the slow-motion sound of a tooth coming out.
Finally the door opens and Floating Boy walks in and pulls me with him. My anxiety gets worse and is squeezing me into a shrinking ball.
It’s tunnel-dark in the main hallway. We walk by a kitchen, maybe. There’s a glint that could be a pan sitting on a counter. We scoot past a living room and shut doors, I think. There’s wood paneling or maybe clapboard on the walls. Might as well be walking through a black bear convention. In a cave. At midnight.
We go slowly and we listen hard because that’s what you do when you can’t see.
There’s someone coughing ahead of us. It’s muffled, behind a door at the end of this forever hallway. Light shines through the cracks in the doorframe. Like there’s another dimension on the other side.
Floating Boy turns around, and puts his face in mine. “His office,” he says again. His words flutter on my eyelids. “You okay?” he adds. Something new and scared is ramping up in his voice.
I whisper, “No. I suck. You?”
We giggle, and it releases some of the pressure, but not all of it. “We can still do this,” I say. “It’s not supposed to not suck, right?”
We walk to the door, push it open. The door creaks exactly as loud as I was dreading.
Inside is an office crammed with bookcases. To our right is a short stack of mini-fridges, and a work station with a spaceship-sized microscope and rows of beakers and test tubes and petri dishes. There’s a few microwave-looking thingies that probably aren’t microwaves. The room is part mad-scientist lab, part library, and all creepy.
Over by the window, to our right, Barron is slumped in a chair at another work station with a docked laptop and a flatscreen hanging off the wall like a bat. He turns his head but doesn’t say anything to us. He breathes deeply, then coughs hard enough to break his chest open.
Floating Boy and I ease into the room, walking like we’re playing a game of red-light/green-light. I think we were both expecting some big showdown.
Barron says, “Didn’t think I’d ever see you back here, Timothy.” He sounds like a grandfather, the kind who gives you handfuls of Tootsie Rolls whenever you see him.
“I’m not Timothy,” Floating Boy says.
A laptop is open in front of Barron. Flying toasters on the screensaver chew up the pixels. Barron says, “Okay. Fine. Andrew, Andy, or . . . um . . . Jason, excuse me if I don’t get up. Who’s your friend?” He laughs and closes the laptop. Guess we’re not supposed to see those toasters.
“Where’s my brother?” I say, and, though it’s shaped like a question, it’s anything but a question.
Barron says, not to me but for me, “It’s a little late to have friends over, no? And frankly—no offense, little miss—she looks like a troublemaker,” and he laughs again, but that starts another coughing fit as wet and mucky as a swamp. If I wasn’t immune or cursed or whatever, I’d definitely be catching something now.
Floating Boy lets go of my hand and crosses his arms on his chest, like those coughs are hurting him, too. Then he grabs my hand back and says, “Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay,” I say, and now it’s my turn to let go of his hand. I kind of drift forward and say to Barron, “No offense taken,” and, faster than I need to, seeing as how he doesn’t even flinch, I snatch the closed laptop off his desk.
What feels like minutes later, Barron stirs in his seat, moving an arm, then a hand to where his laptop used to be.
I open the laptop and swipe the trackpad. The screensaver stuttersteps, fades, and there’s the desktop: a simple green screen scattered with Excel files and Word docs. Clicking around, everything reads like a list of numbers and letters, and symbols I don’t know. The only recognizable words I see repeated are “influenza” and “protein.”
Barron says, “Maybe we can help each other, John. I want to help you. Really. And your little friend, if she’ll . . .”
Floating Boy taps my shoulder hard. He says, “Remember? When I said that? The adults get the bad parts?” He pauses and looks at me. I guess I’m supposed to answer what I thought was obvious, what I didn’t need to answer.
I know he’s not exactly great at conversation. It’s only been him and Barron in this house for who-knows-how-many years. Still, I can’t keep out the snark. “Um, yeah? It’s kinda obvious now with all the adults in Ipswich dealing with, you know, something more than the sniffles— Oh, wait, you’re saying Barron wasn’t sick before. He’s just now catching it? What—he caught it from Terry?”
