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“Always,” says Andrew.
They shake hands, they workout and talk. Other players arrive, subjecting Andrew to a chain of greetings and fresh introductions. He’s already met the other two standouts, both seniors, both set for high slots in the draft. The agile running back Faars and the hulking safety Marques.
They go to breakfast.
Summer classes start. Andrew has a full schedule, physics, chemistry, calculus. Devaris often texts him, often knocks at his door, pulling him to parties full of people Andrew couldn’t care any less about.
He likes Emilia. She often texts him, they often meet and talk over her lunches in the complex café. He takes her to dinner. He listens to her laughter, his eyes on the black mess of her hair to her brow and around her shoulders, to her high cheeks, blushing, to the perfect pink bow of her lips split into her smile. He’s lost in her eyes, gold eyes that chose to look at him.
They sit on his car. They talk, they kiss. Dark figure touching light.
Andrew is obvious in the field.
Where he has known all others as defined by their absence–the void behind clothing, the slow radiation of body heat–his form is different. His is the luminescent center, the golden origin, the fundamental context for all other objects as he moves them. From the first day of his true gift, he knew himself apart from all else and while he could move his clothing or his backpack as it hung from his shoulders or the phone in his pocket, he felt pushback when he tried to move himself, something he could interpret clearly as Not yet.
“So when?”
There have been few nights when he didn't prod the feeling. In his old bedroom, in his room at the beach or alone in hotel rooms his parents would pay for when athletics brought overnight stays. He would try it in different positions and different states of mind, the little attitudinal changes from day to day. Always, Not yet.
Even now as his phone and a baseball orbit him. He could go outside and do the same with cars. Not yet.
He pushes. “When?”
Clearly, as if spoken. Not yet.
“Why not?”
He pushes until he feels all but physically knocked back.
It can kill you.
From the height? No, that isn’t right. He wouldn’t suddenly lose himself unless he rose high enough to risk hypoxia, and neither would he lose it so high, he’s looked on planes in the field. What could it be? He would move his body, the same as a baseball, the same as his car or his father’s truck, the same as a shipping container. Simple, surely.
He thinks.
He feels the gentle ringing. “If I’m moving my body, I’m using this on my body. I could do to myself what I did to the bear.”
Yes.
He feels the change, mental and physical weight lifting as he rises into the air, but in his surprise he relinquishes and falls onto his bed and bounces to the floor where his baseball hits his back but he doesn’t notice. He’s focused again, reaching for his brilliant center where he now finds no pushback, only his excited apprehension as his grip surrounds his form and he becomes weightless, moving himself up and over his bed and dropping.
He sits up and silently roars in success, beating his fists and pounding his chest and rising again. He loses himself in it, not returning until the sound of his alarm.
He jogs to the gym where’s almost frantic, his warm-ups intense, every movement as hard and fast as ever. Gerard, his trainer, says “Hell yeah man, get at it,” but his demeanor changes at Andrew’s ferocity continues through every set.
Bench. “Another fifty.” Gerard checks his tablet and with hesitation adds the plates. No difference.
Gerard asks “Are you okay? Something happen?”
“I feel great, really pumped today.”
“That’s good but you can’t get hurt.”
Andrew laughs, “When was the last time a player hurt themselves working out?” When this is met with silence he says “That’s what I thought. Another fifty.” Gerard adds it, Andrew continues, no difference.
“Where do you get this from? Jesus.”
“Gotta be ready.”
He showers and runs to class where there’s no chance he’ll focus. His recorder is out, next to a notebook he poorly fills. The hall is large and newly remodeled and bright by hanging lights, each row has a single long counter for its desk space and blue like the sound panels on the windowless white walls and he thinks if he could see the sky he wouldn’t be able to stay. The class moves slowly, especially for his absentmindedness, and when his professor finishes he leaves immediately.
Marques finds him at a table and he barely remembers their conversation. His afternoon is in a windowed lab, but there’s balance in being on his feet.
He’s out as quickly as before, running across campus. Through the plaza, past the main auditorium and the stadium, to his dorm and up the stairs and to the door with lock spinning and when the door shuts back he’s in the air. The now-familiar weightlessness returned, he moves in a hover, legs crossed, hands on his knees. His pose isn’t static, he can move his arms and pivot, flip and feel no disorientation, the ceiling is down.
