The Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn't Fly
Page 18
“I’m a cowboy,” he says, dropping to his knees beside me. His front side is all covered in brownish-orange cow hair.
“Best getaway vehicles ever.”
I smile across to him.
“You came from the water,” he says.
“You could say that.”
He shakes his head back and forth in wonder and is wearing a cow-big smile. He says. “You’re the special one. If only Barron had known.”
“Is he—?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer, just kind of squints his whole face.
“I’m sorry, you don’t have to—”
“I don’t know. We crashed and—and he was hurt bad, I think. But he—he told me to go. Made me go.” Floating Boy pauses and his big smile from before goes somewhere else. “We were in his car with police chasing us and everything, and he said he was sorry, and he told me—”
“That he was your—”
“Granddad. You were almost right,” he says, smiling again, the kind you can’t help. He pulls me to him and holds me there. It’s a good place to be.
We talk. I tell him about Dr. Emma. I tell him about high school. I tell him about meatball subs.
It’s nothing compared to what he’s got to tell me. The bomb that Barron dropped on him in the car: that Floating Boy’s parents died in a car accident only a few months before Barron was dismissed from the army base. That he’d been babysitting that night for them. That it was a train that hit them.
“So, no one ever found me in the wreck, you know?” Floating Boy says. “The train kind of . . . there wasn’t a lot left after the—after it all burned.”
I open my mouth but there are no words for this. His grandfather was so grief-stricken, confused, and desperate, he thought only of continuing his work somehow, so he used his suddenly parentless, assumed-dead grandson as the experiment subject. At some point, he must’ve realized what he was doing was so so wrong, and he felt so guilty about it, he couldn’t face it. He made up the legend of Army-kept Seth, he pretended he wasn’t Floating Boy’s granddad, and he pretended that Floating Boy was just another kid, without a family and without a name.
I figure out the rest, remembering when Barron told me that he’d lose Floating Boy if he stopped floating. When Barron finally cured him, it meant that he wouldn’t be able to just keep his grandson there in the cabin forever with him, that he could lose him too. So he re-made him into Floating Boy again.
As usual, I say what I say without thinking about it first: “Totally messed up and creepy, but that means he loved you, then, right?”
He looks over to me for more like this. Like a web search.
“He loved you enough to lie to you,” I say, trying to explain what can’t be.
“Yeah, I guess. But, in a weird way, at least it means they—my parents—didn’t, you know, just, like, sell me, or ditch me at the mall.”
“Is that really how you think things work?”
He looks over at me and then kind of away, and he says, in the way only he can, “No?”
I hug him so hard. River water runs by, cows moo behind us, the sun shines.
I finally say, “So, do I call you Seth now?”
“No. He told me that, too,” he says, looking out across the river. “Cooper.”
“Cooper?”
“Cooper.” He smiles.
I like it.
I feel my hand taking out my baggied cell phone—the automatic response to getting new information: text it. The water drips off the bag but the phone is dry. There’s a thousand million messages from Liv, and more popping in, which means there’s a signal.
“Cooper,” I say, nodding. “Nice to meet you.”
There’s a fire truck or something with a siren designed to cover serious distance. The sound makes it to us just barely.
We start walking to the water’s edge, and Cooper—I do love it, it’s perfect—he says, “You know your mom’s going to be a complete baskethead when she finds out you can breathe under water?”
“Basketcase,” I say for him, then shrug, say, “I’m nearly fifteen years old. She’s supposed to be.”
Cooper takes my cue, smiles, and, as we’re walking up the shore of the river, back to town—walking, not flying, not swimming—I thumb out the one text to Liv that I’ve never done before.
am ok
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
P. T. Jones would like to thank everyone at ChiZine Publications, with special thanks to Sandra Kasturi, Christie DiIorio, and Brett Savory for all of their suggestions, their hard work, and their love of Floating Boy and Mary.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
“P. T. Jones” is Stephen Graham Jones and Paul Tremblay. Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly is their first collaboration on a novel.
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of Flushboy, about a teen working at his father’s revolutionary bathroom establishment, and he’s also got nearly twenty other books out, lots of them with “Zombie” in the title. Stephen’s stories have been in Year’s Best collections, in textbooks, and in a lot of anthologies. Though he lives in Colorado now, Stephen grew up in Texas. If you squint just right, some parts of this Massachusetts story will probably have a tumbleweed or two.
Paul Tremblay is the author of The Little Sleep, No Sleep Till Wonderland, In the Mean Time, Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, and the forthcoming A Head Full of Ghosts. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times and numerous Year’s Best anthologies. He lives just outside of Boston, and when he’s not writing about narcoleptic private detectives, girls with two heads, or teens who float, he helps administrate the Shirley Jackson Awards.
COPYRIGHT
Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly © 2014 by P. T. Jones
Cover artwork © 2014 by Erik Mohr
Interior design © 2014 by Samantha Beiko
All rights reserved.
Published by ChiZine Publications
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
EPub Edition MAY 2014 ISBN: 978-1-77148-174-8
All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.
No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
CHITEEN
Toronto, Canada
www.chiteen.com
Edited by Sandra Kasturi and Brett Savory
Copyedited and proofread by Christie DiIorio
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.
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