by Floating Boy
And, all these landlubber parents—definitely including mine—for their part in all this, they claim not to really remember anything they did while they were sick. That it was all some hallucination or bad dream that faded away when they woke up. That’s how Aunt Beth describes it to me. She calls every night, wanting to talk to me and to apologize for everything. Honestly, she’s been sweet about it: she listens to me detail everything that happened, listens like this is her punishment. I haven’t told her that I forgive her yet, but I’m working up to it. I mean, I’m working around it, anyway. In the very general area. One that involves the Claremonts now getting surprise monthly installments of a journal I found called Evolution, thanks to me cracking my dad’s impossible PayPal password. I’d tried my mom’s name, Terry’s name, and all our birthdays, when suddenly he said it from right behind me: “Try bigfoot99, all lowercase.”
I froze, closed my eyes, said it: “How long have you been watching?”
“You should probably change that to a three-year subscription,” he says, and then just wanders off like this never even happened.
Maybe he’s not so bad for an old guy.
As for the fire at the mill, it was only a blip on the news, given the other fires that happened around town. And, of course, there’s that little floaty story of the century that’s been going on. They’re even replaying that “Birthday Party Hoax” bit with the gingerbread man, playing it in slow motion so they can take it all apart, see if everything that was going to happen was already there somehow, if they’d just have looked.
With all this national attention, the population of Ipswich has doubled in size. We’re a 24/7 news event. The vans are parked on the lawn, the reporters and journalists call my house day and night, and my parents fend off hundreds of interview requests (even the pay ones). I’m still a minor so they can’t officially name me. The Internet, though, has outed me as The Girl Who Couldn’t Fly. High-school translation? “The Girl Who Doesn’t Have to Turn Her Shoulder into a Pin-Cushion.” The social fallout of that kind of notoriety? Yeah, I’m Miss Popular.
Anyway, there’s apparently bigger stuff going on than an angry village trying to burn up flying kids at an abandoned mill. None of the Claremonts have been arrested or excommunicated or put up on the wall at the post office.
As far as I know, no one in town has been arrested. Even Logan is back at school despite his dive-bombing the soldiers, which, if you ask me, has got to be some kind of federal crime.
Everyone’s getting a free pass, a do-over, with the insane quick-everything-is-back-to-normal-really government policy being instituted. Maybe one of the seniors in her robe and gown on graduation day will float up over the crowd. I’ll smile when that happens. With my inside face and my outside face.
So, kids trickle into the cafeteria. And by “trickle,” I mean “trickle.” The school is still only like two-thirds full. Some families are resisting the forced immunizations because of the crazy rumors about the shots causing autism, schizophrenia, sterility, and some other totally obscure diseases with really long names. Of course, many of those resisting families are Claremonts, and they’ve been quarantined because they’re still contagious. I suspect they’ll crack eventually. You can’t walk around your whole life with a dog leash looped around your ankle.
If you ask me, they’ve always been contagious, but nobody’s asking me, of course.
For the kids still undergoing treatment, they don’t let them back into school until they pass some blood protein test. It’s not a perfect test, apparently. Yesterday, some new freshman floated up to the caf’s ceiling after dropping his sub on the floor. Logan and his friends threw meatballs at him. So yeah, Logan is back to his usual jerky self. Maybe we are getting back to the old normal. Doesn’t that sound so sad?
Liv lands on the seat I’ve saved, and hip checks me. “What up?”
“Where’s Marcus?”
“In line. It’s taco day. We won’t see Marcus for a while. He’ll be up there spending half the period trying to figure out how he can get seconds and thirds out of the lunch ladies.” Liv puts down her brown bag lunch and takes out her phone instead. “Did you see this?”
It’s news footage from earlier this morning:
Police chase a brown station wagon on a rural road. The road is in neighboring Topsfield, looks like. Route 97, maybe? Meaning Barron and Floating Boy didn’t skip town like everybody thought. They just found a really good hiding place and waited for everybody to get bored looking for them. Meaning he’s been less than, what, ten miles away for nearly two months? And my radar, it told me nothing.
