by Floating Boy
Trust the football star to move us downfield, I guess.
Then I get it. He’s right, in his own clueless Logan way: Liv and Terry and Marcus, they’re not going into town.
Where, then?
We must be about fifty yards behind, and a little bit above them, too, I think. Instead of seeing scissor-angel shadows floating across the sky, their hands linked, I see two scissor-angels still kicking and swimming after little lost-goose Terry. And that dot, it’s hard to tell in the dark, but that dot, maybe fifty yards ahead of them. Is that Terry?
“He’s going back,” I say, and my eyes tunnel into Barron’s cabin, the one burned into my memory forever, and I see it there. I’m so, so stupid for having not thought of it before: the blanket. Terry’s blanket. He’s going back for it.
I tell Logan to pull me up, and he does. Then he wraps his arms around my waist from behind. I shout out toward the three of them—they’re no bigger than my hand—and Logan breathes in, twists and catapults us ahead again. We’re gaining.
I promise, after tonight, if there is an after, if this works and we catch Terry, I’ll go to a crappy football game. And I’ll even scream my head off every time Logan has the ball.
It takes us forever to catch up to Liv and Marcus. Liv still has Terry’s backpack. She’s holding onto it like she’s going to use it to prove something to me.
“Thanks,” Marcus says to Logan when we finally hook up. It’s some guy thing. Like they’re responsible for us girls. Please.
It’s a little easier to stay afloat now, too. There are three of them to hold just one of me up here. We’re like a bunch of kids whose merry-go-round just blipped out of existence.
I shout Terry’s name as loud as I can. “Can you guys see him? I feel like I can almost see him out there ahead of us. Liv, he’s going back to the shack, to Barron’s shack! He wants his blanket!”
“His blanket? Seriously?” Liv says back.
“Like a pigeon,” Marcus says, kind of just out loud.
Drifting along, a hundred yards above the river, we all look at Marcus and there’s more sharing of really? looks.
“Pigeons don’t use blankets,” Logan finally says.
“They use homing,” Marcus says, because we’re the dense ones.
“He’s really good,” Liv says. “Up here, I mean.”
“Terry?” I say.
Marcus says, “Yeah, like a natural.”
“Like how kids can just naturally learn French and Spanish,” Logan chimes in.
Okay, so everybody lecture Mary at once, yes. But this makes me look over to Logan, and I kind of study him for a second. I figure he might need some extra motivation, some coaching, even.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“What? Why?”
“How old?”
“Eighteen,” he says, rubbing his scratchy chin on his shoulder. I could so smoke him at poker, if I knew how to play poker.
“You’re going to grow some more,” I tell him, just flat out. “If you were already done growing, you wouldn’t be like—well, this kid here, um Floating Boy—”
“Your boyfriend.” This from Liv.
I sneak a smile across and say to Logan, “The floating thing, it hits adults different. It just makes them all sick.”
“Meaning what?” Logan says, getting offended.
“You’re floating because you’re still a kid, so you’re still going to grow bigger,” I say, shaking his arm.
“So?”
“Figure it out,” I say like he’s supposed to know what I mean exactly, even if I don’t.
“Then what are you?” he says back.
I look behind him, then ahead of us. I say, “A big sister,” and kick ahead as much as I can.
“You remember where to get off?” Marcus says after a while.
“Not exactly. We were in the water,” I tell him. “Look for a big curve in the river.”
“Hope Terry remembers—” Liv says, biting the end off because she didn’t mean to say it out loud, probably.
I hope he remembers, too. If not . . . what? The Atlantic? And how many high-tension wires are between here and there? How many helicopters, how many jet intakes, how many rabid bats? How many highways to land on during morning rush hour? I yell his name again, we all yell.
I try to spin us ahead again, but end up throwing the balance off so we wobble for about fifty feet. Logan muscles us back even, and he’s still thinking.
“So, this means I’m still growing,” he finally says. “I’m going to get, you know, bigger? Stronger?”
