by Paul Tobin
Nate slowed down as he neared the two of them. He was a hundred feet away from them. Then fifty. He had his molecule reader out, ready to scan Susan at any moment.
And then he just stopped. Well, not exactly stopped, since he was flying through the air, consistently keeping about twenty feet away from Susan and her mom, who were parachuting down through space. The ground was only about a couple thousand feet below. Time to get moving, Nate!
But he wasn’t. He wasn’t doing anything. I couldn’t understand what was happening. Had something gone wrong? Did he need help? He was just staring at her. Just … staring at her.
Oh.
I yelled, “Nate! Quit staring! She’s pretty and all that, but we have a job to do!”
“Huh?” Nate said, apparently lost in a haze of Susan Heller–inspired idiocy. He had a big dreamy grin as he flapped in the air beside her, entirely invisible to her eyes (which he usually was anyway, if I might make that comment) and all but drooling as he marveled at her long brown hair and whatever else he found pretty about her. She has a good smile, I guess.
Except she wasn’t smiling just then, as she was falling from the sky above the grounds of the Polt Parachuting Program. At first, she’d been horrified and grimacing. Then, for a few hundred feet, she’d actually seemed like she was enjoying it. Now she was frowning. And complaining.
“Mom,” I could hear. “I wanted to go to the mall. I have shopping to do. Shopping.” The last word, “shopping,” was stretched out over two or three seconds, and perhaps a hundred feet of descent as they floated down through the skies among the other parachutists. Her voice was high, with a bit of a whine to it, and when she opened her mouth the rushing winds went barreling inside and puffed out her cheeks, making her sputter. Which made me laugh.
“I’m sorry you wanted to go shopping,” her mother was telling her. “But the coupons from those strange men with tea were for free skydiving today. Today only. Don’t you want to experience new adventures?”
“I don’t want new adventures! I want new shoes!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Who doesn’t want adventures? I would have traded all my shoes to be just where I was. Minus the impending giant-cat doom, of course. But time was running out. We were a few hundred feet above the ground. Actually, only a few hundred feet above the ground.
I said, “Nate! Scan her molecule!”
He looked back at me and said, “Oh. I wish she would smile.” He made it sound like the first line of a poem, and I was not going to have that. I simply wasn’t. So I zoomed closer to him, deciding that somebody better do something before time ran out. Obviously, I would have to take the initiative.
It was at that point when we had a little mistake. A tiny bit of a mishap. Some clumsiness. Nothing much to it. Happens all the time.
Here’s what happened.
I zoomed forward to grab the slingshot so that I could scan for the secret message myself, but I did it at the same time Nate decided he needed to fly around to Susan’s other side, I guess to admire her profile or whisper a poem into her ear or some stupid thing like that. Anyway, we collided.
With our heads.
There was a noise, like CLUDDDK.
And I sort of knocked Nate unconscious.
Again.
In my defense, it’s not my fault that my skull is harder than his. Maybe all that thinking softens his head? The point is, I was stunned for a bit, no more than a second, and when my head cleared I could see that Nate was out cold.
And he fell.
So, you see the problem here, right? Normally when I accidentally knock a boy unconscious, the boy just tumbles to the hallway floor, or the ground, or the wooden floor of the gym, or that one time at the swimming pool when we needed Candy Crable, the lifeguard. So, see? No big deal.
But this was the first time I’d knocked out a boy when we were way up in the sky. About eight hundred feet, at that point.
I had to save him.
I dived as fast as I could, flapping my arms and kicking my feet and pretending I was a cheetah, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. I mean, cheetahs are fast, but they do a lot better on the open plain than they do in the sky. Still, I was trying to feel fast, and a cheetah was the first thing I thought of.
“Cheetah!” I yelled, zooming down through the air. I was closing the gap. We were only a hundred feet apart. But the ground was only three hundred feet below us. Do you know what the ground looks like when you’re falling? It looks hard. When you’re walking on the ground it looks like just the ground, but when you’re falling it looks hard.