I take Liv’s phone from her, hunch over it, and I don’t even realize I’m holding my breath at first.
It’s the big chase at the end of the movie, at the end of their movie. One brown station wagon boogies ahead of every police car in Massachusetts, it looks like, and about half the helicopters. I think there’s even an Army truck or two in there somewhere.
And, yes, there are definitely two people in the front seat. If Floating Boy were a hostage, wouldn’t he be tied up in back? He wouldn’t get to sit so close to the steering wheel, anyway.
Run, I say in my head, willing that stupid brown station wagon faster. They’re whipping by these serene fields of cows and barns and grass and, on Liv’s phone anyway, it’s all so quiet, like this chase is happening inside a snow globe, just without the snow.
Then the camera pulls back and looks ahead to a line of cars and trucks. There are enraged citizens, emergency personnel, reporters. Between the station wagon and the roadblock, there’s exactly one field of cows to the left, and then the live feed cuts out.
“Buffering?” Liv says.
“What? Come on!” I say and shake the phone.
“Maybe it’s not them,” Liv says, her hands swallowing the phone back before I can chuck it.
And maybe cows can fly, I almost say. I laugh a bit. It feels good, being able to laugh. I take out my PB and J and fill my mouth with it. Maybe it’ll stop my eyes from welling up.
“It’s okay,” Liv says, and looks around the caf. She makes me put down the sandwich, smiles, and bores her eyes into me in the most casual way possible. “You’re doing fine. You’re going to do fine, right?”
I don’t know if I’m doing fine, but maybe, possibly, I’m doing better.
Instead of shots, I’ve been meeting with a new doctor, not the school psych who was kind of creepy. Dr. Emma Doherty is much cooler. She was big into punk music in the 80s and 90s and we get to spend part of every session talking music. Still, some days it’s not easy to talk about everything and her questions are hard, especially when she invites Mom to sit in on a session, but we’re all trying, I guess. I’m trying. I am. At least my parents and Dr. Emma are all on board with me trying to make my best go at it without medication. Dr. Emma doesn’t let me call the meds “zombie pills,” of course. I tried using Terese Richmond as my can’t-fail space cadet example, but then Dr. Emma blinked twice and asked me if Terese Richmond had been what I was calling a “space cadet” before her medication as well?
Sometimes I hate my big mouth.
So they’re not zombie pills, fine. So Terese Richmond’s been zoned out since kindergarten, all on her own, no prescription necessary, thank you. Maybe she’s saving it all up to win the Nobel Prize one day. That’s Dr. Emma’s suggestion.
She’s not so bad, really.
I even kind of look forward to our sessions. She’s the only one who can keep up with me, and sometimes win. It makes her a lot easier to believe.
Anyway, no, the fall hasn’t been perfect. I had a meltdown at the first day of soccer double sessions (two fun-fun-fun filled practices in one day!) a few weeks ago, but it was the first one since the one I had with the soldiers there in Barron’s cabin. And really, who can blame me for that one? Doubles are doubles, I mean.
“I’m dealing with it,” I tell Liv. I’m dealing.<
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Marcus finally makes his way to the table. His skinny chest is all puffed out because he has three tacos on his tray.
“You have practice after school?” Liv asks me, still using her casual voice, which is anything but.
“Practice,” I say. “Supposed to, yeah.” I used to live for soccer, I know. Now, though? Now I don’t really know. Whenever I hit the field, I think about Floating Boy asking if he could watch a game, and how that’ll never happen. “But—I could go to the nurse after school,” I say. “Tell her I wasn’t feeling well.”
Liv smiles her real smile again. “Was thinking of going down to the bridge today, now that you mention it.”
