by Halli Gomez
There were mumblings and cheers throughout the group.
“If anyone is pregnant, has a heart condition, or is sensitive to motion sickness, they should excuse themselves at this point.”
I had no idea if I had motion sickness. I’d never been on a plane before, or a roller coaster, but I did love the feeling of jumping over speed bumps on my bike. Did that count? It didn’t matter. I had to experience this.
When the lights came on, everyone scanned the room, probably wondering who would be the first to puke. My money was on the blonde woman. Her face already had a green tint.
Next we were directed to locker rooms where we changed into flight suits and were given bottles of water. Then it was through metal detectors and X-ray machines, like at the airport, to the tarmac outside and the plane. My heart pounded.
Everyone rushed toward it like it was the lunch line and today was pizza today. With each step my neck twitched faster, and the urge to scream my excitement built up in my throat. I clamped my lips together. Mrs. Frances turned to me before she boarded the plane.
“Are you okay?”
“Great.” I said. “You?”
“I think so.”
I followed her up the ramp and into the empty fuselage. The walls, windows, floor, and ceiling were covered in white padding. The plane could double as a kids’ gym or a psychiatric facility.
“Everyone please strap yourselves to the rope running along the sides of the plane,” Mr. Armbretch said as he strolled through the cabin to check that we did it right. “We’ll fly for approximately thirty minutes to our desired altitude, then the plane will fly upwards. I recommend you sit as still as possible. That’s when people usually get sick. If you do, each flight suit has a few barf bags.”
Good to know. I stuck my hand in my right pocket. Yup, there they were. I pulled one out and showed Mrs. Frances. She nodded and patted her right pocket. I stuck mine back in but kept my hand around them. I squeezed, then opened. Repeat.
“Flight crew, strap yourselves in,” a voice announced from speakers in the ceiling.
Mr. Armbretch, a tall man, and a taller woman strapped themselves to the rope near the back of the plane and sat down.
The engines roared to life. The plane rolled forward. Faster and faster. Then up. My ears clogged. I swallowed hard, and they cleared. I wasn’t great at making small talk, especially with a teacher, but Mrs. Frances didn’t seem like she wanted to talk anyway. Her eyebrows were furrowed, and she stared at her hands.
“It will be fine,” I said.
She nodded.
We sat quietly. I focused on where we were going.
“We’re going up,” Mr. Armbretch said. “Remember, stay as still as possible.”
Really? He had to say that? The nose of the plane turned up, and my neck twitched. A wave of nausea rolled through my body. My hand squeezed around the bags again. I closed my eyes, tensed my muscles, and begged them to stay as still as possible. It was easier than I thought because suddenly each muscle felt like a hundred pounds. My neck wanted to twitch, but it was too heavy and collapsed near my shoulder. My shoulder didn’t have the strength to meet it. I sat there lopsided.
“Get ready, we’ll unbuckle in . . .,” Mr. Armbretch said.
The weight of my arm lessened. I lifted my head.
“Five, four, three, two, one. Now!”
We unhooked ourselves from the rope. I expected to float up, but I stayed on the floor. I pushed against the wall and zoomed to the ceiling. Ah, now I got the importance of padding.
Mrs. Frances unhooked herself as I pushed off the ceiling with my finger and floated toward her. She smiled, gave me a little push, and laughed as I bounced off the wall. This was the opposite of being stoned. Then I’d been too lazy to lift my hand, but now I felt like I was made of air. My neck twitched, but there were no muscles to hurt. My head just lobbed to my shoulder, then bounced back up.
I spun around and did a forward roll. Then did a backflip and saw the blonde lady. She was still green and curled into a ball clutching a barf bag. What would happen if something escaped it?
“Back to the straps everyone. Round one is just about up,” Mr. Armbretch said.
My heart sank as I strapped myself in.
The plane climbed again. I forced myself to stay still, squeezed my eyes shut, and balled up the barf bag to distract my neck. I listened to the engines until the noise stopped and Mr. Armbretch announced it was time to unhook again.
