by Floating Boy
Terry looks up from hiding his face in my neck, and he says it for both of us: “That one?”
I beeline to the room with the light on, slam my face up to the window and, in there, sitting on the edge of a bed, holding the syringes he hid away, is Floating Boy. He looks up to me and is so calm now, his face looks exactly the way it did when I last saw him.
I try the door but it’s locked. I bang on the window and yell at Floating Boy, “Why is the door locked? What are you doing? Get up! Why are you just sitting there?”
I fall to my knees—Terry’s extra weight is no picnic—and I’m trying every key on the lock to this door. They all fit but just won’t turn. There’s still four to go, now three, and then the second-to-last one, I feel the gears or whatever relax around it, and I smile, and then there’s that leathery hand on my shoulder again.
Barron. He’s stronger than he looks. And healthy. His hand is a barbell on my shoulder. He looks through the glass at Floating Boy, then down to me. I karate chop his hand off me, and you can tell I don’t know karate by the way I have to do the sound effect with my mouth.
“You are a troublemaker, aren’t you?” he says, and in that moment, I see it all, how it really happened: Not ten seconds after our big exit from Barron’s office, he must have sat up, as healthy as ever, with an evil scientist sneer on his evil scientist face. We live in an evil scientist world, yes. It’s all just a matter of where you are in his latest experiment.
Barron probably laughed a satisfied laugh to himself at that moment, proud of all the other boy-names he was able to come up with, proud he was able to make us feel bad for him. And then on his laptop screen five minutes ago—no, four, three—Floating Boy was a black-and-white rat in a maze, going to where he hid the shots somewhere in the buried little basement chamber with a metal door and a small window. Floating Boy stepped into this little dungeon room, dug into whatever drawer or cabinet or loose tile he’d hidden the shots in. Then Barron pushed a button, locking that door.
“Let him go,” I say, backing away from Barron, and Terry holds on even tighter now and he starts to whimper into my shoulder. “He’s got your medicine.”
I take a glance in the window behind me, at Floating Boy, and it’s like he can’t even look at me. He looks like I do after I’m grounded and there’s nothing I can do. He looks like he’s just accepting this.
We did make a trade. Just not the one I was expecting.
“Oh, this?” Barron says, pulling another syringe from his jacket pocket, and it’s like he’s on stage and has been practicing saying this. He knows just the right casual way to hold that syringe.
“You never wanted Terry, did you?” I say, blinking faster than I want to.
“Is that his name?” Barron says, reaching forward to tousle Terry’s hair. I pull Terry away.
“Let him go,” I say again, and point at Floating Boy.
“Sorry, he’s too valuable, not to mention dangerous. Look what he did to your brother. To your family. To your town.”
“You did this, not him.”
Barron cocks his head to the side, like he’s studying me. But no, not me. Terry. He’s starting to float in my arms, bobbing up so I have to hold him.
“Is this the life you would wish for your brother?” Barron says, holding his hands up to the dungeon all around us. “To be an experiment? Have the military after him? Or me? To never know if he’s just late or if he maybe got caught in the jet intake of a commercial airliner?”
“Shut up!” I scream at him with my whole body. Terry starts to full on cry and scream that he wants Mommy. I whisper back to him a promise that I’m taking him back home.
“But you can save your brother, you know?” Barron says, like he’s just thinking of this. “Be the hero. Save him”—holding up the syringe, then producing another—“and then the whole town, too. It took more than a decade to figure out how to reverse it all. But I did.”
It all clicks in my head. The first shot Barron ever gave Floating Boy was what made him float, but then the rest of those monthly shots he had to take? Those were Barron’s attempts at cures. Until the one shot in July, when Barron finally hit on it and cured Floating Boy from floating. But then? Then? “You turned him back. You cured him and turned him back. Why?”
Barron gives me the saddest of smiles. It makes him look like the cute old guy he could’ve been. “Then he wouldn’t have been special anymore. The irony is that I thought I would lose him if he stopped floating.”
