Ignatius MacFarland (13 page)

She made the case that to allow Mr. Arthur to continue getting away with what he was doing was like helping him destroy the cultures of all the ground-dwelling creatures who had lived their lives just fine before Mr. Arthur started forcing them all to speak English and do all the things he thought they should do. The future of their frequency was at stake, even though Mr. Arthur seemed to be leaving the flying people alone at this point. It was only a matter of time before he figured out a way to change their culture and oppress them, too, she said. And so he must be stopped.

She ended her speech
puh
ing and
pah
ing so forcefully that spit was flying out of her mouth. One of the drawbacks of flying-people language seemed to be that it wasn’t a very good language to yell in, which made it about the worst language for a hothead like Karen to communicate in. It made me wish I only spoke Puhluvian so that she couldn’t yell at me as much. But, as she was proving right then, she had figured out a way to raise her voice in another species’ language, too. Well done, Karen.

She stared at all the flying people for what felt like a really long time and then turned and walked back to me. “If that doesn’t wake them up, nothing will,” she whispered as she turned back to the crowd and watched as Herfta went up in front of them again.

Herfta raised his hand and asked them a question, as if he were asking them to vote on what Karen had said. She gave me a nervous look that said she was hoping for something good to happen. When Herfta finished his question, all the flying people looked around at each other, as if they were considering what to do. They didn’t nod or shake their heads or anything that showed what they were thinking. They did this for about two minutes and the way Karen was fidgeting around and clearing her throat and rubbing her nose nervously I could tell she was about to lose her mind from the suspense of it all.

Then, finally, all the flying people stopped looking at each other and turned back to Herfta. He scanned his eyes over everybody in the stadium, then put his arms straight out to the sides and lifted his palms skyward as if to say, “Well?”

Karen held her breath. I stared at all the flying people. Their faces didn’t give me any indication of what they were thinking. And then, suddenly . . .

“
CHUP!
”

The whole stadium said it loud and at the same time. It was the loudest thing I’d heard from them before or since.

I looked at Karen. She shook her head, mad.

“Idiots!” she said to herself, then shoved the Shakespeare book into my hands and stormed off the platform. Actually, she said a word before “idiots” that I don’t think I should write here because my dad always said that swearing is the sign of a small mind and that if you started using bad words, you’d no longer be able to communicate without them. But please realize that just because I censored Karen’s statement I’m not saying that Karen has a small mind. Because she doesn’t. And, man, she’d really beat me up if she thought I said that.

I turned to watch Karen go and saw the flying girl peeking around the corner at me again. She once again pulled her head back behind the wall the second she saw me. But only after I saw that she was smiling at me. And, man, was she pretty when she smiled.

“C’mon!” Karen snapped at me over her shoulder as she headed off around the opposite corner.

“I’m coming,” I said as I stuffed the Shakespeare book into my backpack and ran off to catch up with her, not at all sure why I had been doing everything she told me to do ever since we met.

19

FOO

Karen wasn’t much fun to be in a small room with.

But there we were, together in a small room.

The flying people had given her an apartment to live in when she met them a year ago and the two of us were sitting in there as Karen stewed about the huge “
chup
” she had gotten a half hour earlier. When I say “apartment,” I mean a tiny room built out of lots of sticks and twigs that had been woven into a super strong sort of wicker. It was the same type of material that my grandma’s ancient lawn furniture was made out of, except her chairs were all white and faded and covered with bird doodies and were so old that whenever you sat in them, they creaked and bent like they were about to disintegrate into a pile of dust. Once I got up from one of them really fast and a piece of broken wicker got hooked on the back of my shorts and tore open a huge hole on the one day I wasn’t wearing underwear because my mom forgot to do the laundry. So everyone at our family reunion saw my butt crack when I turned around to look at the chair, and my cousin Philip called me Rear Window for the next year.

The floor in Karen’s apartment was stronger than my grandma’s chairs but it still creaked and bent when I walked over it. Karen said that the flying people had made her floors stronger than they usually did for themselves because she weighed so much more than them since they have super light bones. As I got up and walked over to look at some weird mural hanging on her wall, the floor creaked so loudly that I got nervous it might break. So did Karen, apparently.

“This apartment’s only made for one person, you know,” she said to me testily. “So could you at least stop walking around and just sit on the opposite side of the room so that the weight is evenly distributed?”

That was easy for her to say. She was sitting on her super soft bed that looked like it was stuffed with feathers and fluff. All I had to sit in was a chair on the opposite side of the room that had been made out of three thick branches and was about as comfortable as sitting on a pile of firewood. But since she was in such a bad mood, I figured I should just sit down and not antagonize her.

“So,” I said as my butt sank painfully into the super uncomfortable chair, “why did they say no?”

“Because they just don’t care,” she said with a shake of her head. “They’ve always lived up in the treetops and since they’re the only things in this world that can fly, they’ve never had to deal with anything on the ground. Their food all comes from the tops of trees, they build their cities out of materials from the tops of trees, and their bodies are so fragile they could really only get hurt by ground creatures.

