Flight (22 page)

“I, too, am lost.”

Prissi was used to Nancy having weekly
swainswoons.

“Who, now? Electron-boy?”

“Migod, no. He’s such a prion. Twisting and
turning and folding everything around.”

“Then who?”

“Guess.”

“I thought I just did.”

“Guess again.”

Prissi went for the dark horse.

“Dog Dalmain.”

Nancy batted her crew-cut eyelashes as she
flashed her village idiot smile.

“I think he wants to have my baby.”

“It’d be a beautiful gob of protoplasm.”
Prissi weighed the possibilities before asking, “Secret share?”

Nancy nodded and said, “Deal. Tell all.”

When Prissi remained silent, Nancy gave in
and gave the correct response, “Words ensnare.”

“I saw Jack last night.”

“Ultra epic uber-shock!”

Before Prissi agreed to tell Nasty Nancy the
story she was begging to hear, she insisted they scan all of the
material they had discovered and input it into both of their
mypods. As soon as they finished, Prissi delayed further by
suggesting they leave to get something to eat.

They walked around the corner of the library
so they could sit in the sun in Bryant Park. The small park was
about half full. At the north end, near the Indian and Cote
d’Ivoire vegan stands, a flock of wingers were slumped on their
castplast perches drinking frothy emoos and picking at eggplant
kebabs, lafels and small balls of deep-fried bosmotic rice. On the
other side of the park, the tables were filled with walker workers
drinking Irn Bru and scarfing Jersey9s with kraut and catzup.
Prissi and Nancy made their way to the Middleground where tall
stools for walkers were placed alongside perches. In a silent
reminder that Prissi had offered to pay for lunch, Nancy climbed up
on a stool and tossed her pak on the counter space next to her to
save a place for her roomie.

“What do you want?” Prissi asked.

“Something unhealthy, please.”

“Unhealthy caloric or unhealthy
chemical?”

Nancy flared her clipped wings in
defiance.

“Both, if they have it.”

Prissi came back with batter fries and a tube
of Bakon-Cheez Sqrt for Nancy and pom seeds and a bottle of AO
Storm for herself.

Nancy looked at Prissi’s tray with a frown
and whined, “Traitor. I read those anti-oxidant drinks can kill
you.”

“I almost fell out of the sky today. I have
to be good.”

Prissi froze at the implication of what she
had said. She sighed in relief when Nancy smiled ruefully and said,
“Yeah, well if you have to be good, I have to be beyond perfection.
I’m starting to look like a bumble bee. I have to lose eight kees
before I can flap a wing. Which deprezzes me, which makes me want
to eat. So, I’m eating. And if you were a trueblu friend, you’d eat
with me. C’mon eat. Be like me. Be deprezzed. Skru up. I know you,
too, have a deep-seated wish to be a walker again.”

“No, I have a not as sub-conscious as it once
was wish to be a big-butted LT winger, which doesn’t work very
well.”

The food was mostly gone, as was the sun,
before Prissi finished her story. She opened her hands into a
finger bloom, “So, what do you think?”

“I think Jack is coy.”

“That’s it? Coincidences, inexplicables,
freeieekin codes and all we have is Coy Jack?”

“We, especially you, don’t have Coy Jack. I
don’t think anyone has Coy Jack. God, he is so oompa… but I don’t
trust him. Why is he doing what he is doing?”

Prissi offered up Jack’s implausible excuse,
“To help find Joe?”

“And why would he do that? You’re the one
that told me they didn’t mesh.”

“Maybe because Jack wants to be a hero. If he
found Joe, he’d be that, plus it would be a way to rub Joe’s face
in it. Obviously, he came to see me because he knows Joe was my
NQB. He thought if I knew, then, with his charm, he could get it
out of me.”

Nancy laughed, “And plenty more
probably.”

“Yeah, when the poles freeze over.”

“Hey, could be happening. Check the weather.
You said you didn’t get to finish your talk with Jack. If your
theory is true, then why would he leave before he had any
information about Joe? And where did he go?”

The way Nancy asked the question, Prissi knew
that her friend had a better answer than what she had been able to
come up with.

“I don’t know. Maybe homing with
friends.”

Nancy bellowed so loudly that several people
looked toward where the girls were sitting.

“You’ve used that word twice. Friends? Cilly,
think of what you’re saying. People as rich as Jack and Joe
Fflowers don’t have friends. They don’t have friends because they
can’t have friends. They either have enemies or sycophants or
Bambi-eyed dreamers, or predators. Even if they could have a
friend, it would have to be a putinly rich friend, otherwise Jack
or Joe would always question whether it really was a friend or just
another person trying to get something. And if the friend is a rich
kid, then think about that for a second. What rich family is going
to hide a kid from another, even richer, family?”