“Just let him go,” I say, but not so loud.
Barron smiles at this. “No. He stays with me. Always. And you can get your brother and you can save him. All you have to do is inject this into your brother’s shoulder. No more virus, no more floating, and then . . .” Barron walks his fingers up the imaginary stairs. “You give the second syringe to my old army friends out there now and they’ll be able to figure out how they can vaccinate everyone else. So, you have to ask yourself, don’t you? Which is more important to you? Your brother’s life, his future, plus the lives of your parents, of everybody in your town, your . . . friends.” Barron’s pause on “friends” is how he’s trying to close the deal, trying to make me believe that he’d help me save the town out of the goodness of his cobweb-filled heart, while I let him just kidnap and experiment on Floating Boy all over again
But, it’s kind of working. I think of my friends. I think of Liv, of her and Marcus running decoy and, for the first time since I left them, I’m wondering if they got away from the Claremonts. I’m wondering if they’re okay.
I reach for the cell phone in my pocket that, of course, isn’t there. What’s there instead is the picture of Floating Boy with the magazine Mom and Dad, which I didn’t realize I’d pocketed.
Barron adds, “Or you try and save one boy, the boy who caused all of it in the first place?”
“It was you who did it to him.”
“Well.” Barron shrugs like he’s both proud and embarrassed.
I flash my eyes from him to the door, then back again. I finally edge up to the door, slam the made-up family photograph against the glass, and look past it to Floating Boy.
I think about yelling at him some more. Telling him that he’s a quitter, that he needs to fight back. Instead I say to him, “I’ll come back. I promise. I’ll go back and tell the soldiers everything about this place. Marcus’s dad, he’s a cop, we’ll—”
“Yes, yes, of course you will,” Barron says, closer to my ear than I’d like.
I step away and rip the syringes from Barron’s hands. I say, “My phone. I want my cell phone, too.”
Barron’s left hand floats down to his pants pocket, like it cannot tell a lie. “Now why would I—”
I re-channel my inner Liv and kick Barron below the belt, a kick with so much behind it I have to really plant my other foot. All my years of laps and drills are stacked up behind this kick—a process that takes so long it’s practically slow motion. He, the old man of the two of us, dodges right. So it’s not quite a knockout blow, but it is enough to lay him over sideways.
I spin Terry onto my back and tell him to pretend he’s a monkey.
Terry death-grips my neck and I say, “Not that tight, Monkey Boy.”
I turn back to the drooling and groaning Barron. I like him better this way. I fish a hand into his left pocket, and what do you know, I’m right. My phone. I take it out and think about saying something smart-alecky, but he grabs my left ankle, twists it painfully, and starts pulling me toward him.
Terry is screaming and crying now, and I’m kicking at Barron’s hand, which doesn’t do any good. It’s locked on.
I look up and into the dungeon room, and there’s Floating Boy, yelling and pounding on the glass.
Barron pulls himself closer to me and I don’t know if I can get away from this. But there’s one more trade I can make. It’s not a good trade, definitely not good for Floating Boy.
My hand fishes into my own pocket and pulls out Barron’s keys. I shake them so he’s sure to see, and then I start trying to stab them into the lock.
It works. He really is more afraid of losing his Floating Boy than keeping the other one he just found. His hand relaxes on my ankle enough for me to break away. Like we’re playing tug of war and he lets go of the rope, I fall backwards and land on my butt, next to the door to the hallway, and Terry’s still on my back.
I stand—Barron can’t, yet, and isn’t acting this time—and Floating Boy watches me through that porthole window.
And then, looking back and forth at Barron’s face and Floating Boy’s face, it hits me, lands on my head like an asteroid, because now I see it in their faces: the family resemblance.
I shout it all out, mostly so Floating Boy can hear it. “He never wanted to keep Terry, he never wanted to because he’s lying about Seth, lying about everything! You’re Seth! You’re his real son! He did this all to his real—”
“Shut up! You’re wrong! Shut up!” Barron hisses, and rises up to one knee. He’s clearly hurt, and looking like he wants to hurt back. His yellow teeth are gritted and bared. We need to be gone before Barron can press buttons and lock other doors, swallow us whole.
