Ignatius MacFarland, page 10
She pointed up with her finger. “Raindrop,” she said, sounding a bit embarrassed. “My dad said I fell from the sky. I don’t really know what that means but he always smiles when he says it.”
“Huh, that’s weird,” I said, unsure if I should laugh or not. But I didn’t laugh since I didn’t want to insult her because she was the prettiest girl who ever talked to me without calling me Piggy or saying “Get out of the way, weirdo,” or “This is the girls’ bathroom, you moron.”
“Are you really from that other world, too?” she said with a look on her face that showed she’d be really impressed if I said yes. So, you can imagine what I said next.
“Yes.”
Man, am I smooth.
She smiled and walked forward a few steps. “Is it true that nobody can fly there?”
“Yeah, pretty much. I mean, birds can fly but they’re animals and they can’t talk or do anything other than fly, really. And people can sort of fly but only if they’re in these big things called airplanes that are made out of metal and use a lot of gas to get off the ground. They’re really loud, lose your luggage sometimes, and used to give you free food but now make you pay, like, five dollars for a box with a Fig Newton and some raisins in it. But I think we all sort of wish we could fly like you guys do. Or, I mean, I wish I could, anyway.”
She stared at me and I immediately felt like I had just made a fool out of myself. But after a few seconds, she smiled and gave a little laugh.
“You’re funny,” she said softly.
And then I sort of felt like I was going to have a heart attack.
But a really good heart attack.
20
MORE FOO
My stomach knotted up like somebody grabbed it and twisted it sideways, and my chest felt like it had gotten hit really hard with a hammer. I’m pretty sure my eyes went wide when she said I was funny and I was worried that her smile was going to turn into the universal girl eyebrow-furrow-and-frown that says “What’s your problem?” But she just kept smiling at me.
Does she like me? I wondered, embarrassed that I could even consider that someone who looked like her could like someone who looked like me.
“So,” I said, now suddenly really nervous, “what’s it like living here?” Oh, man, what a stupid question.
“It’s nice, I guess. I’ve never lived anywhere else. Do you like it?”
“Yeah, it’s really cool. I mean, I’ve only been up here less than an hour, I think. But it’s really pretty and it’s nice being up this high.” Then, for some reason, the next question popped into my head, which I immediately blurted out: “Was that you flying over the field when I first got here?”
“Yeah,” she said, looking embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t spy on people. But I was just flying back from the water place and looked down and suddenly there you were. Since the only other people like you I’d ever seen were Karen and Mr. Arthur, I couldn’t help but stare.”
“You’ve seen Mr. Arthur?” I asked, a bit surprised for some reason that a flying person would have seen him.
“Yes, but don’t tell anybody. We’re all forbidden to fly over the city ever since Mr. Arthur took over.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody wants him to think about us. They figure that if he doesn’t see us he’ll just leave us alone.”
“That makes sense, I guess. But how come you still do it?”
She looked down, like she was feeling guilty, and I suddenly wanted to kick myself for asking her the kind of question someone’s father might ask. But before I could apologize . . .
“Because I sort of like what he’s doing. I think all those things he’s building are interesting and I like the way they look. And I like to hear that music he makes. It’s pretty.”
I’ve always had a hard time disagreeing with people I like and it was even harder at that moment to disagree with a beautiful girl who I thought was maybe starting to like me. But I sort of felt like I had to say something.
“Well, I guess it’s pretty if you’ve never heard it before, but if you heard the music it was based on back in my world, you’d think his version of it is sort of terrible.” It came out meaner than I wanted it to but I guess I was starting to feel as mad at Mr. Arthur as Karen was.
“But if I hear it and think it’s pretty, doesn’t that mean it’s still good?” She didn’t ask it in a sarcastic way, the way Karen would say something like that. She was asking a sincere question. And it kinda stumped me.
“Well . . . I guess,” I said weakly because it just didn’t seem like the right answer. “But if you heard the real version of the song and the voice of the guy who really sang it in my world, then the next time you heard Mr. Arthur’s version you’d say, ‘Man, that’s terrible.’ ”
“But since I can’t hear that version, then isn’t it okay for me to like what Mr. Arthur did?” she asked as innocently as if she were asking me why the sky was blue. “And doesn’t the fact that you are so used to your version that you can’t hear what’s good about his version mean that the version you like is keeping you from enjoying something that you might like if you didn’t know how it was really supposed to sound?”
“Uh . . .” I said, sounding once again like a guy who just got hit in the head. Man, for somebody who just learned how to speak English she could sure talk circles around me, the guy who has been speaking the language his whole life. “I guess so.”
She studied my face for a few seconds, then said, “Do you miss your world?”
“I . . . uh . . . I don’t know. I mean, I hate the thought that my parents and my friends might think I’m dead, but it was sort of a place that I never felt very comfortable in.”
“I don’t feel very comfortable here, either,” she said quietly. “Everybody spends so much time saying bad things about the Chuparians and being so judgmental about each other that I just feel like flying away for good sometimes.”