“So, Joe and I aren’t friends?”

“You’re his, but he isn’t yours. Friends
trust each other. Like us. Did Joe trust you enough to tell you
what he was going to do? No? So, if he didn’t do that, it meant he
didn’t trust you, and if he didn’t trust you, then, by definition,
he ain’t your friend. QED.”

Even though Prissi had ambivalent feelings
about Joe, it still wasn’t easy for her to hear Nancy’s logic. More
in her defense than because she believed it to be true, she said,
“Maybe he was protecting me.”

“From what? “

“Maybe from lying. If I knew where he had
gone and a hawk or teacher asked, then I’d have to lie.”

“Which is what a friend should be happy to
do.”

Prissi was sure she didn’t want to go down a
path she and Nancy had traversed before in late night lights-out
sessions. Instead, she asked, “So what do you think?”

“My guess is that Jack may be trying to
connect with some rad-eco walker group that might have been part
of, or know about, Joe’s going underground. Maybe that’s why he
looked so graggy. Playing the part. “

“Maybe he’s sincere.”

When Nancy chortled a half-eaten fry exploded
from her mouth, flew past Prissi’s shoulder and crashed into the
back of her perch.

“Ick.”

Nancy rolled her eyes in a way that reminded
Prissi of a Qatar doll.

“My poor lost fry is disgusting, but a dirty,
stinking boy warms your soul.”

“I can’t help it. I’m fifteen.”

“Well, I’m fifteen and I can easily help
it.”

“You’re an anomaly.”

Nancy smiled in appreciation at Prissi’s
compliment.

“Tell the lovely anomaly again about the
numbers on the paper.”

“213? SFE-B/TZT/K.”

Nancy wrote what Prissi said on the counter
with a finger dipped in catzup.

“K is probably Jack. So if K is a J, then we
go back a letter in the alphabet and TZT becomes SYS, see you soon,
which really just confirms that you’re on the right track. And he
wants to see you at 213 something street in a lower apartment or
basement, or, if the numbers are off by one like the letters, 212
or, maybe, 102.”

“But what about the SFE-B?”

SF could be about safety. Or San
Francisco—what’s left of it. Or, the arrow refers to those letters
and not the numbers. So one down from SFE-B would be TGF-C. Does
that do anything for you?”

“No.”

Well, he’s not a genius and I am, so let’s
see if the skip a letter backward rule also applies to the SFE-B,
which would be… RED-A. Oh, yeah. Red A. Red A.”

Nancy scooted off her perch and did a quick
war dance.

“And what, my boarding school friend, what
would be the very first thing a boarding school student would think
of if I said Red A.”

Prissi shook her head, “I have no idea.
Ready? Does Red-A mean ready?”

“C’mon, Cilly, think. If a not too smart
boarding school guy, you know, a Bissell kinda guy, was making a
bad pun, what would a Red A mean?”

Prissi jumped off her perch and did the same
dance that Nancy had done.

“Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne.”

“Right. Hawthorne. Probably the name of the
street. Let’s see if I’m right.”

Both girls pulled out their mypods and raced
to see who could be first to input “Hawthorne.”

Prissi slunk back on her perch in defeat.
“Aw, stinkin’ freesia. Eleven Hawthornes. That’s a lot of
possibilities. How are we supposed to figure that out?”

Nancy shook her head as her fingers kept
flying over the mypod pad. When she finally looked up, she was
grinning in triumph.

“Let me ask you, my occasionally sagacious
friend, if you were looking for a lost soul, where would you be
more apt to look? Uptown or Mudtown?”

“Mudtown.”

“Correct. And since he is boy and, worse, a
Bissell boy, you can figure the code is not too, too cypherotically
cryptic. So, to hell with all the Hawthorne permutations, my deb
card is bet on a little street in Mudtown. If, my beauty, if you
want to limb-lock your mysterious scion, fly your not quite fat
butt down to 213 or 102 Hester Street and look in the basement
window.”

“Scarlet Letter. Hester Prinne. And there’s
just one Hester Street?”

“Just one, and it’s in Mudtown, so that has
to be it.”

“What about the arrow? What’s that mean?’

When Nancy’s shoulders went up in a shrug,
the corners of her mouth drew down in a frown.

“Don’t know. Maybe Cupid. Cupid with his
arrow.”

