Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn't Fly
Author: Stephen Graham Jones
Date: 2014-03-18 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Young Adult; Fantasy; Fiction; Romance; Paranormal Romance; Mystery; Horror; Science Fiction; Young Adult Fantasy; Middle Grade; Young Adult Fiction; Contemporary; General; Social Themes; Mental Illne
Description: Things Mary doesn’t want to fall into: the river, high school, her mother’s life. Things Mary does kind of want to fall into: love, the sky. This is the story of a girl who sees a boy float away one fine day. This is the story of the girl who reaches up for that boy with her hand and with her heart. This is the story of a girl who takes on the army to save a town, who goes toe-to-toe with a mad scientist, who has to fight a plague to save her family. This is the story of a girl who would give anything to get to babysit her baby brother one more time. If she could just find him. It’s all up in
Publisher: ChiTeen
Rights: Copyright ‹ 2014 by P. T. Jones

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 them, 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 were 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.

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?

I text Liv: can u sneak out l8r?

Liv doesn’t text me back. At all.

I’m trying not to be a paranoid android, but no text from Liv means she still doesn’t believe me about the party, and now with the Terry floating thing, I’ve totally freaked her out. Or maybe she’s gone out with Marcus Abelson and the rest of them. Or just Marcus, and they’re sitting around, talking in stupid, fake British accents about crazy me.

I’m texting Liv again when my parents are dropped off by their bowling team partners. I’m all in my head and not feeling very verbal when Mom and Dad walk in and say, “How’d it go?” They’re a few drinks past tipsy. I can smell it.

Like a ghost, I follow Mom into Terry’s room. I’ve tied his left ankle to the bedpost with the belt from a hideous purple terrycloth robe I’ve worn approximately never.

After feeling Terry’s forehead (she seems more expert about it than I was) and proclaiming him better, Mom leads me into the hall and asks how much reading I got done.

I shrug, playing dumb. She’s too buzzed to care. I don’t tell her that Aunt Beth called. That’s not to say I’m not 100 percent sure Aunt Beth won’t call back, or that Mom won’t find Terry’s ankle tied to the bed, or that she won’t find him floating above the bed.

There’s only so much I can control. That’s what the people in lab coats all tell me, anyway, and according to cartoons, listening to people in lab coats never leads to disaster.

So she goes to bed and Dad’s already there, snoring. It’s like they want me to sneak down to the river and to the bridge.

Yeah, I’m going to the bridge because floating boy graffiti artists always return to their tagged bridges, right? And because the balloon man will be there in a canoe, with a brush and a mop handle, erasing this evidence, too?

All of it connects and make sense to me until I’m actually there.

It’s way dark out here and I should’ve told Liv where I was sneaking out to. If something happens to me and the cops dig through Liv’s texts, the only place they’ll know to look is “out.” Out could be anywhere, yeah? Out could even be where I am now: down by the river, near the bridge, but not on it or even under it. More like off to the side of the road and hiding behind a tree.

Reason: There’s a group of soon-to-be seniors drinking beer and jumping off the bridge like morons. How does someone drink and jump like a moron? It’s so totally easy and they demonstrate how perfectly. One of the morons is Logan Stoddard, captain of the football team. He whistled at me in the hallways and called me fresh meat all season long, all year long, and I heard he was saying stuff about me being a prospect, and that when I lose my baby fat I’d be first string. Liv offered to kick him in the junk for me. She’d do it, too, because she’s Liv.

So, Logan, he’s completely vomitous and he’s standing on the bridge railing, getting ready to do some half-assed gainer or double-jerk flip into the water. It’d be a shame if he jumped and somehow missed the river and face-planted into the muck. Just saying.

I was so lost inside my head on my sneak over here, I didn’t hear them on the bridge until I was too close to do anything but dive into the bushes. Now I can’t leave until they leave. I want to text Liv, but I’m afraid the phone glow might give me away.

Screw it, I’m behind the tree and they won’t be looking down here, and I can block the phone glow with my hands because that always works, right? Cupping Light in Your Hands should be the name of my new band, and I’ll be the lead singer with the—

“Hi.” It comes from the woods behind me, over my shoulder.

I lose it and try to crawl-jump-run away but smack face-first into the tree I’m hiding behind. I drop my phone and let out a short little yelp of a scream. I think it’s a short scream. Maybe it lasts an hour or two. I spin around and look through the leaves and find . . . him.

Hidden in the bushes, branches form a tight ring around his face. His eyes are open wide, like he’s scared, too. It’s the same kind of look he had when he jumped out of the Claremonts’ tree and just started going up.

His lips say “Sorry” but I don’t hear him. I can’t hear anything over the bass drum in my chest.

Then he says, “You dropped your phone,” and reaches it out to me. My phone has some grass pasted onto it, the whole package in his palm like a bug he just caught. His hand and arm are long and thin like he’s extending me a tree branch instead of his arm.

I kind of stab my hand out for the phone, and at that exact moment (I h8 my life), it lights up and rings. Before I can tell him that I know that muted ringtone (filename: “Footsteps of Doom”), before I can tell him that anybody who actually knows me wouldn’t dream of actually calling, would only be texting at this time of night, he answers.

“Pretty girl’s phone.” He smiles quick, but it melts away like he’s as unsure of what he’s doing as I am.

Anyway, yeah. There’s a guy answering my phone at midnight, my bed at home obviously empty. So not optimal.

I hold my gimme-gimme-gimme hand out and he gives me the phone. “Mom,” I say, my voice exactly as normal as can be, like I’m waiting for her to pick me up at soccer practice.

“Who is he?” Mom says back. She’s not tipsy anymore.

I breathe in, then out, and make angry, you-screwed-up eyes at Floating Boy. I say, “Marcus, Liv’s boyfriend.”

“She has a boyfriend?”

“Him and Liv were fighting. She’s real upset. I didn’t want to wake you up.”

“So you’re over—”

“It’s just two blocks, Mom. Chill.”

“Chill? Mary, it’s the middle of the night. I’m not supposed to be having to deal with this with you yet. We had no idea, we—” She cuts her own self off, her hand cupping the phone the way she does, probably. She’s in don’t-wake-Terry-up mode, which is a mode I want her to be stuck in.

“It’s not like I went out drinking, okay?” I say, which is a low blow, maybe. Then I fake-cup my voice and add, “And, I mean, Marcus—it’s him and Liv, not him and me.”

Mom says, “So I can call Olivia’s house to confirm you’re there?”

“It’ll wake her mom.”

“I wouldn’t mind being woken up for this.”

Like I can argue without coming off as totally guilty. “Just don’t ring too loud?” I say—ha—and Mom hangs up. I’m texting Liv before there’s even a dial tone. I feel Floating Boy watching me and my amazing blur of thumbs.

Six seconds later—I know Liv sleeps with her phone in her hand, under her pillow—I’m covered. Liv will smear the make-up she left on, fake a fight that just ended, and open her bedroom window.

Liv texts: you and M just left. It’s all good.

For this, she can talk British at me all she wants, forever.

I finally look up from all this damage control. He’s just standing there, waiting.

“That was my mom. I—uh—have to be home, like, before now,” I say.

“Sorry,” he says.

I shrug it away like the cool girl I’m not. He doesn’t know any better.

I’m going to say something really clever like, “So do you, um, live here?” but then I remember Logan and the losers. They must’ve heard my scream-and-crash, and then me talking on the phone.

I take a peek around our tree. Logan and some other meathead are walking down the street, away from the bridge, toward us. They’re dripping wet, laughing and whispering, knocking into each other on purpose. So hateable.

I pivot behind the tree, keep the bark to my back, hold my finger up to my lips in the international be quiet sign, and hope we can’t be seen from the street. Floating Boy sinks deeper into the brush but I still see his eyes, which have somehow gone wider than before.

Logan and the other kid, stupid as they are, just walk by. They’re shouting at the surrounding trees and bushes, threatening the “homos” spying on them, promising to kick their ass (shouldn’t that be asses, not, you know, a giant collective ass?) and other typically caveman insults. They’ve walked past our spot, though, which is a good thing.

Not such a good thing: Floating Boy’s eyes are going up. Not rolling into the back of his head like he’s having a seizure or something, I mean his eyes are literally going up. They’re rising and so must be the rest of his body. I mean, if his eyes break the laws of physics, then it totally makes sense that the rest of him has to, too. He rips through the bushes upward, and louder than is exactly helpful.

Logan shouts WTF and their footsteps pound back up the street, toward us.

Thin branches hook into Floating Boy’s t-shirt and shorts and socks, but they’re not strong enough to hold him. He shoots up, knocks into a thick branch from my trusty tree, and he kind of bends around it like he’s stuck, turning himself into a human question mark.

There’s no way he’s leaving me here by myself. I grab his hand, hard, and he grabs back. I pull him over, closer to the trunk above me. His hand is warm and I’m surprised by how much he’s pulling up on me. It stretches my arm out and there’s an ache deep in my shoulder. My toes want to lift off the ground. I dig around blindly with my feet and find a loose root to kick my toes under.

There’s that same tire-smell as before with Terry, only stronger. It makes me a little dizzy.

Floating Boy works to pivot his body upside down so that he’s standing on the underside of a branch. If I look up, I look at him. He looks like I should feel, which is scared. But I’m not, or I am, but it’s different somehow.

Logan and his toadie start their search right in front of our tree, the river water still dripping off their clothes. If Logan gets any closer, I’ll use my starting-sweeper leg and give him Liv’s kick in the junk.

They’ve lost some of their brain-dead tough-guy act now that they’re here. They whisper stuff about it being deer or beavers or an owl, and they kind of run through the local animal kingdom, probably hoping one or the other will say, let’s go back.

Floating Boy’s feet slip out from under the branch, then, and he pulls me up, hard. My arm feels like it’s going to rip out of my socket, but I don’t let go. He scrabbles his feet under the branch again.

Logan and jerk-partner scream and run away toward the bridge, laughing and shouting about something big up in the trees. A real yearbook moment.

“They’re gone,” I say, and my words drift up to him, hopefully.

He nods. And now I’m thinking him floating isn’t something he can totally control. It’s only a guess, but I don’t think he wanted to float out of our hiding spot right exactly when he did.

Okay, a test. I loosen my grip on his hand. I want to see what he’ll do and what it is he wants me to do. I mean, how long does he want me to hold him down here?

He gives me this totally confused look. I tell him I’m switching hands because my arm is getting tired. We manage the swap without him bobbing off into the night sky.

What we’re doing doesn’t seem like much of a plan. We can’t stay here all night just switching hands. What about Terry? And it looks like I’m getting home later and later, and Mom’s probably still up, sitting and staring at the front door like a watchdog.

Luckily, it’s not too long before Logan and his gang’s night ends predictably. Him walking up and down the street yelling and swearing didn’t win over the neighborhood. A cruiser with blue lights flashing, no siren, comes up the street nice and slow. The guys throw their beers into the river and stand in a dummy line along the bridge railing.

Two cops get out and a quick meeting above the river ends with the boys somehow being allowed to drive home. Then I remember Logan’s dad is a city councilman or some local powdered-wig kind of thing. And then I remember I hate Logan even more.

So, everybody drives away. Now it’s just me and Floating Boy alone in the bushes together. I look up and shrug, or shrug as much as I can with one arm all stretched out like I’m Elastic Girl.

I take a deep breath through my nose. I can’t help it; that tire-smell is addictive. Hope I’m not too obvious. I mean, it’d be weird for him to realize that I’m sitting here inhaling him.

“I’m in big trouble because you answered the phone, you know,” I tell him. I try to have it come out all jokey and not serious. Fail.

“Oh, I didn’t mean—that was really dumb, I guess. I mean, I was really dumb.” He ducks his head behind some leaves.

“It’s okay, no worries.” So he floats and he’s sensitive. Not sure I’m all that crazy about either.

“Um, hey, don’t you have to be, I don’t know, somewhere?” he says down to me. He asks it like he’s afraid what my answer will be.

After a few moments of working out what he’s really asking—it’s not every day you get asked what he’s asking me—I smile.

If this trip home doesn’t kill me, then Mom definitely will.

5.

I make it only as high as the tree branch before crying out. Him holding my hands and wrists and me dangling like a kite tail is killing my shoulders.

He puts me down butt-first on the tree branch. I say, “This isn’t going to work,” and rub my shoulders. “I’m a soccer player. Massive upper body strength isn’t really my thing, you know?”

“All right. How about a piggyback ride?”

“You can control this?”

“I kind of, like, I do it a lot, I guess?”

“Float? Or control where you go?”

“Both?” he says, squinting his whole face up in the least confidence-inspiring way.

“Says the guy who blasted off from the party.” Still, I say, “But you can get me there?”

“To your house?”

“Just my street’ll be good enough.”

He hovers in front of me like, yeah, he does do this a lot.

I rope my arms around his neck and shoulders in the most un-girlfriendy way possible. Which isn’t very. His skinny-looking shoulders feel not-so-skinny. His skin feels warm, and I feel warm, and, okay, it’s nice, maybe too nice, like there’s too much nice happening at once.

I go with it, and press myself into his back. We don’t say anything and he shoves away from the tree. I come off the branch, and instead of falling I clamp my legs around his thighs.

He laughs and says, “Wow, soccer player, huh?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, just—uh—you have strong legs?”

His question-statements will drive me crazy quicker than Liv’s British-flag mouth.

And then we’re away from the tree and above the street. Flying—or floating, really—it’s not what you expect. It’s better and worse.

It’s better because it’s like I’m slipping right up and out of all that weight that has been wrapped around my chest since the spring. So yeah, we’re Peter Pan and whatsherface, Wendy.

It’s worse because it’s terrifying. We bob and dip in the air like a lost boat on the ocean. He grunts and twists, trying to find some sort of stable position that isn’t there. My stomach is in my toes.

“Hold on,” he says. Kid Obvious to the rescue.

I giggle nervously, and he does too. We’re above the river now, its surface like wet concrete we could write our initials in.

“We can steer?” he says like a question. Again.

I groan and he leans forward, going almost horizontal. He takes his hands off my forearms and holds them out like plane wings. I laugh again, into the back of his head, but only because if I don’t laugh I might start screaming instead.

He sways and rolls me gently toward the right. My legs clamp tighter, and we turn and dip in that general direction. So, I guess I’m the ballast or counterweight like those sandbags on hot-air balloons, or something equally non-flattering.

“You have to show me where to go,” he says.

I nod but can’t talk just yet.

We’re kind of treading air, not really flying now. My weight must be enough to keep him from getting too high. Still, we’re three stories up, maybe more. It’s cooler up here, and I get goosebumps all over. My arms and legs are tired but I don’t care. This is worth it.

Below is another world. A police cruiser, maybe the one from the bridge, creeps into a convenience store parking lot. A train way out at the other edge of town races through the dark. The stars are all around us. They feel so close.

I bury my face into his neck and look off to the right, along one of his plane wing-arms, which he twists and turns, palm up then palm down, which I think has to be a superstition or something because it’s got zero aerodynamics going on.

And then one of those twisting and steering hands is suddenly gone and goes fumbling in his cargo pocket down by my leg. I shift and turn to look and we lose balance and spin in the air, two, three full turns. It’s like trying to stay on a rolling log, an invisible rolling log, and the hamster wheel that is us stops turning with my back to the ground, face to the black night sky. The pull and fall are beneath me now, and they both weigh so much. I’m so not giggling anymore.

“Sorry! Sorry!” he says, and wiggles and waves his arms. We drop hard for a horrible moment, but then we catch the right wave again and roll back to how we were.

“Um, don’t do that again,” I tell him.

He was digging in his pocket for a flashlight, and has it in his hand now. “Wires,” he says and points the light ahead of us. They’re the high-tension kind that had everybody writing letters to the paper (about how all us kids would get brain cancer from them!) when I was in fifth grade.

I manage to blurt out a “There!” and point to what I think is my street, or at least Liv’s.

He swings and arm-pivots for a course correction that somehow actually works, and there’s another whiff of that tire-smell. We float a totally safe three or four feet over the wires—I hear them humming—and into my neighborhood.

“There?” he calls down.

I nod, and then remember that he can’t really see me nod. I tell him yes, but I’m not that sure. I mean, that’s my street, but this is a whole new view for me. We have that many streetlights? Since when?

“You were at the birthday party,” I say. Let’s try small talk at fifty feet.

He nods. “Yeah, I don’t know. I was just hanging out—”

“Out?”

“Or around. Above.” He sighs like talking to me is hard work. And that’s fine. “And I saw it, the party, and it looked—I don’t know. I was bored, I guess. And I was really hungry.”

I say, “Hungry, yeah. You totally dominated the snack table, dude,” which comes out sounding all kinds of awkward.

“Yeah, I guess.” He sounds nervous. Maybe I’m the first girl he’s brought up here. Surely.

“Hey, that’s my house.” I chance freeing a finger from my death grip around his neck to point. The shingles are all mismatched, some of them overlapped backwards, to catch water instead of shedding it. Dad is a DIY kind of guy, as in Destroy It Yourself.

He tilts left and we do another log roll. He says sorry some more, then something under his breath about landings not being his thing.

I groan my this-sucks groan and close my eyes until we stop barrel-rolling twenty feet up, and we do stop with him and me vertical, like we’re standing in the air. It’s not like air brakes or anything, but somehow we start to slow. We don’t come to a complete stop, though. We drift.

“Do you have any rope in the garage?” he says.

Is that a joke? “How—?” I start but stop, not sure how to ask it all in one question. In answer he just looks out across the tops off all the houses, at the town.

“Looking for a trampoline?” I ask.

He laughs back.

“My little brother is just like you,” I say then.

He repositions us in the sky, and we spin again. Corkscrew this time, which is somehow easier to take. He says, “How is your little brother like me?”

“This.” I lean opposite our corkscrew turn, reversing our direction. “I found him up on the ceiling earlier and had to pull him off. And then, before I came out, I kinda tied him to the bed.”

“He—what?” The floating boy drops his flashlight. It lawn-darts on the neighbor’s front yard. “I don’t understand. What do you mean?” He’s sounded awkward all night, but now he sounds scared. I mean, even if he didn’t know exactly how to get me home, he at least acted like he did. Now he’s breathing fast, but more like he’s mostly breathing out, not in, and the wonderful and weird tire smell picks up again, and we’re sinking. Not too fast or dangerous. We’re going just the speed you’d have if you were falling through a pool of Jell-O.

I say, “Terry was floating. Like you. Do you know why?”

“Front yard or back?” he asks, almost too quickly, like he’s pretending he didn’t hear what I said.

“Front.” It’s the direction I’d come from if I’d just walked back from Liv’s. He overshoots and we come down in the middle of the street. I let go, stumble, and almost fall. I catch myself, but then grab his hand anyway. I pull him onto my neighbor’s lawn and grab his flashlight because, you know, he probably needs a flashlight more than anyone else in the world.

We walk back out into the street in front of my house. My porch light flares on. No worries because we can pretend he walked me home, all proper like.

He says, “Your brother? Like me?” His eyes sort of dart around, like they’re trapped in parentheses.

“Yeah. And I think it might be happening to my cousin, too. Or it was anyway, earlier.” When he doesn’t say anything I rush back in to add the painfully obvious, “It’s never happened in my family before, okay?”

I say it, but then I want those words back. I make it worse by adding, “It happens in yours though, right?” Such a stupid question. I cringe and squint because it’s out there between us and I can’t get it back.

He says, “I don’t—” and kind of looks around, then finishes with, “I don’t know.”

The air changes around us now that we’re on the ground. He says, “So your brother knows Mr. Barron?”

“Who? Look, I’ve got so many quest—” I start, but then my mom’s out on the lawn, taking all three medals in the Embarrassing Robe Competition. There should be a law against that, really.

“Mom,” I say.

Mom blinks, sneezes, coughs. It’s like watching a robot break down. She says, “Who’s this?” nodding to Floating Boy beside me. He’s a this apparently. I’m still holding his hand—holding him down—which is something I’m very aware of.

I could be a total smartass here, but I also could totally just panic and melt down. It feels like an either/or kind of situation here. I say, “Um, yeah, well, this is him,” without explaining who him is. Then I look at him and say, all dopey-like, “My name is Mary,” and I move our linked hands up and down because, you know, it’s like a handshake. Let’s see if the floaty genius can figure out I’m trying to give him an excuse to keep holding my hand in front of Mom.

“Hi, Mary,” he says, and yeah, I’m expecting him to say a name, his name hopefully, But instead he turns and says, “Hi, Mary’s Mom. Um, cool robe?” He waves to her and gives us no name back.

Mom breaks down coughing, then croaks, “I never called Liv’s mom. I will next time.” Her voice sounds awful, like plague awful. “Everyone’s sick. I’m sick. I’m going back to bed. You’re coming in right now, too.” She turns, her giant pile of guilt successfully dumped on me.

“Okay. Okay. Just saying good night to my friend, here,” I say, which is as lame as it sounds.

Mom doesn’t fire back at me. She’s halfway inside the front door when I say, at last: “Mom? Make sure Terry doesn’t go outside, okay? Because he kinda shouldn’t.”

She pauses in the doorway, doesn’t turn around, and then shuts the screen door. Maybe she didn’t hear me, or is too sick to put two and two together, or more likely she wants to spy on us from behind a curtain.

I turn back to Floating Boy, and he isn’t looking at me or my house. He’s looking off to the left.

There’s someone there on the sidewalk near my driveway, just a penalty kick away, standing like he’s been there all along. That someone walks onto my front lawn. At first I think it’s Dad, but Dad doesn’t wear suits, and if he did, they wouldn’t be brown and they wouldn’t have a vest, either, and they’d probably fit him right.

It’s the old guy from TV—the balloon man.

“Son,” he says across the sidewalk, “it’s time to come home.”

Floating Boy shakes his head no and his hand clamps tighter around mine. He’s afraid of this guy. I can see his chest moving now, with panic. Like he’s trying to get his lungs full enough, or like he’s trying to inflate. Then he whispers fragments at me: “Your brother . . . like me . . . did you and him? Did you bring Mr. Barron? Did he send you to, to—?”

“What? The balloon guy? No, no way.”

“Balloon guy?” Floating Boy swivels his head all around, looking for an escape. He thinks I’m setting him up.

I pull his arm and make him lean toward me. I say, “After the birthday party, the news showed this guy and his balloon cart going up and down the street. So, he was there to explain you away, right? Like a clean-up guy? After-the-fact sidekick?”

“No, no, he’s not—” Floating Boy starts, his whole body looking like it’s about to run in three directions at once. Four, counting the sky.

A door opens and shuts. Mom yells, “Who’s out there with you now?”

So much for going to bed, right, Mom? She’s back on the porch, sharing the sight of her robe of many colors with the balloon man.

The balloon man takes advantage of us not watching him and he’s on the street now, only a few steps away from us. He says to my mom, “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am. I’m only here to bring him home, of course.”

“Him?” I call back to the balloon man, and, for my mom, our only witness here, “Do you even know his name?” I step between him and the not-floating-right-now boy. “Do you know your own name, mister?” I add with as much ’tude as possible, and loud enough for Mom to hear. “I’ve read about how senior citizens . . . forget. It’s sad, really. Did you park at the grocery store, sir? Do you remember where you parked?”

The balloon man scrunches away from this and then looks at me like I’m exactly the thing in this world he doesn’t have time for.

“Mary,” Mom says in that through-the-teeth way that means Just Wait Until You Get in the House, Missy.

Floating Boy laughs, either at what I said or at my mom in her robe. Even though I’m only holding his hand, I feel his body relax. I feel him trust me.

He bends sideways so that his eyes never leave the balloon man, and he whispers, “We should talk some more. Near downtown. There’s an old mill. Come by tomorrow afternoon.” Then he lets go of my hand and starts breathing loud. There’s the tire smell again, just a hint of it.

Balloon man is almost close enough to us that he could grab Floating Boy now. The old guy can move quicker than I thought. It’s not a point in his favor. I step even more between them and say, “If we want some gingerbread-men balloons, we’ll call you, okay?”

He smiles like he gets my humor, he really does. But he sidesteps and tries to reach past me. There’s something unlooping from his sleeve. It looks like a dog leash.

“I’m Mary,” I say and mirror his moves like I’m playing a defense drill. I hold my hand out like we’re supposed to shake hands, or maybe even fist-pound if he’s a wannabe hipster. Mom is still there, on the porch, so the man has to give me his hand, right?

“Mr. Barron,” he says, very formal and proper-like. His hand is sandpaper and way icky, as icky as the you-don’t-know-who-you’re-messing-with-girl look he’s giving me.

When the handshake is over, the leash is in my hand. I wrap the nylon around my wrist. “Oh, oh, here,” I say, fake-untangling the leash. “I think your ginormous watch band has gotten caught in my, in my, in my—”

Mr. Barron grunts and works at unwrapping my hand, but my fingers are snakes diving into each new loop, just totally by accident, of course. The one glimpse I catch of Mom, she’s leaned back through the door, saying something to Dad, but her hand’s still holding the door open.