“The Chuparians?” I asked, confused.
She looked a bit embarrassed. “That’s what they call everyone who lives on the ground. I feel bad even saying the word. It’s not a very nice term. Or at least it gets used in pretty mean ways up here.”
“Huh,” I said as a cool breeze lightly blew Foo’s hair. “I guess it’s kinda like how everybody where I live hates the people in the town next to ours because our high school football team loses to their team all the time. It’s so bad that you can’t even be friends with anybody from that town. My friend’s older sister dated a guy from there once and the whole school stopped talking to her. Just because of stupid football games.”
She thought about this for a second, then said, “My father would be very upset if he knew I liked Lesterville. He’d probably lock me in my room forever.”
“Yeah, my dad gets pretty overdramatic about stuff, too. Fortunately, he thinks the whole football rivalry thing is dumb,” I said, suddenly starting to miss him. “He does a lot of embarrassing things but he’s a pretty good guy.”
“I love my dad, too, but he doesn’t take anything I say seriously.” She gave a little sigh and looked out at the treetop city. “I never stand up to him or anybody here because it’s just not worth it. They’ll never change their minds.”
“Yeah, neither will the people in my town.”
We looked at each other, realizing we were both sort of in the same boat in our two different worlds. The only difference was I wasn’t sure if I would ever see my world again.
She suddenly smiled and stepped close to me. “Can I touch your face?”
A second heart attack hit me. This time it was like somebody had just driven a truck into my chest. I can pretty much guarantee that I didn’t hide my surprise at her request, mainly because she suddenly stopped and looked embarrassed.
“I’m sorry,” she said like a little kid who had just broken something. “I need to go.”
And with that, she turned and flew off.
“Wait!” I yelled, and leaned against the handrail to watch her leave.
And that was when the handrail broke and I fell off the walkway and began to plummet to my death thirty stories below.
21
I CAN’T FLY
There was a rumor in my school that if you ever had a dream in which you were falling off a cliff or a building and in the dream you hit the ground, then in real life you would die right at that moment. I always thought this sounded kinda stupid. I mean, how do you ask people who are already dead if they were dreaming about falling off a cliff and hitting the bottom right before they died? But, just to be safe, whenever I’d have a dream where I was falling I always made extra sure to wake myself up before the end was near.
So to find myself suddenly falling through the air toward the ground below in a world that was completely different from anything I had ever experienced in my life made it sort of hard to remember that I wasn’t dreaming.
But I wasn’t.
I was scared out of my wits and unhappy about the fact that I really was about to die. My body was sort of spinning head over heels so that one minute I was looking at the ground approaching and the next I was looking up at the treetops as they quickly got farther and farther away from me. And it was at that moment that I saw Foo flying down after me like some really pretty version of Superman. Her eyes were wide with fear and surprise. I’d say they were probably as wide as mine but since she knew she could fly and wouldn’t herself be dying that day, I’m guessing my face was more panicked than hers. But to see her flying toward me, I had a sudden glimmer of hope that I was about to be saved.
“Iggy!” she yelled as she reached out for me. “I’ve got you!”
She grabbed me with her hand by the front of my shirt. Unfortunately, we both quickly discovered that flying people’s lightweight bodies mean they can’t really fly when they’re holding anything heavier than them. Especially when that heavy thing is already falling really fast. Like I told you earlier, I’m not fat or anything but compared to Foo, I might as well have weighed as much as an elephant. Foo screamed this high-pitched noise that sort of sounded like the scream my cousin Ernie’s parrot makes when it’s hungry and nobody’s paying attention to it. And the minute I heard her scream I knew that, once again, I was pretty much about to die.
I looked down and saw that the ground was only about thirty feet away now and I tried to imagine what it was going to feel like to get killed. Would I know that I hit the bottom and feel some huge pain and then everything would go black? Or would I hit and feel myself spatter all over the place and still be alive even though I was dead so that I would just be lying all over the place in a thousand painful pieces that all hurt worse than the time Ivan accidentally slammed my fingers in his mom’s car door? Whichever option it was, I wasn’t very happy about having to die at that moment.
I looked up at Foo just because I figured if I was about to bite the big one, I might as well do it while looking at someone pretty and nice. I had finally met a girl who it seemed there was a possible chance might like me and now I was going to die before I ever got to know what it’s like to have a nice, beautiful girlfriend. Really not fair. And so I might as well enjoy it while I can, I thought, even if it’s only for about two more seconds.
I saw Foo’s face go from being scared to suddenly looking surprised. And that was when I heard it.
KROOOOOSH!!!
It was the sound of something popping up out of the leaves and twigs and grass and dirt that were all over the ground. And the next thing I knew I felt these really soft ropes hit my back and form around me like the hammock in my grandma’s backyard. And then I felt Foo land right on top of me. She screamed again, but the scream was cut in half as she got the wind knocked out of her when our chests slammed together.
Everything was suddenly quiet. All I could hear was the two of us breathing really hard and fast, like we had both just run the one-mile race on Field Day. I couldn’t see much because Foo’s wings were still on my face, but I could feel how soft they were.