“The night I left, I hid his shots. He gave himself a shot, like, once every, I don’t know, six months? So he wouldn’t get the bad parts.”
Barron says, “Smart boy, that Samuel.” He smiles, rubs at his nose. “I probably would have done the same thing, if I was his age.”
I keep fiddling with the laptop and click on a folder titled observations. There’s a library of folders, all boy names. I click the newest folder. “Like flu shots? Tell me or—or I’ll smash your laptop.” Like I could ever really do that to a laptop.
Barron closes his eyes and rubs his gray, wrinkly face. He talks, but only has eyes for Floating Boy. “Years ago, we—I discovered, by total accident, a protein that aggressively altered DNA in certain strains of fruit flies, silencing the expression of some genes—which was expected—but also causing awakenings, for lack of a better term, in other areas of the strand that . . . that caused mutations, but not in the progeny. In the subject itself. Physical transformations. It was amazing. We thought we had a serious weapon—”
Suddenly I don’t want to hear his evil mad scientist spiel. It’s too scary, too real to think Terry and everyone else has been changed, mutated, because that sounds like something that can’t be taken back, right? But Floating Boy did tell me that he’d stopped floating for a month before he left this place.
“—but in humans, the protein had no seeming effect on adults. They were past the stage where, where mutation could . . . but that’s not quite accurate. I should say that the protein doesn’t do for adults what it does for you, um, um, Allen. Again, it was only by accident that we found what it did in the young, in—” He launches into another coughing fit, recovers. “—adolescents.” Takes a deep breath. “Or some of them. Not all of them could float. For some of them, different mutations happened.”
“Different?” I ask, already imagining all these kids turning into fruit flies.
“For most,” Barron says, sounding like he’s holding back yet another cough-fest, “their DNA changed so that their bodies produced an organic analogue to hydrogen, or, or something between hydrogen and helium, but it produced it in more than sufficient quantities to—”
While he’s up on his evil-doctor soapbox, I bury my head in the laptop again. The Terry folder only has one text file in it. It’s one paragraph long and about Terry being otherwise healthy, and him having a “seeming instinct to modulate his buoyancy.”
I must’ve been reading out loud because Barron picks up where I was in the note: “Some of them can’t. I’m sorry. Couldn’t. I’m still not sure why. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of . . . of susceptibility, if the subject’s immune system is drawing enough of the body’s resources such that it can or can’t . . . that it somehow sees the larger picture, the survival angle, or—”
“It?” I say. “Not ‘him,’ or ‘Terry’? Is that all they are to you?”
Barron says, “I’m so sorry, William. Ronnie. Franklin. I’m sorry, Theodore. Luke. Daniel—”
He’s listing some of the names that Floating Boy wrote under the bridge, I think.
I go back to the library of folders and every name has its own folder. I click on one. There are text documents and videos. Videos I can’t bring myself to watch.
“The army had—has—visions of floating battalions of super soldiers, of course,” Barron goes on. �
��I was only interested in the fact that I could do this. That I could, that I can—” More rib-cracking coughing. “—make it happen. And consequently, the army and I had a parting of the ways, shall we say. I’m sorry for everything, Gary. Really, I am. I know what I am, but it doesn’t mean I’m not sorry. When you left, Sebastian, yes, Sebastian, Sebby. God, it was just like, it was just like . . .”
“Stop! Shut up!” I yell at him. I turn to Floating Boy who grabs my hand, and he’s crying in his quiet way. I say, “But why did you stop floating, early this summer. Right?”
Barron coughs and keeps on talking. “I attenuated a basic flu virus, attaching our protein to it. As the basic flu virus multiplies and infects a subject, so does the protein. But in adults, the protein doesn’t do anything. Or maybe it only makes us more susceptible to the flu virus the protein is attached to.” He shrugs a can-you-believe-my-luck shrug.