By the time I turn around, Floating Boy is gone. Well, not gone. More like up, up, up, and away. He’s already higher than any power lines.

The leash unvines from my wrist and drops to the blacktop. Mr. Barron snarls in my general direction, takes the leash and scurries to his car a half-block down the street, a brown metal slug of a sedan.

Now that he’s gone—was Mom scared of him? Shouldn’t she have been out here protecting me from the freaky pervs of the world?—she comes out and grabs my arm. I’m only now seeing that she’s wearing those Marge Simpson slippers, the ones with the big blue hair for the toes. Anyway, she doesn’t care about the creeptastic old balloon man apparently, and only says something about in and right goddamn now and young lady.

She starts swearing, which pretty effectively squashes any clever comeback I might have had. Which wasn’t much. All I had ready for my defense was wait and please. I just want to stay out here and look up into the sky some more.

He’s gone, but there’s a shrinking dot of light up there. His flashlight. It waves across and back.

6.

Mom calls in sick the next morning. Dad doesn’t have to call in anywhere as he’s been out of work since last winter, but he’s sick, too, not just hungover after an apparently epic night of bowling. They’re both hunkered in the bunker for the day, leaving me on my own for lunch. Which is fine—nothing wrong with grilled cheese—but made-Mary-style grilled cheese doesn't make me smart enough to crack the mystery of what to do with Terry.

What’s not fine: I’m under house arrest and supposedly not allowed contact with the outside. But texting isn’t contact, it’s more like breathing.

So, me: wheels?

Liv: checkn

Liv: 4 yep

Me: take me 4 a ride hot stuff

Liv: where 2 darling?

Me: tell when u get here

Liv: fab

Me: back door it

Liv: what up?

Me: mom lockdown

Liv: ow

Me: be quiet coming in

Liv: ur mum scares me

Me: me too ha

Liv: srsly 2 scary

Me: just do it

Liv: eat nike

Me: ?

Liv: it was fab in my head

Me: 11

Liv: l8tr

I’m in Terry’s room. He’s eating toast with grape jelly, the purple smeared on his PJs and around his lips. Ant bait for sure, but at least he doesn’t have a fever anymore. I’ve taken his temperature twice. I’ve pulled him off the ceiling once.

Where I am besides that is Google Maps. Or, where I am is the family laptop, which I’m not supposed to take out of the family room. Whatever. Taking the laptop in here with me is small fry, doesn’t even count after sneaking out in the middle of the night to see a boy, but I still hit the keys softly.

I zoom in and click around on the Ipswich map, and I think I find Floating Boy’s mill after a few minutes. I mean, I find a mill. There could be a bunch of old mills around here, and Ipswich covers a big area. But this place I found, it just looks like a hideout. Not too far from downtown, and it’s still surrounded by woods, and the river runs behind it.

I zoom all the way in so I can see the black tar roof. There are splashes of color that could be empty bags of chips or soda cans, and that blue thing there, it might be a beach chair. Who knows however many months ago the satellite snapped this picture. But it’s good enough for me to conclude the mill is definitely a hideout. Maybe.

I write some directions on my hand, scrub my temp files, shut Terry in his room, and take a quiet and quick shower. Liv will be here soon. Another thing you need to know about Liv: she’s always painfully early.

Post-shower, I throw on jean cut-offs, my Chuck Ts (high top, ninja black), and a zombie tee (guess what color that is). I sit at my desk and write Mom a note on my green “Mary” pad of paper Aunt Beth gave me for Xmas last year. Maybe Mom will be happy I finally used it, even if I X’d out all the Marys and wrote Josephs over them, which seemed hilarious at the time, and yeah, some days I don’t even get me. This green note is a confession note, a just-in-case note. I’m telling her everything: where I’m going, Aunt Beth calling about floaty-baby Jack, and most importantly, Terry and his not-unrelated, floating-to-the-ceiling thing he does now. It’s just so cute. Our little boy’s growing up.

No, no, I mean he’s going up.

Mom needs to know because Terry can’t be let outside, at all. I trace the letters of that part of the letter deep, then underline it over and over. Floating Boy might know how to move around up in the sky, might know how to come down easy, but I’m guessing that’s something you only pick up after all the crash landings twenty miles away from your hideout. It makes my eyes a little hot when I think of Terry twenty miles out of town, looking around at some trees maybe, thinking it’s a Little Bear cartoon gone bad.

In the note I tell Mom that I’ll call her, that she shouldn’t be mad at me, that I’m trying to find out what’s going on. I sign it “Nancy Drew to the rescue” (Mom will like that—she made me plow through the whole craptastic series when I was in fifth grade). Then I add a P.S. and tell her again to seriously watch Terry close.

I’m folding up the note—she can’t see it first thing—when the front doorbell rings. And rings. Our stupid ring takes like nine seconds to cycle all the way through Pop Goes the Weasel, and that’s if you just push it once.

I can’t believe she’s using the front door. I cover my ears at first like that can possibly stop Liv from being an idiot. Then I pull the door open so hard I’m surprised I don’t suck every leaf in the yard into the house.

Liv doesn’t even look at me. She’s half into this wiggly dance move she saw on a music video. She’s always like this when she’s creatively borrowed big sis’s license and keys.

I drag her in by the wrist. “Come on!”

We creep like creeps past my parents’ bedroom and then up the stairs. Liv doesn’t take off her sunglasses and makes goofy faces at me the whole way, trying to make me laugh. She has zero handle on the gravity seriousness of the situation.

“Nice hair,” I whisper, because I mean the opposite. Part of snaking her sister’s license is making her hair match it, and Liv’s sister’s a walking fashion disaster. Liv’s smile ratchets down a click or two, but I don’t let go of her wrist.

“What are—?” she says, too loudly of course, a seagull at a funeral, but by that time we’re past my bedroom. I need to make sure all the windows in Terry’s room are locked. Same with the back door. And the front. And then I have to leave the note somewhere, and all the things I have to do are piling up, and I’m starting to get that mudslide feeling in my stomach that I had all spring in school.

I open the door to Terry’s room and he’s on the ceiling again, above his bed, crying into his chest like he’s been crying for a while. His little hands are reaching out. No, down. Reaching down.

This is so wrong. I pull Liv inside and shut the door. She doesn’t move, doesn’t even take off her eye-color-hiding sunglasses.

On the bed below Terry are his two favorite dinos: Steggy and Rex. I pick them up and give them to him. He stops crying. Magic, right? He holds them out and makes flying sounds for them with his mouth. Then he says, “Hey, blankee.” I give that to him. Steggy and Rex take the blanket for him.

Liv says, “How’d you get him up there?”

“I rubbed him on my head like a balloon.”

Liv looks at me like I’m the worst big sister in the world which, even though I know none of this is my fault, is what I feel like.

“You know, like in science class? Static electricity? Come on, it’s a joke, Liv.”

I know I should be listening for Mom’s footsteps and panicking about my soon-to-be AWOLness, but I’m not. What I am is all told-you-so. I grab Terry by the robe belt still tied to his ankle and pull him down a little until there’s a foot of space between him and the ceiling, so Liv can see there’s nothing up my sleeve, no wires above him, then I let him go.

He bobs back up quick, and bumps his head on the plaster. He giggles and says, “Again!”

“Believe me now?” I say to Liv, watching her watch him.

She wraps her arms around her chest like she has to hold something. I wonder if she notices the wonderful tire-smell in the room.

“No, way—” Liv whispers, darting into the middle of the room, arms held out basket-style, like she’s getting ready to catch a giant ostrich egg.

Terry floats down off the ceiling in tight little circles, airplaning his dinos the whole trip down. He lands on the bed, then whines and scrambles to his knees, lifting those extinct lizards over his head.

I butterfly around the room and make sure all the windows are latched. I say, “We gotta go, girl.”

“Where?”

“To meet up with him.”

“Who him?”

“Him him.”

“Him him?”

“The one you thought I was lying about. From my cousin’s party?”

“Oh. The one who, who really can . . .”

The rest of her sentence is on the ceiling above us. I don’t make her say it out loud. I’m not even sure she could yet. Wait till I tell her about last night.

I usher Liv to the door as best I can, then I crouch in front of Terry, give him the big sis pep talk about staying in the house, not answering the door, going to wake Mom if anything scary happens.

It’s hard to know if he’s listening and what, if any of it, he really understands. So I untie his ankle and tell him that if he’s good he can watch TV in my room, cool?

He nearly knocks Liv over, rocketing past her and down the hall. I get there just in time to see his last two steps before he makes the corner into my room. His little socked feet aren’t touching the carpet. Literally, actually: he’s running on air and getting used to it. His hand flashes out and hooks on the edge around my door, and he slingshots in.

“God,” Liv says.

“I know,” I tell her, and push her away from the wall.

Then together we check the locks on my two windows, and we’re about to step out, leave him alone for who knows how long, when Liv darts back in, hefts this two-hundred dollar purple-and-white geode down from my middle shelf. My dad got it for me when I was in third grade and was doing the rock-unit from our Earth Sciences book. He got me a rock instead of jewelry or ice cream. I’d never tell anybody, but it’s maybe my most favorite thing. And it’s perfect, too: Terry’s always been reaching for it.

Liv settles the heavy rock onto his lap. I start Little Bear for him, and when Liv comes into the hall I take her hand, and she’s just as quiet as I am on the stairs until she sneezes three times. They’re full-on, open-mouth, look-how-loud-I-can-sneeze sneezes too.

I glare at her at hard as I can.

Liv shrugs and whispers, “Sorry. Summer cold.”

I don’t see Marcus sitting in the front seat until I’m hauling the door open.

“Nice dicky dirt,” he says in his British vampire voice.

“What?” I flash my eyes over the top of the car to Liv.

“Shirt,” Liv says, doing her head back and forth to show that dicky dirt and shirt are the same in some other, way stupider universe.

“Glad you brought him,” I tell her. “That’s kind of exactly what I asked you to do.”

“It’s a zombie,” Marcus says and he traces his fingers over my tee’s decal.

I push his hand away. “Seriously?”

Liv ducks down into her sis’s ancient, green M&M-color Ford Taurus. What she’s doing really is hiding. Great. And her maybe-boyfriend’s fingers are waggling out to my shirt again. I kick him in the thigh and that ends the waggling.

I rub my eyes and study the small little square of my bedroom window. Be safe, I whisper in my head to Terry.

“Well?” Liv says, and then she sneezes again

“Move over, bacon. You get to sit next to Sneezy,” I say to Marcus, and before he can resist I’m in, scooting him over into the middle of the bench seat. Yeah, a bench seat: serious proof of how old this car is. I mean, are bench seats even legal anymore?

“Hey, hey,” Marcus barks, holding his hands up. The drink gripped between his legs scoots with him and is magically not spilling. “Wait, I can’t—” he tries to get out, but I hip check him back down, then Liv peels away from the curb in typical Liv fashion.

To show Liv I still don’t appreciate the company, I nab the cup from Marcus and take a long drink—orange soda, what is he, eight years old?—without even wiping the straw clean.

“So you should’ve seen Mary’s little brother,” Liv says to Marcus. She’s all leaned forward on the wheel, kind of hugging it. It’s her adult driving pose. I’ve seen her practice it in the garage. We were taking turns, actually.

I say, “No, he shouldn’t have. Really.”

“But—”

“Seen what? That thing with the nose again?” Marcus says and holds his ready-to-inflate fingers up to his nose like he’s going to mime a snot bubble.

“It’s nothing,” I say. “He was eating chocolate. It was all over his face. It was Funniest Home Videos cute.”

Liv looks at me like she doesn’t understand what I’m saying. I get that look a lot. She says, “Yeah, really light chocolate. The kind that floats right off your tongue.” She takes a corner too wide, sending Marcus smooshing into me.

Where we are eventually is downtown, kind of, because Liv can’t help herself and has to show off. We do a slow drive-by of Fat Burger. Some Logan look-alikes yell at us, or at Liv’s sister’s car because big sis is supposed to be at basketball camp for another two days, not, you know, cruising Fat Burger. Liv sticks her hand out the window and waves back.

“You know them?” Marcus asks, not looking back of course.

“They’re just,” Liv says, doing her fingers in the air, her hands all rich-girl, like she doesn’t have enough time in the day for all the boys she knows.

“Just what?” Marcus says.

Liv smiles and checks her rearview—for what I don’t know since all she can see is Marcus’s face in the mirror because, you know, he’s sitting right in front of it—and squeals the car around, across a thousand lanes. This is exactly what I asked for, right? Yes, wunderbar. Thirty painful seconds later we’re second in line at the Fat Burger drive-through.

“We don’t have time for this, Liv,” I say.

“Sure we do. My treat,” she says to both of us, or mostly to Marcus.

Marcus. Why’s he here again? She and him are so annoying together. It’d never be like that between me and Floating Boy. You know, just hypothetically speaking. We’d never go bowling on Tuesday nights. We’d spend our weekends tracking down hot-air balloon festivals. We’d wait for them all to lift up off the ground and get up into the clouds, then we’d sneak up and just suddenly be inside their basket, asking for a bottled water or something equally wise-ass.

Part of me is up in that balloon already. My head’s out the car window so I can scan the sky, see every little blip up there, every bird, every—

“Liv,” I say and reach across Marcus. She spills her dollars and change into the floorboard.

“What, Mare?”

“Hey,” Marcus says and lifts his chin, pointing at the open drive-through window.

Without making a sound—we’ve been doing this since third grade when Mrs. Boutin put us on opposite sides of the room because, according to her, we talked more than we breathed—I mouth up there in the sky for Liv.

Liv pushes her sunglasses up high on her head so she can look up, and then she smiles in a nervous kind of way. It’s Floating Boy. Not a flock of birds in the shape of a boy. He’s so high up that he’s just a shape but it’s him. It’s gotta be him.

“Mare,” she says, smiling all the way now, and somehow forgetting her foot’s supposed to be on the brake the whole time, here. We jerk forward to the drive-through window, the space miraculously empty.

I say again, “Forget it, Liv. Let’s go. Seriously.”

“Relax.” Liv clomps back on the brake, the tires chirp, and it’s a perfect, face-on-dashboard stop. She smiles, so totally impressed with herself, and then a siren blips behind us, and flashing blue lights.

Marcus is all scared pale from looking behind us, and saying, “Nononono,” unlike Liv, who’s just paralyzed.

Great. Just great. “Sunglasses,” I whisper, like the sunglasses are so going to fool the police into believing her big sis’s license is actually Liv’s. She nods and lowers her face into them. Her hands are shaking.

Like in a horror movie, the police officer’s footsteps get closer, closer. Then: “Well, well, well,” he says and leans down to look inside at the three little chickens we are. Because he’s not our dad, me and Liv just stare straight forward.

Because he is Marcus’s dad, Marcus turns his lips into a giant squiggle, chews on his straw, and says, “Hey. Yeah.”

Everybody in the Fat Burger patio is leaning over the rail and making faces. So yeah, I totally remember putting this in the text I sent to Liv this morning: Besides finding Floating Boy who can long-shot-maybe help my brother not float, any chance we could almost crash into Fat Burger and then maybe get arrested, too?

“This how it is now?” It’s Marcus’s dad. Officer Marcus’s-dad. He’s squatted by Liv’s door, to see us better.

“How what is?” Marcus repeats back to his dad.

“The guy goes in the middle?”

“I get car sick if I’m in the middle,” I try saying, but my voice is weak and nobody’s listening to me. I’m feeling panicky, but it’s a normal kind of panic, one that I can handle. I think.

I’m still tracking Floating Boy a thousand impossible feet up and wishing we were up there instead of here.

I look at Liv and in my head I’m screaming Liv, do something loud enough she should totally hear me. Liv’s eyes are the dots under question marks. And then—this has always been the plan—I see her hand start to pull her sis’s license from the ashtray, except what we never planned on was knowing the officer.

“Liv Jackson, is it?” Marcus’s dad says back to us.

She nods and gulps, pulls away from the ashtray and puts her hands back on ten and two on the wheel.

Marcus’s dad smiles and it’s obvious he knows exactly what grade she’s in. “So, is your sister going to take us to finals again this year?” he asks.

“I didn’t want to!” Liv blurts out then and starts in with some tears. Real or fake is hard to tell with her. “Her brother, Mary’s Terry, he’s—he’s—”

“Sick,” I interrupt. “Ginger ale. We needed some ginger ale for him, sir.”

Marcus’s dad smiles and is obviously loving this. “Nice of your sister to let you take her car while she’s at camp.”

Liv nods yes. Yes, her sister is very, very nice. “She’s good this year,” she adds, finally answering him about the state finals.

“All right,” Marcus’s dad says, finger-shooting Liv. “I’m going to hold you to that, check?”

Liv does more nodding. It’s too much and too fast.

He says, “Would you girls mind driving Marcus back on your way home? He has a bunch of chores he was supposed to do yesterday.”

Marcus nods his head. His eyes go wet at the corners and this is bigger than just today for him.

Liv says, “Yes, sir. Of course.”

“Thank you. You drive safe now.” He walks away, lets us go. We breathe. We remember that we can breathe.

Liv tries starting the car that’s already running and everybody at the patio rail grimaces with the grinding noise. Then she, being Liv, hits the gas too hard and squeals us forward, right out of the drive-through. No ginger ale for anyone.

We dump Marcus off on his street. He lifts a sad hand to us, sneezes a sneeze that bends him in half, then gets his skateboard from its hiding place and sulks the long way up to his house.

“Well,” Liv says.

“Well, what?” I say back to her.

She nods down to the directions written on my hand. The directions to the old mill.

I say, “I don’t know.” I’d lost sight of Floating Boy after the close call with Marcus’s dad and we booked it out of Fat Burger. “Maybe?”

“To the mill!” She pulls away from the curb. “Is he cute?”

“What? Yeah. Sure, I guess.”

Liv laughs at me. I probably deserve it. She says, “Catalogue or TV?”

“Movie,” I say.

“Harry Potter?”

“Skywalker,” I say, and we’re moving again, but a lot more carefully and slowly. The whole ride, we scour the sky above Ipswich looking for a shadow, a shape, hoping we see him. I say, just because somebody always needs to, “You don’t really look like your sis at all, you know.”

“Mare,” she says, her face gone slack or serious, her voice dropping through the floorboards. My stomach drops down there, too.

I follow where she’s looking, mostly expecting Marcus’s dad, lights flashing, or maybe even my mom in her robe, on a scooter with the hair of her Marge Simpson slippers dragging.

It’s so much worse.

We were looking too high, the whole way over to dropping Marcus off. We’re near Bradley Palmer State Park, to our left, a couple hundred yards away across the big field of grass and trees next to the Ipswich River, and there! Near the bridge Floating Boy is trapped on the high-tension wires. He’s spasming, flailing, kicking, hooked by a rope or something, and I remember his joke about me having rope and it’s even more not-funny.

“No,” I say and lock eyes with Liv, and then she doesn’t care about Marcus’s dad or anybody with a siren anymore. She hits the gas so hard the car explodes forward and Liv almost dumps us into the field.

We leave one guy honking as our two-wheeled left turn almost wipes him out. My window is down, and I’m halfway out, just about sitting on top of my door, trying to see through the trees, watching the Floating Boy blur, dangling off the end of the rope with the sun right behind him. He’s not even trying to pull himself in. Is he giving up? Already electrified? I can’t tell and I’m not blinking and I’m trying not to lose it, but I can feel it all building into an avalanche inside me.

We’re almost there but I shriek “Faster!” like Liv’s not already. The car surges forward and the trees and their branches whip past. My cell is ringing and vibrating in my pocket. It’s “Footsteps of Doom” but I can’t answer, Mom, not now.

Just a couple hundred feet from the bridge and being under him—to what? catch him?—Liv slams on the brakes. I jolt forward hard, fall part way out of the window, then grab onto the side-view mirror and catch myself.

Before I can even touch my forehead where it’s hurting, Liv’s out of the car and running. That doesn’t do it justice, though. Liv. She’s doing her own version of flying.

I had no idea she could move like that. But then I see why. It’s Logan and his crew. They’re on the bridge again. The same one they were chased away from last night. They’re all bunched together at the bridge railing.

I pivot and slide out of the car window, landing on shaky legs. “Liv!” I call with every last little bit of my voice, and then Logan angles something up higher than all their heads, and all I can do is fall to my knees, and cover my mouth.

It’s a shotgun. It’s pointed up and starting an invisible dotted line between him and Floating Boy, who’s trapped and whipping in the wind up there.

The high-tension wires are humming, filling my head. Logan’s crew cheers him on. I open my mouth to scream but then Liv—and I know I’ll owe her forever for this—she’s there, slamming through all of them like they’re mannequins, getting to Logan just a moment after he fired, after that distinct little firecracker pop.

Liv’s taller but doesn’t weigh as much as me, and doesn’t play soccer, doesn’t play anything, really, but still, you don’t want to make her mad. She rams her shoulder into Logan with everything she has and it’s enough to send him over the bridge railing, into the river. The gun, too, but it doesn’t matter. She was too late. She ran faster than any human ever, and still, he got the shot off.

My chest tightens and I can barely breathe. I look up to Floating Boy and there’s just a shirt up there now, ragged at the end of the rope. A shirt made of—wait a minute, foil? One by one, the pieces come together in my head. Logan got the shot off. His aim was on, or whatever gun-people say to mean he hit what he wanted to hit. And when he hit it, it—it popped. It, not him.

It’s one of those big gingerbread-man balloons, hanging limply from the caught string. Its unpainted insides twinkle sunlight down across all of us.

The sound of Logan yelling from somewhere in the river becomes real. The other guys are falling-on-the-bridge laughing.

I hold myself up with the side-view mirror. I can’t get my legs under me yet and just collapse again. All the emotions of the last five minutes are tangled inside me, so I’m laughing and crying, hating myself, loving Liv, and wishing hard for—for I’m not even sure what.

And then, because Mom’s radar tells her there’s no better time, my cell’s all “Footsteps of Doom” again in my pocket. I don’t even mind. My robot hand tries to take the phone out to tell Mom everything.

Except before I can get the phone out to answer, a folded up piece of paper falls out onto the street.

It’s the note. The one I wrote for Mom all about Terry and its detailed how-to and what-to-avoid instructions for his floating. Somehow I forgot to leave it for her.

How could I have messed this all up so badly? Is there anyone else as messed up as me?

My robot hand palms the cell up and there’s M0M on the display, the zero-vowel not as funny as it used to be. I rub my eyes with the other hand to try and fix my head and my life, and then, like it’s just reached through some crack in the day, some opening between my world and some other, colder one, there’s this hand on my shoulder. It’s crackly and old. It’s a zombie hand. It’s my future, reaching back for me.

“What?” I say, my chest hitching, and look up into the old man’s face.

Mister, Mister, Mister . . .

Mr. Barron.

Hello.

7.

I can’t catch my breath. I feel-hear each thrum and thrush of mud-thick blood in my neck. This is how it starts: an anxiety attack. “Attack” makes me the victim, the docs say, but their word “episode” makes it sound like a television show I can supposedly choose to turn off. Yeah, right.

My phone is still vibrating in my hand like it’s trying so hard to shake free from me.

“Nice to see you again, young lady,” Mr. Barron says.

Looking up at him would almost be easier if he had mad-scientist kind of eyes. But his eyes aren’t all Stranger-Danger. He looks as lost and desperate as I am. Whatever Floating Boy is to this guy, he doesn’t have him anymore, right? So it’s got to hurt.

Inside me, everything’s amping up, and at the same time I’m breaking into sharp pieces. I’m trying to hug them all to me but there’s so many. This is exactly what my classes in the spring felt like: serious internal trauma while sitting at my desk in geometry. Nobody around me knowing there was anything wrong. Same exterior, melted-down interior. Welcome to my life.

“Go away . . .”

He says, “May I?” and plucks the cell phone from my hand. He straightens his arm out to read the screen, then holds it between us and hits the answer key.

On the other end, Mom is hysterical, completely losing it. “Mary? Where are you? It’s Terry! Terry—he’s floating! What did you feed him? He’s—Terry, T, baby, come down—”

Barron taps the phone off with his spidery index finger, a neat little move for a citizen as senior as he is. “Mom sure sounds upset, doesn’t she?” he says. He pockets my phone, not making any kind of evil production out of the theft. The phone is just another thing that’s his now. He adds, “Very, very interesting. A little brother that floats. He and I should meet, don’t you think?”

The whole time he’s looking past me into deep-thought land. Then he steps over to Liv’s sister’s car, snakes an arm through the driver’s open window, and stands back into the heat with a tinkling handful of keys.

He says, “You don’t look like you’re in any condition to be driving,” then tosses the keys into the brush.

I can’t say or do anything. My stomach is a bird wing. I’m taking too many breaths at once. Is this how it feels right before you float? It can’t be because it’s the worst feeling in the world.

And there’s screaming now. But it’s not from me, I’m pretty sure. It’s a howling siren, but a siren that’s making words?

It’s Liv. She’s screaming my name.