Round two of 1.8 g’s to weightlessness. Mrs. Frances and I grabbed hands and did rolls together. Round three, we opened our water bottles. Bubbles escaped and floated around the cabin. We chased after them and gobbled them up. By round four, we were all experts. Even the blonde lady uncurled herself and “swam” by me.
For the next twenty minutes, I floated up and crashed to the floor. The weightlessness was a high, better than any drug. I was a cloud, big and puffy. No bones or muscles to hold me down.
I turned to Mrs. Frances. I wanted to hug her. “You have no idea how much this means to me. Thank you again for arranging this.”
“My pleasure. You are a very special person. Do you know?”
I didn’t know. Not in the way she meant. Kids at school called me special, but it was their way of saying I was a freak without getting in trouble. Mrs. Frances was sincere. Something I’d always remember.
I sighed, sank into the padding, and tried to get the weightlessness feeling back. The wheels touched the ground. My neck twitched, and the shooting pain came back. I closed my eyes and imagined a cloud. For a few seconds I was floating.
MARCH 22
I would have loved a day off to recover, since we got back late last night, but we were forced to go to school because of tests. And I would have given anything to be back on that plane instead of in math with Mr. Nagel. I tried to get the feeling back, being pulled by the g-forces, then floating through the cabin, but every time my fingers touched the grimy school floor, I crashed back to reality.
Of course, Jay, Diego, and Rainn knew about it even before we went, and it seemed the entire school knew by the end of block two. It was a schoolwide game of telephone. I hoped this turned out better than the one I played in kindergarten when I said, “The dog shit on the carpet.” Wouldn’t you know it, that time everyone heard it correctly.
As soon as I walked into science, Mrs. Frances popped up and stood in front of the class, although no one noticed but me. People were deep into conversations about boyfriends, girlfriends, and an Instagram picture of a girl named Trish.
“Phones away everyone,” Mrs. Frances said. “Troy, Khory, come up, please.”
Up where? To the front of the class?
Most of the class slipped their phones into backpacks. I wanted to personally thank those who kept theirs out and their eyes off me.
“Yesterday Khory, Troy, and I went to Gravity Redefined, the company sponsoring the summer science program. I would love to talk about the workshops and simulators, but today I will give you a break from me and let you hear it from them.”
Mrs. Frances took a step toward her desk, leaving us on display like animals in the zoo, which actually wasn’t a far-off description of high school. I wanted to disappear into the wall, but my face was so hot, it had to be bright red and sticking out like a beacon. Thanks for blindsiding me, Mrs. Frances.
“Khory, you did the vomit comet?” Abhy asked, getting to the good stuff. No one wanted to know about a workshop.
“No,” she said. “But Troy did.”
Suddenly all twenty-five pairs of eyes were on me. No phones out. No heads on the desk. They stared at me. I took a step back.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
The invisible hand squeezed my chest. No sliding in slowly. No nice to meet you. Just right in for the squeeze. I planted my feet and took as deep a breath as I could, but a two-year-old couldn’t live on that amount of air. My neck twitched. My hands squeezed together. I pictured the empty
warehouse. A little air got in. Then I thought about floating and being the big, puffy cloud. I closed my eyes and put myself back in the plane.
Khory squeezed my hand. That one touch seemed to transfer her bravery like she was a superhero and her power was mind control. I lifted my hand. It wasn’t weightless, but it wasn’t balling itself up.
“So it’s like floating,” I said. “Kind of like you’re a cloud. Really light. And you don’t have to do much to move, just a push off the wall or ceiling. But if you push too hard, you’ll bounce around like a Ping-Pong ball. It’s kind of hard to explain. You really had to be there.”
I opened my eyes. Talk about looking like an idiot. Everyone stared at me, but this time their noses weren’t crinkled, they weren’t pointing or laughing. They were smiling.
“What else did you do? I’ve seen videos of astronauts doing flips and stuff,” Eric said.
