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

  Liv says, “Fine. I’ll ask him why he doesn’t have Colby’s skinny ass down here for you.”

  “Shut up,” Kelli cuts back, studying the top of one of her magnificent fingernails.

  “What? Nothing wrong with a skinny ass.”

  As for my Godzilla-IQ, I watched those movies when I stayed home from school for a few weeks last spring. A little case of anxiety, at least that’s what they finally called it. Except it wasn’t so little. Or isn’t so little. It started after I made soccer, which makes zero sense, I know. You’d think I’d be all confident, a freshman sweeper on varsity, but that was when it started happening in class. I’d sit and stress about all the reading and homework I’d have to do, and it’d seem like this impossible thing, something I couldn’t do even if I had years to do it, and I couldn’t concentrate.

  It was totally weird and scary. I could feel myself changing. I wasn’t me anymore, you know? I started bombing tests and quizzes, even though they were the only thing at the end of my tunnel vision.

  My parents thought I was slacking, that I was trading books for soccer, and they’d get mad at me, which made it all worse. I totally crashed in May. I couldn’t get out of bed. My head was spinning and the blanket got so, so heavy, and Mom or Dad would have to call in sick so someone could sit some kind of suicide watch over me. I was the sadsack girl in all those afterschool TV movies. Guess I still am, but kind of in secret.

  Now, the re-start of school is only two weeks away and if I’m not “better” by then, it’s zombie pills, and I’ll be like Terese Richmond, the town’s resident space cadet since the docs daily-dosed her up.

  As far as anybody but Liv knows, what was wrong with me when I missed school was mono, the kissing disease, right? There are worse things to be known for.

  “Here, I’ll take a pic of you and send it,” Liv says to Kelli and angles her cell phone up. “I’m sure Colby would say something like, My isn’t she a fetching young lass?”

  One more thing you need to know about Liv: she likes to talk in a fake British accent sometimes. She’s the best, but like I said: total freak.

  Kelli looks both ways to make sure the road is clear of boys with skinny asses, then gives Liv and her cell the finger.

  “Come on,” I say and slide down from the rail, not going anywhere, really.

  Liv tucks her phone away and says, “Like they’d want to see anybody but me anyway.”

  “Oh, but, Olivia, he’s just got that little screen on his phone,” Kelli says. She works her thumbs and index fingers into a cell-phone sized square and pretends to try and fit Liv into it.

  Liv says, “My, aren’t you a douche,” in her Brit accent.

  I’m going to have to do some distracting to keep them from killing each other. “Guys? Yo, guys!” I’m leaning on the railing now, and when they both look over I finger-wave to them, roll back, and somersault over the railing, toward the water.

  It’s only a ten foot drop but I feel like I’m falling in slow motion. I crash down into the cold, dark river and I hold my breath and stay under. My eyes are open but I can’t really see anything other than floating bits of river mud. Kelli isn’t the only one who can manufacture a little drama on demand.

  There’s a big splash right next to me. It’s Liv. She jumps in because my dad probably found some point in the last few months to pull her aside and ask her to keep an eye on me.

  And now she’s screaming bubbles at me underwater, grabbing my shoulders from under my arms. She pulls and kicks, trying to drag me up to the surface. It hurts a little and her fingers are probably leaving marks in my sunburn.

  But do I kick, too, and help her? No. It’s kind of fun to get saved, really, even if I feel like gill-girl and could stay down here for hours.

  We surface together. I’m laughing. Liv is swearing about jumping in with her phone and sunglasses.

  “Mares, Mares!” Kelli calls down from above. She leans out across the bridge railing, toward us, with her purple cell in her right hand, and takes a picture. I flip her off and duck. Liv splashes at her. Kelli is still trying to snap this pic when I see it.

  On the bottom of the bridge, or on the underneath, which is out of range from all the already-graffitied places on the sides, there’s writing. Underneath the bridge. On the underside. The writing isn’t giant spray paint letters, either. It’s just with a stupid marker—blue, the most temporary color. It’s not the blueness that stops me, though. It's that there’s a reason there’s never been any writing there. The water is never high enough to reach the underneath. Not even close. And there’s nothing to hold onto to lean out or get up that far. There’s no way to crawl or swing out there. The only way up there is up there, you know? You’d have to be like a hummingbird or bat or something. Or a balloon.

