The Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn't Fly Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Part I: Treading Air

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  Part II: Falling Hard

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  Part III: Just Breathe

  21.

  22.

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  Also Available from ChiZine Publications

  DEDICATION

  For Cole, Emma, Rane, and Kinsey

  1.

  There are worse ways to spend a summer Sunday afternoon than at my little cousin’s first birthday bash. That’s the lie I’m telling myself. It’s not that I don’t love the little spud, Jack, because I do. Jack’s round and cute, and falls down a lot. He can’t say much of anything without spit bubbles. He calls me “Nucky,” which is close enough to Mary, right?

  So getting my ankles wet in the kiddie pool and greasy burgers shared with my favorite three-hundred-pound uncle would be fine by me most days, it’s just that today I have options. Or, I have an option.

  I could be at the Asbury Street Bridge, jumping into the Ipswich River with Liv, Jules, and Kelli with an i. That’s how Kelli introduces herself to everyone, and if there isn’t anyone new to introduce herself to, then she just finds a way to drop her i into any conversation. So yeah, me and her aren’t exactly best friends.

  There are only two weekends left to my summer, and those weekends are like the last two pieces of candy in a Halloween bag. They need to be used wisely. You can’t just go giving one of them away.

  Why am I talking about Halloween candy in August? I don’t know. The end of summer has me big-time frazzled. It doesn’t help that I still haven’t read two of my summer reading books. Let’s not go there, either.

  So here I am at the party, which is at my cousin’s grandparents’ house. Notice I didn’t say my grandparents’ house. I can’t really be related to all these Claremonts, I mean. If I were, then I’d have their same God-squad, super religious, suspender-wearing blood in me, ready to take me over the minute I forget to keep on guard. But that’ll never happen. Especially with them watching me every step of this party, eternally judging my black Paramore t-shirt and the streaks of red in my hair. Their smiles are all better-than-thou.

  The bleached-white Claremonts wear a lot of sweaters, even in summer, and on their coffee tables they leave out inspirational-type books with sun-streaked clouds and big, yellow-lettered titles on the covers. Those books creep me out and make me think of the end of the world, which, like school, is something I don’t need to be thinking about right now.

  My little revenge is calling the Claremonts muggles. I earn bonus humor points because they don’t approve of Harry Potter books and all that witchcraft and blasphemy. Mom and Dad laugh when I call them muggles, but they hush me up out in public like this, lest the Claremonts hear me and their ears doth melt. But I should be saying prayers of thanks, I know. That my parents aren’t the pure Claremont strain. That, while definitely muggle-class, they at least buy the occasional entertainment mag or gossip rag, and don’t have any books with titles like My Fifty-Nine-Second Glimpse of Eternity.

  Because it’s Jack’s first birthday, the Claremont house is jammed full of old folks (barely walking mummies, really) and cousins of cousins of cousins. I haven’t even seen most of these people before.

  Over there stuffing his face at the snack table is a guy who might be my age, my grade at least, or close. Going on tenth grade? Hard to tell with his face dripping Doritos shards. Now that he’s done chowing on the chips he leans on the porch, stuck to it like a periwinkle on a rock. He kind of looks like a periwinkle, too, with his gray t-shirt, jean shorts, dark hair, a shy don’t-look-at-me smile. He’s very just-there, very unnoticeable, even if I’m noticing him. He hovers behind the grandparent brigade, watching them look through old photo albums of people everyone has probably already forgotten.

  I’m stuck here in the front yard on kid duty, making sure none of the four-year-old-and-under pack, including my little brother Terry, drown in the three-inch water of the kiddie pool. The pool is shaped like a clown’s mouth, so it looks like the clown is eating all of us. And they think I’m twisted.

  I do Jaws shark-attack music at the kids splashing me the most—Luke, Gideon, Joshua, I can’t keep them straight—but they are, shall we say, unfazed.

  Mom comes over, trailing salad off her Styrofoam plate, sucking ranch dressing from the side of her hand. We both have soccer-player legs, which means thick calves. “How’s it going over here?” she asks.