“Go pro,” Marcus says, knowing what Logan wants to hear. “Definitely, man.”
Logan smiles, all focused on his future, and I’m all focused on Liv, who’s watching him be all daydreamy, so that Marcus is the one who has to say it: Shhh.
“What?” I chirp out, and Marcus squints like something hurts.
Somebody else below us answers my question with another “What?”
Soldiers. They’re stringing some sort of net across the river. Their gun-mounted flashlights settle on us, blinding us. And they’ve got something else, too.
A puff of air from some cartridge and poof, a shadow lobs past us. Marcus kicks his foot free of it. Now they have their range with whatever their stupid gun is and are loading another as they splash along the shallows of the river to follow us.
“They’re not gonna stop us!” Logan yells. His eyes are still all narrow with his pro football future full of glory and concussions.
“Move!” Liv shouts, trying to swing us around.
“Ready . . .” Marcus says, tracking their gun-thing, counting it down like you do a video game battle you’ve done a thousand times before. “Now!” he shouts and ducks. Liv and me duck with him.
The shadow blob whooshes past us, and it’s a net! They have some 007-ninja gadget thing that shoots nets. It never worked on Godzilla, but we could be in serious trouble. This one splats down in the water, and one of the soldiers starts reeling it in, wrapping the cord around his thumb and elbow like my dad does the weed whacker cable.
Because we’ve stopped with our forward-motion spin tactic, we’re just kind of floating in place now. It was all Logan muscling us around, anyway. I pull on his arm, trying to yank him out of his head, but he just looks over to me and smiles big and stupid.
“I’m going to go pro,” he says, shrugging like it’s true now that he’s decided on it. Then: “Let’s go. Come on,” grunting it, more to himself than us, like he’s trying to pump himself up for the big game.
“He’s got hydrogen on his brain,” I say to Liv. I still try to pull Logan toward me, to get the spin going. “Can you and Marcus just—?”
I don’t get to finish because he lets go of me. I dip about three feet and it feels like a thousand. Marcus’s skaterboy grip’s the only thing keeping me in the air. And Liv’s floatiness.
“Logan!” I scream at him.
Logan looks down at me, nods, and still has that stupid grin on his face. “They can’t pull me down,” he says, “I’m going pro,” and, to show me, he takes my hand, pulls me close to him—all three of us, really—and plants the balls of his feet against my hip. He squats sideways against me, and then he explodes, a thousand and ten sled-dummy drills coiled up in his legs, and it’s two things at the exact same time:
1) Logan lets go of my hand, jets out and down with his arms in front of him like in a comic book. He crashes into the air-net gun soldier, taking the other two down as well, with the fourth getting wrapped up in his own cord trying to help, and
2) I go like a bullet in the opposite direction. Marcus isn’t able to hold on. Liv screams behind me, doing that same trick Logan did, I guess: planting her feet against Marcus, then kicking ahead and down.
She catches me just as my feet are hitting the surface of the river water. Not that Liv can hold us both up, but
she tries. We kind of skate-run on top of the river, and if I had enough breath I’d tell her to let me go, that I can swim, that I’m not afraid, that this is where I belong, and the current’s going this way, anyway.
After twisting and tumbling away down the river for a bit, we finally wash up in some shallows. Liv looks back, studies the sky for a Marcus-shaped shadow. I study the sky ahead, for a little-brother shaped shadow and I find him, right there, thirty or so feet above us. I shout his name, tell him to come down to me.
Terry yells, “No. Blankee!” And shoots off above the shore line and toward the tree line. He stops like he wants to make sure we’re following, but then shoots off out of sight.
I stop yelling. “Unbelievable. He’s not going to come back to me unless he or we get his blanket first. The little donkey.”
Liz and I are stuck. The suction from the river mud is keeping Liv grounded. The water around her is fizzing, though. She looks down to it.
“Should I be embarrassed?” she says.