  What’s written is weird, too. It’s not Jenna Loves Gilbert or Marcus89 Was Here or Bobcats Rule, and it’s not all layered across generations of high schooler crushes. This is all from one time and from one writer. Somebody wrote a whole mess of names and crossed them out. Probably happened recently because the marker is still up there, hanging out on that little lip underneath.

  I close my eyes and can totally see Floating Boy pinned up against the bridge underneath, writing down and then crossing out all those names.

  Who’s Timothy?

  3.

  At dinner, Mom asks me what summer reading books I have left, and I know she’s expecting me to tell her that I’ve read everything. That’s how it’s supposed to work, see?

  In June, the school psychologist set up a reading schedule for me. The idea was that chipping the mountainous reading assignment into doable chunks would keep me from melting down. None of us kept track of that schedule, though. The schedule was like the family secret or something. I think we all wanted to go through summer pretending it didn’t exist and that I didn’t really need it because nothing was really wrong.

  So, yeah, Mom asks and I’m a terrible liar, always have been. My life would be so much easier if I wasn’t. I tell her the bad news: two books left. The big hairy scary fat books, Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein. Both were written, like, what, a thousand years ago?

  Dad doesn’t like drama so he slow-fades out of the kitchen. It’s cute and depressing. Mom stays and I can tell she wants to totally freak out, but she can’t. She’s not supposed to do anything to make my anxiety worse.

  Before Mom even speaks, my chest starts getting tight. Then Mom starts in, real quiet at first, sounding like she’s standing way at the other end of a long hall. She decides that I’ll stay home at night for the rest of the week to get the reading done.

  I have to babysit Terry tonight anyway because Mom and Dad have their bowling night, but the rest of the week, too?

  Most days I feel like I know myself less well than other people claim to know me. But I don’t think keeping me confined to nineteenth-century literature is going to help.

  I’m upstairs in my room as the ’rents get ready for their big night out. Wuthering Heights is crushing my lap and my social life. I’m texting Liv about it.

  Liv: tht sux

  I text about our finding the writing under the bridge.

  Liv: weird 8th grade trolls prbly

  Liv: hey did leg call me 1 hr ago?

  Leg call explanation: I don’t password protect my phone and never remember to lock the screen, and when my phone is jammed into my jeans, any sort of movement means a muffled call from the inside of my pocket. The inside of my pocket is just so chatty. Used to creep her out, but she’s so used to it now that she lets all my calls go to voicemail, and only answers my texts.

  Anyway, yeah, it was a leg call. I ask her how she thought those names got way up there under the bridge. Tell her that only a floaty boy could get up there to Michelangelo those names.

  Liv: u r scarin me crazy lady ;-)

  Liv is the only person in the universe who gets to call
me a crazy lady and not have kicked shins.

  Mom calls for me to come downstairs. I text a grrrr and pocket the phone.

  My parents’ bowling shirts are puke green with animated bowling pins on the back, and the pins have creepy red smiles. Total nightmare fuel. I think Mom and Dad are accidentally wearing each other’s shirts. Again. Mom runs through the emergency contact list on the fridge like I’ve never seen it before, like the list hasn’t been there for as long as we’ve been in this house, like the list isn’t curled and yellowed with age.

  On the way out the door, Mom drops a bomb on me about Terry running a fever.

  “Fever?” I call out after her, but the door’s already closed. “Thanks, Mom.”

  A bottle of kiddie ibuprofen is on the kitchen counter, next to a lonely spoon. I’m reading the label, trying to figure out how many teaspoons a munchkin Terry’s size is supposed to have when our kitchen phone rings its ancient ring, announcing to the world that it’s stupidly attached to a wall.

  I let it ring three times then finally pick it up like the antique it is. I loop its long squiggly cord around my wrist.

  “Speak and be free,” I say, expecting Liv.