All right, I get that part of it now. And I see Floating Boy there at my cousin’s party, eating all those snacks, putting his hands all over the table, and then on the kids before he climbed the tree. He was spreading his special floaty flu virus to everyone without knowing it. Now I remember Terry’s fever, and Liv and Marcus and even Logan coughing or wiping their noses. They didn’t get the “bad parts”: the flu. Or at least, they didn’t get the bad flu that our parents are getting. They got the full-on protein mutation.
But why did Floating Boy get more shots and what shots did he hide from Barron before taking off. I say to Barron, “Wait. Is the shot you were taking some kind of a cure? A vaccine?”
Barron stops talking and looks at me like he’s seeing me for the first time. “If I had a clearer head,” he says, “I’d be surprised you both got here before they did.”
“They?”
“My employers, or former employers, of course. They’re quite busy in Ipswich right now, I imagine, but they’ll be here any minute. I’m quite sure they’ll take all of us away. We’ll all get to be together. You and your brother. Me and David. Me and Matthew, me and . . .” His voice trails off, running out of air.
I pace, making little circles around Floating Boy, who’s just standing and staring at Barron.
“When you left,” Barron says, right to Floating Boy, “when you left, I—I’m sorry for everything, Ryan. Really, I should’ve treated you better. Should’ve let you do more, taken you out more, shown you more, appreciated you more.”
Floating Boy is still just standing, like he’s pinned to the wall by all these names. I don’t know if he even remembers I’m in the same room with him. A blast of wind rattles the office windows. Are the helicopters and soldiers here already?
I say, “Let’s make a trade.”
“There’s this whole world out there,” Barron’s saying to Floating Boy. “The whole world, and I kept you here, like you were a plant. But I had no choice. It was the only way to get him back.”
“Listen!” I shout.
Barron stops talking and swivels in his chair. Floating Boy turns and looks at me with the saddest look I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen someone so visibly lost.
I say, “You give us Terry. You get your precious research back.” To show where the research is, I shake the laptop like an Etch-a-Sketch. “And, um, he’ll give you the shots he hid too. Yeah?”
Floating Boy puts his hand inside of mine, like it’s hiding.
“My shots? My shots are just regular flu shots to keep me from getting sick like this when he’s around. They’re nothing special, not like Seth. Now he’s special.” Barron shrugs like the game’s over anyway and then opens a drawer under the tabletop, and takes out a set of keys chained to a laminated card covered in bar codes. He holds it out to me. I shut the laptop and make the exchange, not letting go of the laptop until I have at least enough for a tug of war.
Sitting like this, Barron looks very small, and worn. He says, “He’s down the hall.” Then, throwing his voice over my shoulder, “He’s in your room, Seth.”
Floating Boy closes his eyes from this last name, this last non-mistake, so that I have to turn around and say it for him: “He’s not Seth. He never was. None of them were. Got it?”
Barron smiles, leans over to cough again, and doesn’t bother to watch us make our big exit.
18.
Out in some new and even longer hall—evil lairs are always confusing—Floating Boy slows down, like his battery pack is dying. I tighten my grip, mistaking his shuffle and drag for the way he tends to float away at the least good time, the way he needs some dead weight like me to hold him down. But when I finally look back, I see the hesitation in his face, parentheses around his eyes.
His battery is dying. The one that keeps him on-task.
He’s pulling to the side. At first I hang on and insist on Terry’s direction, but then I get it, and my batteries kind of drain, too.
“You were going to save Barron anyway, weren’t you?” I say. “Give him his vaccine or whatever? That’s why you came, right? Because you feel guilty.”
The way he flicks his eyes away is all the answer I need.
His hand falls away from mine. “So I guess this is, this is . . .” he says.
“No way,” I tell him, stepping in so we’re close.
He smiles that smile you save for little kids, the one that means you know the truth, but understand that they have to learn it themselves.
I grab his face and pull it to my own, a bold move for Little Miss Anxiety—I am trouble—and plant a kiss on his mouth, stealing that smile from him.
