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  FREEFLY

  MICHELE TALLARITA

  Cover art by Casey McKenna

  [email protected]

  Copyright 2012 by Michele Tallarita

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the writer, except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks are not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  CHAPTER 1

  Damien

  My name is Damien Savage. I am six-foot-one inches tall and 162 pounds. I have black hair and brown eyes. I am currently getting beat up.

  “What’s the matter, fudge-face? Don’t want to fight me?” crows Joe Butt as he swaggers closer with his fists raised. He has red hair, a pink face, and a cleft chin. I estimate that he is six-foot-four inches tall and 230 pounds, which makes him 68 pounds heavier than me. We are in my high school, in the intersection between the C- and D-wings. Joe Butt’s goons surround us, sniggering as they watch me look for an escape, their biceps bulging from their T-shirts. They are athletes. I know their names: Kevin, Jason, Hank, Leslie, and Leslie. That’s right, bulky jerk guys named Leslie. Life’s little ironies.

  Joe Butt jumps toward me. “Boo!”

  I jump back, smacking into one of the Leslies, who flings me forward again. Joe Butt sticks up his fist in time to collide with my face. I stagger backwards, clutching my right eye. Wetness touches my fingers. Blood.

  “You were talking to Tiffany?” Joe Butt says, his eyes flaring with anger. Tiffany is his girlfriend, a tall girl with long, black hair and a lean body. She flirts with me in calculus, but I’ve concluded this is only because I let her see my homework. I do this so she will stop talking.

  “Well?” Joe Butt says.

  I remain silent.

  Wham! Joe Butt’s fist smashes into my right cheek. I fly backwards, into one of the Leslies again, who wraps his arms around me to hold me in place. Butt leaps forward and jabs me in the stomach. I wheeze, slumping in Leslie’s grip.

  “Teachers coming!” cries Hank.

  Leslie’s grip loosens and I fall to my knees, still wheezing. Butt and his goons take off down the D-wing. I climb to my feet and limp away.

  My name is Damien Savage. In case you didn’t pick it up yet, I am a dork. I have been dealing with Joe Butt since roughly kindergarten. I have often suspected that the source of his bullying is having the last name Butt.

  I walk to my locker, which is in the B-wing, and spin the combination in carefully, 16, 34, 37. Tonight, I will need four different textbooks: physics, advanced calculus, biology, and microbiology. I scan the covers carefully, ensuring that they are the correct ones, before sliding each one into my backpack.

  I walk to my car. Each day, I park as far away from the school as possible. Jocks like Joe Butt and his goons compete for the spots near the entrance, so it’s better to opt out and walk an extra hundred feet. My car is a Pontiac, black, the Grand Prix model from 1997. I wash it every three weeks, and wax it every three months. It was a gift from my parents for my seventeenth birthday. I like it.

  I open the passenger-side door, deposit my backpack, and get in the driver’s side. In the rearview mirror, I examine my face. A purple bruise spreads across my right cheek. Blood crusts over a cut near my eye. I will avoid my parents tonight. Eventually, when they notice, I will tell them I got hit with a hockey stick in gym class. My history of athletic failure will corroborate this story.

  I jerk the engine on, creep across the parking lot, and pull into the street. The speed limit on the road adjacent to my high school is 15 miles per hour. I drive this speed exactly. I reach a red light and drum my fingers on the steering wheel.

  My house is fourteen minutes away from my school. My town is called Boorsville. It’s suburban and middle class. There is a Walmart, a shopping mall, and a laser tag arena. I drive past each of these on the way to my house.

  My street is wide, with streetlights every 35 feet, white sidewalks, and two-story houses with two-car garages. Little girls ride pink bicycles up and down the sidewalk. A basketball game occupies one of the driveways: middle-school-aged boys chasing each other beneath a metal hoop. I ease my car into the spot next to my house. I like to align the passenger-side door exactly with the front door, to create the most direct path.

  The house is empty. Mom and Dad aren’t home yet from their jobs at the post office. They are exceptionally happy, almost all of the time.

  I climb the stairs to my room. It has one window and a desk flat against the wall, so that the desk’s surface is flush with the bottom of the window. The room also has a chest of drawers, a small closet, a television, and a bed. I make the bed each morning. There is nothing on the floor, and nothing on the walls.

  I sit down at my desk and open my backpack, then pull out each textbook and place them in a neat stack. I pull two sharp pencils from my drawer and rip a fresh piece of loose leaf paper from the stack at my feet. I am about to start working when I realize I should probably wipe the blood off my face.

  The bathroom is directly outside my room. Since I’m my parents’ only kid, I’m the only one who uses it. (They have their own bathroom, attached to their room.) I stand before the sink and examine the cut near my eye more closely. By now it’s scabbing over, a reddish brown patch the shape of a hook, beginning at the corner of my right eye and curving inward for roughly half an inch. Not too bad. I open the cabinet beneath the sink and remove a packet of rubbing alcohol. I don’t want to die because of an injury inflicted by Joe Butt. I rub the moist cloth over the cut, which stings a little: the price of avoiding a death by Butt.