I yelled, “Nate! Wake up!”
Nothing.
I was flapping my arms like crazy. Like super-crazy. We were only fifty feet apart. The ground was still a couple of hundred feet below.
I was going to make it!
Then the antigravity cloth tore away from my left arm and went whooshing up into the skies, mocking gravity, and mocking me. It immediately unbalanced me, sending me into a dizzying spin. I lost track of Nate.
One hundred and fifty feet to the ground. I didn’t know what to do. I was starting to panic, but fought it off. I reached up and tore the tinfoil away from my right leg, hoping it would somewhat balance me so that I would quit spinning. It worked, but barely, and I wasn’t moving nearly as fast anymore. I quickly looked around, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t see Nate crumpled on the ground. I didn’t see him on the ground, which was good, but I also didn’t see him anywhere, which was bad. My throat was tight.
I didn’t see him.
I didn’t … THERE!
Nate was still limp. Unconscious. Plummeting. He was fifty feet from the ground and completely unable to control his antigravity cloth. I dived for him as fast as I could, but at an angle. My mind was screaming that I had to grab him immediately, as fast and as directly as possible, but it wouldn’t have done us any good if we both slammed into the ground at full speed after I caught him. I had to come at him from the side, grab him before he could hit. Before we could hit.
He was forty feet from the ground. We were over a small rise at the edges of the open field. The hill was no more than thirty or forty feet tall. I could have really used another thirty feet of distance.
Nate was thirty feet from the ground. Then twenty, and then ten. I was reaching for him. Stretched out. We were nine feet from the ground. Eight. Seven.
I grabbed his ankle and held on tight.
I pulled up as hard as I could, trying to stop Nate’s fall. I was wishing I’d done more weight lifting. I was wishing I’d done any weight lifting.
Nate’s fingers touched the ground. I was holding him upside down. I was yelling. We scared a bunch of sparrows up from the ground and they took to the skies as if they could never ever fall.
“Aaaargh!” I wasn’t really screaming. I was grunting with effort. Nate’s fingers were kicking up dust as I dragged him along the ground, trying to stop his fall. And then …
… and then …
… we started to move higher up into the sky.
Five feet into the air.
Six feet into the air.
Seven feet into the air. We weren’t exactly soaring.
Finally, we were about twenty feet into the air, and at that point I realized I wasn’t in the mood for being in the air right then. So I landed.
I was on my feet. And it felt good. It felt very good to be standing on solid ground. Although, to be honest, Nate was rather heavy. He started to slide out of my arms and I had to hug him really tight. Which of course meant that he chose that time to wake up. I bet he did it on purpose.
“Delphine?” he said. He was dazed. His eyes were unfocused.
“Nate!” I said. I was really happy that he was alive. I thought I’d lost my friend. I think it was that moment when I started to realize how quickly he’d become important to me. I wanted to understand science. I wanted to understand Nate. I wanted to call Liz Morris and tell her about the expression on Nate’s face when I’d kissed hi
m on the cheek. I knew that Liz would make fun of me and I wanted that, too, in a way.
So I kept hugging Nate.
“What happened?” he said. His words were slurred.
“You smacked your head into mine,” I said. I felt that it was best to put the blame where it almost assuredly and entirely more or less belonged. And, yes, I was still hugging him.
“I must have fallen,” he said. “And … you caught me?”
I nodded.
“Thank you,” he said. His arm went around my back and he started to hug me in return. It was our first full hug. But of course we’re only friends and so I’m only mentioning this for no reason in particular.
Nate looked into my eyes and said, “Delphine. I …” He stopped. Gulped. He was verbally stumbling. I was still hugging him. He said, “Delphine, I think that you’re really—”
It was at that exact moment that Susan Heller and her mother fell on us.
In their defense, they couldn’t have seen us, as Nate’s light wave–bending was still going on, meaning we were invisible.