She runs toward me, not in slow motion but that’s how my head processes it. Behind her is a wet Logan and his teen-boy mob. They’re chasing her, but she’s not running from them, she’s running to me.

Logan’s voice goes real time, then. He yells something about her having to find his shotgun, collector’s-item-this and his-dad-is-going-to-kill-him-that. If I wasn’t looking at them all sideways—I’m lying down in the dirt? Is that why the grass is so tall?—I’d laugh at how five-year-old he sounds.

I crane my head around to Mr. Barron to make sure he can see Liv, too, impossible, wonderful Liv, charging right at him faster than she can even run. All I see is his brown sedan just a little farther down the road put-puttering away.

I’m alone, and then—blink, blink—I’m back in Liv’s car with a brain-busting headache, and she’s shaking me, asking me where the keys are.

“Mary, think!” Liv is suddenly at full volume.

I flinch away, then pull her close to me. “Aren’t they mad at you?” I ask, meaning Logan and his crew who are tromping all over the road behind the car, looking for the keys like they might have fallen out while we were driving.

Liv says, “You were passed out, Mare, and your breathing was all wrong. God, don’t do that.”

I say, “I’m fine,” I think, but now I’m watching a movie in my head. It’s Mr. Barron doing an evil-cartoon tiptoe down the hall of my house to Terry’s bedroom.

I open my mouth. The words come slow, but they come out: “In the bushes.”

“What?”

“The keys. They’re in the bushes.”

Liv looks around wildly, tells the guys to check the grass and bushes along the road, and then says to me, “Why? Why would you do—”

“Wasn’t me,” I say, my tone all about how she won’t believe me. “It was him.”

“Him him?”

“Not him him. Not Floating Boy. It was his—it was Mr. Barron. He’s an old man, drives a brown car. Didn’t you see him? And that was his balloon up there, in the wires. His gingerbread—”

Someone outside the car yells, “Found them!” There’s an approaching jingle of metal on metal and the keys are back in Liv’s hand. She says, “Thank God,” blows kisses in every direction, then jams the key into the ignition. “We’re taking you to the hospital, girl.”

“No, he . . . he already . . .” I say, touching all my pockets for the phone that isn’t there.

“Already what?” Liv says with some new concern in her voice.

“He took my phone, too.” I say, and then: “It’s Terry. Barron’s going to get him. He wants Terry, Liv. Because he’s floating, too, remember? I know you saw that.”

“Mare. You need—”

“No, we have to go get Terry before he does!”

She twists the car key, destination unknown. The engine grinds, squeals, grinds some more, our faces squinch up from the sounds, and the car doesn’t even come close to starting. Probably from the way Liv ground on it at Fat Burger. I’d be laggy, too. I am laggy.

Liv takes out her cell phone. I snatch it from her and call home. It rings four times before Dad and his goofy “Nobody’s Home” sung to Beethoven’s Fifth picks up. When I try Mom’s cell, it goes straight to her no-frills voicemail message.

Liv wants her phone back and is yanking on my arm to get it. “Wait,” I say, “we need someone to go—what about Marcus?”

Liv reaches over and holds the second speed-dial key down in an obvious way that says that’s what she was trying to do anyway.

When Marcus picks up, I’m already saying his name.

“Um, Mary?”

“Terry,” I say, “you’ve got to, my brother—”

“Why are you calling on—” he starts.

“My brother, Marcus. And we’re stuck. At the bridge. You need, you, you need—”

Liv pulls the phone away from my stuttermouth. “You need to get to Mary’s house, cool? As in now. As in no matter what. You gotta check on her brother, okay? I don’t care what your dad . . . just, I don’t know how, it doesn’t matter how. Run, skateboard, teleport, buy a kangaroo from the kangaroo stand, just do it. . . . Are you even listening? We can’t. My sister’s car—listen, do I need to call somebody else here?” She pauses, listens, and grabs my hand, then says, “Yeah, yeah, for real. Three-alarm here. I don’t have time to—”

Logan’s head hovers outside of my passenger window. It’s a creepy hovering head. He says, “She okay?”

“Just go,” Liv says to Marcus, then flashes her eyes across to me, to Logan standing there dripping, dripping with no gun, thank you. But he is still hateably who he is.

Logan says, “We have a little problem, girls.”

8.

The problem turns out to be that Logan won’t let his friend Charlie (or Churlie, or whatever he calls himself) work on Liv’s sister’s car until real-and-true rescue efforts are being made for the gun. Like that’s a fair trade.

Of all the places I ever expected to find myself, standing with Logan and his crew of tools on the bridge in the middle of a hot afternoon has got to be the most last one.

Liv is doing her dolphin impersonation in the river below us when it should be me looking for the gun. Liv couldn’t even go to the deep end of the pool without floaters until seventh grade—her big secret. If I weren’t Mom’s little soccer star, maybe I’d be on the swim team instead, winning state by now, with scholarships lining up. Water is the best place for me, I think. All that pressure from all around, it equalizes me somehow.

And I would be down in the river, too, except when I stepped out of my shoes to go gun-diving, Liv latched onto me and my still-shaking arms. Logan laughed at me. They both said something like you’re kidding, right? though Logan’s version had more swears. It doesn’t make sense to them that I can go from catatonic to okay in the space of ten minutes. Not that it makes sense to me either.

Instead of diving for firearms, then, I keep calling Mom and she keeps not picking up. In her defense, I am using Liv’s phone, so she can’t know it’s me. Or maybe she’s somewhere without a signal. Or maybe Mr. Barron stole her phone, too, and he’s at my house with the whole family tied up. Maybe—

Liv yells at us from the river. I lean over and Logan of all people is right there, ready to grab me, to save me, whatever. Below us, Liv is treading water. Little Miss Drowned Seal, her hair is all matted and hanging in her face so she can’t see what she’s holding. It’s not a gun. It’s a waterlogged branch trailing moss and river trash, and—is that a condom? Seriously?

Logan’s crew explodes into laughter. I blush and kind of hate myself for it. Liv sighs with her whole face, looks to me to make sure I’m okay, then dives back down again.

Then finally, a text from Marcus dings in on Liv’s phone. It says: no brother. It could mean a thousand things, none of them good, so now I’m so worried I can’t even feel my own face.

I must be leaning or swaying too far over the bridge railing because Logan drops a thick hand on my arm again.

I should free-kick Logan somewhere below the belt. I say, “Listen, I’m not—” but then Liv’s sister’s car revs to life behind us.

The crew on the bridge whoops and hollers. Logan says, “You all right now?” like I’ve become this injured bird he’s found and trying to take care of, and it’s weird and I hate it.

I call Marcus. He answers after a hundred redials and is breathing hard into the phone. He must be on his skateboard. He says, “What what what? I needed to be back home five minutes ago. I’m so toast.”

“What do you mean ‘no brother’?”

“Oh, yeah. He wasn’t home, nobody was home. But hey, I just talked to your neighbor, Nosy Nelly—”

“Rita,” I correct.

“Right. Rita Rumor said the ambulance took Terry out, your parents followed, big parade.”

“You were going to tell me that when exactly?”

“When I got home. I know. Sorry, but my dad is probably already back home, and—I gotta go. Have Liv call me later, yeah?”

So: no Barron. Terry being hauled away in an ambulance with Mom probably freaking out and still wearing her crazy-lady robe isn’t exactly great news, but still, I smile.

Liv climbs up the bank and onto the bridge, dripping and out of breath. She’s holding a muddy stick across her waist. Water leaks out of its end. Then she flexes her right hand and there’s a mini-explosion at the end of the stick. In a swirl of boyflesh, Logan and crew all hit the deck, their fingertips digging into the blacktop. I guess she found his gun.

Liv laughs at herself. “Oh my god, I didn’t mean to do that, I swear,” she says, but I know better. Her Dad has made her go to the firing range with him since she was nine, even though she always says that she hates-hates-hates it. “You drop this?” she says to Logan. “Still works, I guess.” She holds it out to him—or down to him, since now he’s hugging the pavement.

Logan gets up, his knees skinned and bleeding. He looks at Liv a little different, a little better. He takes the gun, cocks some part of it open, and more water trickles out.

Behind us, Charlie or Churlie revs the car again, clearly trying to be part of the fun.

I grab Liv’s arm and pull her along because she’d stand here all day and bask in the glory of her insane moment if I let her. “Come on. We gotta go.”

“Where?”

“Hospital. I talked to Marcus.”

Hospital is a magic word. It gets us in the car and finally off the bridge. On the way, I tell her everything Marcus said, including him being toast.

Liv says, “I kind of like toast.” We swing by my house, just to double-check, but, when we see Mom’s car is gone, we don’t stop. Liv cuts through the side streets and fearlessly plows through intersections in her sister’s car.

At the hospital, Liv parks in the ambulance lane, and I’m still so spacey she pulls me across the bench seat and out her own door. And just at the exact moment when the electronic eye of the sliding doors registers us as humans and swishes those doors open, I look behind us, down into the long slope of the main parking lot.

And I think I see a brown sedan. Waiting.

9.

Sunday morning has never been about church for us. Or, as my dad puts it: one family reunion a year’s more than enough. Amen, Dad. The last time we went to church, which was more than a year ago, the Claremonts were on us like piranhas in their outdated Sunday finest, or, I guess, on us like the Claremonts they are: asking if we wanted to be caught up on the sermons (“Did you know we have a podcast?”), asking if we were coming back next week, even asking me if I was going to go to the Safe Friday Dance-Offs (“clean” music, appropriate clothes, no “suggestive dance moves,” and room enough between the boy dancer and the girl dancer for the Holy Spirit).

So, the morning after sitting most of the night by Terry’s hospital bed, surprise, we don’t go to church, even though I guess there is stuff to be thankful for: no floating was documented—no anything was documented. One of the docs did try to decipher the “funky smell” note on the paramedic’s write-up. I’m pretty sure our family is on the Child Protective Services watch list now. Solely because of the public menace of Mom’s robe. But at least they let us bring Terry home.

After all of that, we just sleep in, and then sleep in some more. We’re, like, going for the record, I mean. Take two sick parents, add a weekend to that, and no one’s opening the refrigerator until the crack of two in the afternoon.

Terry and I eat cartoon cereal and yeah, we’re so normal I want to giggle. I don’t even think about my stolen cell phone until Little Bear is on again. I haven’t told Mom yet about the snatched phone, which seems like the right thing to do for both of us.

I sneak into my parents’ cave of a bedroom—seriously, they should consider opening a window someday—and ease my mom’s dinosaur of a phone from her purse. It’s bedazzled, crusted with plastic rhinestones. Yeah, she’s, like, twelve. What scares me is that the genes that made her do that, they must be in me somewhere.

I almost make it back out, I’m sort of half-out already, when Dad sits up. He still has his sleep mask on, the one with wide-open eyes stitched into it. So weird. And then it gets worse: he cranks his head over, like he’s looking at me with those fake eyes. His floppy comb-over is plastered to his forehead with fever.

“Mary Ellen?” my mom mumbles, her voice all creaky. “That you, hon? What are you doing?”

Ellen isn’t my real middle name. It’s just what Mom told me she’d originally meant to name me. She said something about it being timeless, classic, stylish. Like a rhinestoned cell phone.

“Nothing,” I tell her, and because she’s not all-the-way awake, she buys it, and rolls back over.

I escape, finally. Thank you. I pull their door shut and sit in the hall, my forearms propped on my knees, my thumbs already buzzing a message at Liv. This takes longer on the rhinestone-dino phone because each number is three letters and I don’t know how she can even function in the normal world with a phone like this.

I wait for one minute. No answer. I repeat my message six times. Is Liv grounded, too, now? And, if so, what kind of surgery would it take to physically remove her phone from her hand? And wouldn’t a medical feat like that be televised?

I pocket Mom’s phone on the chance that Liv is climbing up Marcus’s trellis or something, with his dad patrolling the grounds, pistol drawn, face all scowly.

When I pass back through the living room, of course Terry is on the ceiling again with his blanket. Little Bear is still on. I don’t even think he realizes he’s not on the couch anymore.

Instead of pulling him down, I haul the family laptop out and park myself on the couch right under him. Then I reconsider—he’s not in complete bladder control yet—and take the chair instead. And of course I have to get up all over again for the power cord because I’m the only person in the house who knows how to charge a battery.

My plan is to throw up a big net, just search “floating” and, I don’t know, “floating in Ipswich, Massachusetts”—no, no: Barron—but before I open the browser, I can’t resist trolling through Dad’s bookmarks and web history. I’m not spying, I swear. If he’s stupid enough to leave them right on the desktop then it’s practically an invitation.

First up: a whole full row of classified ads, job postings. He’s all over the place there, from car washers to vice principals. I’m starting to get worried about him.

The second row is his more private bookmarks, his usual stuff: UFOs, Bigfoot sightings, a house that’s there for some people, not for others. If only he could get paid for lurking these sites. If there’s a newslist and it’s paranormal or conspiracy-related, he’s not only on it, he’s a moderator. Ugh, he’s using his real IP address and everything. Poor Dad. I mean, in his day there weren’t even more than three channels on the TV.

The third row of bookmarks is just spillover from the second. But the bottom one, the newest one—click, click—is for some message board. The freak-o bulletin-board crazies have been dissecting the “Birthday Party Hoax” vid starring everyone’s favorite balloon man. The thread also has all these links to other supposedly flying people. Most of the vids are shaky and low-res—something Liv and me could make over lunch.

After a few more posts, it’s gnomes in the bushes, people with wings at ATMs, slouchy guys with rabbit heads and like, this was the final word; one link that just says “Cowabunga.” Yeah, when you start going Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the conversation’s over.

This isn’t to say I don’t click. It’s a trick page, too: every time you try to hover over the cow-icon, it moves away, always ahead. A stupid game. Wunderbar.

Because this isn’t my first time on the Internet, I just hold the control button down, and I’m able to arrow right over the cow. It turns over on its back, eyes X’d out, and it squirts milk up from its udders. Cute and gross. Double wunderbar.

I fold the screen down and look to make sure Terry isn’t spying over my shoulder, but he’s asleep up there somehow. I watch him and try to figure what’s the best thing to do here—take a picture, post it to Dad’s thread? (like it wouldn’t look fake)—and then there’s a noise from the laptop.

I unfold that dead cow. Clicking it let me through to the hidden video.

Like the rest, it’s grainy and shaky, and I can hear two guys talking behind it, one of them at the side of the frame sometimes. They’re just walking through some field way out in nowhere. No, no: they’re sneaking up on a cow! To tip it over? The world’s full of Logans, I guess.

And now the two Logans are daring each other. Finally, there’s a camera exchange, and then the one dude I haven’t seen yet starts to creep out to the cow. And—I wouldn’t have seen it except for somebody edited the video and circled the cow’s mouth with a yellow highlighter—this cow, it’s not eating like I thought it was. It’s been throwing up the whole time. A thin line of vomit pours out of its mouth.

And then the world changes for these two Logans.

The former cameraman darts out, shirtless, balancing a beer—at least I think it’s beer—and just before he’s there, just before he’s going to plant his hand on that cow’s rump, the cow looks around at him, swishes its tail once, and lifts off the ground.

The Logans aren’t saying anything now. The camera dude tracks the mooing cow up into the sky until it’s just a blurry dot, and then comes back down to his friend, standing there with his beer all poured down his pants leg.

At least I think it’s beer.

The way Terry finally floats back down is like a leaf. I don’t catch him so much as guide him. And then I look in on my parents—it’s four o’clock, guys?

I can’t sit around and do nothing all day. So, of course, I climb out my bedroom window and onto the roof with a brush and a can of reflective paint. A little redecoration?

The can of reflective curb-paint is a failed business idea of Dad’s. The garage is filled with serious leftovers. I paint a big, white-bright circle on the shingles, taking up more than half the slightly slanted roof, the section that faces the street. I’m sure the neighbors will groove on it.

The rest of the afternoon melts away with me sitting in the middle of my bat-signal, all paint-splattered and waiting with my mom’s embarrassing phone in my hand. Still nothing from Liv.

I hang out on the roof and have a look around the neighborhood, and the look, it’s weird. There are no lawn mowers buzzing? No grilles smoking? And—and where are all the cars? Mary, Last Girl in the World, stands up from her reflective surface and scans the horizon for Godzilla.

There are a few people out there: kids at a pool, and some other kids playing basketball in their driveways. But you can’t make a summer Sunday late afternoon in the burbs from that, can you? Where’s the kickball games, dog walking, and all kinds of sad stuff that’s supposed to be going on without me? At least give me one divorced mom desperately tanning in her backyard, right?

Something’s off. Everybody has—what?—gone to the movies? I start over and take what I can see section by section. And then, just barely, I see that there’s two arms waving at me, waving at me from all the way at the top of our tripod-monster water tower.

Him.

Him him.

I’m out of breath from coming hand-over-hand up the blazing hot ladder. The metal clangs, groans and, just for effect, shakes. I didn’t know metal ladders would do that, and it shouldn’t be doing that this high up, which is what, fifty feet or so above the hard, hard ground. You really have to want to be up here. The sun has just about set by the time I finish climbing.

“Mary,” Floating Boy says. He’s sitting on the waffle-metal catwalk part of the bulb of the tower, so his legs can dangle down through the railing, over all that space. His feet are treading air and he’s wearing the same tee and shorts from the other night. He holds up the leash he’s got himself tied to the railing with.

“You’re the one who can float, right? And you’re making me climb crazy death ladders?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry. Your roof, I thought it’d be too—” He pauses and shrugs.

“Conspicuous?” Liv hates it when I’m obnoxious with vocabulary. But she’s not here and she’s still not answering my texts.

“Um, if that means too out in the open.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry I never made it to the mill yesterday.” I almost say sorry I stood you up, but that would’ve been too weird. Maybe. But it’s what I think of: him in the mill alone, waiting, the floor all swept or whatever, and then me never knocking on the humongous Frankenstein door. “Things got complicated with Terry.”

“It’s okay,” he says.

I sit down beside him and dangle my legs out like his, even though it gives me a hollow feeling in my chest.

“I saw a cow float away,” I say, and add, “on-line.” Then, because I’m not awkward enough already, I say, “The computer. I mean, you know?”

“Huh,” he says, and maybe he’s smiling a bit, it’s hard to tell. “The cows.”

I’m not sure what kind of answer this is supposed to be. “All right,” I say. “I’ve got some questions. Scratch that. I’ve got a lot of questions.”

He looks over at me for a second through his bangs. It’s a good look. It’s almost enough for me to forget how high up we are.

“Okay?”

“So, where do you go to school?” I ask.

“You want to know how I do it,” he answers anyway.

I shrug and nod: bingo.

“You and him both,” he says. “I mean, he knows, but still. It’s always been him still trying to figure me out.”

“Barron?”

“Yeah.”

“He stole my phone,” I say, then add a quick rundown of my afternoon with Liv and her sister’s car and dicky dirts and guns and bridges and hospitals. Everything, yeah.

He doesn’t say anything and it’s almost like I’m speaking code. I don’t know, maybe I’m too much for him. His quiet is making me nervous. “So what’s this Barron guy to you?” I say at last. “Is he your father? Crazy uncle? Flying coach?”

“I never knew my parents,” he says, and he’s definitely not looking at me now. “Everybody down there knows their parents, right?” He laughs through his nose, at himself, I think. “For a while I used to think I was a robot. That Barron had, like, made me from spare parts or something. From extra pieces of real people.”

“Is that why you danced like that? To see?”

“Danced like what?”

“Your robot dance,” I say and hang my arm down loose from the elbow, showing him. “It’s an easy test. You’ve either got it or you don’t.”

“Hard-wired or not . . .” he tags on, getting it. “It’s just—until a few months ago, I wasn’t even sure what state this was. All that mattered was my room. Whenever he’d leave I’d be in there for hours by myself.” He pauses and I don’t say anything because what do you say to something that’s as horrible as that?

He suddenly blurts out, “Every month or so, for as long as I can remember, he gave me my shots. I kinda even looked forward to it, I think.”

“Shots? Like needles and special secret serum or whatever?”

“Yeah. And now I know he was lying to me the whole time, too. He always said I needed my shots or I’d get real sick and I wouldn’t make it. And he said I couldn’t go outside, that it wasn’t safe for me, or anyone else. And—he had me write everything down in a log for him.”

After a few awkward moments of not saying anything, and letting our dangling legs knock into each other for a little while, I give him a pseudo-confession, just to get him talking again. I say, “Sometimes I wish I didn’t know my parents.” I cross my arms over the lower of the two crossrails and rest my chin there.

“Maybe I didn’t have any,” he says. “I mean, if I was, like, made—”

I punch his shoulder. “But you’re a real boy, Pinocchio.”

“Pinocchio?”

“I was just—”

“You know, he says my name is Timothy, and sometimes, it’s what he calls me. But then he’ll call me by other names, a whole bunch of other names, other boys, all the kids he tested before me, I think. So, it’s like I don’t even have a real name.”

I try to remember all the names he scratched out under the bridge. There are too many. But I remember Timothy was the only one not scratched out.

“He told me that when I was little-little, I was just sort of abandoned, like the rest of them. It would explain some of this, wouldn’t it? How nobody misses me?”

I say, “I’m sorry,” because what else is there? Then, when he goes quiet and it feels like there needs to be something else to say, I try this: “Hey. What does it feel like?”

He shrugs like he’s bored with the question. “I don’t know. It feels like me.”

“And now my little brother . . . Why is Terry floating now?”

“Was Barron his doctor, too?”

“What? No. Barron was just the gingerbread-balloon man to us.”

“So he never? Even when your brother was born in the hospital?”

“Floating doesn’t run in my family. This didn’t start until the party,” I say. “Until you showed up. No offense.”

“No, it’s my fault. I don’t know why or how, but I know it is. I left. I was gone. I suppose Barron needed somebody else, then. He must’ve gotten to Terry somehow. I’m sorry. It’s—it’s just because he’s so young, I think. . . .” and he just trails off, like he’s not sure what he’s talking about.

“What do you mean? Why does his being so young matter?”

“The shots and floating. It doesn’t work out too good for adults. Barron told me once that, so far, grown-ups only get the bad parts from the shots.”

“What bad parts?”

“I don’t know what the bad parts are. He never said.” He shrugs and shakes his head. Then he adds, “I actually stopped floating a few months ago. At the beginning of the summer. It happened a few days after another one of the shots. But I felt so different a few days after. Barron seemed so happy about my not-floating. He let me outside more and everything.”

“How long did the not-floating last?”

“A while. A month or so, I guess. It was cool but I also missed that floating feeling too, you know? It lasted until after the next shot, and I was floating again, back to the way I’d always remembered being. He gave me that other shot only a few days before I left. ”

“Before you escaped, you mean?”

He says, “Yeah. Hey, but your brother . . . I’m thinking if I went back to Barron then he might let your brother go.”

My head spins with everything he’s telling me about the shots and floating and not floating. “Wait. What? No, he doesn’t have my brother.” I chinpoint down to my house, the one with the glowy roof that was supposed to be his landing pad.

“And he’s like me?”

“No. Terry can’t control it.”

“You get better at it—took me a while, but I can mostly go where I want to now. But you can’t always control it.” To show me, he lets go of the railing and bobs up about eight inches. He’s been faking normalness for the past I-don’t-know-how-many-minutes.

He says, “I don’t know, floating is kind of like an emotion. You think you can control it, and you can sometimes, but . . . it’s not like that at all? It’s like how you can throw a ball to a dog, and he’ll get it. Um, that’s what dogs do, right?”

“Um, yeah.”

“So you throw it once, the dog gets it, you throw it again, and the dog gets it again, but you’re not in control, not really? The dog’s playing with you, it’s not you playing with the dog. One of these times the dog’s going to see some better ball and just keep running, and you can’t whistle him back, and then the people in the van take him to dog jail.”

I almost smile here because what he knows about dogs sounds like it’s all from kid movies. “Listen,” I say, kind of taking the side of his hand in mine—not romantic, I swear, and more about holding him down—“you don’t have to go back to—” but right at that moment, the rhinestone phone in my front pocket doesn’t just buzz or burr, it plays that old and embarrassing theme song to Titanic, the one Mom always sings with her arms outstretched.

I shut it off fast and read Liv’s text out loud: “marymarymary.” It’s code for trouble. The same way “911” means emergency, our names three times to each other is drop-everything-save-me.

“Liv,” I say and look past the phone out over our neighborhood and to her house. It’s already past kind-of-dusky out, but up here her house looks just the same as ever.

“There,” Floating Boy says. He’s standing and unhooking his tether.

I stand with him and feel the dizziness of this many feet up. I have to clutch the rail to keep from spilling over.

“I don’t—” I say, but then I do. There’s a small light winking at us from the sky, about the same level up as we are, and out over our neighborhood. The small light is attached to a shadowy figure.

“Liv?” The light is Liv’s cell phone. The figure is Liv. She’s floating. I can just make out her outline.

“No,” Floating Boy says and stuffs the leash into the cargo pocket of his pants. “Stay here.” He turns to be sure I will stay, like I have a choice. He’s looking at me when he steps over the rail onto some pad of air and doesn’t fall.