  “Wunderbar,” I say. “The next muggle that splashes me is gonna get goal-kicked across the street.”

  “Lovely. Aunt Beth needs you to get some more juice boxes from the kid cantina when you get a chance.”

  Aunt Beth is Jack’s mom. She keeps a permanent stash of kid drinks and food in the trunk of her tank-sized SUV. And yeah, she calls it the “kid cantina.”

  “Does that mean I’m dismissed from kiddie-pool patrol?”

  “Oh, right. Never mind, I’ll get the juice.”

  My shoulders slump and my toes curl up under my feet. I say, “Fine. But hey, Mom. Who’s that on the porch, behind the great wall of old people?”

  She turns quickly, flinging more lettuce off her plate. One piece lands on my leg. It’s wet, cold, and looks like a tattoo. She says, “I don’t know. He must be one of the other cousins. Why? You think he’s cute?” She laughs, thinking she can embarrass me more than I can her. Oh, Mother.

  “Yes, Mom, I was planning to lie across Granny Muggle’s lap, pull him on top of me, and start making out. Hotly.”

  “I’m so proud.” Mom walks away, probably to slather her whole arm in ranch dressing.

  “Get me a burger, please? Hey, Mom!” She’s not going to get me anything.

  The party goes on, and I’m still stuck in the kiddie pool. No, still starving in the kiddie pool. One of the muggle aunts comes over to talk at me. She’s all pink and white and jewelry. I feel my toes wrinkling in the water, which is filling up with dirt and grass and a piece of lettuce.

  She asks how I’m doing in school.

  “Fine.” I’m not doing fine.

  She asks if I do any cheerleading.

  “No. I made varsity soccer as a freshman.”

  Her “how nice” drips with disapproval. There’s no soccer in the Bible, I guess. But there’s plenty of cheerleading, right?

  Mom and Aunt Beth save me when they call the kids away from the pool to get ready for cake and presents. Adults, all hunched over like coal miners, move the mountain of presents off the porch and onto the front lawn.

  My dad totters out carrying a robotic-looking high chair with birthday boy Jack still strapped inside it. Let me repeat that: with Jack still strapped inside it.

  I cover my eyes, afraid to watch. Dad is a world-champion klutz and has only a basic understanding of how to work his opposable thumbs and cement-shoe feet. Every adult who even sort-of knows him tells him to be careful, and the ones still sitting on the porch ask if he needs help.

  He laughs at t
hem, not with them, and gives us a few fake-whoops moments, you know, pretending to trip and drop the one-year-old on his head. Ha, ha, Dad! You’re the bomb!

  Jake and the chair miraculously survive the trip to the front lawn, so I get to leave the pool. They bring out a white cake with its white and somehow religious-looking ONE candle as big as Jack’s head. I wonder what a one-year-old thinks of any of this.

  The opening of presents passes without a major meltdown (only three kids cry because they aren’t getting anything). Next up, as if there hasn’t been enough violent activity for the kids: a piñata. A blue-and-green Pokémon hangs off a lower branch of the spidery oak tree. My dad volunteers to be the spinner of blindfolded children armed with bats.

  Mom pushes me away from the porch, takes my meal of cake away before I’m finished. She tells me that I need to help keep an eye on Dad and make sure he doesn’t get hurt.

  Awesome. Jumping off a bridge and into the Ipswich River would’ve been so much more fun than this. Jumping off any bridge would’ve been more fun than this.

  The kids form a circle around the tree. They’re already full of righteous sugar and corn syrup, and they jump and throw their hands into the air, shouting like they’re about to kill Piggy. Lord of the Flies is the one summer reading book I got to, all right?

  With my dad’s help, the new one-year-old gets first crack at the Pokémon with the Wiffle Ball bat he can barely hold. Him they don’t blindfold, but he gets three surprisingly healthy swings in. The kid is a tank! One swing misses, one hits the piñata, another hits my dad in the knee.