“Ooomph!” I said, at the moment of the quite dramatic impact.
“Guhhh!” Nate said.
“Aaaph!” Susan Heller said.
“Awwpp!” That was from Susan’s mother. Nate and I went tumbling, and mother and daughter went sprawling, still bound together by their tandem parachuting harness. We all fell over. And then the parachute itself settled whimsically over us, trapping us together.
“What did we hit?” I heard from somewhere in the big nylon parachute that was covering us. It was Susan’s mother.
“I hate parachuting!” I heard. That was from the brat.
“I have an idea,” Nate said, whispering to me. He reached into his shirt and pulled out his electrical slingshot (of course I mean the molecular scanner, but you really do need to see the device, and then you’ll understand why I call it a slingshot) and also another small machine. It was shaped like a cell phone.
“What’s that?” I asked. I was keeping my voice down. The impact had wrecked Nate’s light-bending machine, meaning we were no longer invisible, but we were hidden by all the parachute cloth, and I wanted to stay that way.
“An illusion machine. I’ll project images so that you and I will look like two deer. We have to do something now, since they know they hit something.”
As Nate was speaking, two things were happening. The first was that he was reaching out and touching the slingshot to the back of Susan’s neck as she crawled past us, having unhooked herself from the parachute harness, and now bitterly complaining about missing all the good sales at the mall. She never even felt it when Nate touched her neck. The molecule was scanned. Success! Three parts of the formula retrieved.
The second thing that was happening was that Susan’s mom was gathering up the parachute, pulling it away from us, revealing our illusioned bodies. As soon as she did, Susan and her mother both gasped and stared. Nate and I stood very still.
Susan said, “Mom? Do you see them?” She pointed to us. Her eyes were wide.
“Y-yes,” her mother said. She looked … scared? They both did. Why were they scared of deer?
“Bears!” they both screamed. Oh, wow, did they scream. Nate looked down at his device. He grimaced.
“Uh-oh,” he said.
“Did you …?”
“Yeah. It’s on the setting for bears. An honest mistake. It was dark underneath the parachute!”
“Bears!” Susan and her mother screamed again. “They’re growling!”
“Do something!” I told Nate. I nudged him.
“They’re attacking!” Susan yelled.
And then they ran.
Honestly, it was kind of funny. I didn’t mind Susan running and screaming and I even secretly enjoyed how Susan tripped and fell at one point. Nate, of course, was heartbroken.
“Susan?” he said sadly, reaching out. His eyes were weepy. His lips were trembling. I rolled my eyes at him.
Boys.
Bears, too, I guess.
chapter
8
“Betsy,” Nate said. “Where are Vicky Ott and Marigold Tina?”
We were zooming along in Nate’s car, driving past Krallman Forest, and he had apparently forgotten my name.
“How would I know where they are?” I asked. “Don’t you have some … some science way to find them? And my name isn’t Betsy. It’s Delphine.” I tried not to sound irritated, and I tried not to punch Nate in the arm. It’s probable that I sounded irritated, though, and it’s positive that I punched him in the arm.
“I know you’re not named Betsy,” he said, rubbing his arm. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Piffle,” I said. “Nice try. But there’s nobody else around, so that’s the flimsiest excuse that—”
“Scanning for Vicky Ott and Marigold Tina,” the car said. The voice was feminine and coming from the glove box. I opened it up and looked inside. There wasn’t anybody inside. No weird robot car face, either. It was only a speaker. I was relieved. Though somewhat disappointed.
“That girl is looking in my glove box,” the car said.
“Oh, Betsy doesn’t like that,” Nate said, gesturing for me to close the glove box. I did.
“Your dog and your car both talk,” I said.
“Yeah. Listen, we spent too much time getting that molecule reading from Susan. Bosper can’t hold Proton much longer, so one of us will have to go find Vicky Ott and the other will need to scan the molecule on Marigold Tina.”