“And so they want nothing to do with anything down there and as far as the Mr. Arthur thing goes, they all just think the ground creatures are stupid anyway and so they deserve what they get. Herfta says if someone like Arthur can convince them to do everything he says even though there’s only one of him and thousands and thousands of them, then it’s their fault for being so easily manipulated.”

“He’s sort of right, isn’t he?” I said, feeling pretty certain Karen would yell at me for saying that. But she didn’t.

“I guess so.” She sighed. “But it doesn’t mean the flying people shouldn’t do something to help. Just being smarter than the ground creatures should make them want to stop anybody from taking advantage of them. Especially when I just proved to them that Arthur’s been passing off other people’s accomplishments as his own. I really thought that would drive them crazy, since they respect art and intellect and fairness. But it seems they only care about those things if they exist in their treetop world. It’s really depressing.”

She fell back on her bed and sighed again.

“So . . .” I said uncertainly, “what do we do now?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. I couldn’t
see
her shrug because she was lying down but the way she said “I don’t know” sure sounded like she had just done a major-league shrug with her shoulders.

“This really sucks,” Karen said. “If we hang out on the ground we get chased by Arthur’s army and if we stay up here there’s no way we can do anything to stop him. And we can’t even really do anything up here because most of the city isn’t reinforced for us to walk on and we can’t get from building to building because we can’t fly.”

I was going to suggest that we just get back to the ground and take our chances but then I remembered how close we had come to getting killed when Arthur’s soldiers had caught us. I had to imagine that my cell phone alarm ringing could only save us so many times before they figured out what it was or stopped being scared of it. I pulled out the phone and looked at it and saw that we didn’t even have that line of defense anymore: the battery was about to die because I forgot to turn it off. Good going, Iggy.

Karen was now quiet and lost in thought. Since I didn’t know what to say and my butt was practically numb from the branches in the chair cutting off my circulation, I stood up and walked out of the room. Karen could clearly hear the floor creaking as I left but she didn’t even bother to say anything. It was the first time I’d seen her actually quiet. Sadly, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would.

I went to the wooden railing at the edge of the walkway outside Karen’s room. I looked over the side and couldn’t get over how high up we were. I’ve never been afraid of heights, but my mom is. She freaks out if we get a room on the second floor of a motel, so I could only imagine what kind of meltdown she would have if she was standing on a rather rickety walkway suspended a few hundred feet off the ground. But I liked the feeling of being this high up.

I could understand why the flying people sort of didn’t care what was going on below them. If I could fly in my frequency, I can guarantee I would do everything possible to not interact with the people who were mean to me on the ground. I guess I’d still hang out with Gary and Ivan and my mom and dad but since they wouldn’t be able to fly, I could see even getting bored with them. And so if there were other people who could fly, I’d probably spend more time with them and less time with my earthbound friends and family. Well, unless the other flying people were jerks. I mean, if the only other people who could fly were Frank Gutenkunitz and his bully friends then that would be about as bad as it could get, unless the fact that we all were able to fly suddenly made them decide we had a lot in common and should agree to see the best in each other. But then I couldn’t imagine what would be the best inside Frank and his goons, even if they
could
fly. They’d still be the mean bullies who made my life miserable but now they’d be able to chase me through the sky and beat me up in the tops of trees in addition to making my life terrible on the ground.

Man, I couldn’t even have a good daydream about the world I had left that morning. Maybe it was better that I
was
trapped in this frequency.

Before I could think about that for too long, I noticed that the cat who thought it was a dog was down at the bottom of the tree with its paws on the trunk and its tail wagging, staring up at me. The cat was too far away for me to yell down to and since I didn’t want to disturb anybody, I just waved at it. Apparently the cat had really good eyesight because it spun around in a circle like it was excited and I heard the faintest meow come from it. Man, this cat was loyal, if nothing else.

As I stared down at it, I felt someone else looking at me. I turned and saw the girl again. But this time, she didn’t disappear. She looked a bit startled at first, but then she just stood there and stared at me. The setting sun was making everything turn orangey brown, and her white clothes and pale skin made her almost appear to be glowing. She was sort of dressed the way kids are when they play angels in school recitals, except her outfit was prettier than that. It was like a long nightgown or robe but it had lots of twirly patterns embroidered on it. She had a belt tied around her waist that showed how thin she was, and on her feet she was wearing white shoes that sort of looked like ballet slippers except that they were pointier and had almost foamy-looking soles. And she was really really pretty. Like, she’d be the prettiest girl in my school hands down and Cheryl Biggs would probably go insane trying to get her transferred so that the flying girl wouldn’t be more popular than she was.

I just stared at her, probably looking like an idiot, before I finally summoned up the courage to say something.

“Hi,” I said like somebody who had just been hit in the head really hard. Then I immediately realized she probably didn’t even know what “hi” meant.