Again, Nancy leered and, after a second,
Prissi leered back.

“I can’t go there. I already got attacked
today in the village and Mudtown’s even worse.”

Prissi wrapped her arms around her wings.
“Ooooh, ooooh, it’s far too dangerous for me. Maybe, just maybe,
you could go for me? You know…as my best, bester, bestest
friend.”

Prissi accompanied this improbable suggestion
with a simpering smile. As soon as she saw the anguished look on
Nancy’s face, Prissi knew she had made a horrible mistake.

Nancy seemed on the verge of tears when she
said, “Stop it. You know I’m can’t go with you. The only place I’m
going is home.”

Prissi apologized, “I’m sorry, Nano, I forgot
you’re clipped. It’s hard to imagine us not flying to Waterville to
get good bad food.”

“I've got to get home.”

Nancy made a theatrical tata with her
hand.

“Okay. Maybe, I’ll let him languish for a day
or so. I can use the time to figure out what devious things Jack’s
grandfather was doing sixty years ago. Or, maybe I can track down
some of the people mentioned in the stuff we found…you know, maybe
get more names for the people in that pix…. Sound okay?”

Nasty Nancy nodded approval of the plan as
she threw their trash down the co-gen pipe. On their way out,
Prissi read the plaque at the park’s entrance.

“I wonder why it used to be called Needle
Park.”

Nancy did a community theater imitation of
furrowed brows.

“Maybe because scholars sat out here after a
long day researching or writing about something of interest only to
themselves and four other people in the world. They staggered out
of NYPD, came here, got hyper-caffeinated on triple eso’s and
needled one another.”

Prissi shook off Nancy’s explanation like a
catcher with an over-eager pitcher.

“You don’t think it was a place filled with
immigrant or grandmotherly knitters?”

“Nope, that would be Needles Park.”

“Maybe an Egyptian obelisk used to be sited
here.”

“Probably just some guy who donated
something, or maybe it had a lot of pine trees here once. Ooops.
Look. You want that one?”

A yellow rubberized bi-bus, with its lower
deck of perches nearly empty while most of the upper level seats
were full of walkers, pulled up to the curb. Nancy nudged her head
into Prissi’s wing.

“Tytle.”

“Tytle back and thanks a lot.”

Nasty Nancy scuttled toward the bus looking,
to Prissi, like a baby beaver returning to the comfort of its
mother. When the bi-bus made a huge sigh as it pushed itself back
up on its air cushion, Prissi felt like the words had been taken
out of her mouth.

After the bus disappeared into the twilight,
Prissi opened her kanga to make sure everything was secure. When
she was satisfied, she started to read the winds for pre-flight. As
she flew south toward Gramercy Park, Prissi fought the urge to make
a quick detour over the Hester Street area of Mudtown. Her eyes and
mind were tired from hours at the fiche reader and puter screens,
but the fatigue from the tedium of what she had been doing only
reinforced her desire for physical exertion. The thing holding her
back was the fear left over from the morning. It wasn’t so much the
attack by the keds as the fear she had felt when she was over the
Hudson and her body was refusing to do her bidding. She flew a
half-dozen tight figure eights as she considered what to do. The
sun, defeated by the day, was glowing orange behind New Jersey’s
hills. To the north, strips of L&L lights, green for launch and
red for landing, illuminated office buildings. The sky was swirling
with wingers leaving work. To the south, the decrepit buildings of
Mudtown had already fallen into a shadowy murk. Prissi considered
how, if she waited a few more minutes, she would be able to douse
her light and fly as a shadow against shadows.

Prissi slowly flapped her wings as she keyed
in the Hester Street address into her mypod before dropping a wing
and heading down Broadway. As she crossed 14th Street and Union
Square, she fought a flutter in her chest which she told herself
was nerves and nothing else. She counted down to First Street.
Broadway ended in the next block where it ran into the Houston
Street levee. Prissi doused her lights and looked down the
crepuscular tunnel made by the dark and decrepit buildings slung
along both sides of the canal made by a submerged Bowery Street.
The small girl canted her wings to rise above the height of the
abutting buildings. She wanted to avoid guy wires and bracing
girders as well as to keep an eye on those citizens who hovered
around the coproquette roof fires cooking their dinners. When she
came within a half klik of her destination, her mypod screen
displayed five small amber arrows. She continued flying over the
Bowery before making a wide right turn onto Hester Street—a narrow
duct of oily backwater. The last arrow disappeared and a star
flashed on her screen.