The glove box voice said, “Marigold Tina is at Bowen Science Center. Vicky Ott is traveling along Highway 36 at a speed of sixty-two miles per hour. She is three miles ahead of our current location.”
“That’s lucky!” Nate said. “Only three miles away!”
“Right! Drop me off, and then I’ll go to the science center, and—”
“I know the science center better than you do, so I’ll go there. You catch up with Vicky.”
“Uh, Nate? That doesn’t make any sense. I’m—”
Nate opened the car door. He touched a button on his belt and simply stepped out of the moving car, accompanied by my screams.
He didn’t fall.
He began hovering right next to the car, shooting along on several tiny jets that were whooshing from his belt.
“See you later!” he said, and then shot up into the sky and zoomed off over the horizon.
Leaving me sitting entirely alone in the passenger seat of his car.
I said, “Ahhh!” It was barely a squeak. The car was speeding down the highway.
I said, “AHHHHHHHHH!” It was about three levels above a shriek. The car was now absolutely roaring down the highway.
I rolled down my window, leaned outside, and screamed. “AHHHHHH!”
The car said, “ ‘AHHHHHHH’ is not a command, Driver Delphine Cooper. Please enter a command.”
“What?” I said, suddenly noticing how, despite the fact that nobody was behind the wheel, the car was traveling down the center of the proper lane at a reasonable speed.
The car said, “You are now in command of this vehicle. Do you wish to accelerate and overtake Vicky Ott?”
“Um, yes?”
“Noted,” the car said. We began to drive a bit faster.
I said, “So you’re some autopilot thing?”
The car said, “I am not a thing. I am Betsy.”
“Oh. Hi, Betsy. Should I be in the driver’s seat?”
“Unnecessary,” Betsy said. “But it’s your decision.” We were passing several cars. Each of them, of course, had drivers.
I said, “Actually, it might be necessary. We can’t have the other drivers thinking nobody is driving our car. It could cause a panic. Accidents.”
Betsy said, “I am currently projecting an illusion of a driver.”
“You are? What driver?”
“I have chosen to portray you, Driver Delphine Cooper, at fifty years of age.”
“Really? M
e? Fifty years old? I have to see that! Can I see that? Why can’t I see that?” I moved my hand through where a driver would be seated.
“The illusion is triggered only by the window. You would have to be outside if you wished to see. Would you like to step outside?”
“Is it safe to step outside?” It did not sound safe to step outside. I did not, for instance, have a belt that came complete with several mini-jets. Yet.
Betsy said, “No, it is not safe for you to step outside. You would fall and be seriously injured.”
I said, “I wouldn’t like that.” I was starting to detect a certain … tone in Betsy’s voice.
“If you wish, I could describe the image of you at fifty years of age,” Betsy said.
“Okay. Sure.” I suspected what was coming.
“Scraggly gray hair. Drooping eyes. Wrinkles. Splotchy, thin skin that—”
“Betsy?”
“Yes, driver?”
“Are you mad at me for something?”
“I am not capable of being angry.”
“Oh. That’s a relief, because—”
“But if my programming did include emotions, then it is entirely feasible that your unnecessary and unwelcome intrusion into my association with Nathan Bannister, the mastermind of my creation, could trigger irritation, annoyance, aggravation, and similarly justified feelings.”
“I see.”
“Further, my sensors detect traces of your lipstick on Nathan’s cheek. You have kissed him.”
“What? I mean, I did, but I don’t even wear lipstick! Why would I wear lipstick? Mom would kill me if I ever wore lipstick. So I don’t. Except for a couple of times at Liz’s house when we tried it on, but mostly I just wrote ‘dork’ on Liz’s arm, and then it didn’t wash off for three days, and she had to wear long-sleeved shirts and pretend she was sick during gym class, but none of that matters because I didn’t wear lipstick when I was kissing Nate, and it was only a ‘thank you for saving me from getting hippo-chomped’ kiss on the cheek because, again, not romantic, and—”