  “Mary Elaine?” a woman on the other end guesses.

  I sigh and switch ears with the phone. This conversation’s ending with me getting blessed, I can already tell. It’s Aunt Beth, one of the Chosen Claremonts.

  “Hi, um, yeah, it’s me.”

  “Well, it’s—it’s Jack. He . . . I think he’s . . . sick,” she says, with a fat pause right before the “sick,” so it sounds like it’s not the right word, but she can’t think of another one.

  So Jack the birthday boy is sick. Not a shocker. All those kids at the party: total germ fest. “Must be going around,” I say and switch the phone back to the original ear so I can step over the cord and maybe see what Terry’s doing in the other room. No luck. “Terry has a little fever, too.”

  “Oh?” she says, but sounds farther away from the phone now. “Yes, just—” and then, like that, she’s gone. But the call didn’t get dropped. I hear footsteps, I think, and Jack—it has to be Jack—giggling.

  I listen for a bit and can’t make out much more. I say, “I can’t hear you anymore, Aunt Beth, sorry. Gotta go. Mom will be home later tonight. Goodbye,” and hang up.

  As for our sick kid, he’s in the living room, lying on the couch, his favorite (and I mean cry-for-three-hours-if-you-can’t-find-it-for-him favorite) blue blanket wrapped around his legs, and he’s watching Little Bear for the bazillionth time. It’s a mind-numb-a-thon, sure, but better than him barnacling to my leg and asking me to draw him pictures of dinosaurs with really big teeth.

  I walk over to him, feel his forehead with the back of my hand like I’ve seen hundreds of TV moms do. Feels like a forehead is supposed to, I guess.

  But there’s this smell. It’s not a Terry smell, or even a people smell. At least I hope not. Something industrial, maybe? Another of Dad’s great laundry experiments, probably. He once tried using liquid hand soap in the machine. It didn’t go well.

  I’d sit on the couch next to Terry and try reading, but I’d probably just start watching Little Bear. I tell Terry that I’ll be in the kitchen if he needs me. This still makes me a good and totally responsible big sister, because normally I’d hide out in my room.

  I sit at the kitchen table, open up Wuthering Heights, and focus on reading. One. Word. At. A. Time. And nothing else. Definitely not thinking about how many words or how many letters are in the book, or how long it’s probably going to take me to read this and the next book, and the rest of the school work I’ll have to do in a few weeks.

  My cell phone blips with more texts from Liv. I’m trying to be good here, so I shut off the cell and go back to staring at the book. Ten minutes later, I’ve only read two pages, and I can’t even remember them.

  Somewhere, wuthering along on page three, I hear Terry whimpering from the other room, calling my name.

  “I’m reading,” I announce, but there’s no answer. “Terry?”

  I walk in and Little Bear is over. Just the on-demand guide screen is on the TV. And the room—there’s that smell again. It’s not bad, not good, kind of interesting, I guess. One of those smells you like but would never admit to anybody you liked. And it totally smells like spare tires, or the insides of inner tubes.

  “Terry?” I say again. His blanket is there on the couch, but there’s no Terry inside it. Where would he go without his blanket?

  The hall light is definitely off. He’s afraid of the dark and he’s too scaredy-cat to go upstairs alone. I duck in my parents’ room really quick. The lights are off in there, too. That leaves the kitchen, but I was just in there. The fireplace? That’s stupid. I check the sliding glass doors to the patio: the broken mop handle hasn’t been moved. It’s still jammed in the frame to keep burglars from sliding in and stealing our oh-so-expensive stuff.

  I shake my head and go around the living room, checking behind the chair and in the pillow cabinet of the entertainment center. I say, “Come on, little dude, I gotta get some work done. Let’s pick out a movie, okay?” I don’t hear any hidden giggles or snuffling noses.

  “Terr—” I start, and my voice has a Mom edge to it that’s definitely not going to make him come out of hiding. Then something brushes my hair.