“I mean, just wait,” he says, then grabs the rail, tucks his legs around to get the soles of his feet between his hands, and exactly like pushing off for the backstroke, he dives away into the night air, toward Liv.

All right. So now Liv’s floating, too? Everyone except me. I’m the opposite of Typhoid Mary. I’m the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly. I’m the one who’s going to be all anxietied out on the ground while everybody else floats away.

Maybe if I could just close my eyes and step out there into all that nothing, then that pad of air would be there to catch me. Even just thinking about it gets me that sinking feeling in my stomach, in the base of my jaw. But I do think about it.

So Liv is floating with him. I guess I’ll go hang out with Marcus, then. We’re both grounded anyway, right? Ha!

Yeah, ha, ha, ha.

Without letting go of the top rail, I make my way back to the ladder then swing my legs over for the long haul down. My feet feel heavier than normal. I get only about ten rungs away from the top when there’s the very distinct sound of sirens.

My automatic response: clamp onto the sidebars of the ladder and pull myself close.

Did the police follow floating-Liv here? Did a nosey neighbor (or my sick Mom?) call them because we were up on the tower? Is someone falling? Is the ladder coming loose? Is the water tower falling over from my weight? Seriously, why are the police here?

And oh, hey, there’s Marcus’s dad, his crackly voice trying to soothe me, but bullhorns don’t soothe. Don’t they learn that in training? And now the fire truck. Of course a fire truck, so everybody can know, so I can have this, too, to drag through the halls of my high school career.

All of which is to say: anxiety attack. Seconds or hours pass and I’m still barnacled to the ladder. I open one hand just to see if I can, and it works, and I turn to wave to Marcus’s dad and the firemen, to tell them it’s all right, they can all go home and take their flashing lights with them, that I can take it from here. But then, with my hand out and ready to do all that important waving, I see what’s parked just two doors down from my house, and nobody's looking that way but me.

Barron’s brown sedan. Its driver’s side door is open.

And then my other hand slips off the railing.

10.

I’m awake and asleep at the same time, and for a long time. I can’t open my eyes, but it feels white and bright, so I don’t really want to open my eyes anyway. I dream about rivers filled with guns and a cow jumping over the water tower.

There’s talking and coughing, but those busy people-noises are muffled.

Then there’s pressure on my upper arm. Something is squeezing it, and it’s this big squeeze that opens my eyes. A nurse dressed in white and wearing a white face mask is taking my blood pressure.

I twitch, and it kind of jumpstarts my head, and then things click together: I’m in a hospital room. I’m sitting up in bed, white sheet pulled over me, left foot sticking out of the covers because that’s the way I sleep (or go unconscious!), no matter what. To my right, there’s a thin blue curtain cutting the room in half, like I’m giving the silent treatment to the person I’m sharing the room with. When I was a little kid, I used to imagine sharing my bedroom with the big sister I never had: she was cool but we’d fight and divvy up the bedroom with duct tape so no one could go on the other’s side.

I tell the nurse (who clearly isn’t my imaginary big sis) that I feel a little weird. No kidding, right? Even though she’s sitting, I can tell she’s tall and thin. I can’t really see her face with the surgical mask on, but she’s probably as old as my mother, and she has hair blacker than my Chuck Taylors, so probably a dye-job.

The nurse tells me that I was given a prescription dose of Valium earlier, to keep me relaxed and let me sleep, and I have another prescription that’ll be filled tomorrow. Then she turns her head away and coughs into the mask, and keeps her head turned even after the cough is over, like she’s recovering from it.

And . . . prescription? Where there’s one, there’ll be more. Specifically, the zombie pills that have been hanging over my head for months. I mean, there was serious talk of heavy-duty, mind-numbing drugs back in the spring, when school wasn’t going great, wasn’t going at all, really, when getting out of bed wasn’t really a thing I could consider. But thankfully Mom and Dad resisted then. Now, with a fresh new hospitalization incident to add to the list, maybe they’ll feel like they have no choice but to push me out into the pharmaceutical wastelands.

And now I remember slipping off the ladder while climbing down from the tower. And I did slip, I didn’t just let go. To all of them, it probably looked like I was giving up. I’m guessing they think the worst.

I wasn’t as high up as I thought, but still high enough to make an impact on the two firemen dudes who caught me. More like I fell into them and without a lot of style. Then there was the yelling and screaming from everyone else, and hands carrying me to the ambulance, like I was crowd surfing, and then a bee-sting needle in my arm, and now this room and this nurse who coughs and looks like she should be the one in the bed, not me.

There’s a lot of movement and people telling other people what to do out in the hallway. The nurse tells me not to worry about anything. But she can’t stop me from worrying about where Liv might be right now, and if Terry’s gravity problems have popped up again, and if he’s inside or outside.

I ask where Mom and Dad are. I’m surprised Mom isn’t here with her own stethoscope, taking my pulse every minute. The nurse peels off my blood pressure cuff and whispers that my parents are okay but aren’t feeling so well. Resting comfortably with IVs is a phrase that comes out next. Then she points at the curtain.

So, great. Mom and Dad came in as patient visitors, but stayed to be patients. Then where’s Terry? And everyone else?

Liv?

I say it out loud and the nurse pats the top of my hand, agreeing with me, I think. Sharing the sentiment. Adults are so perceptive.

She leaves after taking my temp and coughing into her mask some more. Isn’t a nurse coughing on a patient against the law or some sort of oath?

I wait a few minutes to make sure the nurse isn’t coming right back with a tray stacked with ginormous pills and needles, and I listen for Mom and Dad to say something. I squeak out a quiet “Mom?” as a test. All’s quiet behind the curtain. I can’t say the same for out in the hallway. Hard shoes pounding on the linoleum out there, and screaming phones, and other electronic blips and beeps.

I swing my legs out of the bed and onto the floor. Holy floating cow, the floor is cold, and that helps keeps things clear in my head, as clear as they can be. I stand slowly, afraid I’ll fall down, afraid I might trip some secret alarm wire they’ve got me hooked to, but I think I’m clean. Nothing on me or attached to me, and the same goes for the breezy hospital gown not being tied in the back.

I shuffle past the door and to a locker under the TV hanging down from the ceiling. That thing is so old it has knobs. The locker throws a hissy fit when I open it. I wait for the rushing feet in the hallway to burst back into the room, but none of them are for me.

I put on my tee and cut-off jeans. My mom’s cell is in the front left pocket, and, better yet, most of its five pounds must be battery: it’s still got a decent charge. I check the messages: there are ten R u OK?s and six call mes from Liv. I text her back.

Me: here, at the hospital

Liv, back at me faster than it actually takes a cell signal to travel: u okay? leave?

Me: mostly. I want 2 leav. where are u?

Liv: meet Marcus in the lot. give him 10.

I ask her where she is again, and who’s she with, but she’s ignoring her phone-hand now. Or maybe she only stopped flying with Floating Boy long enough to shoot off a few texts and now she’s back in the air, giggling, her non-soccer legs not getting in the way of anything way up there. I’ll try not to obsess on that.

It’ll probably take me ten minutes at least to find a way out of here, if that’s even something I can pull off. I peek behind the curtain. Mom and Dad have their own beds like in old sitcoms, and both are totally zonked. Dad’s fully reclined and on his side. Mom looks like a vampire with hands properly folded on her chest. She looks really old all of a sudden.

I slide over and whisper in Mom’s ear, ask her where Terry is. She stirs but doesn’t open her eyes. I say it again and she says, “Home with Beth Anne”—which is what you call Aunt Beth when she’s your sister—and she sounds surprisingly fine about it.

I say, “Go back to sleep, Mom.”

She mumbles something with a parental order in it, so I fake-mumble something back then sneak to the other side of the curtain where the room is empty. I take out Mom’s phone to call the house and ask about Terry, but Liv hits me with another text.

Liv: Marcus is there but sayz u not so much.

Me: Where?

Liv: in the DDonuts lot across from the hospital. hurry?

Me: down in 2

Why won’t he meet me in the hospital lot?

This would all be easier if someone, I don’t know, would just float up to my hospital window, break the unbreakable glass and glide me out of here. . . .

I stick my head into the hallway and there’s no one sitting next to my door, not even a chair. There are doctors and nurses running up and down the hallway, all of them wearing white masks. Orderlies push occupied gurneys around and leave them parallel parked in the hallway. Everyone is coughing and talking. A couple of guys in army fatigues speedwalk past my room. They’re wearing masks, too, with a camo print on the crinkly paper.

Now I’m scared, and kind of want my own mask. I duck back inside the room and find a stash in the cabinets. I put it on and my breathing is Darth Vader loud.

Okay. I take a few deep breaths that are supposed to clear my head, then double-knot my sneaker laces because it’s the only thing I can think to do before tip-toeing out into the hallway.

The chaos has intensified, with more runners and shouters, more abandoned patients on gurneys. I think my bio teacher, Ms. Looney, the one with her right leg three inches longer than her left, is on the gurney across from me. All the patients look like they’re Mom and Dad’s age or older. Sick adults are multiplying like cells under a microscope in one of those scary outbreak movies.

I sidestep away from the nurse’s station, hopefully not toward some restricted area. I follow the winding hallway and I pass way more army guys, then to the elevator where another mess of army guys is waiting and talking loudly into their masks, speaking some weird language of abbreviations I don’t understand.

I slip past them and to the stairs. I jog down the three flights, my face sweating in the mask, and I’m in the emergency room/lobby that’s flooded with coughing, sneezing adults.

I put my head down and march out the front double doors, which are propped open and guarded. I can’t stop, so I don’t. I get a few steps past and one of the guards shouts after me, something about where I’m going. I don’t know, so it’s easy for me to turn around quickly, walk backwards, wave and point at the lot, like I’m just going there for my toothbrush or my blanket, or I just need to duck behind this group of parked-but-still-wailing ambulances . . . and then I’m into the full parking lot, ducking between cars parked on the curbs and cement islands.

I look over my shoulder. No army guys.

At the back of the lot I cut through a small patch of woods, ditch my mask, then loop around on Main Street to the Dunkin’ Donuts. There’s Liv’s sis’s car sitting by itself, and Marcus behind the wheel.

He’s looking at me, but it’s like he doesn’t see me. I wave my arms fast enough to helicopter around his car. He absently pushes open the passenger door and I drop myself in.

“What’s going on over there?” he says, and points at the hospital. Two army jeeps are blocking off the road right next to the emergency entrance.

“Everyone’s sick. Some kind of flu, maybe. My parents are still in there.”

Marcus hasn’t moved, hasn’t started the car. He sneezes. Great, he has it too, yeah? He doesn’t seem as sick as everyone else in the hospital though.

I start shaking in my seat. International body language for let’s go! let’s go!

He says, “My parents are sick, too. It’s how I, you know, snuck out. Should I go back home?”

“I—I don’t know. Maybe? Are you sick, too?”

“Don’t think so. Feel a little weird, but okay, I guess.”

“Good enough for me. Let’s go then.”

He starts the car. “Have you seen Liv yet? What she can do?”

“Not up close.”

He nods like I’m offering deep wisdom, the kind you find in a fortune cookie.

“Marcus?”

“Yeah?” He’s clearly spooked by the scene at the hospital.

“Thanks for getting me. But, can we, like, go now? And quick, before the army dudes want some donuts or something?”

“Yeah, okay.” He shifts into drive and starts a slow roll. “I’m going to go home after I drop you off, I think.”

Home. Right. Home is where Terry and Aunt Beth are supposed to be. I take out Mom’s cell and call home. No one answers.

Marcus drives away from the roadblock and the hospital, puttering along at below the speed limit. He’s probably driven even less than Liv has and is only behind the wheel because she made him. And by making him, I mean she probably kicked or punched him over the phone.

I’m still vibrating in my seat, trying to psychically goose the speed up, until I can’t stand it anymore. “Hey, leadfoot,” I say a couple of minutes into it, just real casual. “Think we can swing by my house first? Real quick, only be a minute, in and out, promise.”

The reason I don’t look at him when I say this is that’s it not so easy to lie to your friends.

11.

Because the front window of Liv’s sister’s car is down, I stick my head out like I’m a dog. Is this what it’s like, flying? Just giving yourself over to the rush, not worrying about falling, even though you’ve got to come down somehow?

That’s not what I’m supposed to be thinking, though. The wind-blast is supposed to be clearing the cobwebs from my head. But it’s still scary. Most of that’s due to Marcus, taking all the turns wide, and I’m not talking safe-wide, or even grandma-wide, I’m talking geometrically wide, paranoid-wide, stop-me-Officer-this-isn’t-my-car-and-I-don’t-have-a-license-anyway wide. The front bumper whispers against three telephone poles, and he just misses flattening some hunched-over coughing dude in a Smart Car.

What’s even more scary is that dude in his Smart Car, his is the only car we see the whole ride. The streets are empty. It’s a ghost town. No packs of kids wandering the sidewalks. No dog-walkers, bikers, joggers, porch-sitters, or lookie-loos.

We turn right onto my street and the left side of the car goes up on a curb. I’ve never driven before—how hard can it be, though, right? I mean, I’ve played videogames with steering wheels. I’m seriously considering reaching across, opening Marcus’s door, hip-checking him out, watching this pretty little skaterboy roll, and taking the wheel, taking my shot at keeping it between the lines, but somehow we’re at my house already.

There are two cars in my driveway and two more parked out front. No sign of any bad-guy brown cars. The big green SUV is Aunt Beth’s. She’s more interested in saving souls and lugging around her kid cantina than saving the planet.

Marcus makes a crooked line with Liv’s sis’s car at the end of the driveway, boxing everyone in. He says, “Whose are all the cars?”

“Them.”

“Them?”

“The Claremonts’.” I wasn’t expecting all these cars, just Aunt Beth’s. She brought company, must be making this into a revival or something. Maybe they’re all inside holding hands, performing some sort of exorcism on the house, trying to clean it. Good luck with that, guys. Don’t forget under the fridge.

“I’ll stay here,” Marcus says. “You’re in and out, right?” He looks around, probably waiting for his cop-dad to pop out from the back seat like some never-dead slasher from a cheesy horror flick.

I leak out of the car and guide the door shut. When I’m halfway across the lawn, Liv texts me.

Liv: why so slow?

I stop and look up. Can she see me? Is she up there with Floating Boy, texting and laughing, laughing and texting? And flying? The signal’s got to be crystal up there.

Liv: u should be at the mill already. like before now

Me: soon. home checkmark terry first.

Liv: hurry scurry

I creep up to the side door, smooth out the permanent wrinkles in my zombie tee, like that’s going to help me with the Claremonts, then it’s through the door and into the house. Kitchen lights are on but no one’s in there, and the chairs are gone from the table. All kinds of voices are coming from the living room, and I get a hospital hallway flashback. Only these voices are hushed, in unison. Praying, naturally.

“Hello? It’s me. Mary,” I call out, throwing my voice around the corner, and hoping I don’t find them all wearing robes, hands on Terry, dousing him with holy water.

I make the turn Marcus-wide. Aunt Beth is in the middle of the couch. Pigtails on a woman her age is just so wrong. On her right side is an old woman, her mother-in-law, I think—some shrivelly version of a mother-in-law anyway—but I can’t be sure without an album, a family tree, and my own mom to park-ranger me through. Her face is all scrunched up like she thinks pigtails suck, too.

On the other side of Aunt Beth is a squat older guy with fire-hose veins bulging from his brown-bag neck. Sitting in kitchen chairs, forming a weird kind of Stonehenge circle with the couch, are three men and another woman.

The men look like the kind who belong to one of those clubs for old men, where everyone wears stupid little hats and hates everything. The woman is the youngest and might be Aunt Beth’s sister-in-law. It’s weird because she kind of looks a little like a younger version of Aunt Beth, but no pigtails. Her eyes go moon-big on me. They all have Bibles in their laps.

Before I can ask about Terry, the one with the crazy-wide, laser-beam eyes says, “Where is he?” She coughs, sneezes, and wipes her face on the back of her long black sleeves. So nasty.

“Terry?” I say, and my insides crumble all over again.

The circle pipes in with everyone talking at once, everyone coughing and leaking snot out of their blotchy faces; everyone sick, a delirious kind of sick. They all ask the same basic question:

“Where is the boy?”

“Who is he?”

“The boy!”

“You best be not hiding him, girl.”

“Protecting him.”

“He’s to blame.”

“For everything.”

I hold my don’t-shoot hands up and say, “Whoa, whoa. I’m just here to see—”

Aunt Beth interrupts. “Mary, we’re talking about the boy who came, uninvited I might add, to my Jack’s party.” She pauses to unleash her own chest-rattling cough, and then tries to give me an everything-is-peaches smile. It looks like a cross-out of a smile instead.

“What, why would I—”

The circle chimes in again:

“The one who flew away.”

“The one who performed a blasphemy in front of us.”

“All of us.”

“He is to blame for this.”

“For Jack.”

“For Terry.”

“For everyone.”

“He’s a plague.”

“A pestilence.”

As Twilight Zone as their unified weirdness is, I’m getting pissed. I mean, hey, this is my house, right? This is my living room. “Everyone be quiet!” I yell, my hands curled into Mom-fists by my hips.

The Claremonts stop, clearly shocked at my outburst. Score one for the home team.

Aunt Beth’s smile is gone. I can feel bad for her because her Jack is like Terry who is like Liv who is like . . . She says, “Your mother told me you’ve seen the boy since the party, multiple times.”

Thanks, Mom. “I’m trying to help him. He’s trying to help me. To help Terry.”

“Well, we want to help him, too, Mary,” she says, adding my name at the end like its own meaningful little punctuation mark. “Please let us help him. Tell us where he is.”

“I—I don’t know.” I look around the circle and can tell that’s not good enough. Like I might be stoned to death, or buried under an avalanche of their Bibles if I don’t give more. “I saw him on top of the water tower last night,” I finally say. “And I climbed up and then fell off and landed in the hospital. You tell me how I’m supposed to know where he is right now.” I’m getting more pissed and it feels good. Unless the more-pissed feeling is just fear with some extra hot sauce on it.

Aunt Beth’s sis-in-law, in her phlegmiest voice, says, “She’s lying.”

Vein-man agrees, but he’s coughing too much to do more than just nod.

“I’m not lying!” I tell them. “Where do you get off coming to my house, uninvited I might add, and accusing me of lying, lady?”

Aunt Beth says, “Mary, it’s rude to talk back to your elders.”

“And it’s rude to give me the third degree in my own house for no reason. Now where’s Terry?”

More coughing fits and some whispered prayers pass around the circle.

Aunt Beth says, “Your brother is at the hospital.”

“Wait. What? Mom said you were here, watching him.”

Aunt Beth blows her nose in a way-overused handkerchief that practically crawls out of her purse. Then she says, “I was watching him. Then,” she pauses to look at her watch, “about two hours ago, a government agent from Health and Human Services was here, following up on Terry’s previous hospital visit—”

“A government agent?”

My hearing sort of cuts out there, but she prattles on, telling me about the nice chat she and the agent had about Terry and his floating. They talked about Christianity and its rightful role within our government. They even said a prayer together before she helped carry Terry outside and buckle him into the booster seat in the man’s car.

I don’t even need to, but still I ask, “Was this guy, like, old? Looks kind of like a wrinkly Muppet? Wears a brown suit and drives a brown car?”

At my detailed description, disapproving moans pass around the circle. I’m such a huge disappointment, am so not worthy of their Claremontness. Aunt Beth manages to hold it all together nicely. “He was an older gentleman, yes. He was wearing a suit, brown maybe, I think. But yes, he was driving a brown car. Have you met him, dear?”

“Have I—What? I can’t even deal with this. You let him take Terry?”

“Who—who is he, Mary?” Aunt Beth’s eyes are red and she wipes her forehead. She looks around the room for support.

“You let some stranger take Terry away!”

“I—he wasn’t a stranger. He was a government agent. He was someone. I’m not—I’m not feeling well. He showed me his ID. It was very—official.”

Some of her circle-mates pat her hand and tell her she did the right thing.

She says, “I tried telling him about Jack and how he won’t come down from the skylight. Jack’s home with his dad. He’s sick, too, like we’re all sick, everyone’s sick, and I thought the agent might want to help my Jack, too.”

“I can’t believe it!” and then, because it’ll make me feel better and them worse, I drop an f-bomb—not “fiddlesticks”—right there in the living room, and in the silence it makes, I crash upstairs to see if Terry is really gone.

He is. Really. Gone. Completely. His bedroom and my parents’ room are empty. He’s not in my room, either. Only the laptop rests on my bed where I left it.

So. Mr. Barron has Terry. I have to find Barron to find Terry. So yeah, I need to get to the mill and Liv and Floating Boy so I can find Barron and then find Terry. It’s like a bad nursery rhyme. One that doesn’t come halfway close to rhyming.

I take an old backpack and sweep inside the loose dollar bills and change off my desk, then stuff the laptop in, too. And yes, I’m definitely taking the charger with me. I might not be able to fly or float, but I can remember chargers every time.

Back downstairs and the circle is there waiting for me, huddled and hunched at the bottom of the stairs. All except Aunt Beth who’s lying down on the couch with her hands over her face, moaning and crying.

No one moves to let me through. I try staring them down because I’m so intimidating with my Hello Kitty backpack (at least I already gave the kitty a black mohawk with a Sharpie).

Still, they don’t budge, and just give me a lot more coughing. As nasty as their dripping noses and drooly mouths are, their eyes are worse: bloodshot—bloodthirsty—red, and glassy, and empty. Really, not that they weren’t crazy to begin with, but I think whatever virus they have is mucking up their heads even worse.

“Wait,” I say. “So what are you all doing here if Terry was taken hours ago?”

“We told you already.”

“We came over here to wait for him to come back.” Veiny says this, and the threat of violence in his voice, you can’t miss it.

“We’ve seen the signal you put on the roof.”

Oh, right. The reflective paint. That hasn’t really worked out like I hoped.

The sis-in-law says, “You’re going to wait here with us, now, aren’t you?”

“He’ll come for sure now.”

“His girlfriend is here.”

“I’m not his girlfr—”

“Probably can’t wait to see you again, eh, missy?” One of the other old boys says this, licking his lips and dentures, and he couldn’t possibly be a dirtier old man if he was covered in, you know, dirt.

I say, “Get out of my house. Now.” It doesn’t come out like the bend-to-my-will command I want it to sound like. It’s like air leaking out of a balloon.

Aunt Beth is passed out on the couch. The rest of them don’t move. That’s not true. They move. They sway, mumble, pray, and hold hands, forming a snot-oozing human barricade at the bottom of the stairs.

I could take each of them individually, I’m pretty sure—kick, kick, kick—all except Vein-Man, who looks like he still has the python arms and vice-grip hands of wherever he worked his whole life. But there’s six of them and one of me.

Crashing through their wall and running for the front door would be the most direct route. Even if there was a guarantee that I could smash through their crazed this-little-light-of-mine circle, I don’t really want to make contact with them because then I’d have to waste time at the carwash, spraying off their crazy-cooties.

I think about threatening them with calls to the police, but I run up the stairs to my bedroom instead. I shut and lock the door. They moan and shamble up the stairs after me. They’re slow, luckily. I think I can hear their replaced hips creaking. I look down at my tee and suddenly hate every zombie movie I’ve ever seen.

I open my window, pop the screen, and climb out onto the roof. My brightly painted bull’s-eye reflects the moonlight. It’s almost like day out here. Can Marcus see me from the car? I wave my arms but stop quickly, figuring there’s nothing he can do anyway.

The slope of the roof feels steeper now that I’m being chased. I crab my way down to the drop-off with the front lawn and front door somewhere below me. It’s hard to see the ground after climbing through all that reflected moonlight, but it’s about a twelve-foot drop, I think.

I can’t really roll out of any jump with the laptop in my pack, and I don’t want to just chuck the pack down then jump, either. So I hang my feet off the edge of the gutter, then my legs up to my knees, then inch forward, waiting for the moment when gravity takes over and slides the rest of me off the roof. I get about halfway up my thighs when it happens and happens quick.

The dark lawn rushes up to meet me. There’s no floating or whooshing off to safety at the last minute, and there’s for sure no nice little pads of air. Not for me. I land hard. Electric shocks of pain shoot up my ankles into my knees, which bend me over, making me plant my hands into the turf.

Off to my right, the front door opens and it’s Aunt Beth’s sis-in-law. She scrambles down the steps screaming at me. All her words sound like they’re made of consonants and saliva.

I get up and run through our small set of way-unmanicured bushes and into the driveway. Vein-Man is there waiting for me. He wipes his nose then assumes that athletic position all my coaches talk about. The one where your knees are bent, feet shoulder-width apart, hands out.

I run at him, then dodge hard to the left, hoping my feet don’t slip out from underneath me. He gets a hand on one of the loose backpack straps and spins me around. I stay on my feet and keep the spin going, which twists the nylon strap out of his hands. He yells something at me. It’s not very holy.

Marcus has the car running. Smart skaterboy. “GO! GO! GO!” I’m screaming before I even shut the door.