8 foot ceilings and 500 square feet are not an ideal area to practice. It was fine for a week, by the next Andrew would rather be caught than be stuck another day in his dorm. No way around it, somewhere no one will see him, somewhere close enough to jog, somewhere he can rise quickly.
He’s seen trail cameras in the field, little boxes in boxes, tiny components slightly brighter than their surroundings, while street cameras are obvious even outside the field. There’s planes, but he’s small and dark and he has two ways of seeing their approach. There’s radar, he’d read by size as a bird but he’s not sure about his movement, then he has an unexpected sudden certainty: You don’t need to worry about radar that he doesn’t question for his excitement.
There are many groves in the city and he looks at each. One uninterrupted swath is ideal, subdivisions to its north and south but no paths through it. A short run takes him to the grove and he finds a spot where the fences are bowed from weather and overgrowth and when the road is clear he jumps into the brush. He pushes through until he sees he’s deep enough, then gives a last check. No figures anywhere close, no boxes attached to trees. There are no full towers in Gainesville, the stadium is the tallest but even if it were day and the sky were clear, someone there looking at the exact spot might fail to see him, or fail to distinguish anything about his shape beyond an errant blur. He has no way to measure altitude, but with the stadium as his reference he can estimate.
He has to get that high, first.
He hesitates. He’s comfortable with movement from his practice and he knows the field makes no distinction in height or distance, no difference in being forty feet up in the trees or in his fourth-floor dorm. He doesn’t fear heights, but this is time for caution.
He rises, already so accustomed to weightlessness that he relaxes, legs slightly bent, arms loose at his sides. He realizes he feels no wind, but the change in view is satisfying, and now peeking above the canopy he sees no lights except those of the stadium and a distant radio tower. He looks up, checking for planes, finding none, then repeating. Rise until I’m high enough. Rise until I’m high enough.
He launches.
He was prepared to force ascent until he was certain of his invisibility, now he continues because he doesn’t want to stop. The dark mass of trees falling away as the city spreads until the cars are flecks of light and a thumb with arm outstretched covers most of the stadium. He soars, the city always in view as he goes into rise and fall until he doesn’t even care about whatever radar blip he might produce by releasing his grasp, bringing weight and the feeling of wind back to his body and sending him into a dive that he does twice more to know the sensation.
His self returns only when he notices the darkness on the horizon, racing to return where he started from, again holding himself in the canopy to check for any who might see him.
He runs back to his apartment and changes, he should already be at the gym.
He wonders if he smells like the sky.
Gerard greets him near the door. “Morning, Andrew. Not like you to be late.”
“Yeah, sorry about that, I was out on a run and lost track of time.”
“Going to be too tired for weights?” asks Gerard, a knowing grin.
“Do I ever seem tired?”
“Don’t know. Can’t tell with you. Do I?”
"No clue."
The following night he has added a digital watch — long velcro straps, very secure — and black tinted goggles branded for use in skydiving, though he leaves them behind. His routine is the same, jogging to the forest, timing his arrival with an empty road, making his way through. Waiting in the canopy again, checking for aircraft again, and just before he launches he thinks he needs to find more places to start from.
The summer passes. A Thursday night, dinner with Emilia and a kiss at her apartment door then back to his dorm. Conditioning is complete, his classes have finished. August camp starts in ten days that are otherwise his to use. With the watch he has an idea of his speed: variable, seemingly as fast he wants. Atlanta will be easy, as he’s already taken a dead sprint west, far over the gulf, the lights of the coast small in the distance. Tonight he goes northwest, with the route studied and the scant landmarks visible at night memorized as best he can. A paracord compass wristband is next to his watch, and in some sense of prudence he’s added an insulated mask to go below the goggles.
The watch and compass help but the only useful landmark is the Atlanta airport. he finds his suburb and the thicket he planned to drop into. He lands and jogs a familiar route.
His father is in his office, there’s heat from the small television. Andrew is up the stairs, through the mudroom, past the kitchen, knocking on the door of his father’s office.
“Andrew? I didn’t hear your car—” thoughts connect.
“I can fly.”
James runs a hand through his hair. “Are you hungry?”