“I did that. Front flips, backflips. We opened water bottles and chased drops of water.”
“Did anyone get sick?” Esther asked and glanced at the teacher.
“No, I did not,” Mrs. Frances said.
“But there was this one lady.” I turned to Mrs. Frances. “The blonde lady, remember? She was pretty green for a while.”
“So, would you do it again?” Spencer asked. “What was the best part?”
“I would do it again in a second. I’d live on that airplane if I could.” I stared at the sea of faces. Everyone focused and interested. Not even Mrs. Frances commanded this kind of attention. They wanted to know what I had to say.
“The best part was that my body wasn’t in pain. For the first time since I was six, my neck didn’t hurt, my hands didn’t hurt. It was like I didn’t have Tourette at all.” I gasped. I said the word. In front of all these people. I squeezed my eyes shut. Then my hands. No laughs from the class, no comments about disinfecting my seat. I opened my eyes. They were still interested.
So I went on.
“That’s why I do these movements. The neck twitches. It’s Tourette. And when your head bobs to your shoulder ten, twenty times a minute or more, your muscles burn. But in the zero-gravity plane, I was like a cloud. Or a jellyfish. No muscles, no bones, just air.”
“Yeah, I never thought that you’d have pain like that. Sorry, dude. But it’s so awesome that the experience took it away,” Abhy said. “Mrs. Frances, will we do that in the summer program?”
“We are still working out the details, but that is what we have planned.” She nodded toward Khory and me. “Okay, class, if there are no more questions. We have our new chapter to go over.”
Khory and I went back to our seats. My legs were shaking, and my stomach did flips. I actually said the word out loud, and to people notorious for teasing me. I didn’t mean to, it just slipped out. And I survived it. Khory smiled at me as she leaned over and grabbed her notebook. I grinned back like I’d just leapt a tall building in a single bound.
. . . . . . . . . .
Mr. Price changed his mind about Khory babysitting. Sort of. She could take care of Jude only if her mom came over, too. Taking care of a baby was a huge responsibility, her dad said, and she had to be ready. But Khory and I knew the truth: he had to be ready. Hopefully he would be soon. I had a deadline.
After school, I rushed home and changed for my first job, cleaning rain gutters for a man who had broken his leg playing football. Mr. Cooper would never ask anyone to do household chores for him, but since he had broken his leg playing football (which he repeated several times), he couldn’t get on a ladder. The cast would be on for six weeks since it was a bad break, as happens with tackle football (sigh), and his rain gutters couldn’t wait that long. So basically, could I clean them? Yes, yes, I could.
But first I had an amazing idea to check out. I told Spencer I’d live on the airplane if I could, then I thought, why not? I grabbed a snack, sat down at my laptop, and googled International Space Station.
The idea of living in weightless conditions was intriguing, much better and more productive than living stoned. And no way I’d be able to get the smell of pot past Dad forever. NASA’s website had a lot of information on the space station: bios on past and current crew members, experiments like engineering designs and biomedical research, and classroom Skype lessons. Some astronauts were lucky enough to have spent a year there. That’s a good start, but I wanted to know if I could stay longer.
The doorbell rang. I closed my laptop and dashed to the front door.
“Hi,” Khory said.
She practically glowed. There was no shadow today. I wanted to pull her toward me and kiss her soft, strawberry-flavored lips. Then let my hand slide down her hair and get lost in the curls at the end. Instead I moved to the side and let her and her mom in. We closed and locked the door.
“Are you ready to babysit?” I asked.
“Yes, I’m excited. What time do you have to leave?”
“Soon. I’m not sure how much work I’ll be doing, and I didn’t get much homework done when I came home.”
I went over Jude’s routine with them. He was a pretty easy baby, and I already knew he loved Khory. She walked to the garage, and I got on my bike.
“Tell Jude I said hi. Remember, he likes his blanket with him in the family room, and there are little containers of mashed fruit in the pantry.”