  I duck my head, push whatever it is—please don’t be a spider—away. My headband is old enough that it’s like Velcro and maybe it just snagged the fan pull-chain. Then it brushes me again and instead of all the cobwebs and creepy crawlies that usually scratch at me from above, it’s a small hand.

  Terry.

  His back is pressed up against the ceiling. He’s looking down at me and smiling, and he gives me a wave with that little hand.

  I open my mouth to—I don’t know, scream or cry or laugh. All around him on the ceiling are handprints from the chocolate chip granola bar that Mom thinks is a healthy snack alternative.

  “Terry,” I whisper, trying not to show the panic exploding inside me, and I hold my hand out to him, or up to him.

  He pushes off the ceiling with his chubster legs and skims across the living-room ceiling, kicking up clouds of dust and cobwebs. He’s not scared at all, either. Unlike his big sister.

  “Come down,” I say to him again, reaching, bouncing on my feet. “Ice cream?”

  Compared to floating, I guess ice cream is nothing. Terry laughs and pushes across the ceiling again. He seems to be getting the hang of it.

  I offer him Coke and cookies, but then it hits me: Little Bear. I sit down next to where Terry was on the couch, pick up the remote, and restart the same episode he just watched. I’m pretending to watch, and I feel a stillness above me. A closeness. He’s drifting down. Thank you, Little Bear. I hold his blanket up to him, and when he reaches for it, I take his hand and I pull him down, easy as that.

  I bury him in a hug and keep him there on the couch. All the icky dust on him is now on me, but it doesn’t matter. He wiggles and squirms, turning around so he can keep watching TV. I try to breathe in and relax, somehow.

  My little brother smells like the inside of a spare tire.

  4.

  Terry’s asleep upstairs and his fever is gone. That tire smell washed off in the bubble bath. I think. I hope.

  Liv, of course, doesn’t believe me, even after I text her a pic of the living-room ceiling and the chocolate handprints.

  Clev3r, she texts back.

  “3” for “e” is a thing she does sometimes. It’s more annoying than Kelli’s “i.” Why can’t people be normal? So says anxiety girl with the antigrav little brother.

  Because Liv doesn’t believe me, I can’t ask her if/when I should tell Mom about Terry. I mean, I have to tell her eventually, right?

  But Mom had been so quick to believe the floating boy was a hoax, fanatically quick, like she trusts the lame local six
o’clock news more than her own eyes. So let’s say I call Mom now and then she and Dad race home, and Terry’s fine—fine as in not-floating, and smelling like bubbles instead of tires, and he’s asleep in his bed, cheeks all rosy cute. Mom will think I’m having an episode and maybe use it as an excuse to take me back to the oh-so-understanding doctor and fill me a nice little prescription of zombie pills. . . .

  Me-to-Liv: I h8 my life

  Liv: gotta go. dinner

  I drop myself on the couch and search the DVR guide for a Godzilla movie, just to turn my brain off. No luck. All our recorded shows are Terry’s or Dad’s.

  Dad fills the hard drive with his movies, his inventor-this, dog-training-that shows. But then, toward the bottom of the first screen is something labeled simply with a date, no show title. I watch. It’s that news footage from after the birthday party. There’s the balloon man, showing how the hoax was done, and letting one of his gingerbread-men balloons drift up and cartwheel into the sky. Its frosting smile is so creepshow.

  And now I’m thinking about Aunt Beth’s call about Jack. He has a fever like Terry did, and she sounded all weird, more weird than usual. Like she had her head tilted up to the ceiling, looking for her own floaty kid, maybe?

  I rewind the news clip again. How stupid is it that the balloon man was randomly there in the first place? No one questioned it and everyone just assumed he was late to the party, that someone dial-a-clowned him up. I don’t think so.

  If a Claremont had ordered him, though, he would’ve had Jesus balloons. No, he was definitely there to cover for the floating boy, to make him not impossible. Or make him impossible, make the boy into a balloon. He was there to make it all a big, floaty misunderstanding that Mom and everyone else wanted to believe.

  So that means this old guy knows. Maybe he’s the cause.

  Floating boy or balloon man, I need to find one of them. How hard can that be, right? In a town of 7500?