“What are those?” He points at the lumpy shadows lurching down the driveway.

“Them!”

“Them?”

“Go!”

After checking both mirrors twice, and putting his seat belt back on, we’re gone.

12.

Liv: look up when you get here. k?

Once we’re off my street, I tell Marcus about Terry being gone, and then it’s a grim ride through downtown Ipswich and its shoulder-to-shoulder historical section, past the train station, to a wooded road. Then we take a random right onto a smaller wooded road, one with a thick chain and a NO TRESPASSING sign lying dead across it.

As we drive the dark twisty snake of an access road, Marcus fiddles and rolls his fingers across the steering wheel. It’s annoying. He says, “I looked it up. The paper mill was built in 1917 and has been empty since 1982.”

“Anything else I need to know, Mr. History Channel?”

“Ipswich River runs behind it,” he adds, chewing his cheek like he’s guilty for knowing.

“Sorry,” I tell him. “Sorry sorry sorry. I’m being a tool. Thanks for everything tonight. Really. You were a lifesaver.”

“Not the pee-colored ones?” he says.

“The opposite of those,” I say back, and that’s that.

The mill’s ancient driveway is grown over and glittery with broken beer-bottle glass. I guess this is one of those fabled party spots I always hear about.

The road empties into a lot with sprouts of weeds as tall as the car. There are other cars parked up against the building in no particular order, one of those sliding puzzle things where you can’t move any car without moving another one back.

The brainiacs are here, yeah, all their car doors open, radios blasting music. Everyone is tuned to the same station, all playing the same song, which kind of creeps me out in a really vague way. There’s a small group of three people all leaning on one car. They look up to us, to see if we matter enough to push away from their fender.

Nope. This is good, normal even.

Behind the too-cool ignorers is the mill. Marcus weaves through the post-apocalyptic-looking parking lot and pulls right in front, so we’re almost touching that faded wood. The building is this giant rectangle. The Godzilla of rectangles, yeah? I count four layers of windows, but have no clue if that translates to actual stories. It sags in parts like a deflating kiddie pool. This place is definitely haunted.

How can I tell? There are shapes buzzing the roof. They’re my classmates, flying, floating, whatever you want to call it.

“Hey,” Marcus says, looking up, kind of taking the corner of my hand for balance, so he doesn’t tip over backwards.

“Looks like we’re late,” I say, pulling Marcus in by the hand, trying my best to adopt my mom’s all-business posture—tucked butt, hunched back, eyes set on some meaningless task she’s blowing all out of proportion.

I drop Marcus’s hand as soon as we’re inside. He and his lighter can guide us up the stairs, still hanging on the wall by ninety-year-old nails. The kids have put candles in parts of the stairwell, but we’ll never see that missing stair, that gap waiting for us to fall through.

That’s the anxiety talking, not me. Sorry.

On the way up, Marcus holds his lighter hand above him. I stay three stairs behind so if one of us falls through we’ll be far enough apart that the faller won’t take the other one out, too.

Part of me is studying this place. Like I’m getting to take a secret stroll through Floating Boy’s head. There are these ghostly handprints in the dust where there should be no handprints. But there aren’t any cobwebs, either. Not even one. Dark old places like this, they’re spider factories, aren’t they?

Maybe Floating Boy was cleaning the place up for me. This is what I tell myself.

We keep going up and there are no decorations, no band posters, no band names or song lyrics written on notebook paper during geometry class.

I walk faster, fast enough that Marcus has to slow me down. His hand goes all police in a way that would definitely make him sick to his stomach if he knew.

“Where do you think Liv is?” Marcus says, half out of breath.

Some casual top-of-the-rickety-stairway conver-sation: me the soccer player totally out of breath, and Marcus the skater, his heart probably hitting just sixty times a minute. He’s walking lighter than me, too. The wood creaks only under my feet. Or maybe I’m only noticing that now.

“She’s with him,” I say, obviously, and push through the even ricketier door. This ricketier door opens onto the starry sky. Into the starry sky. I stagger out onto the roof, my feet still used to going up.

There’s an orange glow up here. Someone built a small fire with a ring of rocks around it. I’m afraid to ask if that’s only tarred and flammable roof underneath the fire.

Marcus and I, we can’t help but stare at the fire, and then there’s this quiet moment of—I don’t know what to call it. Whatever the word is for looking up and then seeing people you know just as these blurry shadows, drifting through the air, rolling into each other, laughing. And, in the far back corner, sitting between two rusted vent pipes, is Floating Boy.

Sliding down his right arm is his tether. It’s wrapped around the rustier of the two pipes. Now that everybody is like him, he wants to sit down.

I kind of touch Marcus on the shoulder, telling him to stay. I walk over toward Floating Boy. But then, just as I’m trying to figure out which side of Floating Boy to sit on, Liv touches down right beside him. She grabs onto his shoulder to keep herself there. So Floating Boy is her anchor now. Okay, I don’t really care, and I don’t want to talk about it, either.

“Mare!” she says reaching for me to be her anchor, as well. “You’ve got—he says—”

“You invited all these people?” I interrupt.

“Did you notice I can fly?”

“Glad you’re okay,” I say, instead of everything else.

“He saved me,” she says back, batting her eyes, maybe on purpose, maybe not. “Here, here,” she says, pushing off from the second vent pipe, lifting off, dragging her hand for Marcus. He just catches her. It skates him across the roof, toward the edge.

Floating Boy stands like he’s supposed to do something here, but then Marcus tumbles off still holding onto Liv. They disappear over the edge, then Liv bobs back up, holding Marcus. And then she’s not holding Marcus: he drifts up beside her, amazed.

Of course his feet were light on the staircase. He’s caught it, too.

So, everybody but me now? Perfect.

“I didn’t know this would happen. I—I didn’t want it to—” Floating Boy says. He’s standing now, a couple of loops of his tether unwrapped from his arm, but the red marks are still there. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”

I say, “I know. But did Marcus have to catch it, too?”

“They all just showed up here! It’s not my fault. Well, it’s not all my fault.” He rewraps his arm in the tether, really tight.

“Hey, I’m sorry, I was just kidding. Joking, because, you know, I’m so scared.”

He stops tightening the tether and just looks at me.

“My brother—”

Logan comes tumbling through the sky and nearly clips my ear with his foot.

“Hey, it’s my favorite freshman bridge babe! What’s up? Well, I’ll tell ya. It’s me.”

I could just vomit in my mouth.

Logan catches his fingertips on the last edge of some different pipe than the one we’re leaning against. He laughs, wipes his nose with the back of his hand (so totally not gross at all), and then he slings himself around the pipe, going feet first back into whatever rough-and-tumble games his crew has going on fifty feet above the ground.

I run my fingers through my hair and grrr my teeth. “Logan, now? Really?”

“I don’t even know where he came from,” Floating Boy says.

Liv had it, I don’t tell him. Liv must’ve had the floaty in her when she slammed Logan off the bridge.

“All right, all right,” I say instead. “It doesn’t matter. Look, your—Mr. Barron, right? He came to my house—and he took Terry!”

Floating Boy closes his eyes in pain. Even more pain than having your secret hide-out invaded by a bunch of ridiculous high-schoolers using your disease like happy fun time, like it’s the best thing ever and not a curse.

“Your brother,” Floating Boy’s saying, to himself, almost.

“Terry. He’s only three. You have to help me find him.” And now I’m crying. I tried to, I don’t know, to be stronger than I am, but it’s coming out tears instead.

Floating Boy stands up and pulls me into an awkward hug, with his chin on top of my head. I mean, it’s not terrible-horrible-no-good, but it’s awkward enough for me to stop crying and back out of it.

“I’ll be okay. I just need to find him.”

Liv and Marcus are there, above us, getting the hang of their float. They’re laughing and holding hands, and Liv, she’s yelling down to me, “Way to go,” or something equally obnoxious. I wave her down and, using just my lava-dagger eyes, tell her to shut up. That this isn’t that.

Liv and Marcus land next to us. I hear Marcus mumble, “Oh yeah, right,” and then he tells Liv about Terry being taken.

I wrap my arms around my chest, hugging myself. “Where would he have taken Terry?” I finally say to Floating Boy.

“My room?” he says.

“Your room where?”

“Cabin in the woods is all I know.” Floating Boy looks past us, out to all the nothing Massachusetts is. “There was a big storm the night I got away,” he says. “The wind was—it was everywhere.”

“Do you remember a river?” Marcus says.

“Lights from the city?” I add. “Highways, foghorns, airports? Radio towers? Did an X mark any spot?”

Floating Boy shakes his head. It’s like watching an infinity of nos. “I think there was a blackout?” he says. “Like, the power. It’s why my door could open?” He’s back to his statement-questions, and acting like any of us could give him answers. “Everything was dark. I just went out and up. I was gone, and I crashed here.”

“Then Terry—he’s gone,” I say.

“Like me,” Floating Boy says.

“You don’t remember anything?” Liv says again.

“It’s hard. Hard to remember,” he says, each word getting quieter until there’s none left.

At which point Logan barrels down, clipping Marcus on the shoulder, knocking him into Floating Boy. “My bad, my bad!” Logan calls back, his feet already pushing off the edge, back into the big, floaty wrestling match in the sky.

“We can’t think here,” I say. “Can’t even talk.”

Marcus just glares at Logan. Liv holds onto his left arm with both hands, like she’s keeping him there. “Where to?” she says.

“Can’t we just float around and look for a—a cabin, right?” I say to Floating Boy, but the hopelessness of that idea is already in my voice.

He nods. Then he shrugs so I know it’s a not-sure nod.

Liv takes my hand. “We’re gone,” she says, and pulls me to the rickety door.

When I look back to make sure Floating Boy’s coming, too, that he knows he’s a part of us now—that we need him—he’s gone. He stepped off the edge of the mill to get down to the car. I hope.

And don’t worry, just because all the other kids are jumping off the edge of the old mill, that doesn’t mean I’m going to do it, too.

13.

Where we end up is the coffee shop.

Correction: the deserted coffee shop.

When nobody ever comes to the counter, Liv finally opens the cooler, brings us back four cold frappuccinos. The frosty air swirls up when we twist the metal caps off.

Floating Boy takes a sip, coughs it back up, tries to catch it with his hand. It drips through his fingers.

“Not chocolate milk, is it?” Liv says.

“That was—so gross.”

Speaking of gross, Liv and Marcus blow their noses at the same time, then giggle. Marcus smiles, shrugs, and pushes a napkin across the table to Floating Boy. He wipes his hands, and when he thinks no one is looking, he wipes his tongue, too.

“Awesome,” I say.

He sticks said tongue out at me.

We lean over the map Marcus produced from who-knows-where. It’s a map of all of Massachusetts. Yes, it’s hopeless.

“Where you were, did it snow there in the winter?” Liv asks.

Floating Boy nods and shrugs. A shrug nod.

“Could you hear anything?” Marcus asks.

“Radio!” I say, sitting up. “What stations did you listen to?”

“Stations?” Floating Boy says back.

“News, at least?” Liv asks.

“Nobody listens to the news,” Marcus says, sitting back from the table.

“Or reads papers?” I try, and now I’m the one with the statement-questions.

Floating Boy shakes his head no.

When the sirens come on—“Fire truck,” Marcus says, able to tell a difference, I guess—we all look out the window. Maybe there’s a fire truck somewhere, but what rumbles by is some big, green army truck, the kind with a round tent on the back and filled with all these grim-faced soldiers. They’re grim-eyed, anyway. The rest of their faces are hidden behind gas masks.

“My dad’s going to kill me,” Marcus says.

Nobody disagrees, though Floating Boy’s eyes ratchet up a little, like he’s worried, like he thinks Marcus might be serious.

“Listen,” Liv says then. “Storms with blackouts aren’t every week, are they?”

“A month ago,” Floating Boy says. “Ish.”

“Exactly. All we have to do is—is look up the wind patterns or cloud direction or whatever. And—and how long were you up there that night?”

He says, “It wasn’t a straight line, though. It was like—just swirling. I thought I was dead. Like I was a leaf that dreamed of being a kid, but had woken up, you know?”

Liv repeats her question, “Yo, how long were you up there? For two hours? One hour?”

“Hour and a half?” he tries.

“Are you like, always floating? I mean, how long can it last?” Marcus says then.

“No. Not always. But when I am, I don’t know. Hour and a half,” Floating Boy says again.

Which means either Logan and his crew are getting a surprise right about now or Floating Boy’s seriously guessing here, or both. But it’s better than nothing. I do remember the storm in late July that knocked the power out. I slept through it, and only woke up when Mom was screaming about the power and something about a stupid blinking alarm clock.

Liv gets up and paces. She comes back this time with chocolate and pretzels.

“We’ll pay,” she says in response to my glare.

The four of us can’t keep our hands out of those bags.

“How far can a person drift in an hour and a half?” Liv says, drawing a big oval around Ipswich. So now we’re down to a quarter of Massachusetts. Great.

I haul my laptop up and give the cord to Marcus. He finds an outlet.

“Wireless is up,” I inform them, waggling my fingers in the air to show that, even without adults around, we still have the ’net. It’s not the end of the world yet.

“Search, I don’t know, last month,” Liv says. “Big storm.”

“I don’t even remember it,” Marcus says on his way to the bathroom.

“Lots of lightning,” Floating Boy chimes in.

The news stations don’t archive their old weather footage, do they? A few clicks and the answer is a fat no. Why would they? Everybody wants to know what tomorrow’s going to be like, not what yesterday was like.

I change the search to “blackout.” There are fewer returns, but they’re all about famous blackouts. And German metal bands. And political stuff.

I pull the screen closed halfway and look up just in time to see Marcus coming back. Walking on the ceiling, his smile is so big.

“Thought you were grounded?” Liv says, reaching up to brush his fingertips.

Marcus shrugs, and his next step goes through the ceiling tile, his leg going in up to the thigh.

“We’ll pay for that, too,” Liv says, looking down now.

“Hey, um,” Floating Boy says then.

He’s got the laptop unfolded and the useless browser is all frozen. It’s not his fault. If there’s a toolbar or gadget to add on, my dad’s added it on. I’m surprised the thing even works. I kill the browser. Behind it is the desktop.

“Just click here—” I say, but Floating Boy’s leaning in now. We go to the paranormal directory I found earlier. “Yeah, you’ll like that,” I add, and click through for him. We get to the cow icon that’s impossible to click on. I click on it.

“What is it?” Marcus says, behind us now but upside down, like a bat.

“Where milk comes from,” Liv says, her thighs suddenly pressing against the bottom of the glass table, gravity reversing for her, too.

The video, it’s starting. The beer drinkers do their ninja thing to sneak up on this totally unsuspecting cow. The cow—surprise, surprise—throws up the whole time, and then it looks around, lifts off.

Marcus wows his mouth out, impressed, and Floating Boy smiles, too.

“The cows,” he says. “Oh yeah.”

“What?” I say.

“Barron sometimes tests on cows, like to process it or grow it or something? I don’t know. But they catch it too fast, keep flying away. I had to go out with him once, and help catch them.”

“You’ve seen these cows,” Liv says to him, barely keeping herself at the table.

“They were fun,” he says. “There was like a . . . like a herd, I guess. A big group of them. They’re really—Barron called them ideal subjects?”

“Mary,” Liv says, taking me by the wrist, using me as ballast—thanks. “He saw these cows.”

“Yeah?” I say.

“Don’t they put marks on cows?” she says then.

“They still do that?” Marcus calls down from his perch.

“Tattoos, yeah,” I say. “What do they call them, ‘brands?’ I don’t know.”

“Doesn’t that, like, burn them or something?” Marcus asks, unable to get over that part of it.

I pull the laptop back. Liv is behind me now, holding on, her legs floating up behind her. We go frame-by-frame through the video, until there’s some kind of mark on the cow’s rump.

“Ouch,” Marcus says. “Now just flip it.”

“Flip it?”

“Here,” he says, and we pass the laptop up—this is the freakiest coffee shop ever—and Marcus does his keystroke magic, all in about three seconds. Then he turns the laptop back around and holds it down to us.

He’s made the screen into a negative of itself, zoomed in and, with the dark light, the light dark, the cow brand is so obvious now: a “Y” with curved skis on. Or a one-legged person skiing. And very happy about it.

“Give that to me,” Liv says, and burrows into the web. She doesn’t find a brand decoder ring but does find pages with all of them listed.

“Rocking Y,” Floating Boy says just before Liv does, and after that it’s like we’re running downhill. Turns out Rocking Y is the brand of an old milk farm just over in Middleton.

I take the laptop, tab us over to some satellite views, go terrain instead of map, and it only takes ten minutes of scrolling the cursor across the hills. It’s there, right near where the Ipswich River goes into a big bend, at the best zoom the military will let us have.

Floating Boy stands up and pushes back from the table hard. What we’re zoomed in on is the roof of this one lost little cabin, way out in nowhere.

“That’s it,” I say, pegging the coordinates, then zooming out for some roads that might be close and writing them down, too.

“I—I can’t,” Floating Boy says.

Liv is just looking at him. None of us knows what to say or how to fix this.

“He’ll—he’ll keep me there again.”

“We won’t let him,” I say, closing the laptop. “I promise.”

“Well then?” Marcus says. He drifts down to the ground beside Liv, who’s got her arm hooked under the coffee counter, trying to snag one more cinnamon bun, I guess.

“Middleton,” I say, tucking the laptop under my arm, whipping the cord to myself. “Terry.”

14.

We’re in the car again. Girls in front, boys in back.

I’m riding shotgun, but not with any sort of shotgun, definitely not Logan’s. Instead, I have coffee shop leaflets and flyers in my hands, the ones with scrawled out directions to Barron’s shack. Or shed.

Liv pumps Floating Boy for more info on the why and how of him, and of how he and they are all floating. Of course, he only can speak for him, which is less confusing than it sounds. He tells her what he told me up on the water tower. He tells her about Barron and the shots, how it’s supposed to be different for some people, how the adults only get the “bad parts.” That’s me finger-quoting bad parts. I still don’t know what the bad parts could be, but it has to be something to do with my sick parents and everyone else’s sick parents in the hospital, yeah?

Liv goes quiet, and I think for the first time, she’s worried about her own floaty self, about what she’s going to do about this.

Marcus says, “Hey, Twitter is, like, freaking about everyone getting sick in Ipswich. And there’s some army base—didn’t even know it was there, near Salsbury—under weird lockdown.” Marcus disappears into his smartphone (the one he has to be grounded from), then adds, “They’re saying webstreamed police scanners in the area are down, too. Awesome.”

“That’s not awesome,” I tell him.

Liv breaks in and asks, “How come Mare can’t—how come she hasn’t, you know, caught the floating like the rest of us?” She says it like she’s sorry she has to ask it, knows on some level it’ll make me feel bad, but she’d stop being Liv if she didn’t say the thing that everybody’s thinking.

Floating Boy says, “Don’t know. Mr. Barron just told me once that other kids had, um, a different reaction. Not everyone floats.”

Liv reaches across the bench seat and squeezes my hand. It feels like pity. Then Marcus asks her to keep both hands on the wheel, maybe? So, yeah, everything’s good and fine with our big rescue mission, at least until we get to the edge of town. Remember that green army truck we saw go past? Maybe it’s not the same one, but it looks the same. It’s there now, parked in the middle of the street. A big green roadblock, the ditch all chewed up in front of and behind it. Soldiers park like Liv, I guess.

There are soldiers and guns, marshmallow suits and portable floodlights, and a big sign on the wooden horse thing—red and white, not green. It says QUARANTINE.

As in us: we’re quarantined.

For maybe thirty seconds, there’s a standoff of sorts. We don’t say anything to each other, just stare, like if we stare long enough, the roadblock soldiers will blink and let us through. But then we remember we’re just kids, that they have guns and orders, so Liv backs up carefully, legally, respectfully even.

Marcus whistles out the window, making the backing-up sound big trucks make. He’s always so helpful. We head back toward town, toward we-don’t-know-where-we’re-going-yet, but well under the speed limit.

“So?” Liv says. “Can’t say this doesn’t suck.”

“What do they think is wrong with—what do they think we have?” Marcus says, casting around for answer. “Do you think they’ve blocked, I don’t know, everything?”

“Kind of what quarantine means,” I tell him.

Liv goes off on a wild-goose plan, saying Marcus should ask his dad to police-escort us out of town. Marcus then goes off about her being some kind of effing crazy, that his dad is sick and can’t move, like everyone else. Then Liv, mad now that her plan is being blasted, starts saying stuff to get Marcus going, saying he should go home and swipe his dad’s police radio and badge so we can fake our way through the roadblock.

In the middle of this, Floating Boy kind of shrugs and says, “We could maybe, like, fly there?” It makes Marcus and Liv go quiet. My heart soars and my stomach drops at the idea of flying with him again.

“I just started,” Marcus says. “Don’t think I can control it so good.”

Liv says, “What are they going to do, shoot us?”

“Um, yeah. They’ve got guns and stuff,” says Marcus.

“They won’t shoot at kids.” Then she holds her phone out, backwards to take a picture. “Especially if we’re taking pics and posting them on the net.”

Floating Boy doesn’t say anything, even after Liv cuts the wheel hard, announces that we gotta ditch the car. She says ditch. She means park. I hope.

We’re not that far away from the mill so we backtrack. Liv parks in a little weed-filled dip, totally not full of broken beer bottle glass, I’m sure. We don’t go all the way back to the mill lot because we don’t want Logan and his chimps seeing us, following us, doing anything in our general area.

Marcus gets out and immediately starts floating up. He holds onto the doorframe and says, “I don’t know what I’m doing. What if I, you know, don’t stop going up?”

My feet feel heavy on the dirt road. “You won’t,” I tell him. Because I’m an authority on the subject and all.

Liv shuts the trunk. I didn’t even see her go back there. She has bungee-cord ties in her hands. “Better than nothing, right?”

Liv ties our waists together, using two cords and weaving them through our belt loops. She has one extra cord she ties to Marcus, leaving him with a tail, or a leash, and she wraps the other end around her wrist.

I can feel Liv getting lighter next to me. Marcus is already floating above us. Floating Boy gives me his flashlight and says, “You’re in charge of directions. Piggyback again?”

Piggyback again, yeah. I go all dizzy for a second. This isn’t going to work and I think they know that, but we’re going to do it, anyway. Just because we’re trying doesn’t make me feel any better. I say, “All right, let’s go.”

Our take-off has to look like clowns falling up into the sky. Like the sun, calling all its shadows home. I’m holding onto Floating Boy’s neck, the directions, and a flashlight all at the same time. Liv bumps into Floating Boy and me on his back. Marcus tugs at us from above, and we’re just kind of lumbering along, a tangle of balloons, forty feet above downtown Ipswich.

Marcus and Liv share cute British banter, the kind people not dating find puke worthy. Floating Boy asks if we’re going the right way. I say yes, even though I’m not entirely sure.

There are so many ways for this to fail. I can’t read the street signs from up this high, and the written directions give me only the fuzziest sense of where we need to go in Middleton. It’s not like we can just head sort of southwest, as the crow flies, like any of us are crow experts. As dumb as it sounds, we need to follow roads.

I’m banking on us getting somewhat close to Barron’s place and then Floating Boy taking over, remembering how to get there, even though he says he can’t.

I can’t help but think about how they can control their flying. And I think about Terry being able to float down the hallway and into my room, and maybe it’s an innate thing they suddenly just get, like riding a bike. Now that the normal folks are all becoming floaty freaks, I’m the new freak. Up in the air with them, I’ve never felt heavier.

The roadblock is up ahead. I shut off my flashlight and tell everyone to shut up. Liv catches my eye, takes her cell phone out, itchy finger on the picture button.

We veer left over a grove of trees, off the road but probably not far enough off the road. I can still see the roadblock and army dudes and their guns. I try to shift my weight left, to steer us all away. It doesn’t work. I don’t have that kind of control.

And then the cell phone in my pocket rings. It’s not just on loud, it’s on whatever setting is six bumps above that—a measure of how old my mom is or how insane she is about maybe missing a call.

And the ring tone, it’s “Wind Beneath My Wings.” Wunderbar.

Everyone yells at me in whispers to shut the phone off. I wiggle and squirm on Floating Boy’s back, trying to hold him, the directions, and the flashlight with one hand, and dig in my pocket for the phone with the other. I get the phone out, its rhinestone skin catching on every fabric of denim possible, and what the caller ID says, it’s MARY. A picture of me from second grade smiles up from the ancient screen.

I’m calling my own phone. No. I’m calling my mother’s phone. With my phone. No, no—my stolen-by-Barron phone is calling my mother’s phone.

I answer, “It’s me, it’s me.” Everyone shushes me again, Liv yanks on my bungee, cinching my waist, and I lose my breath.

On the other end all I hear is some fuzz, muffled noises, and there’s someone coughing, like really hacking up a lung. Oh my god, Barron has leg-dialed me with my own phone!

I look around to everyone and nod my head at the phone like they’re supposed to know what that means. I adjust myself on Floating Boy’s back and press the phone against my ear. And I hear it, soft and in the background. There’s crying. Terry!