I edge backwards until I can turn around safely, and then I’m barreling away with Terry, down the dark hallway and up those forever-long stairs. Barron bellows behind us, but he sounds farther and farther away.
But Floating Boy is shrinking away from me, too. Yeah, I know where the cabin is now and I will come back, but I can’t help but feel like I’m leaving him with no chance to ever see the sky again.
I feel like I’ve lost a part of myself, just when I finally started to find it.
19.
I stop running when we hit the cow pasture and the fence, and give myself a few seconds to breathe. Give my bare feet a chance to un-hurt for a few seconds. We’re close enough to the river that I could spit into it.
Terry has his arms around my neck, piggy-backing. He smells like him and he smells like the tires. I check the vaccine syringes in my pocket, and work to reach behind me and Terry to slip them into one of the side-pockets of my old backpack.
I have no idea if the vaccine is legit, if it’ll work, and even if it does work, how do you administer it, or who would administer it? I mean, I just can’t stroll up to a hospital and say, shoot this into my balloony kid brother, k? thanxbi! And if not to a hospital, where do we go, and how do we get there, and—
Instead of getting lost in my head, just lying down here for a few days, letting the grass grow over Terry and me, hiding us from the bad guys forever, I take out my cell phone. There isn’t much of a charge left and, like, only one bar.
I text Liv: Where r u? have Terry!
Liv’ll probably be as excited about my phone being back as she is that we’re somewhat safe. She responds, yelling in all caps:
TRAPED @ MILL! CLARMONTS R INSANE! U NEDE TO COME SAV US TALKE TO THEM SOMTEHING NOW
Oh. No.
How is she trapped at the mill? She’s not like me. I mean, she can go all blimpy on everyone and float up and away. Unless there’s the army and helicopters there, or secret dudes in jetpacks.
But she said Claremonts. And, there’s all those capital letters. To Liv, the lowest class of people are those who speak in all-caps all the time. No, to her, people who do that are the slime on the shoes of those people.
Something’s way wrong.
The phone goes back in my pocket. I try more breathing.
Terry pats my cheek and says right into my ear, “Go home?”
I pluck him off my back without dropping him, without letting him go, which is a neat trick. “Yeah.” I’m holding him so that he’s facing me, his pudgy little face just a few inches from mine.
Okay, the mill. It’s just up the river a ways. But we can’t inner tube it upstream, and we can’t ride a cow, and so far wishing isn’t working. So how about a little floater and soccer legs combo?
I say, “Let me wear this, okay?” I take the pack and he frowns and crosses his arms over his chest. “Hey, T. Got one more in you, little guy?”
Instantly un-mad at me, he giggles, breathes in and out real fast, almost like he’s pumping himself up, and yeah, he really does know how to do this. His eyes are huge and happy, and maybe he’ll never want that vaccine. I mean, I don’t blame him. I can’t imagine what being able to fly at his age must feel like. He must feel like a superhero, right? It must feel like the cartoons aren’t just in the television anymore.
Terry bobs up quick, a mini-elevator, and I weave his tether around my forearms and wrap my arms around his waist. He’s not big or strong or floaty enough to carry me, but to do this—I’m starting to get the hang of it, too—I don’t think he needs to full-on carry me. Maybe he can be my sort-of jetpack.
A little test in the soft grass of the pasture: I run parallel to the river, stepping as soft as I can because I know there’s going to be thorns, and jump with Terry in my arms. We go up maybe ten feet. And we go out a whole lot more. We just covered, like, thirty feet. New world record, and we come down soft enough that I land running, and I feel strong and take two hard steps and bound again, this time over some smaller trees that are just kind of there, you know?