“Are you all right?” I asked her, unsure what to say after what we had just been through. Plus, I was really worried that maybe she wasn’t all right.
“Yes,” she said, still trying to catch her breath. “Are you okay?”
“I think so,” I said as I tried to take stock of my body to feel if I had any pains that might mean something bad had happened. And if I did have some injury, I hoped it wasn’t somewhere that Foo could see it. It was embarrassing enough to have her try to save me and almost get killed without then having to be all hurt and probably start crying because I’m not very tough when it comes to getting injured.
“What happened?” I asked as Foo lifted her head and looked around.
“They built a safety net system when Karen started living here. They were afraid that the railing would break someday and she would fall.”
“Did she?” I asked, hoping more than anything that Foo’s answer would be yes. I really didn’t want to be the first idiot to fall out of the treetop city.
“No,” said Foo. “You’re the first one.”
Oh, man. How embarrassing.
We heard a meow.
“What was that?” asked Foo.
“Oh. I think that’s just my cat . . . dog . . . thing,” I said, not really sure what to call it. We both looked down through the net and saw the cat who thought it was a dog ten feet below us looking up from the ground, wagging its tail.
I turned and looked back at Foo. It was only then that both she and I seemed to realize at the exact same moment that she, a very pretty girl, was lying on top of me, a sort of dorky guy, and that our faces were close together enough to either tell each other a secret or to kiss. I can’t speak for how this affected her but I can tell you that it made my brain suddenly explode. My heart started pounding like some tiny person with a sledgehammer was trapped inside my chest and was trying to break through the inside of my rib cage to escape.
Foo sort of looked embarrassed that she was on top of me but also didn’t jump up to get off of me, either, the way I imagine any other girl I’ve known in my life would if they ended up anywhere near this close to me. Instead, she raised herself up on her arms and looked at me again.
“You’re lumpy,” she said with a bit of a smile.
Before I could panic too much about exactly what she might mean by that, she started lightly poking my chest and shoulders with her fingers, the way you might touch a bed to see how soft it was.
“Is everyone from your world as heavy and solid as you?” she asked innocently. I could imagine somebody who wasn’t as skinny as I was taking that as an insult, but in my short time knowing Foo, I knew she was usually not being mean or sarcastic when she asked those kinds of questions.
“Yeah, pretty much,” I said, still very very aware that she was on top of me. “Most people are way heavier than I am. And there’s some guys who are what they call ‘bodybuilders’ and they’re so solid because of all their huge muscles that they become professional wrestlers and then they can hit each other with metal folding chairs and wooden tables and not even get hurt. Although most people think stuff like that is fake. Wrestling, that is.”
She was staring at me strangely as I continued my rambling explanation of professional wrestling while I kept asking myself why I was telling her all this. It was like my brain was so desperate not to freak out about having her so close to me that it told my mouth to just come up with whatever it could, no matter how insane it was, just to fill the air with words so that she wouldn’t suddenly decide to get off me and end this extremely great moment in my life.
And it was my fear of her getting up that made me completely unprepared for what she did next.
Foo suddenly held out her hand and gently touched my face, starting at my chin, then brushing her hand lightly over my nose, then across my cheek to my ear, then running her open hand with its long thin fingers up over my eyes and across my forehead, and finally putting her fingers right through my hair. Her face had a slightly perplexed expression, the way you might look if you were trying to figure out what something you were touching was made of. I tried to keep a normal look on my face as if this kind of thing happened to me every day back in my frequency, but the guy with the sledgehammer inside my chest was now using a really huge and powerful jackhammer as he blasted away.
And that was when I heard the voice yell, “FOO!”
Suddenly, Foo jumped like somebody had just shot off a gun behind us and her wings slapped all over my face as she flew off me in a panic. I quickly sat up, too, but because the net I was in was so soft and had so many holes in it I couldn’t do much other than thrash around like a goldfish that had jumped out of its bowl.
I saw Herfta and his flying sidekicks speeding through the air toward us from the treetops and Karen staring down at me from the walkway high above as Foo hovered about ten feet over me.
Two of the flying guys came down and looked me over to make sure I was all right as I heard Herfta start puhing and pahing like crazy at Foo. I couldn’t tell what he was saying but it sounded like he was really mad. She kept gesturing toward me with her arms, then pointing up at the treetops, then back at me and the net and I assumed she was telling him what had just happened. But Herfta kept interrupting her and talking in the soft flying-people language so forcefully and angrily that I expected him to just start yelling really loudly in English the way Mr. Gilley, my insane math teacher, did whenever he heard anybody talking in class after he had already warned us to “keep our lousy mouths shut.”
Finally, Foo nodded and stopped trying to explain and then turned and looked at me with sort of a sad, embarrassed look on her face. Herfta looked at me, too, then gestured to Foo to go back up to the treetop city. She nodded and flew back up super fast, like she was trying to disappear off the face of the earth. Then Herfta flew down next to me.