“We’ll meet out front, cool?” I say, and it’s not a question at all. “We’ll meet there, and then . . . and then one of those cows will float down to us and we’ll grab on, go home, mooing all the way, okay?”
“Or, you know, maybe not mooing,” he says, his hands on mine, now.
“Moo-oo.” My mouth feels all stupid.
He nods, and I’m not even sure the exact moment he slips away. But he does.
I turn, scurry the way I was already scurrying, for once in my life not weighed down with the whole world. Because everything’s fixable. We made our deal with Barron, I’m going to get Terry, Floating Boy’s going to get Barron the shots he hid, and we’re going to meet out front. Perfect, right? It doesn’t even matter that I can’t float like everyone else.
Seriously, I almost smile, feeling my way down another random dark hall, trying to find my baby brother. But then I see him, and my face prickles and my eyes heat up with tears.
He’s sitting in a room all by himself. The door is open so I almost walked past it.
Like Barron said, it’s Floating Boy’s old room. It has that lived-in-by-a-boy look to it: random stuff taped to the walls, the bed forever unmade, junk on the floor. And one of those pieces of junk is Terry. He’s sitting with his back to me, busy at something. He’s wearing my old backpack. This one has pink butterflies, and yeah, I X’d those out with a Sharpie. The backpack is too big for him. It makes him look like a punk turtle. My punk turtle.
I step inside and can see what he’s got: a round peg. One that isn’t going to fit in that square hole, bub. But I love him so much for trying.
“Terry,” I whisper, and he stops rattling the block, looks to the side to be sure he isn’t dreaming this. By then I’m with him, scooping him up, getting tangled up in his blanket, and finally shaking it off behind me, just to see him better, to prove to myself that it is him.
Tied around his ankle is a long, thin leather strap, a tether just like Floating Boy carries around. It’s a sad and horrible thing, but I can’t take it off him just yet.
I hold up a strap to the backpack. “Where’d you get this?”
“He told me I could take it. Sorry.”
“No. No sorry. It’s okay.”
I hug him more. And for once, he lets me hug and hold him like he’s actually happy to see me.
While in the greatest Terry-hug eve
r, I look up and see the wall above the cabinet. It’s covered in photographs of Floating Boy. As I scan to the left, the pictures of him get younger and younger until, all the way at his youngest—two?—there he is with a mom, a dad. Only—
Only they’re magazine parents. He’s cut his own picture out, glued it in between them, so their paper hands are on his shoulders like they’re holding him in place and keeping him from floating away.
I reach out, pull that picture down. I want to give him everything good there is in the world.
There’s an electronic buzz behind and above me, that almost makes me flinch, then a click. The door behind me starts to creak shut.
“No!” I shriek, and dive, holding Terry like a football, but I’m already hours too late. The door’s almost there, about to catch, almost closed, except there’s Terry’s blanket in the way. That awesome, ratty blanket, it’s in the door’s swing path. It folds up with the door pushing it into a wad.
It gives me time. It gives us time.
I yank the door open and crash out into blackness. Terry is a monkey-boy on me, a sniveling, breath-hitchy monkey boy, and I’m running blind now, am going at least twice as fast as I’ve ever run.
When I hear footsteps ahead of me—soldiers, maybe?—I fall back, take the first side door I can, and it’s a stairway going down, I guess to a basement or something. I grope for a rail, find it at the last possible moment, and then I’m at two locked doors. It’s a dead end and those footsteps in the dark are still coming.
“No no no,” I say, falling back into the corner—this is it, I’m never letting Terry go, no matter what—but, when I sit with Terry’s extra weight on me, something stabs me in the hip.
The keys. Barron’s keys. I stand, fumble through them, feel out the keyhole in the first door, and the eighth key I try turns just as the stairway light comes on. I crash through the door still holding Terry, and we’re in what looks like a real-live dungeon, one somehow bigger than the cabin itself, I’m pretty sure. There’s cells with metal doors, small windows, all of it. Only one of the windows has a light.