“To do what?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing,” I repeat, tasting it, and thinking about Chemistry, Modern European History, and how I’m going to get through those periods without getting caught stealing time on my own phone to watch the news. I’m not supposed to think of everything that I’m supposed to get done in a day, am supposed to just leave it broken up into chewable bites. I’m trying, Dr. Doherty. Emma. Mom. Maybe I’ll take some more trips to the bathroom.
“Yeah,” I add. “That could definitely work.”
On the way to the bridge, the streets are empty. Everybody’s either at school or glued to the news. I’ve been watching replays of the wagon crash on my phone the whole trip over. The volume is still down, but the station wagon, it’s upside down in that cow field now. All the windows are gone and smoke comes up from underneath. Emergency personnel are all around. Ambulances. So many ambulances, and stretchers, and gurneys.
Liv takes my cell phone, makes a show of putting it into a Ziploc baggie for me. There’s still chip crumbs in it from lunch.
“Just to be safe, but don’t get any ideas,” she says and holds my hand instead of Marcus’s. I slide the baggie into my front pocket and let her pull me back into summer, or as close as we can get, anyway.
We lean over the bridge rail and watch the water slip past. Then Marcus gets a game of Leaf going. It’s not that complicated. You drop a leaf into the current, race to the other side of the bridge, try to drop a piece of gravel onto that leaf. If the leaf sinks: point. If the gravel floats away on the leaf: all the points in the world. It’s never happened, I mean. There’s hardly ever any points.
Liv falls into the game too, dropping a whole handful of gravel down. I lean over, watching all those ripples happen and then not happen. I’m still leaned over, all lost in myself, when I hear it, distant and wrong: a cow.
I look to Liv and Marcus, but they’re not hearing this. This is the almost-country, though. Cows abound, right? Except—this close to town? And then it comes again, a more forlorn kind of mooing, like some drama queen of a cow.
It’s Marcus who finds the source first. He falls back against the rail, like his eyes are passing him bad data. Like this can’t be possible. But it is. It is.
Coming up, following the S of the river, is a herd of cows. Floating, floating cows. My heart bobs up into my throat and Liv takes my wrist and is smiling, too.
“Does this mean—?” she says.
“They had to catch it somewhere, right?” I say, stepping out to the middle of the bridge.
And then the first one passes over. It’s maybe only about twelve feet up. It looks at us as it passes. It’s probably just sad that it can’t chomp any grass from all the way up there. And then the next, and the next, and the mooing is louder now, so that it’s like we’re in it, like we’re part of the herd.
I stand up on the rail and want to just brush my fingertips along the bottom of one of their hooves, or touch their long straggly tails. And I do.
“Mare,” Liv says, in what I know is going to be her mom-voice someday.
I don’t answer.
“Is she—?” Marcus says, looking everywhere for help, for an adult, a teacher, somebody. Then a thing happens to him in just the skinniest little instant: he sees that there aren’t any adults or teachers around to do this. There’s just him. And without even blinking, he turns around to me, hooking his thumbs into his belt so his hands hang above his hips in a way I know he’s not aware of. “Hey now,” he says, using his dad’s cop-voice for it, and I want to smile for him, for who he’s becoming here on the bridge with us.
What he’s thinking is what Liv’s thinking, what anybody would be thinking: We’ve been here before with you, Mary. Your maybe-boyfriend’s gone, is maybe-dead on the news, you’re seeing a punk rocker psychiatrist, you’re a suicide waiting to happen.
I can read it in the way they’re angling their bodies over at me. Over to me.
For all I know, my parents had some secret meeting with the Marcus and Liv and told them to keep an eye on me, keep me safe. But they would anyway.
But I’m not stupid, guys. And I most definitely don’t want to kill myself. Maybe it sounds weird, but I am doing better.
I look at the floating cows and I think I get it—flying, floating. My mental block has always been that I haven’t believed. I couldn’t let go of my doubts. I always had this anxiety weighing me down. Seeing these cows, though, I can feel that’s all gone.
I say, “I’ll be all right. I can do this, Liv. Really.”
I’m not immune. I can fly.
Watch.