And then I catch it, on the air. A smell. It’s like a few times every year at school, when the maintenance guys spread manure around to all the flowerbeds and rake it in.
“This is so bogus,” she says.
“Why didn’t I remember his blanket?” I say. “Barron’s going to keep him this time. There’s no way he won’t. Two’s better to trade to the army than one.”
“Don’t,” Liv says, taking my hand now because I’m about to give in and just start crying here at the edge of the river.
“I don’t think this is mud,” Liv says, observing the disgustingly obvious.
I shout to Terry again. Nothing.
We look down to the water, and she starts to dry heave. We clamber up toward shore. I stop being dragged and let her hand slip. I look down and it looks like nasty toilet water swirling around my knees. I lower my hands to it, my fingers in the brown.
“Cows,” I say.
“Does that make it better?” Liv asks, trying to step out of her own skin. She’s afraid to wipe it off with her hand. Her fingers are all extended away from her palm in disgust, like a rich lady on a soap opera.
“A lot better,” I say, and step up, take her hand in my wet one. “Cows. Remember that video? And there was a fence before, when I came here. We had to cross a fence.”
Liv gets it and we walk. We walk and we’re breathing hard from all the walking. But there, finally, glimmering in the moonlight, are two strands of wire with the third hiding under the tall grass, the tall grass on the other side of the fence. Meaning the cows have chomped it down on this side.
“Mary, this is . . . ?” Liv says, and I just pull her behind me, walking along the fence until it Ts into another fence, one that runs along the river.
“This is the one we crossed,” I say.
Just like it’s supposed to be, ten minutes later there’s the cabin. It looks like a giant’s hat, with the rest of the giant buried standing up.
“You don’t have to,” I say to Liv, opening my hand to let her go. She just squeezes tighter and then looks behind us.
There’s a helicopter spotlighting the river now.
Logan, Marcus?
“Go,” I say to Liv. “Get Marcus.” But she doesn’t.
“I’m not floating, you know,” she says, showing me how planted her feet are.
Maybe Marcus is swimming now, or walking, and isn’t going to be cut up into potato chips by the helicopter blades.
“All the lights are on,” I say about the cabin and then go into full sprint mode.
“Wouldn’t the guy want to like, hide? Not advertise?” Liv shouts to me, but I shush her.
The only door I know is the one we used before, and it’s open wide, so, trap or not, we go in, and I’m definitely running now, crashing from room to empty room.
I jump down the stairs, zero in on Floating Boy’s cell. The door is open and the room is empty.
“Where’s he even supposed to be?” Liv says.
I’m running again, back up the stairs.
Terry’s right where I found him the first time. He’s floating up against the ceiling and the blanket hangs down from his arms, so the world must be a good place. I use the blanket to reel him down to me.
Liv hugs both of us to her, and then I nod, and turn Terry around to dig into my old backpack. I am going to do this once and for all. I pull out one of the syringes, the shot, the vaccine. The cure. At least, that’s what it is according to Barron. If you can’t trust an evil mad scientist, who can you trust, right?
Liv sees and wows her eyes up like Are you sure?
No. Not even close to sure. Maybe it’s as simple as jabbing the needle into his tiny, flabby thigh before Terry can start screaming—he hates the doctor. But I don’t know how to do this. What if he kicks or spazzes out while the needle is in there? If only Mom was a diabetic and I’d had to help give her shots for all these years—
“Mary?” Liv says, because Terry has seen the needle and is crying.
There are footsteps pounding above us. They sound like the end. I slowly move the tip of the needle away from Terry’s exposed thigh.
It takes them about twenty seconds to surround us, their lights hot, their faces masked, their guns serious. “It’s over,” one of them says in his robot voice.
I nod. I know it’s over. It’s been ending all night. But I hold out both syringes before me, one in each hand, and say to them, “We need help. My brother needs help. And your Mr. Barron left me this. It’s a—a vaccine. The antidote.” At least I think I say that to them.