  The rest of the kids take their turns attempting candy carnage. When it’s my brother Terry’s turn, I notice that the guy in the gray t-shirt is standing across from me, leaning on the porch stairs railing. He’s leaning on it like he needs to, like he’d fall down without it. I’m watching him and Terry at the same time.

  Terry giggles when Dad spins him around fast, too fast. Mom yells, telling Dad to go easy.

  That other boy, he looks sick. Probably scarfed down too many nacho chips. No probably about it. His lips are still stained radioactive-cheese orange. He pulls at the collar of his shirt and takes deep breaths. His right leg vibrates up and down like he’s trying to stamp a huge mutant bug under his heel.

  Terry stops spinning and stumbles toward the piñata. He misses with a wild swing and the bat makes a whoosh sound.

  The other boy rubs his face hard enough that an eye might smoosh out a socket. And both his legs are twitching now. I don’t know how he’s doing it, but it doesn’t look right. I look around to see if any of the adults notice him. Where are his parents? Where’re the grown-up Shaky Legs?

  Terry hits the Pokémon and lops off a front leg, but no candy spills out yet. A piñata flesh wound. Terry goes for the kill, hits the Pokémon’s belly, and it explodes open. Kids scream and rush Terry, who’s still swinging the bat with the intent to maim.

  I look over and the other boy sees me, and kind of smiles. I say kind of because I’m not sure, okay? Maybe it’s an I’m-gonna-puke-up-Doritos-and-birthday-cake look and not a smile. But he doesn’t puke: he rushes the piñata tree and wades through the kid feeding-frenzy, leaving cheesy, orange fingerprints on more than one kid’s t-shirt.

  What, is he going to fight the toddlers for candy?

  I try to step forward to ask him what he’s doing, I guess, or maybe ask him, I don’t know, if he smiled at me, or what’s your name, what school do you go to, why are you here, did you see me totally rocking that kiddie pool? But my dad’s in the way, as usual.

  “Dad, what’s that guy doing?” Dads are supposed to have answers, supposed to make things like this right. Not my dad, though. And he’s not going to hear me anyway, so I say it mostly to myself.

  The boy brushes past me and because I’m tallest, maybe (not that I’m Gigantor or anything, but I’m taller than the toddler gimme-candy-mob), or closest, he plants his hand on my left shoulder, and pushes himself up into the tree so fast that I barely register that he also stepped on my shoulder. It was so light, like he wasn’t pushing on me at all.

  All around me, the muggle kids are on the ground, picking up the candy guts of the Pokémon. On the branch above us now, the branch the piñata was tied to, is the other boy.

  Dad finally sees him, and laughs nervously, like he doesn’t want to be left out of whatever this joke is going to be.

  The boy gets both feet under him and scrambles higher into the tree. He’s rough with his climbing, grabbing fistfuls of branches, snapping some, stripping others of leaves, like he’s bullying his way through the tree instead of climbing. Finally he’s near the top, at the top, and I have to squint in the sun to almost see him.

  The other adults flow down the porch steps and look up. It’s really bright and the sun is directly behind the top of the tree. Everyone squints like me. Aunt Beth says, “Get down from there,” and her voice is the one you use on your dog when it’s up on the couch again.

  And now the boy’s lost in the brightness somehow. The whole tree shakes. He’s up in the thickest part of the tree.

  I step back, looking up, and I keep going until I back into the kiddie pool, which takes me out behind my knees. My soccer calves are no help and I splash down butt-first into the water. No one is watching me, so no one laughs or asks if I’m okay. I’m not okay.

  There, he’s at the top. Definitely. Am I the only one who can—?

  The light branches bend under his weight, and then he just leaps forward, into the air, into nothing.

  There are screams all around, but he doesn’t fall, doesn’t plummet, doesn’t make a body imprint on the lawn like some cartoon character. He just hangs in the air like he’s getting his grip.

  And then he rises.