“Are you sure you’re okay with this? You sound like his mother.” She kissed me. “If I have any questions, I’ll call you.”
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you, too.”
Mr. Cooper’s house was two stories with a tall, peaked roof and a yard Mr. Price would be proud of. Clearly the owner hadn’t let a broken leg keep him from chores on the ground. There wasn’t a single layer of dust or speck of dirt anywhere. I wiped my hand on my jeans before knocking.
Mr. Cooper opened the door, and it was clear why he needed someone to clean his rain gutters on the second story. He may have played football, but he was no Peyton Manning. He had a large stomach that hung over his jeans and goggle-thick glasses. Even if he didn’t have a cast up to his knee, I wouldn’t have recommended he climb to the top of a ladder.
I smiled, then introduced myself. Mr. Cooper studied me and scrunched up his face. “You okay? Something wrong with your neck? You’re not on drugs, are you?”
My face grew warm, and I wanted to shrink into a ball. Was I limited to one explanation in my lifetime?
“No, Sir.” Not the kind he meant. “It’s Tourette.”
His face scrunched up a little more, then he shrugged his shoulders. “Whatever.”
I said it again. Twice in one day. And he didn’t care either. I practically floated behind him to the garage.
I climbed to the top of the ladder. He watched for a few minutes, maybe to make sure I wouldn’t fall and break my leg, then went inside. When the door clicked, I pulled out my earbuds and turned on music. Today was a great day for Shinedown.
I thought about the space station. I had questions—well, one big one that Mr. Armbretch could probably answer, if he didn’t laugh me out of the room first.
ME: Assuming I can get there, would it be possible for me to spend the rest of my life on the International Space Station?
Mr. A: Why would you even consider that? Didn’t you see Matt Damon in The Martian? All he wanted to do was get back to his family.
ME: I don’t care about a family or kids.
Mr. A: Well, did you ever think someone else might want a turn? Or funding could run out? And we have no idea what long-term zero gravity does to a person.
ME: Dude, does it look like I care?
I came back to reality and focused on my job before I fell off the ladder. I pulled out sticks and twigs, got the hose and washed away leaves and cobwebs, then made sure the water flowed freely. Sweat dripped into my eyes. A shower was mandatory as soon as I got home, but the physical activity felt good. It lessened my stress, which lessened my tics.
Tourette. I still couldn’t believe I sa
id it out loud in class. “Tourette.” I said it again, although no one was on the roof to hear me. I still didn’t like the sound of it and wouldn’t be shouting it in the hallway, but I’d completed another item on my list. Another step toward number ten. But the more steps I took toward it, the less sure I was about my final destination.
MARCH 25
A little time with Khory, another job, and a TS meeting. I had actually looked forward to today. It could’ve been the day I shared my story. If I could talk about Tourette with my science class, why not with a bunch of ticcers who would definitely understand? And if I could share good news, maybe the Isenhours would take the Tim Howard picture for David.
I peeked in on Jude, who was still sleeping. He’d be asleep for the night by the time I got home. I sighed. We still had time. And with the way life was going, we might’ve had even more.
The silver Mazda pulled up, and Khory got out. I met her at the front door, and she waved to her mom.
“What’s going on? She’s not staying?”
“No. I’m on my own today. Surprise!” Her eyes twinkled, and she grinned. “But I’m a little freaked out, so don’t make a big deal about it. Okay?”
“Okay. I promise.”
Did this mean I found a babysitter for Jude and could check it off my list? I wanted to pull out my list right there. But really, I wanted to celebrate for her. This was a huge step toward her freedom. I hated to leave.
I kissed her. “Sorry, but I have to go.”
“Go. Do your sweaty work and leave me in this incredibly air-conditioned house.”
I kissed her again, then rode to Mrs. Blackwood’s house with a surge of extra energy. The house was similar to Mr. Cooper’s but weathered and worn. Maybe she called me because her neighbors complained. People in my neighborhood were notoriously cranky about messy yards.