I scream, “Terry! Terry!” into the phone before even thinking.

Liv and everyone else yell at me again, this time in their outdoor voices, nothing whispery or secret about it. We all waver and bobble in the air like we’re hitting turbulence, only I know it’s me. I’m the turbulence.

It sounds like something is knocking up against the phone, then the line goes clear. There’s that hiss of open space, of not-in-a-pocket, and Terry is louder. His crying is the worst thing I’ve ever heard, and then it cuts out right as a hot white light flashes on, blinding me. I’m thinking that something finally broke in my head, some sort of circuit breaker flipped. I bury my face into Floating Boy’s back.

“They see us!” Marcus yells, twisting around in the air to point.

I squint at the road block down below and we’re caught in one of the heavy-duty spotlights at the roadblock. Maybe they think we’re giant moths and we’ll just fly right into their bug zapper.

Someone down there with a thick, angry, and official voice gets on the megaphone, a bullhorn, whatever they call it. He says that we are not to pass over the roadblock, we are to turn around, or we’ll be grounded by force. He repeats his message.

From right beside my head, then, Liv’s cell phone snaps a picture of what must look like the sun.

“I got you!” she yells down to the voice, then bicycles her legs. I don’t know if she’s been acting like our rudder this whole time or not, but we start to slowly turn away. I think Marcus might be whimpering. We all hear helicopter blades whomping in the distance, and Floating Boy kicks his legs like Liv and windmills his arms.

“Can’t get near helicopters,” he says. “Not those. They’ll suck us right up.”

I say, “Let’s just land. Maybe we can talk to them. Maybe they’ll help us.”

Yeah, I’ll be able to convince the army, the National Guard, and the President that some evil genius/mad scientist has my brother in some secret shack in the woods, and that they don’t have to take the clearly contagious Floating Boy—the one with no ID and no parents—they don’t have to take him and the rest of us to the secret base they closed in Salisbury. What’ll happen is they’ll give us numbers and file us away with the rest of the secrets.

Marcus suddenly dips below me, and drags Liv lower with him. More of a dive than a dip, really. The bungee around my waist pulls fast and tight, turning me, pulling me.

I lose some of my grip on my ride’s shoulders and I drop the flashlight and directions. Crud. More crud: I slide down Floating Boy’s back and try to hook my arms around his waist, and now we all drop with Marcus. The roadblock spotlight follows the bouncing ball that is us.

We lose half our altitude and become the piñata people. They might be able to hit us with a really long stick. Now Marcus and I are both dangling as Floating Boy has us each by one hand. Liv is attached to Marcus, the other cord still wrapped around her wrist.

She yells, “What’s happening?” struggling to hold Marcus up, to hold us all up. She goes lower, hooks her arms under Marcus’s armpits and around his chest. Floating Boy reaches down and does the same for me.

There’s more shouting from below. Boots running on the pavement and following us. Men in green suits carrying black guns. We’re only twenty feet above the ground.

I say, “I’m so sorry, guys, I’m so . . .” and I start to untie the cord around my waist, so I’m not connected to Liv anymore.

“Mary!”

Next I’ll pry Floating Boy’s fingers apart. I’ll be okay from this height. Then they can float away and be safe. And I’ll fall, like always. And then I’ll run, and lead the army dudes in the opposite direction of Middleton and Terry.

“Mary! Stop it!” Liv says.

“Just let me go!” I yell to her.

As she’s winding up to tell me no at serious volume, there’s a loud, glass-shattering pop, and the spotlight flares up even brighter than it was before. Then it just fizzles down to black.

My first thought is that Liv zinged her cell down into the glass. But no, she’d chew her hand off first because she has two of those.

The way we all flinch from the sound, too, it twists us into a slow, corkscrew spin. Everything is dark. I hold my breath, and I hold Floating Boy’s hands against my chest.

“I don’t—” I start to say, except now there’s this lonesome figure below us. It’s waving a stick at us.

Marcus says, “Is that? Logan?”

And his shotgun, yes. What’s he doing? Oh, gross, does he think we’re all like his buds now because of the bridge and now the mill? How is he here? He must’ve seen us ditch the car on the mill road and followed us, stalked us. Totally something he’d do.

But now, now he’s not sneaking around anymore. He’s running away, waving at us, and yelling at the soldiers behind him, something about how they have to get out of his town, which again, is so totally Logan. I guess there’s something to be said for being dependably predictable.

Logan’s run turns into a take-off, up into the air, floating in an opposite direction from us. Our corkscrew has taken us away from Main Street. We’re floating parallel to it, on a side street.

We’re low enough to the ground that the downtown rows of two-family houses protect us from the view of the roadblock. No one seems to be headed our way. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men are going after Logan now.

But. Those helicopter noises are still there in the distance, the quickly approaching distance if that makes sense.

“So what do we do now?” Marcus asks.

15.

The wind blows. It kicks our collective butts all over downtown Ipswich. Marcus still isn’t floating. He’s taking deep breaths, holding them in, then letting them out fast and inhaling again, trying to fill himself up with floaty air, maybe. I don’t think him panicking and hyperventilating is going to put him back into balloon mode.

Not that I know anything about it, but I want to tell him that it’s probably like how in the dark you can see something if you look right beside it, right? Maybe that’s how floating works: don’t think about floating, just think about where you want to go instead. Maybe my overthinking the floating is the reason why I’m not. If I stopped thinking could I be like everyone else? Is that what normal is, just walking around with an empty head?

What we need to do is land, regroup, re-plan, re-everything, but—big surprise—there’s a small crew of national guards below, shuffling along, waiting for us to come down. Their coughs and sneezes echo through the weirdly empty downtown and up to us. At least they haven’t aimed their guns at us yet. It’s easier for us to barely stay afloat when they’re not trying to put holes in us.

“They’re talking about us,” Marcus says, miming their walkie-talkies.

“That’s not nice,” Liv says in her Brit accent. She giggles and we sink lower.

“Crap,” Marcus says, perfectly.

Floating Boy has gone all quiet on us. He’s breathing heavy under the strain of carrying all of us. He hasn’t said anything to Marcus about how he can start floating again, about whatever trick there has to be. Is he mad at us? I don’t know. It feels like it’s a don’t-bother-me-I’m-thinking kind of quiet.

And then it’s me who gets the bright idea. I nudge Marcus in the ribs with a pointy elbow, and say, “Ballast.”

“What’d you call me?”

“Get lighter, dumbass.” I kick off my Chuck Taylors. They’re made of canvas so they probably don’t weigh too much, but every little bit, right? I don’t watch their sad fall down to the street.

Marcus has on big clunker basketball sneakers, and even though he’s as skinny as a strand of spaghetti, his feet have to be like size thousand or something. Each shoe probably weighs five pounds.

He looks at me like I’m asking him to cut off a finger. “I need these—they cost a lot of money. My dad—”

I elbow him in the ribs again, harder this time, and it’s totally something Liv would do. “You’d rather fall?” I say.

Those cement shoes slide off his feet, and I swear I feel us rise in the air a bit. His big rubber-soled sneakers twirl down to the pavement and hardly bounce when they hit. The army guys duck, cover, and grumble something official into their walkie-talkies.

“You know, that actually helps,” Liv says. “I can feel it.”

I don’t have much else on me I can ditch. I let my keys go. The key chain itself is a thick pewter metal soccer ball. Plus there’s my house key, a key to the back of the garage, a little bronze key to luggage I never lock, some other random key that I found but don’t know what it goes to, and a USB flash drive with all the unfinished homework of spring.

“You wearing tighties or boxers, big boy?” Liv says to Marcus.

“What?”

“Your jeans have to be like fifty pounds, not even counting the belt and the chain wallet.”

“I’m not—”

“It’s an emergency! Every little bit helps. Even Mare’s keys made you both feel a little lighter.”

She’s totally lying, but he loses the pants anyway. They fall like a bag of rocks, and we bob up at least ten feet. We laugh, but more out of surprise that he actually did it.

“Are those pelicans?” I ask about the small white birds on his blue boxers.

“Shut up.”

Floating Boy laughs in my ear. It’s a good laugh. And I know it sounds totally stupid, but it makes me feel lighter.

Marcus mumbles something about him thinking he can feel his float coming back. We bob up a little higher. Then Liv tells us to look. Or she’s yelling it, really, and yelling it as I’m seeing it, too.

It happens so fast, I’m not sure it’s possible that I can actually see it happening, but looking past downtown, into the surrounding burbs, the lights are going out, and the darkness that replaces all those street lamps and houselights, it rolls at us like a shock wave. All the lights around us go out, and we’re in the dark.

We all yell at once, asking who can see what, and I scream, thinking I see my legs about to smash into the chimney of some building, but they don’t and I don’t.

The helicopter sounds are a lot closer now somehow and, I mean—how could they sneak up on us like that? We’re moving and spinning in the dark, and it’s all so disorienting. Over there, I can see them now: two helicopters with searchlights, and they’re gaining on us.

“We gotta go,” Floating Boy says.

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Anywhere.”

We pick up speed, and I know that Floating Boy is pushing us, driving us, somehow. With the blackout, there’s more stars than I’ve ever seen around here, and the half-moon, it puts us in a weird white light that makes everything seem like it’s moving slower. We stop spinning and gain some sort of direction. We even pick up speed, but there’s no way it’s going to be enough. The helicopters are closing in on us.

“We should land,” Marcus says, even though he’s floating again, mostly on his own, even if he doesn’t trust it as much as before. He grabs my arm, trying to help pull the dead weight that I am.

Liv says, “No, not yet.”

We’re through downtown, and flying over Rt. 133, heading away from the mill, back toward my neighborhood.

“Why not?”

“She’s right,” I say. “If we land now, they’ll grab us. Aim for—aim for the water tower, all right? Then we’ll go all low and lose them in the woods near the river.”

And, of course, it’s now while we’re floating away for our lives, I get another fab idea. Thinking must be easier when you’re fifty feet up and don’t have shoes. Now I think I know how we can find Barron’s shack, even without the handy dandy map.

When we’re almost to the tower, one helicopter buzzes to our left and swoops away, but the other one passes above us. It probably clears us by a hundred feet, but I can still feel the heat from its engine. The blast of rotor wind sends us careening away from the water tower and toward the neighborhood. My neighborhood. And yeah, there’s one house with a landing strip. A house that has reflective paint all bright and shiny on its roof. Who would do something like that?

Floating Boy says, “We’re going.”

I’m sure in his head it makes sense for us to land there: the helicopter shot us way off course, away from the water tower, and we have to land before the helicopters come back for us, and landing where we can actually see where we’re landing is a definite bonus. But he doesn’t know about the—about the Claremont complication, let’s call it.

I say, “No, not there! Anywhere else, anywhere!”

Too late. Floating Boy shifts his weight, holds me lower, and we twist down toward my roof, falling fast. Those painted shingles rush at us and I lift my legs, trying to get into the emergency crash landing position they tell you about on planes, or movies about planes.

The second before the last second, Floating Boy pulls back, slowing us down, and my feet skid on the roof. I’m the landing gear and I’m only wearing socks. But I land standing—okay: stumbling—and so do they.

“We can’t stay here,” I say as soon as I can breathe again. Everyone looks at me like I’m crazy. Each of them is bent at the waist, hands on knees, looking like spent marathoners.

“Give us a sec,” Liv says. “That wasn’t easy, you know?”

No, I don’t know. And I hate her a little bit for saying that, even if it is true.

“Fine, but we can’t stay. The helicopters will come back. Army dudes, too. And worse, the Claremonts might still be here.”

Marcus straightens up. “Oh, yeah. You think those crazies are still here?”

I make a sssh face, scramble to my window, and press the side of my face against the screen. I can hear people yelling and scrambling inside the dark house. Hopefully they’re loud enough that they didn’t hear us crater into the roof, and are stumbling around looking for candles and flashlights.

“Come on, let’s go,” I say.

I slide-step down to the edge of the roof, and up pops my little cousin Jake. He has a rope around his chest. The knot is fat, maybe triple and quadruple tied.

Another kid pops up next to him. She’s a little older, maybe Terry’s age. She’s one of the tadpoles I had to watch in the kiddie pool at Jake’s party. She has a flashlight in her hand and shines it in my face.

“Mommy, Mommy, on the roof!” she starts in, and her voice—the girl has trumpets for lungs.

More kids on strings pop up next to the roof. Two of them have green glow sticks, and it makes them look like aliens.

Liv pulls up next to me. “What the what?”

It’s the Claremonts. There are more of them, if that’s possible. They’re gathered in the front yard and they have their children tethered to them. And all of them, they’re just coughing and sniffling and swaying, and I can’t help but think of zombies again. That they’re not a congregation, they’re a horde.

Then they see Floating Boy behind me, and for an instant they’re all healed. No more sniffling, no coughing.

“Him!” one of them shouts, right in time with the countdown in my head.

The rest of them shout in agreement. They press up against the house, their kids on strings getting tangled. The tall ones grab the gutters and try to pull themselves up after us, but thankfully my dad used the wrong kind of nails or something: the gutters peel off and get tangled in the kid strings.

The four of us retreat, climbing up the roof, past my window, to the roof’s peak. The other three grab me, wrap their arms around me, getting ready to fly me somewhere else, but I hear the helicopter circling back toward the bull’s-eye that is my roof.

And we’re not going anywhere, either. Whatever it is that allows Liv and them enough float to pull me up into the sky, it’s all been used up. Their arms and legs are shaking. They can’t carry me anymore. And I don’t want to be carried anymore.

“Hey, hey. No, guys, listen. New plan.”

I tell them. They listen. Liv and Marcus try to interrupt. They throw a bunch of Mares and buts at me, and stuff like:

“No way.”

“We’re coming, too.”

“It won’t work.”

Then Floating Boy says, “I think she’s right.” The way he says it, it makes them stop arguing with me. And it makes me think that he knows more than he’s been telling us.

I think Liv gets the same vibe, too. She looks at Floating Boy like she wants to smack him. It’s a weird moment, and it feels like everything is changing again.

I don’t know, I’m being melodramatic, maybe. Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Liv and Marcus give in to my plan.

We make the boys turn around so Liv and I can switch t-shirts. As we’re swapping, Marcus says, “Yeah, we’re totally not watching you take off your shirts.”

Liv whisper-yells, “Pervs!” and Floating Boy laughs or coughs, I can’t tell which with my back turned.

Since Liv’s wearing obvious white sweats (that, yes, say “PINK” on the butt), we switch pants, too. I totally love seeing her in my zombie tee. And now I’m in a green t-shirt that’s way too tight near my armpits and shoulders.

Marcus and Floating Boy switch shirts, too. They’re built like each other, but Marcus doesn’t seem all that thrilled to be swapping out his DC gear for the plain gray.

So now, in the dark, Liv looks like me in the zombie tee. Marcus kinda looks like Floating Boy. Hopefully the crazies will think the pelican boxers are Floating Boy’s shorts. It’s what all the sinful kids are wearing this summer.

Liv says to Marcus, “Take off from here, and do this quick.” Then she punches my shoulder, something she’s never done before. Ever. It makes me love her all over again. “You bring Terry back to us at the mill, okay?”

I say, “Yeah, the mill.”

She looks at Floating Boy, waiting for his answer. It has to be the right one, I think, or she’s going to nip this operation in the bud.

“I promise?” he says, and gives her a crack of a smile.

It’s enough for Liv. She and Marcus jump up into the air, kind of shrug for traction, and stay there. She uses her arms more than Marcus does. He uses his legs and feet, looking like he’s on a skateboard. They float up and then over the front lawn.

The Claremonts explode again: more yelling and threats and bobbing children on strings, one of them slipping up too high. His string is untied, so I almost scream out for him, Claremont or not, and blow our cover. At the absolute last possible moment, though, one of the other floating Claremont babies reaches out and grabs his tether. Not to save his cousin, but just to chew on the string.

“All right,” I say to Floating Boy. “Follow me.”

I don’t let him offer to carry me down to the ground. I climb down the roof the hard way: hanging over the edge again, then falling. Floating Boy does the same. He lands heavier than I do, and kind of grunts about it.

“Gravity sucks, yeah?” I say, then run to the garage, but of course I can’t open the overhead door without electricity. So it’s off to the back entrance, through the kitchen.

There’s a lone lit candle on the kitchen table. I take it with me into the garage. The candle’s better than nothing, but just barely. Luckily, all the summer stuff is just tossed into the back corner, and I find what I want: an inner tube.

“Ever go tubing?” I say over my shoulder.

16.

The thing about running with someone who can fly—when you’re holding hands—is that your steps, sometimes they’re not steps at all. They’re more like bounds. And our bounds are twenty feet apart.

We cut back toward the river and angle through Liv’s neighborhood. The inner tube is hooked under my other arm, and we’re still holding each other’s hand as we clear a parked car, long-ways. This shouldn’t be fun, right? I mean, Terry’s been kidnapped by a mad scientist guy and we’re jumping cars in the middle of quarantine night.

The night sky above us is crisscrossed with spotlights. Some are from the ground, from those lights in the back of military trucks, and some are from the air, attached to helicopters.

And more lights, too. Parents are out with whatever flashlights they can scrounge, poking them up into the sky. Their lights are all trembly because the parents keep having to hunch over to cough.

In one yard we run through, there’s a bonfire. The parents are draped in quilts beside it, moving across the ground like turtles. And they’re . . . spreading aluminum foil over the grass?

Before I can ask, we’re over the fence, over two fences at once, and I get it: the foil is reflective. They can’t find their floated-away kids in the sky, so they’re trying to make it so their kids can find them.

I hold tighter onto Floating Boy’s hand. I use every last soccer muscle I have to push our hops even farther, until finally Floating Boy has to sling his leash out from his sleeve and snag a tree top. We swing out on it, him hugging me now, and the water of the river is right below us. We’re angling over to the bridge. Always the bridge, which is the center of our Ipswich universe. I find the ground first and pull him down beside me.

Above us and around us, maybe a thousand feet up, parachutes pop open and the soldiers have blinking orange lights strapped to them. The soldiers—they’re falling down from the clouds, maybe trying to collect as many kids as they can on the way down. The kid we’re trying to save, though, he’s not in the sky.

There are sirens and shouts in the distance, the sounds of everything falling apart. “This isn’t good anymore,” I say, hooking my head back to town.

“I should have just stayed in the cabin, stayed with Barron,” he says a few steps later.

I don’t know what to tell him, how to answer him.

“This goes the right way?” Floating Boy says, leaning over to study the black glass of the water. He sounds his usual fake-unsure.

“Middleton and to Barron’s,” I say, tracking down the river. It’s a slick black ribbon, a completely different thing at night. “You remember the river being there, don’t you? It was on the map.”

He doesn’t say anything. He sags and slumps his shoulders, eyes on the bridge instead of me.

I say, “The night you left, you followed the river up to the mill, didn’t you?”

He looks up at me, opens his mouth to say something but stops. He nods his head yes, then says, “I’m not running away anymore, am I?”

We turn away from each other and look at the water. I haul the inner tube up onto the stonewall railing.

He points and says, “And, I’m really exhausted. And—” kind of biting his lip.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him, “I can swim for both of us. My grandparents were mermaids.”

He looks back to the apocalypse happening in town, finally steps up onto the stone railing. Then he slips over the edge and hardly even makes a splash.

I Frisbee the tube a few feet ahead of where he went down, sit up on the stone myself, and fall backwards, into this.

Because he swims in the sky, not the normal way, I make Floating Boy take the donut hole part of the tube. I hook my arm over the side and paddle along next to it. The current’s got us, though, so mostly I’m just paddling to stay warm.

And then, in a quiet bend of the river I don’t remember from the road, I look over and—

“You’re fizzing,” I say.

He is. All around him, the water’s like the top of a soda you just filled at the fountain. He draws his arms in tight, like he can stop it.

“Sorry,” he says. “You mean everybody . . . doesn’t?”

I smile, look at the river ahead of us. Floating Boy is morphing into The Kid Made From Baking Soda.

“I should really call you something normal,” I tell him. “As in a name. Maybe Timothy . . . but you’re not, are you?”

“Normal?” he says.

“Norm,” I try. No. If my dad had friends, one of them would be named Norm.

He looks behind him like someone’s there, following and listening. He says, “It doesn’t matter what he called me.”

“How come?”

“Because that’s not who I am?” he says.

“Who are you, then?”

Before he can give me another statement-quest-ion, the current spins the tube so that I drag behind for a bit, and I say, “How about Skywalker? That’d be cool.”

“Nah, it’s too . . . something. What about Lorenzo?”

I splash him with water. “Cloudboy,” I say, taunting him. “Or Sir Floats-a-lot.”

“Leadfoot,” he says back to me, about me, completely in rhythm, and I’m able to hold the smile on my face, but I’m aware of all the muscles involved.

“Balloonhead,” I kind of trail off, the enthusiasm gone, and then it’s quiet for a few minutes. Not the good kind. Not for me, anyway.

“Are we still in your town?” he asks, cueing into the much-needed subject change.

“I don’t know,” I say.

It’s a good idea, I think, what we’re doing—he’s tired, and when everybody’s looking up, you sneak past where they’re not looking—but I guess I thought there were going to be signs or something, telling us where to get out. Unless he says stop here, we could float to the ocean, right?

At least—and I definitely get some points for this, even if it’s pure accident—my mom’s dinosaur of a bedazzled cell phone is still in my pants pockets, the pants that are on Liv and not on me. Liv is styling in my cut-offs right about now.

“Can you, you know?” I say over the black hump of the inner tube.

“Float?” Floating Boy asks back.

“Maybe you’d recognize something, I mean. From up there.”

He closes his eyes, opens his hands, but no, nothing.

“It’s the water, right?”

“No, I’m just tired. And hungry.”

Behind us, something splashes. A turtle ducking down for a midnight snack, maybe. I kind of want to go down there with it and be somewhere I can only see five inches in front of my face, and just feel along. It would be so simple.

I kick for maybe half a mile, trying to keep us to the middle of the current. We wash up against a bank, like I missed a turn. The trees are too thick around us to see much. Ipswich is somewhere back upriver, all small, dark, and lost.

“I can make it there myself,” I say at last. “If you don’t . . . you know.”

That he doesn’t answer is his answer.

“It’s my brother, I mean,” I add.

Floating Boy nods, but it’s less a nod than a gulp. He’s trying not to cry.

I pretend not to be noticing this.

He lowers his head for a long time then angles it all the way back, just staring up into the sky, I think. “I know who, who the first Skywalker was. The first one of me.”

“You’re the only one of you,” I tell him.

“No, there’s been a bunch,” he says, and his eyes flash into mine. The way they’re heavy with all that he’s holding back, I can tell he knows what Barron is but he kind of loves him anyway.

“He’s not your dad,” I say.

“Then who is?”

“It doesn’t—not him, okay? He’s evil, right? Keeping you prisoner? Poking you with needles? Kidnapping little kids from their own houses? Lying to the six o’clock news?”

“That’s so bad?”

“Okay, but the first three.”

“No, no, you’re right. The things he does. But. He doesn’t think I know.”

“About Skywalker One?”

“His name was Seth.”

“Seth? What kind of evil name is—?”

“Seth Barron.”

Oh.

“This last year, before I—he stopped locking my door. Would let me go outside and everything.” He laughs a bit, remembering the next part: “He tried to play football with me once. He mowed this, like, I don’t know, this square out by the cabin, and we . . . it was so stupid. Took him all day to cut the grass to how he wanted.”

“And you loved it.”

He’s crying now.

I take his hand. I say, “My dad can’t throw a football. If the aliens came down, said all they needed from him was one perfect pass to spare us, then yeah, zorp, we’re space dust. Human race, over.”

“Zorp?”

“It’s a scientific term.”

We laugh at this like we’re supposed to.

When we’re done, he says, “Sorry I didn’t tell you all this before. I just . . . didn’t know how to say it, or what I was doing, really.”

“His son?” I ask. “He experimented on his own son?”

“In his desk, he still has pictures.”

“And he . . . ?” I ask, lifting my hand up to the sky.

“Barron was—he had some contract with the government. To develop this vaccine, or virus, whatever the shots are, I don’t know. But either he quit or they shut him down when it kept not working right. He used to grumble and complain about the ‘stupid army’ all the time. He tried the shots on himself first, just got real sick. Something about kids, he says. It works on them the best. Or only. Or we’re a side effect. It doesn’t make complete sense.”

“Was his son, like, kidnapped, too?”

“Seth, he was—Barron says he was like me. He could control it. They lived at the base. But then, when he left and wanted to take Seth with him—”

“No.”

“They wouldn’t let Seth go. They wanted to keep studying him.”

“That’s what Barron says.” I hope my distrust of the not-so-good Mr. Barron is as clear as a punch in the face.

“Yeah, that’s what he says. And Barron says he doesn’t know if they’ve moved Seth to another base or not. So, with me, and I guess with all the other ones before me, whatever happened to them, what he wants to do is make, like, a trade? He wants to show how I’m a better test subject, a better case to study. But he hasn’t made the trade yet. I think he . . . he keeps, like, forgetting—”

“That you’re not him.”