And that’s it. We’re bounding upstream and we’re bounding across-stream. Some bounds put me ankle deep in the river, but I don’t mind the wet feet. We get the hang of this quickly, lighting softly on the trees along the river, using the branches as landings and push-offs. We’re both giggling and laughing the whole time. We follow the S of the river, and this is like the best game ever.
It’s when we bounce over our favorite river bridge that I smell the smoke. And I stop laughing.
We stop Tiggering in the thick woods behind the mill, and I find a small path. Everything, even the sky, has this weird orange glow. I don’t see any flames yet, but they’re close, and they’re loud, like a monster truck rally, not that I’ve been to one, though Dad always threatens to take me.
I hear people yelling, too. A whole angry crowd of them.
Terry is sweaty, all kinds of overheated, and breathing heavy. According to the mad scientist Barron, Terry’s body must have been working hard to create and pump out some made-up kind of hydrogen, right? That can’t be easy. And it’s pretty clearly exhausting. And I’m starting to understand how Liv and Marcus can be trapped at the mill: they’re tired, wiped out, and yeah, I’ll say it, out of gas.
“Relax, little T. We’re here.” I slide him off my back, pull him around so I’m holding him in front of me.
“Home?”
“No, we need to get Liv first, okay? She needs our help. Maybe.”
He doesn’t say anything. He trusts me, or is used to the giant older people telling him what’s what, even if it doesn’t make any sense. The super-fun river jump is over and he’s transformed back to being a powerless little dude. I feel him sagging, deflating in my arms, and it’s more than kind of sad.
We unwrap—though I keep one end of the tether around my wrist, the other end wrapped around his ankle—and we rearrange. The backpack goes back on him, and he becomes my pack again. He rests his head on my shoulder and twirls my hair around a pinky.
I run, following the winding path, and there, up ahead, are rectangles of orange light hovering in the air, which makes no sense. I mean, not everything should be floating. Especially orange rectangles.
I keep running, and then I can finally make out the mill’s rear wall, and those floaty orange rectangles are rows of windows with fire raging inside. And it’s proof of what I was afraid of, of what I knew was true when I first smelled the smoke back at the bridge: the mill is on fire and Liv is in the mill, and—and what happens if you have hydrogen in you and there’s fire all around?
Don’t even want to think about it.
A chorus of hallelujahs and amens echoes throu
gh the woods, and there must be an army of Claremonts at the mill. I try to run faster and, if nothing else, hope I can outrun panic and meltdown. I scream Liv’s name and it gets lost somewhere in the branches ahead of me, or the smoke above us.
I don’t break stride while taking out my cell phone. I shouldn’t run and text at the same time, especially with a baby on board, but I don’t know what else to do, and I need some direction. I need to know exactly where Liv is and who’s with her.
Then I run smack into a tree with my right shoulder, and spin two, three times in slow motion, and not because I’m graceful or anything. My feet twist all up like a knotted kite string and I land on my butt.
Terry giggles.
I stay sitting for a couple extra seconds to make sure nothing is broken. Or nothing that wasn’t already broken. My left hand, which is my phone hand, is empty, and I have no idea where the cell went.
I pat around for a second. It’s not on the path in front of me or behind me. I hit the tree so hard the phone probably flew out of my hand and out into the woods.
See? Everything but me can fly.
I have no idea if Liv got the text or if she replied. There are more righteous roars from the mill crowd, so I can’t go looking for the phone now. Back on my feet, the path dumps us out behind the mill, and we run into a wall of heat. Terry squeals and buries his head in my neck. My god, how long has this fire been burning? The rear mill wall is going black, sagging in spots, and I can almost see that charred ash in real time as it crawls up the length of the mill toward the roof.
The roof! That’s where Liv and Marcus are. They have to be. They were chased here and crashed on the roof, and then were too tired to go anywhere or do anything. They wouldn’t go inside, probably afraid the Claremonts would break in and look for them, so they barricaded the roof door, thinking they were good.
I yell, “Liv! Down here!” The flames are so loud. No one’s going to hear me.