Things are getting fuzzy and my mouth feels full, full of words that are having a hard time getting out. And it’s hard to tell with them wearing masks and all, but by the way a few of them turn their heads to the sides, I think some of them recognize Barron’s name.
When I stand, one of the soldiers pulls Terry away from me. My arms go dead. Another soldier pulls Liv into the shadows, and both she and Terry are screaming.
Another soldier yells some order above the chaos of sounds around me. Liv and Terry stop screaming, I think. I’ve sunk to my knees by now and I’m fading fast here.
This soldier crouches down in front of me. She gently takes my hands, thanks me, tells me that we’ve done good, that I’ve done good, that these vaccines will save the whole town, save everyone.
Because I can’t speak or smile, I just nod.
She tells me that she’s here to help. She asks me to let her help. So I do. I let her take the syringes.
And now, instead of fuzzy, I can see fewer things, but in higher detail. What I see in highest detail is Floating Boy’s photo life on the wall, and I think it’s this that finally cues up my big anxiety meltdown, the one that gets me a ride on the helicopter, a respirator, the whole works.
Or, it’s not all the pictures together, but one in particular, the one I left downstairs, of him and his magazine parents, his magazine family. It’s back in place at the front of the line.
I reach out to take it with me, just that one thing to remember him by, but there’s another soldier at the end of a long, long tunnel, and he’s already pulling me away from all this, into myself. Into the future.
21.
It’s the second day of school, and the one annoying part one of the thousands of annoying parts is that everyone is trying to act like everything is back to normal, or some new normal that is supposed to be exactly like the old normal. Never mind that this second day of school is taking place on October 24th. Back-to-school aisle or the Halloween aisle? Exactly.
I leave math class early, asking to go to the bathroom right before the end of some ginormous factoring problem. My math teacher Mr. Rest looks at me like I’m a hand grenade with a loose pin, but he lets me go. I sprint through the hallways and don’t stop at my locker.
My plan: get to the cafeteria before everyone else. I’m not all that much for the crush
of kids in the hallways in between classes anymore. Especially when everyone hates me.
I’m sitting at an empty table in the caf, waiting to eat lunch with Liv and Marcus. They’re the only ones who’ll sit with me or talk to me.
The whole school blames me for all the shots they have to take. Ridiculous, right? It’s pretty clearly not my fault, but every kid in school stares at me and rubs their shoulders like the sight of me brings them some phantom pain. Bunch of crybabies, if you ask me.
So yeah, about a month after I gave them Barron’s vaccines and with the help of whatever they’d found left at his cabin, the army was able to quickly pump out their own version of a vaccine, and it works. Mostly. Only, it’s less a vaccine and more a gene-therapy type of treatment. Treatment means more-than-one. Turns out it’s like rabies shots, only you don’t need them in your stomach or eyeballs or armpits. No, where you need these shots, it’s right in your day planner—twice a week for four weeks, and even then there’s a test to be sure it worked. I guess two-for-four is the minimum. It’s what you get if your karma’s good and you know the doctor.
And, though nobody will tell you this, everybody is just hoping the shots are actually changing back the DNA. Lots of fingers crossed. Maybe the vaccine only turns off the hydrogen manufacturing protein thingy but still leaves them all fundamentally changed. That’s the part of all this I don’t get. Why doesn’t everyone just accept that everything has changed?
The government set up immunization clinics all over Ipswich because of all the kids needing all those shots. They’ve taken over the local polling stations, where the proud citizens of Ipswich go to vote for Logan’s dad. So this means the Claremonts’ church has been turned into a walk-through clinic, which pleases me in a weird, forced-communion kind of way. That’s where Terry has to go, still. The poor kid comes home rubbing his shoulder, holding a little yellow lollypop that’s supposed to make up for everything.
Of course, the adults only need one shot to get over their flu. They always have it easier than us. But they never got to fly, either. I wonder if the kids who did, I wonder if they talk about it to their parents. And, if they do, is it all about how wonderful it was, or do they make it sound scary, like the parents want?