“Right. I almost went back a thousand times that first day. But I didn’t. And I made myself believe that I just found the mill. That I didn’t follow the river.”

After a while, I finally say it: “It doesn’t make him a good guy. You know that, right?”

“I know,” he says, standing, kind of bouncing on his toes, testing the air. “What does that make me, though? Either I ran away, left him with nothing, or I got a whole town sick.”

“No. It’s not your fault. It’s Barron’s. Don’t forget that, okay? And the army’s, too. That’s why they’re there. To clean up their own mess.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh, yeah. And you have to say it, and say it right. Say it like you really believe that this isn’t your fault.”

He smiles and doesn’t say anything. So much for my pep talk.

Then he says, out of the blue, “Hey, I want to come watch you play soccer.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, you know, I’ve never seen a game before. And—I bet you’re really good? I mean, I bet you’re really good.”

“I don’t score goals or anything. I’m defense. A sweeper.”

“Sounds cool. Are sweepers the most impor-tant?”

“That’s me,” I say, “Ms. Important,” and he splashes me.

He’s floating again. His feet are a few inches above the water. I take his hand, keeping him there, and I see past him, in the trees, a pair of green eyes. I fall back and pull him down with me.

“What?” he hisses.

“Night vision,” I say, showing my own eyes.

We peek above the top of the dry grass, and there’s green eyes blinking everywhere now. It’s a wall of soldiers! With goggles on!

“They found us,” I say, tugging at his hand, pulling us back to the water, and Floating Boy, what he does seems to be the bravest and stupidest thing I’ve ever seen: he stands and faces all these glowing eyes.

“They did,” he says, smiling, and pulls himself up.

“What are you doing?” I hiss at him. I half-hide behind him, ready to slip under the surface like the fish I am, but then one of the soldiers kind of whips his head side to side like it’s big and heavy. And he moos.

The rest of the soldiers fall in, and they’re mooing, too. They step out of the trees and the mud sucks at their heavy hooves.

“This is it,” Floating Boy says, looking past the trees at the shape of the land, this now-obvious bend in the river.

The soldiers are cows. Or the cows are cows. And there’s a Rocking Y on one of them. The cows brush past us on each side, splashing into the river, wading out for the cooler part of the water, I guess.

“Hey! We found it!” I say, and step ahead and around, holding both Floating Boy’s hands now like this is a dance. Together we wade through the tall grass, hopefully up to wherever Terry is.

17.

The sky is quiet and clear of floaters and parachuters and copters. For once, right?

We’re through the field of tall grass, and past the rusty barbed-wire fence that I can’t believe keeps those cows penned in, even when they’re not in Float Mode. Then we disappear into a dark thicket of pine trees. Their dead needles are soft under our feet. We don’t make a lot of noise. At least, none that I can hear over my own pounding heart.

And then Barron’s house just sort of unfolds from behind the trees. With the cloudless sky and bright moonlight, the place has this weird, faded glow-in-the-dark-t-shirt look. It’s an L-shaped ranch, with dark-colored shingles big enough to be scales on Godzilla. The roof is covered in satellite dishes. Barron’s brown car is parked on the far side of the house.

Seeing the car sends me ducking behind a tree. It’s an instinct: my caveman ancestors have always feared the old brown car. I remind myself that the car is good news. The car has to mean Barron is still here and so is Terry. Brownie the mobile and the dirt-patch driveway are underneath a lit up window. It’s the only window that isn’t dark.

“His office,” Floating Boy says about the one yellowy window.

We don’t move right away, hanging out long enough for me to imagine us taking a wrong step and being caught in snares, nets falling from the sky, or booby traps that spit poison darts or fire or a pack of underfed flying-monkey-Rottweilers.

“Let’s go,” Floating Boy says at last, latching onto my hand so we can do our creep routine up to the front door. It’s thick and wooden, with dents and scratches.

Floating Boy turns the handle, and that creaky sound, it’s exactly the slow-motion sound of a tooth coming out.

Finally the door opens and Floating Boy walks in and pulls me with him. My anxiety gets worse and is squeezing me into a shrinking ball.

It’s tunnel-dark in the main hallway. We walk by a kitchen, maybe. There’s a glint that could be a pan sitting on a counter. We scoot past a living room and shut doors, I think. There’s wood paneling or maybe clapboard on the walls. Might as well be walking through a black bear convention. In a cave. At midnight.

We go slowly and we listen hard because that’s what you do when you can’t see.

There’s someone coughing ahead of us. It’s muffled, behind a door at the end of this forever hallway. Light shines through the cracks in the doorframe. Like there’s another dimension on the other side.

Floating Boy turns around, and puts his face in mine. “His office,” he says again. His words flutter on my eyelids. “You okay?” he adds. Something new and scared is ramping up in his voice.

I whisper, “No. I suck. You?”

We giggle, and it releases some of the pressure, but not all of it. “We can still do this,” I say. “It’s not supposed to not suck, right?”

We walk to the door, push it open. The door creaks exactly as loud as I was dreading.

Inside is an office crammed with bookcases. To our right is a short stack of mini-fridges, and a work station with a spaceship-sized microscope and rows of beakers and test tubes and petri dishes. There’s a few microwave-looking thingies that probably aren’t microwaves. The room is part mad-scientist lab, part library, and all creepy.

Over by the window, to our right, Barron is slumped in a chair at another work station with a docked laptop and a flatscreen hanging off the wall like a bat. He turns his head but doesn’t say anything to us. He breathes deeply, then coughs hard enough to break his chest open.

Floating Boy and I ease into the room, walking like we’re playing a game of red-light/green-light. I think we were both expecting some big showdown.

Barron says, “Didn’t think I’d ever see you back here, Timothy.” He sounds like a grandfather, the kind who gives you handfuls of Tootsie Rolls whenever you see him.

“I’m not Timothy,” Floating Boy says.

A laptop is open in front of Barron. Flying toasters on the screensaver chew up the pixels. Barron says, “Okay. Fine. Andrew, Andy, or . . . um . . . Jason, excuse me if I don’t get up. Who’s your friend?” He laughs and closes the laptop. Guess we’re not supposed to see those toasters.

“Where’s my brother?” I say, and, though it’s shaped like a question, it’s anything but a question.

Barron says, not to me but for me, “It’s a little late to have friends over, no? And frankly—no offense, little miss—she looks like a troublemaker,” and he laughs again, but that starts another coughing fit as wet and mucky as a swamp. If I wasn’t immune or cursed or whatever, I’d definitely be catching something now.

Floating Boy lets go of my hand and crosses his arms on his chest, like those coughs are hurting him, too. Then he grabs my hand back and says, “Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” I say, and now it’s my turn to let go of his hand. I kind of drift forward and say to Barron, “No offense taken,” and, faster than I need to, seeing as how he doesn’t even flinch, I snatch the closed laptop off his desk.

What feels like minutes later, Barron stirs in his seat, moving an arm, then a hand to where his laptop used to be.

I open the laptop and swipe the trackpad. The screensaver stuttersteps, fades, and there’s the desktop: a simple green screen scattered with Excel files and Word docs. Clicking around, everything reads like a list of numbers and letters, and symbols I don’t know. The only recognizable words I see repeated are “influenza” and “protein.”

Barron says, “Maybe we can help each other, John. I want to help you. Really. And your little friend, if she’ll . . .”

Floating Boy taps my shoulder hard. He says, “Remember? When I said that? The adults get the bad parts?” He pauses and looks at me. I guess I’m supposed to answer what I thought was obvious, what I didn’t need to answer.

I know he’s not exactly great at conversation. It’s only been him and Barron in this house for who-knows-how-many years. Still, I can’t keep out the snark. “Um, yeah? It’s kinda obvious now with all the adults in Ipswich dealing with, you know, something more than the sniffles— Oh, wait, you’re saying Barron wasn’t sick before. He’s just now catching it? What—he caught it from Terry?”

“The night I left, I hid his shots. He gave himself a shot, like, once every, I don’t know, six months? So he wouldn’t get the bad parts.”

Barron says, “Smart boy, that Samuel.” He smiles, rubs at his nose. “I probably would have done the same thing, if I was his age.”

I keep fiddling with the laptop and click on a folder titled observations. There’s a library of folders, all boy names. I click the newest folder. “Like flu shots? Tell me or—or I’ll smash your laptop.” Like I could ever really do that to a laptop.

Barron closes his eyes and rubs his gray, wrinkly face. He talks, but only has eyes for Floating Boy. “Years ago, we—I discovered, by total accident, a protein that aggressively altered DNA in certain strains of fruit flies, silencing the expression of some genes—which was expected—but also causing awakenings, for lack of a better term, in other areas of the strand that . . . that caused mutations, but not in the progeny. In the subject itself. Physical transformations. It was amazing. We thought we had a serious weapon—”

Suddenly I don’t want to hear his evil mad scientist spiel. It’s too scary, too real to think Terry and everyone else has been changed, mutated, because that sounds like something that can’t be taken back, right? But Floating Boy did tell me that he’d stopped floating for a month before he left this place.

“—but in humans, the protein had no seeming effect on adults. They were past the stage where, where mutation could . . . but that’s not quite accurate. I should say that the protein doesn’t do for adults what it does for you, um, um, Allen. Again, it was only by accident that we found what it did in the young, in—” He launches into another coughing fit, recovers. “—adolescents.” Takes a deep breath. “Or some of them. Not all of them could float. For some of them, different mutations happened.”

“Different?” I ask, already imagining all these kids turning into fruit flies.

“For most,” Barron says, sounding like he’s holding back yet another cough-fest, “their DNA changed so that their bodies produced an organic analogue to hydrogen, or, or something between hydrogen and helium, but it produced it in more than sufficient quantities to—”

While he’s up on his evil-doctor soapbox, I bury my head in the laptop again. The Terry folder only has one text file in it. It’s one paragraph long and about Terry being otherwise healthy, and him having a “seeming instinct to modulate his buoyancy.”

I must’ve been reading out loud because Barron picks up where I was in the note: “Some of them can’t. I’m sorry. Couldn’t. I’m still not sure why. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of . . . of susceptibility, if the subject’s immune system is drawing enough of the body’s resources such that it can or can’t . . . that it somehow sees the larger picture, the survival angle, or—”

“It?” I say. “Not ‘him,’ or ‘Terry’? Is that all they are to you?”

Barron says, “I’m so sorry, William. Ronnie. Franklin. I’m sorry, Theodore. Luke. Daniel—”

He’s listing some of the names that Floating Boy wrote under the bridge, I think.

I go back to the library of folders and every name has its own folder. I click on one. There are text documents and videos. Videos I can’t bring myself to watch.

“The army had—has—visions of floating battalions of super soldiers, of course,” Barron goes on. “I was only interested in the fact that I could do this. That I could, that I can—” More rib-cracking coughing. “—make it happen. And consequently, the army and I had a parting of the ways, shall we say. I’m sorry for everything, Gary. Really, I am. I know what I am, but it doesn’t mean I’m not sorry. When you left, Sebastian, yes, Sebastian, Sebby. God, it was just like, it was just like . . .”

“Stop! Shut up!” I yell at him. I turn to Floating Boy who grabs my hand, and he’s crying in his quiet way. I say, “But why did you stop floating, early this summer. Right?”

Barron coughs and keeps on talking. “I attenuated a basic flu virus, attaching our protein to it. As the basic flu virus multiplies and infects a subject, so does the protein. But in adults, the protein doesn’t do anything. Or maybe it only makes us more susceptible to the flu virus the protein is attached to.” He shrugs a can-you-believe-my-luck shrug.

All right, I get that part of it now. And I see Floating Boy there at my cousin’s party, eating all those snacks, putting his hands all over the table, and then on the kids before he climbed the tree. He was spreading his special floaty flu virus to everyone without knowing it. Now I remember Terry’s fever, and Liv and Marcus and even Logan coughing or wiping their noses. They didn’t get the “bad parts”: the flu. Or at least, they didn’t get the bad flu that our parents are getting. They got the full-on protein mutation.

But why did Floating Boy get more shots and what shots did he hide from Barron before taking off. I say to Barron, “Wait. Is the shot you were taking some kind of a cure? A vaccine?”

Barron stops talking and looks at me like he’s seeing me for the first time. “If I had a clearer head,” he says, “I’d be surprised you both got here before they did.”

“They?”

“My employers, or former employers, of course. They’re quite busy in Ipswich right now, I imagine, but they’ll be here any minute. I’m quite sure they’ll take all of us away. We’ll all get to be together. You and your brother. Me and David. Me and Matthew, me and . . .” His voice trails off, running out of air.

I pace, making little circles around Floating Boy, who’s just standing and staring at Barron.

“When you left,” Barron says, right to Floating Boy, “when you left, I—I’m sorry for everything, Ryan. Really, I should’ve treated you better. Should’ve let you do more, taken you out more, shown you more, appreciated you more.”

Floating Boy is still just standing, like he’s pinned to the wall by all these names. I don’t know if he even remembers I’m in the same room with him. A blast of wind rattles the office windows. Are the helicopters and soldiers here already?

I say, “Let’s make a trade.”

“There’s this whole world out there,” Barron’s saying to Floating Boy. “The whole world, and I kept you here, like you were a plant. But I had no choice. It was the only way to get him back.”

“Listen!” I shout.

Barron stops talking and swivels in his chair. Floating Boy turns and looks at me with the saddest look I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen someone so visibly lost.

I say, “You give us Terry. You get your precious research back.” To show where the research is, I shake the laptop like an Etch-a-Sketch. “And, um, he’ll give you the shots he hid too. Yeah?”

Floating Boy puts his hand inside of mine, like it’s hiding.

“My shots? My shots are just regular flu shots to keep me from getting sick like this when he’s around. They’re nothing special, not like Seth. Now he’s special.” Barron shrugs like the game’s over anyway and then opens a drawer under the tabletop, and takes out a set of keys chained to a laminated card covered in bar codes. He holds it out to me. I shut the laptop and make the exchange, not letting go of the laptop until I have at least enough for a tug of war.

Sitting like this, Barron looks very small, and worn. He says, “He’s down the hall.” Then, throwing his voice over my shoulder, “He’s in your room, Seth.”

Floating Boy closes his eyes from this last name, this last non-mistake, so that I have to turn around and say it for him: “He’s not Seth. He never was. None of them were. Got it?”

Barron smiles, leans over to cough again, and doesn’t bother to watch us make our big exit.

18.

Out in some new and even longer hall—evil lairs are always confusing—Floating Boy slows down, like his battery pack is dying. I tighten my grip, mistaking his shuffle and drag for the way he tends to float away at the least good time, the way he needs some dead weight like me to hold him down. But when I finally look back, I see the hesitation in his face, parentheses around his eyes.

His battery is dying. The one that keeps him on-task.

He’s pulling to the side. At first I hang on and insist on Terry’s direction, but then I get it, and my batteries kind of drain, too.

“You were going to save Barron anyway, weren’t you?” I say. “Give him his vaccine or whatever? That’s why you came, right? Because you feel guilty.”

The way he flicks his eyes away is all the answer I need.

His hand falls away from mine. “So I guess this is, this is . . .” he says.

“No way,” I tell him, stepping in so we’re close.

He smiles that smile you save for little kids, the one that means you know the truth, but understand that they have to learn it themselves.

I grab his face and pull it to my own, a bold move for Little Miss Anxiety—I am trouble—and plant a kiss on his mouth, stealing that smile from him.

“We’ll meet out front, cool?” I say, and it’s not a question at all. “We’ll meet there, and then . . . and then one of those cows will float down to us and we’ll grab on, go home, mooing all the way, okay?”

“Or, you know, maybe not mooing,” he says, his hands on mine, now.

“Moo-oo.” My mouth feels all stupid.

He nods, and I’m not even sure the exact moment he slips away. But he does.

I turn, scurry the way I was already scurrying, for once in my life not weighed down with the whole world. Because everything’s fixable. We made our deal with Barron, I’m going to get Terry, Floating Boy’s going to get Barron the shots he hid, and we’re going to meet out front. Perfect, right? It doesn’t even matter that I can’t float like everyone else.

Seriously, I almost smile, feeling my way down another random dark hall, trying to find my baby brother. But then I see him, and my face prickles and my eyes heat up with tears.

He’s sitting in a room all by himself. The door is open so I almost walked past it.

Like Barron said, it’s Floating Boy’s old room. It has that lived-in-by-a-boy look to it: random stuff taped to the walls, the bed forever unmade, junk on the floor. And one of those pieces of junk is Terry. He’s sitting with his back to me, busy at something. He’s wearing my old backpack. This one has pink butterflies, and yeah, I X’d those out with a Sharpie. The backpack is too big for him. It makes him look like a punk turtle. My punk turtle.

I step inside and can see what he’s got: a round peg. One that isn’t going to fit in that square hole, bub. But I love him so much for trying.

“Terry,” I whisper, and he stops rattling the block, looks to the side to be sure he isn’t dreaming this. By then I’m with him, scooping him up, getting tangled up in his blanket, and finally shaking it off behind me, just to see him better, to prove to myself that it is him.

Tied around his ankle is a long, thin leather strap, a tether just like Floating Boy carries around. It’s a sad and horrible thing, but I can’t take it off him just yet.

I hold up a strap to the backpack. “Where’d you get this?”

“He told me I could take it. Sorry.”

“No. No sorry. It’s okay.”

I hug him more. And for once, he lets me hug and hold him like he’s actually happy to see me.

While in the greatest Terry-hug ever, I look up and see the wall above the cabinet. It’s covered in photographs of Floating Boy. As I scan to the left, the pictures of him get younger and younger until, all the way at his youngest—two?—there he is with a mom, a dad. Only—

Only they’re magazine parents. He’s cut his own picture out, glued it in between them, so their paper hands are on his shoulders like they’re holding him in place and keeping him from floating away.

I reach out, pull that picture down. I want to give him everything good there is in the world.

There’s an electronic buzz behind and above me, that almost makes me flinch, then a click. The door behind me starts to creak shut.

“No!” I shriek, and dive, holding Terry like a football, but I’m already hours too late. The door’s almost there, about to catch, almost closed, except there’s Terry’s blanket in the way. That awesome, ratty blanket, it’s in the door’s swing path. It folds up with the door pushing it into a wad.

It gives me time. It gives us time.

I yank the door open and crash out into blackness. Terry is a monkey-boy on me, a sniveling, breath-hitchy monkey boy, and I’m running blind now, am going at least twice as fast as I’ve ever run.

When I hear footsteps ahead of me—soldiers, maybe?—I fall back, take the first side door I can, and it’s a stairway going down, I guess to a basement or something. I grope for a rail, find it at the last possible moment, and then I’m at two locked doors. It’s a dead end and those footsteps in the dark are still coming.

“No no no,” I say, falling back into the corner—this is it, I’m never letting Terry go, no matter what—but, when I sit with Terry’s extra weight on me, something stabs me in the hip.

The keys. Barron’s keys. I stand, fumble through them, feel out the keyhole in the first door, and the eighth key I try turns just as the stairway light comes on. I crash through the door still holding Terry, and we’re in what looks like a real-live dungeon, one somehow bigger than the cabin itself, I’m pretty sure. There’s cells with metal doors, small windows, all of it. Only one of the windows has a light.

Terry looks up from hiding his face in my neck, and he says it for both of us: “That one?”

I beeline to the room with the light on, slam my face up to the window and, in there, sitting on the edge of a bed, holding the syringes he hid away, is Floating Boy. He looks up to me and is so calm now, his face looks exactly the way it did when I last saw him.

I try the door but it’s locked. I bang on the window and yell at Floating Boy, “Why is the door locked? What are you doing? Get up! Why are you just sitting there?”

I fall to my knees—Terry’s extra weight is no picnic—and I’m trying every key on the lock to this door. They all fit but just won’t turn. There’s still four to go, now three, and then the second-to-last one, I feel the gears or whatever relax around it, and I smile, and then there’s that leathery hand on my shoulder again.

Barron. He’s stronger than he looks. And healthy. His hand is a barbell on my shoulder. He looks through the glass at Floating Boy, then down to me. I karate chop his hand off me, and you can tell I don’t know karate by the way I have to do the sound effect with my mouth.

“You are a troublemaker, aren’t you?” he says, and in that moment, I see it all, how it really happened: Not ten seconds after our big exit from Barron’s office, he must have sat up, as healthy as ever, with an evil scientist sneer on his evil scientist face. We live in an evil scientist world, yes. It’s all just a matter of where you are in his latest experiment.

Barron probably laughed a satisfied laugh to himself at that moment, proud of all the other boy-names he was able to come up with, proud he was able to make us feel bad for him. And then on his laptop screen five minutes ago—no, four, three—Floating Boy was a black-and-white rat in a maze, going to where he hid the shots somewhere in the buried little basement chamber with a metal door and a small window. Floating Boy stepped into this little dungeon room, dug into whatever drawer or cabinet or loose tile he’d hidden the shots in. Then Barron pushed a button, locking that door.

“Let him go,” I say, backing away from Barron, and Terry holds on even tighter now and he starts to whimper into my shoulder. “He’s got your medicine.”

I take a glance in the window behind me, at Floating Boy, and it’s like he can’t even look at me. He looks like I do after I’m grounded and there’s nothing I can do. He looks like he’s just accepting this.

We did make a trade. Just not the one I was expecting.

“Oh, this?” Barron says, pulling another syringe from his jacket pocket, and it’s like he’s on stage and has been practicing saying this. He knows just the right casual way to hold that syringe.

“You never wanted Terry, did you?” I say, blinking faster than I want to.

“Is that his name?” Barron says, reaching forward to tousle Terry’s hair. I pull Terry away.

“Let him go,” I say again, and point at Floating Boy.

“Sorry, he’s too valuable, not to mention dangerous. Look what he did to your brother. To your family. To your town.”

“You did this, not him.”

Barron cocks his head to the side, like he’s studying me. But no, not me. Terry. He’s starting to float in my arms, bobbing up so I have to hold him.

“Is this the life you would wish for your brother?” Barron says, holding his hands up to the dungeon all around us. “To be an experiment? Have the military after him? Or me? To never know if he’s just late or if he maybe got caught in the jet intake of a commercial airliner?”

“Shut up!” I scream at him with my whole body. Terry starts to full on cry and scream that he wants Mommy. I whisper back to him a promise that I’m taking him back home.

“But you can save your brother, you know?” Barron says, like he’s just thinking of this. “Be the hero. Save him”—holding up the syringe, then producing another—“and then the whole town, too. It took more than a decade to figure out how to reverse it all. But I did.”

It all clicks in my head. The first shot Barron ever gave Floating Boy was what made him float, but then the rest of those monthly shots he had to take? Those were Barron’s attempts at cures. Until the one shot in July, when Barron finally hit on it and cured Floating Boy from floating. But then? Then? “You turned him back. You cured him and turned him back. Why?”

Barron gives me the saddest of smiles. It makes him look like the cute old guy he could’ve been. “Then he wouldn’t have been special anymore. The irony is that I thought I would lose him if he stopped floating.”

“Just let him go,” I say, but not so loud.

Barron smiles at this. “No. He stays with me. Always. And you can get your brother and you can save him. All you have to do is inject this into your brother’s shoulder. No more virus, no more floating, and then . . .” Barron walks his fingers up the imaginary stairs. “You give the second syringe to my old army friends out there now and they’ll be able to figure out how they can vaccinate everyone else. So, you have to ask yourself, don’t you? Which is more important to you? Your brother’s life, his future, plus the lives of your parents, of everybody in your town, your . . . friends.” Barron’s pause on “friends” is how he’s trying to close the deal, trying to make me believe that he’d help me save the town out of the goodness of his cobweb-filled heart, while I let him just kidnap and experiment on Floating Boy all over again

But, it’s kind of working. I think of my friends. I think of Liv, of her and Marcus running decoy and, for the first time since I left them, I’m wondering if they got away from the Claremonts. I’m wondering if they’re okay.

I reach for the cell phone in my pocket that, of course, isn’t there. What’s there instead is the picture of Floating Boy with the magazine Mom and Dad, which I didn’t realize I’d pocketed.

Barron adds, “Or you try and save one boy, the boy who caused all of it in the first place?”

“It was you who did it to him.”

“Well.” Barron shrugs like he’s both proud and embarrassed.

I flash my eyes from him to the door, then back again. I finally edge up to the door, slam the made-up family photograph against the glass, and look past it to Floating Boy.

I think about yelling at him some more. Telling him that he’s a quitter, that he needs to fight back. Instead I say to him, “I’ll come back. I promise. I’ll go back and tell the soldiers everything about this place. Marcus’s dad, he’s a cop, we’ll—”

“Yes, yes, of course you will,” Barron says, closer to my ear than I’d like.

I step away and rip the syringes from Barron’s hands. I say, “My phone. I want my cell phone, too.”