22.
For two seconds—but they last a lifetime—I’m absolutely right. I am so flying. Except the world isn’t in synch for some reason and has chosen this exact moment to bob up and rise all around me. It’s like I’m staying in place, hanging there just past the railing, but it’s everything else that doesn’t understand.
Liv is already screaming, and Marcus is breathing in to scream. I crash through the surface of the water.
I was so sure I wasn’t going to fall this time that I don’t even have any breath. Wrong again. So sick of being wrong. I sink, hard and fast, and the water is cooler the deeper I get. Cooler and better. Now all I want is a few more moments of this, to be somewhere where nobody’s pointing fingers, where nobody’s whispering behind their hands, where nobody’s asking me questions about me and about what I can or can’t do. Now that I’m here, I decide it’s nice, and I don’t have to leave if I don’t want to.
After a few moments there’s a crash and the water pressure all around me changes abruptly. I gasp and water rushes in, and now I’m looking up at the surface, wondering how hard I can kick, how fast I can get there, if I’m going to get there.
But then I sort of just breathe the water back out. I put my fingertips to my throat, to be sure this is really happening. Like my fingers are the experts.
The water, though—this is like nothing else. Ever. It’s cold and it’s in my lungs.
The other times I’ve breathed in too early in the middle of a swimming stroke, or been pushed in, the water never got chest-deep into me like this. But this is just—it’s like when you put your mom’s expensive lotion on your hands. It’s cold, but a good cold.
In and out. And again.
And holy giant radioactive lizard! The water, it’s like air to me. Because I don’t have two lungfuls of real air, I’m not trying to bob up to the surface anymore. I’m just hanging here, or hanging out, ten feet underwater.
And there’s another body in here with me, of course. With me, but not with me. Liv. She’s up near the golden surface and keeps having to come up for air to yell my name. She slaps the top of the water like she can wake me up.
I take a few more water breaths, my mouth Godzilla-wide, so I can be sure it’s really happening, that I’m really doing this. I am.
I breathe like these are practice breaths, and part of me is thinking that maybe this is just me drowning. But I’m not drowning and I’m not blacking out. These water breaths, they bring such relief. They feel amazing. They feel right. For the first time in my life, something feels right. And mine.
Then I remember the shed, and what Bar
ron said about the mutations: Not all of them could float, you know. For some of them, something different happened.
Something different. My chest swells. Not with water, but with—what?—happiness? I scream a cloud of bubbles, but that’s not good enough, so I drift up to just under the surface, my hair probably barely there, all spread out.
I see a wavery Marcus. He’s standing up on the bridge with Liv’s phone. He’s probably calling his dad to come rescue me.
But I don’t need rescuing, guys.
I reach up to wave to him, to them, to tell them I’m all right, but just as I do the current swells around me, so I have to steady myself. And then Marcus is even more wavery, and then smaller, and then I just go with the water.
I dolphin kick, one of my feet slipping up into the air a moment, giving them all a big splash, and then I dive deep. All the pressure outside my body kind of equalizes with everything I’ve got inside. Down here I’m just neutral. I’m normal, I think.
So, yeah, I can catch it like everybody else. This is me. Sophomore in high school. Soccer player. Fishgirl.
Finally, a mile or two later, I surface like an otter, like a seal at the zoo. There are no houses, no people, no roads. But I can hear the cows. I’ve found them again, like I’ve got a special radar in me for them. Or maybe I just like hamburgers. I sidestroke down to where they are. They all look up to me when I climb up, dripping, muddy, laughing.
“Go on, go on,” I tell them, raising my hands, telling them they should keep eating, and they do. This grass is their version of Aunt Beth’s kid cantina, I know. Their sugary treats before their next big lift-off.
And then I study the land, the tree line, and that’s when I see him. Floating Boy. He’s coming through the cows for me, touching each on the side or rump to guide himself around them.
I fall to my knees and don’t even feel the ground under me. “You’re alive,” I just manage to say.