  The sun is behind him so he’s a shadow. He moves his arms and legs, but I can’t tell if it’s gaining him any sort of direction. He drifts away, up and to the left, and somersaults in the air a few times.

  Everyone is out in the yard. The kids laugh and wave. The adults grab and claw at each other, terrified. They try to herd the children away. And the kids, they only start crying because they want to watch. They want to see that other boy, that older one, the one floating away like a lost balloon.

  2.

  I’m finally here at the Asbury Street Bridge, which is less a bridge and more like a road that passes just above the river. I’m a day late and, because of yesterday and the party, I’m not really into it. None of us really are.

  Kelli is here because she’s Kelli, and Marcus Abelson is supposed to show up with his friends, but it’s four already and that means Marcus isn’t coming. Liv is only here because I demanded a day at the bridge to make up for my lost Sunday. And maybe she feels guilty for not believing me about the floating boy.

  I can’t pretend it didn’t happen, though. It did. I was there. He touched me on the way up, even, and used me like a stepladder.

  After, though, with me sitting in the clown-mouth pool and him just a speck against the clouds, the party went into total panic mode. My family ran around like Chicken Littles, like it’s written in their DNA or something. The Claremonts held hands and prayed, my mom called the police, and someone, I think it was crazy Uncle Al, the one with the cane and ears bigger than the rest of his head, called the news.

  Of course I texted Liv and Kelli. They didn’t believe me and just blabbed on and on about the pack of pervy eighth-grade boys spying on them, hiding under the bridge like the trolls they are.

  I’m not gonna lie: my friends not believing my floaty-story hurt.

  What hurt worse was the footage on the news later that night: The Birthday Party Hoax, they called it. It was footage of this ancient old dude in a brown suit. He was walking down the sidewalk, pushing a cart. The news never said if he was from the zoo, the carnival, the Cover-Ups-R-Us factory, just that he was a freaking balloon man. His balloons tied to the front of his cart we
re shaped like gingerbread men. Up close, you’d never mistake those balloons for a boy, right? Liv saw the news, too, and hit me with: knew u were BSing.

  It all sucks, with everyone in Massachusetts, including my parents, acting like it was just a balloon.

  “Oh, the sun was in all our eyes, honey,” they say, and “That boy took one of those balloons up with him in the tree, right?” plus, “Well, duh, no one saw him after because he snuck down out of the tree when everyone was freaking out,” and the most annoying: “Easiest prank ever.” So, I truly and forever hate the news and am starting to hate not-funny texts from Liv. I definitely hate the balloon man and I kind of even hate the boy for floating away, for setting me up like this, making me (at a party of Claremonts) be the one true believer.

  I say to Liv and Kelli, “We don’t have to stay if you don’t want, you know.” We’ve been here most of the afternoon already, lounging on the bridge, sitting on the railing, each of us practicing our so-you’re-finally-here looks for whoever shows up. My shoulders are getting sunburned, too. My skin feels tight like that.

  “Whatevs,” Liv says, going overkill on her shrug. “I’m good when you are.” All you need to know about Liv is that she’s taller than me, she laughs in three short bursts, and she doesn’t like ice cream. Total freak, but in the best way possible.

  “Not yet. We gotta wait for Marcus and Colby, right?” Kelli says, or begs, really. Her hands are on her hips when she says it so that she really, really means it.

  “He’s not coming.” I say it all official, like it should be in a document.

  “Like you know, Mares,” Kelli says.

  I hate when she calls me “Mares.” It’s not catching on, thank god.

  “Text him,” I say to Liv. Marcus is Liv’s on-again-off-again boyfriend. He works nights at the ginormous sporting goods store on Route One, where I go for my soccer gear. The store is as big, green, and ugly as Godzilla. Not that anyone knows what Godzilla looks like besides me. Definitely not Marcus. I tried explaining to him that Godzilla was a giant Japanese monster with atomic breath and is played by a guy in a rubber suit. Marcus looked at me like I had a Jupiter-sized zit on my forehead.