Barron’s left hand floats down to his pants pocket, like it cannot tell a lie. “Now why would I—”

I re-channel my inner Liv and kick Barron below the belt, a kick with so much behind it I have to really plant my other foot. All my years of laps and drills are stacked up behind this kick—a process that takes so long it’s practically slow motion. He, the old man of the two of us, dodges right. So it’s not quite a knockout blow, but it is enough to lay him over sideways.

I spin Terry onto my back and tell him to pretend he’s a monkey.

Terry death-grips my neck and I say, “Not that tight, Monkey Boy.”

I turn back to the drooling and groaning Barron. I like him better this way. I fish a hand into his left pocket, and what do you know, I’m right. My phone. I take it out and think about saying something smart-alecky, but he grabs my left ankle, twists it painfully, and starts pulling me toward him.

Terry is screaming and crying now, and I’m kicking at Barron’s hand, which doesn’t do any good. It’s locked on.

I look up and into the dungeon room, and there’s Floating Boy, yelling and pounding on the glass.

Barron pulls himself closer to me and I don’t know if I can get away from this. But there’s one more trade I can make. It’s not a good trade, definitely not good for Floating Boy. My hand fishes into my own pocket and pulls out Barron’s keys. I shake them so he’s sure to see, and then I start trying to stab them into the lock.

It works. He really is more afraid of losing his Floating Boy than keeping the other one he just found. His hand relaxes on my ankle enough for me to break away. Like we’re playing tug of war and he lets go of the rope, I fall backwards and land on my butt, next to the door to the hallway, and Terry’s still on my back.

I stand—Barron can’t, yet, and isn’t acting this time—and Floating Boy watches me through that porthole window.

And then, looking back and forth at Barron’s face and Floating Boy’s face, it hits me, lands on my head like an asteroid, because now I see it in their faces: the family resemblance.

I shout it all out, mostly so Floating Boy can hear it. “He never wanted to keep Terry, he never wanted to because he’s lying about Seth, lying about everything! You’re Seth! You’re his real son! He did this all to his real—”

“Shut up! You’re wrong! Shut up!” Barron hisses, and rises up to one knee. He’s clearly hurt, and looking like he wants to hurt back. His yellow teeth are gritted and bared. We need to be gone before Barron can press buttons and lock other doors, swallow us whole.

I edge backwards until I can turn around safely, and then I’m barreling away with Terry, down the dark hallway and up those forever-long stairs. Barron bellows behind us, but he sounds farther and farther away.

But Floating Boy is shrinking away from me, too. Yeah, I know where the cabin is now and I will come back, but I can’t help but feel like I’m leaving him with no chance to ever see the sky again.

I feel like I’ve lost a part of myself, just when I finally started to find it.

19.

I stop running when we hit the cow pasture and the fence, and give myself a few seconds to breathe. Give my bare feet a chance to un-hurt for a few seconds. We’re close enough to the river that I could spit into it.

Terry has his arms around my neck, piggy-backing. He smells like him and he smells like the tires. I check the vaccine syringes in my pocket, and work to reach behind me and Terry to slip them into one of the side-pockets of my old backpack.

I have no idea if the vaccine is legit, if it’ll work, and even if it does work, how do you administer it, or who would administer it? I mean, I just can’t stroll up to a hospital and say, shoot this into my balloony kid brother, k? thanxbi! And if not to a hospital, where do we go, and how do we get there, and—

Instead of getting lost in my head, just lying down here for a few days, letting the grass grow over Terry and me, hiding us from the bad guys forever, I take out my cell phone. There isn’t much of a charge left and, like, only one bar.

I text Liv: Where r u? have Terry!

Liv’ll probably be as excited about my phone being back as she is that we’re somewhat safe. She responds, yelling in all caps:

TRAPED @ MILL! CLARMONTS R INSANE! U NEDE TO COME SAV US TALKE TO THEM SOMTEHING NOW

Oh. No.

How is she trapped at the mill? She’s not like me. I mean, she can go all blimpy on everyone and float up and away. Unless there’s the army and helicopters there, or secret dudes in jetpacks.

But she said Claremonts. And, there’s all those capital letters. To Liv, the lowest class of people are those who speak in all-caps all the time. No, to her, people who do that are the slime on the shoes of those people.

Something’s way wrong.

The phone goes back in my pocket. I try more breathing.

Terry pats my cheek and says right into my ear, “Go home?”

I pluck him off my back without dropping him, without letting him go, which is a neat trick. “Yeah.” I’m holding him so that he’s facing me, his pudgy little face just a few inches from mine.

Okay, the mill. It’s just up the river a ways. But we can’t inner tube it upstream, and we can’t ride a cow, and so far wishing isn’t working. So how about a little floater and soccer legs combo?

I say, “Let me wear this, okay?” I take the pack and he frowns and crosses his arms over his chest. “Hey, T. Got one more in you, little guy?”

Instantly un-mad at me, he giggles, breathes in and out real fast, almost like he’s pumping himself up, and yeah, he really does know how to do this. His eyes are huge and happy, and maybe he’ll never want that vaccine. I mean, I don’t blame him. I can’t imagine what being able to fly at his age must feel like. He must feel like a superhero, right? It must feel like the cartoons aren’t just in the television anymore.

Terry bobs up quick, a mini-elevator, and I weave his tether around my forearms and wrap my arms around his waist. He’s not big or strong or floaty enough to carry me, but to do this—I’m starting to get the hang of it, too—I don’t think he needs to full-on carry me. Maybe he can be my sort-of jetpack.

A little test in the soft grass of the pasture: I run parallel to the river, stepping as soft as I can because I know there’s going to be thorns, and jump with Terry in my arms. We go up maybe ten feet. And we go out a whole lot more. We just covered, like, thirty feet. New world record, and we come down soft enough that I land running, and I feel strong and take two hard steps and bound again, this time over some smaller trees that are just kind of there, you know?

And that’s it. We’re bounding upstream and we’re bounding across-stream. Some bounds put me ankle deep in the river, but I don’t mind the wet feet. We get the hang of this quickly, lighting softly on the trees along the river, using the branches as landings and push-offs. We’re both giggling and laughing the whole time. We follow the S of the river, and this is like the best game ever.

It’s when we bounce over our favorite river bridge that I smell the smoke. And I stop laughing.

We stop Tiggering in the thick woods behind the mill, and I find a small path. Everything, even the sky, has this weird orange glow. I don’t see any flames yet, but they’re close, and they’re loud, like a monster truck rally, not that I’ve been to one, though Dad always threatens to take me.

I hear people yelling, too. A whole angry crowd of them.

Terry is sweaty, all kinds of overheated, and breathing heavy. According to the mad scientist Barron, Terry’s body must have been working hard to create and pump out some made-up kind of hydrogen, right? That can’t be easy. And it’s pretty clearly exhausting. And I’m starting to understand how Liv and Marcus can be trapped at the mill: they’re tired, wiped out, and yeah, I’ll say it, out of gas.

“Relax, little T. We’re here.” I slide him off my back, pull him around so I’m holding him in front of me.

“Home?”

“No, we need to get Liv first, okay? She needs our help. Maybe.”

He doesn’t say anything. He trusts me, or is used to the giant older people telling him what’s what, even if it doesn’t make any sense. The super-fun river jump is over and he’s transformed back to being a powerless little dude. I feel him sagging, deflating in my arms, and it’s more than kind of sad.

We unwrap—though I keep one end of the tether around my wrist, the other end wrapped around his ankle—and we rearrange. The backpack goes back on him, and he becomes my pack again. He rests his head on my shoulder and twirls my hair around a pinky.

I run, following the winding path, and there, up ahead, are rectangles of orange light hovering in the air, which makes no sense. I mean, not everything should be floating. Especially orange rectangles.

I keep running, and then I can finally make out the mill’s rear wall, and those floaty orange rectangles are rows of windows with fire raging inside. And it’s proof of what I was afraid of, of what I knew was true when I first smelled the smoke back at the bridge: the mill is on fire and Liv is in the mill, and—and what happens if you have hydrogen in you and there’s fire all around?

Don’t even want to think about it.

A chorus of hallelujahs and amens echoes through the woods, and there must be an army of Claremonts at the mill. I try to run faster and, if nothing else, hope I can outrun panic and meltdown. I scream Liv’s name and it gets lost somewhere in the branches ahead of me, or the smoke above us.

I don’t break stride while taking out my cell phone. I shouldn’t run and text at the same time, especially with a baby on board, but I don’t know what else to do, and I need some direction. I need to know exactly where Liv is and who’s with her.

Then I run smack into a tree with my right shoulder, and spin two, three times in slow motion, and not because I’m graceful or anything. My feet twist all up like a knotted kite string and I land on my butt.

Terry giggles.

I stay sitting for a couple extra seconds to make sure nothing is broken. Or nothing that wasn’t already broken. My left hand, which is my phone hand, is empty, and I have no idea where the cell went.

I pat around for a second. It’s not on the path in front of me or behind me. I hit the tree so hard the phone probably flew out of my hand and out into the woods.

See? Everything but me can fly.

I have no idea if Liv got the text or if she replied. There are more righteous roars from the mill crowd, so I can’t go looking for the phone now. Back on my feet, the path dumps us out behind the mill, and we run into a wall of heat. Terry squeals and buries his head in my neck. My god, how long has this fire been burning? The rear mill wall is going black, sagging in spots, and I can almost see that charred ash in real time as it crawls up the length of the mill toward the roof.

The roof! That’s where Liv and Marcus are. They have to be. They were chased here and crashed on the roof, and then were too tired to go anywhere or do anything. They wouldn’t go inside, probably afraid the Claremonts would break in and look for them, so they barricaded the roof door, thinking they were good.

I yell, “Liv! Down here!” The flames are so loud. No one’s going to hear me.

But there, four stories up, a hand waves down to me. It’s so friendly, geeky, and panicky. It’s Marcus. He’s yelling, too, and bent over coughing. I think he’s saying can’t fly can’t fly. Which is kinda obvious because, you know, he’s not already flying off the burning building.

I take two steps in every direction, not sure what I’m going to do. The totally despairing part of me imagines running back to the river and cupping water in my hands to douse the fire because that’s as about as useless as I feel right now.

As I’m running in circles behind the mill, and my head is running back to the river for another handful of water, Terry says, “I’m thirsty.” He sounds so dry and wasted, like he’s dying of thirst, and I’m so frazzled that hearing that in his voice might be enough to burn me down, totally.

But then he says it again. And I get an idea. A real one. One that might save, like, everything. I say, “Hold on, I’ll get you something.” I readjust Terry on my back, and oh please oh please oh please, I hope crazy Aunt Beth parked her crazy mobile out front.

“I’ll be right back!” I yell up to Marcus, even though I can’t see him anymore.

We fight through fallen branches, and we run through big twisting hunks of ash floating by my head, and I make my way to the front of the mill.

There’s thirty, forty, fifty, I don’t know how many people out front. The Claremonts brought, what, their whole church parish with them? Neighbors? The rest of Ipswich? And not-so-holy floating cow, the ones who aren’t holding hands and swaying are holding torches. Seriously, torches! This isn’t a horde, it’s a mob.

To my left is one of the first station wagons ever made. I sprint over and duck behind it, waiting to hear the crowd roar GET HER! When that doesn’t come, I peek my head up, and look through the rolled-down windows of the wagon.

The mob is a chaotic mess, a slushie made of people. There are some folks singing and throwing their torches at the mill. Beth’s sister-in-law and all the old dudes I escaped back at my house are here. They’re across the lot from me, on the other side of the mill, and let’s keep it that way.

There’s a smaller and less brimstone-y mobette of people who are barely standing upright. They just shamble around, coughing, crying, bumping into people and randomly parked cars, and they moan a little, and keep shambling. I don’t think I’ll ever wear my zombie shirt again.

And there are others who, like the rest of their mob buddies, are still clearly sick, clearly brain challenged, but seem to be a bit more with it. They’re going around asking why the kids on the roof haven’t flown away. They shout up to the kids on the roof, yelling, “Hey! You still up there?”

I see Aunt Beth. She’s saying, “Maybe they’re stuck. We have to help them!” I’m guessing the mob’s idea was to smoke the kids out, make them come down off the roof, not burn them alive. Real shocker that the brain-addled mob didn’t think things through clearly, right?

There’s a crash from inside the mill somewhere, and Liv is screaming from the roof. There isn’t much time for my super idea.

Cars are zigzagged all over the lot, which looks like Terry’s room after one of his Matchbox frenzies. I need Aunt Beth’s T Rex-sized SUV, the one with fake wood paneling on the side. It’s hard to see any color other than orange and every car looks like an SUV or wagon. But there! It’s parked behind the crowd, maybe twenty yards away from me, its passenger side scraped right up against the trees.

Then everyone starts yelling and pointing at the mill. There are kids on the edge of the roof, waving their arms and yelling for help. Liv is on the corner of the mill closest to me. I wave my arms, tell her in my head that I’m hurrying, I’m hurrying, even if to her it looks like I’m running away.

Terry’s still on my back, and he hasn’t really said anything. Is he asleep? I tell him to hold on and I sprint to Aunt Beth’s SUV, to the trunk. As I’m running I hear there she is and get her, and it’s almost a comfort to finally have something that I expect to happen actually happen.

None of the sick adults can move as fast as I can right now so I get to the car no problem. My little cousin is in the backseat, asleep, strapped into his car seat, which is both seat-belted down tight and then bungee-corded over, just in case.

I go behind the car, open the trunk and, thank someone, Aunt Beth’s kid cantina is there, or at least the cooler is still there. I open the lid, afraid it’ll be empty, but it’s not. It’s half full of juice boxes, granola bars, cookies, animal crackers, and even some bags of orange wedges in case an end-of-the-world soccer game breaks out.

Quickly, I put Terry down in the trunk, give him a juice box and a little bag of animal crackers. “Drink and eat as fast as you can, T.”

I don’t have to tell him twice. He sucks the juice box dry and turns the crackers into dust, inhales them. I fill the backpack with the rest of the snack-time haul while he’s chowing down.

Aunt Beth is the first person to make it over to her car. She puts her hand on my arm but doesn’t grab onto it. She’s gentle. Already, without her saying anything, I know she’s not going to stop me, not going to try and keep me here.

“You’re okay? You’re not up there? What are you doing, Mary?” She sounds and looks terrible. Her hair has fallen out of the pigtails and is all stringy. Her eyes are so red they’re almost swollen shut.

“I’m helping my friends. You know, so they don’t burn to death.” I zip the pack and crouch down to T’s level, and put my face in his.

Aunt Beth is crying and mumbling about how this wasn’t supposed to happen, how she isn’t sure how this happened, how it got so out of control.

“Terry,” I say, trying to ignore Aunt Beth. “I need you to fly up to the roof and give Liv the food in the pack, okay?”

It’s not a sentence I’ve had a lot of practice with, but Terry nods his head and gives me exactly what I’m terrified of here: a thumbs up. It means we’re really doing this. It means I’m having him float to the top of a burning building. Yeah.

Aunt Beth tugs on my shoulder again, and I tell her, “Just keep everyone else off us, okay?”

She nods and wanders away, into the rising slushie of the mob. I think she’s officially part of the shamblers crew now, and will not be any help at all.

Terry is up on my back one more time, and it’s another sprint in wet socks through the lot, dodging cars and old, sick, demented Claremonts and their posse. Hands reach out for me and Terry, but they can’t get a good grip on us with their weakened, designer-flu-infected fingers.

There are more crashes and smoke and ash plumes inside the mill. I don’t know how long before the place collapses, but we need to get closer before I let Terry take off, just in case the backpack is too heavy for him and it limits his flying. I jump on the hood of the station wagon that’s parked closest to the mill and scramble up onto its roof. Up here the flames are jet engines. They’re bombs going off.

I yell, “You know not to touch fire, right, T? Please be careful!” and I know I sound like Mom.

Terry is looking all around, and too fast, like he’s not sure where to go. This might be the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life: letting him try this, saving him just to ask him to do something like this. I’m about to make myself think of something better when he lets go of my neck and floats up. His comfortable weight suddenly goes away. My heart goes up into my throat after him. And, for real, my left arm goes up, too.

Crap, we’re still tethered together! One end is still wrapped all around my stupid wrist. I quickly wriggle out, hoping I didn’t weigh Terry down too much and ruin his takeoff. Takeoff is probably important, maybe the most important.

Terry goes up slowly, like he’s unsure of how far up and how fast to go. And he’s too close to the mill’s front wall. He’s only about ten feet off the ground, hovering between the first- and second-floor windows. His takeoff—I did screw it up!

“Stay away from the wall!”

The added weight in the backpack must be throwing him off. He dips and lists off to the side like a drunk bumblebee. He’s not going up anymore, and he’s screaming and reaching for his ankle.

The tether! I follow the length of it from his ankle down to a rounded piece of metal sticking out of the mill’s front wall. Terry’s stuck! Stuck to a burning building!

I fall to my knees on the car roof and everything in my head goes swimming. The car under me is swimming too, or bouncing. The nastiest part of the mob, the one still tossing torches and praising the Lord, has me surrounded. They’re rocking the car back and forth.

Terry screams again and I don’t think. I just do. I run off the roof and onto the hood, but Claremonts block my path to the mill. I jump over their front line and land on some old dude’s back. He goes down. I land on my feet and run like a wrecking ball at the mill. Fire spits out of the window just a few feet away from me, but I don’t care. The tether is above that window. I can reach it. I have to.

I leap like I’m jumping into the mill, plant my left foot on the smoldering window frame, and push off and up, using everything my non-floaty legs have to launch me up the wall, toward the tangled tether. And then I’m going up, the hard way, and I stretch, pressed up against the mill, which is like pressing up against an open oven. I’m willing my right arm and wrist to be long enough, to get longer if they have to.

I snatch a handful of tether and hold on, but I’m not falling back to earth like I should. The tether is still stuck, and all my dangling weight threatens to pull my shoulder out of my socket. I’m not letting go, though. My arm can rip off and I’m not letting go.

Finally, I do fall, like everything does eventually, and I land hard, a jolting shock of pain jouncing up through my feet, into my ankles and into my knees. And I’m still holding the tether.

I’ve pulled Terry down to me. He’s crying. “It’s okay, T, I promise. Watch.” He watches and I untie the tether from his ankle. He stands twisting his leg all round, looking for, what, a ghost tether?

And when he starts to bob away, I pull him to me. I can’t let go again.

He looks up to the roof, like this is confusing him. Do big sisters say one thing and then do another?

“No,” I say into his neck, “no no no.” But then a Claremont paw on my shoulder makes me flinch around, and Terry kind of giggles right in my ear and pushes off. And he’s gone, just like that.

He goes. Up, up. Claremont hands stab into the space Terry was a millisecond ago. Their hands reach up and over me, and in the shadow of the mill, they look like crows flying above my head, but they’re too late.

Terry rises up fast, like a superhero. He quickly reaches the same height as the roof, and there are other hands up there, gently reaching out to him. I blink, and Terry disappears above the roof.

The Claremonts move in, pressing up against me so tight I can’t move. Everyone’s yelling and grabbing and pushing. I’m lifted off the ground. My feet lose the pavement. This isn’t floating.

I scream and thrash around, connecting an elbow with somebody’s nose. It feels squishy. The mob collectively breathes and retreats just enough to give me the opening I need. I gain my feet, bust through and past them, then dash over toward the mill and pick up one of the still-burning torches.

“Stay away!” I wave the torch at them, and they back off, cringing and groaning and praying the whole way.

I walk away from the mill, to its side, and near the path to the river. Not that I have any sort of plan. I mean, I did what I could do. Now it’s just me waiting, dying a thousand deaths inside until Terry floats off the roof, down and safe.

I can’t see them up there. I don’t hear them up there. Did he tell them what to do?

Even if they do eat, I don’t know how long it takes to metabolize the food, to get whatever nutrients they need into the bloodstream and do whatever it is their new DNA needs them to do.

Not that I can wait even one breath longer to see. “Terry! Terry!” I yell. “You okay? Liv! Liv! Can you hear me?”

I’m still yelling and waving my torch around and sending the most urgent mental texts when the mob stops its mobbiness. They stand slack and just stare up. I do, too. And I laugh because right now, this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

Four of them rise above the roof and the flames, hand in hand, in a kind of formation, a giant wing. Liv, Marcus, and is that Logan?—yeah, it is—and flying far enough out in front of them that I want to have a heart attack . . . Terry. They’re beautiful, and maybe always have been.

I laugh some more and wave my hands. Terry sees me, I think. He waves back and kicks his legs like he wants to just bounce up and down.

The mob breaks out of its trance and rallies for one last unified roar against those meddling kids floating in the air, and they make one last charge at me. I back away with my now-dying torch, and I’m near the woods.

Liv yells something but I can’t hear it. Then they turn away from us. They fly behind the mill, above the woods, and toward the river.

Okay. We’re totally done here. I drop the torch and make a mad sprint to the path. I’m into the woods and I can hear people following me, their footsteps slow and heavy. They crash into and through branches and young trees.

I’m not scared of them anymore, though. Not now. No way. I’m running to the river. I’ll get there before them. Nobody can swim like me. It’s my flying.

I get to a clearing at the shore, and I look up. Terry is flying way too far ahead of Liv and Marcus. And Liv, I hear her. She’s yelling Terry’s name.

Wait. Are they chasing him now?

The Claremonts are still coming, so I’m about to dive into the river, see how far downstream I can get. Maybe break some sort of river swimming record. And then there’s a light tapping on my shoulder, even though no one’s behind me.

Logan says, “Need a lift?”

20.

Yuck. Because it’s just Logan being Logan, I don’t scream, but it’s a close one. The way he plopped down behind me without me seeing, and the way he’s gotcha-smiling at me now, he so wanted me to scream.

“Jerk,” I say, not-so under my breath, in a jokey, happy-to-see-you-ya-big-lug way, instead of asking him what he’s still doing hanging around us.

I do need a lift. Liv and Marcus not stopping for me and then tumbling and yelling after Terry, it’s not a good sign. Maybe I should’ve put Terry’s tether in the backpack with the food, so Liv could’ve put it back on him right away or something.

“Can you, you think?” I say to Logan, tilting my head up into the sky, to the flickering light that’s either a square fairy or the screen of Liv’s phone.

Logan chuckles an insulted little chuckle. He’s lying along the bottom side of the thick branch of a giant dead tree, now. He rests back like people in picnics do, with his feet crossed, hands behind his head, and a gigantoid mouthful of Aunt Beth granola bar crumbling down. It’s all ideal and normal except it’s nighttime, he’s upside down, and the Claremonts are still crashing through the trees behind us.

“I think I can, yes,” Logan says, way too much emphasis on the “can,” there.

“I need to get my brother, and now,” I say.

“Freaky little kid,” Logan says, and kind of smiles. He adds, “Why can’t you?” and kind of nods up, above us.

“I don’t know, okay? Because everybody’s better than me. Because they’re not, because they don’t, because I can’t—”

I stop because I’ve said too much. And I stop because I’m listening to how close the Claremonts are getting.

Logan pushes off his branch hard enough to pat his feet into the ground beside me and then hook his right foot under a climbed-out root.

“So where they going?” he says, about Liv and Terry and Marcus.

I give him my best really? look. He’s earned it. “They’re not going anywhere. They’re going after my little brother.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” he says, and, “Hey, thanks for the delectables,” saluting me with some chocolaty remains before popping the last bits in.

“Big word,” I say back, and his right hand finds my left. He gives me his smirk and arched eyebrow look. It’s a look that says I’m supposed to melt because he’s going to be a senior, football captain, and I’m just a squat little sophomore, a less-than-nobody.

A gaggle of Claremonts stumbles out of the woods and onto the shore. One almost falls into the river. They yell and point at us, but they’re not moving so fast anymore.

“Um, come on,” I tell Logan. “Let’s go.”

Logan nods, looks above us for clearance, then unhooks his foot anyway, so that when he takes my hands and we bob up, we crash through dead branches and I try to kick them out of our way.

Up here, the river is a flat glass surface and the town stretches out below us. There are soldiers on the bridge. The glow of fires is all over Ipswich. Helicopters thump and tear the night into black ribbons falling down over us all. And over there, a bobbing speck—

“That’s her! There’s Liv!” I say.

Logan squints and isn’t so sure, and then my dead, dead weight pulls us down below the canopy again.

Logan grunts a laugh, hauls me back up, nearly pulling my arms off like I’m an action figure. But then I get why: the momentum of him jerking me straight up like that, the follow-through, it pushes us up just enough.

It takes me a bit to find her again, but I see Liv’s cell light.

“So they’re not going into town?” Logan says.

“They’re not going any—just follow that car,” I tell him in my best movie voice.

“What car? I don’t see any car.”

Why am I not surprised Logan doesn’t get me? “Just follow Liv.”

Logan smiles, we dip down again, and finally, to stay high enough, he spins us around, and kind of swings me like one of those hammers with the long leather strap that they throw at the Olympics. It’s ugly, probably looks like I’m a dry cat in a wet sack, but it gets us going faster than usual, too.

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?

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.

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 Barron 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.

“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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