  I return to my room and sink down in front of my desk. For a few seconds, I shut my eyes and just breathe. I haven’t glanced at the digital clock near my bed, but I estimate it’s 3:30 p.m., which leaves me six hours and 26 minutes before I go to bed. I have roughly five hours of homework. When I complete this, I will remove a laminated sheet of paper from the drawer to my left and study it. It contains interview questions. One week from today—today is Tuesday, May 16—I will meet with a recruiter from GLOBE. GLOBE is an international academy for the sciences, accepting only juniors and seniors in high school. GLOBE is known for sending revolutionary scientific thinkers into the world. The inventor of Facelook, the Internet’s largest social network, spent his senior year at GLOBE.

  I desperately want to be accepted.

  I pick up one of my pencils, test the tip against my thumb, and crank it through the sharpener three more times. Then I open my physics book.

  Sammie

  My name is Sammie. I’m blond, five-foot-two, and could kick the crap out of you if I felt like it. In fact, I’m kicking the crap out of someone right now.

  “Sheesh! Calm down!” yelps Ronnie, the guy receiving the crap-kicking, as his head whips back from my last punch. He backs into the cracked wall of his house, leaning his hand against a rotting bookshelf. “I said I’d get you the money!”

  I stomp closer, getting in his face. The top of my head maybe reaches his chin, but his eyes widen in fear. I shove my hands against his shoulders, smacking him into the wall. “You said that last week, Ronnie!”

  “I swear! I’ll get it to you!”

  “Prove it!”
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br />   He nods wildly. He’s a skinny man with mousy brown hair, sunken eyes, and a hooked nose. “Okay, okay.”

  “I said prove it!”

  “If you’d just calm down, I’ll prove it!”

  I pull away from him and make a show of scrunching up my face, like I’m gonna explode with rage or something. Ronnie darts past me to his desk, whose surface is littered with fast food wrappers, ruffled stacks of paper, and brown packages. Knowing Ronnie, the packages don’t contain anything you’d send to your grandmother. He’s a drug middleman, the guy who hooks up the grower of the illegal stuff with the seller. He’s got a history of not coughing up the fees for my services.

  Ronnie ruffles through some hamburger wrappers, pulls open a few drawers. I walk to the grimy window. It’s gotta be close to four, with the sun slinking down the horizon and casting long shadows on the streets. Ronnie’s townhouse is in Philadelphia. Through the half-open window, the smell of roasting hot dogs wafts. People in business suits charge down the sidewalks, while cars inch along the road. In an alley between two buildings across the street, three men dressed in black huddle. I shiver.

  A knife appears at my throat.

  Ronnie hisses in my ear, “Tell your boss we negotiated for you to give me another month.”

  I take deep breaths. “And if I don’t?”

  He grasps my shoulder, and the cold metal blade touches my skin.

  It’s moments like these that normal people break a sweat.

  I shoot up toward the ceiling at the speed of light, knocking Ronnie back. The knife clatters to the floor. In half a second, I dive and snatch it up. I plant my feet on the ground in time to catch Ronnie from his initial stumble, wrapping one arm around his forehead and putting the knife to his throat with the other. This arrangement requires me to hover about a foot off the ground.

  “Please,” he mutters. His breath’s coming in little gasps. “Don’t kill me.”

  “Why shouldn’t I? You seemed pretty eager to do me in.”

  “I’ll pay you the money!”

  I edge the knife into his skin ever so slightly. “Swear?”

  “Yes! I swear!”

  I twist away from him, landing lightly on my feet. Ronnie bolts to his desk, pulls open one of the drawers, and thrusts a crinkled envelope at me. I take it and shove it in the back pocket of my jeans.

  “Thanks.” I head toward the window.

  “Wait!”

  I whirl around. Ronnie’s eyes are huge with fear. He leans on his desk with one hand, like it’s the only thing keeping him from collapsing.

  “You’re not going to tell your boss I tried to, you know, knife ya?” he says.

  I smile, turn back to the window, and promptly jump out of it.

  I rocket upwards, zooming close to the exterior of Ronnie’s townhouse, till I’m clear past the roof and soaring in the open air. May has brought warmth to this part of the country, and for that I’m thankful: I can wear jeans and a T-shirt without feeling like my limbs are going to freeze off. The city shrinks beneath me, the roads like thin lines on a map, the roofs of buildings like postage stamps. Only the skyscrapers remain intimidating, their slim upper stories jutting into the atmosphere.

  Ronnie’s made me late, so I tilt my body in a northeasternly direction—the watch strapped to my wrist doubles as a compass (how bout that?)—and power forward. Slung through one of my belt loops, a pair of sunglasses dangles. I grab them and slide them over my eyes. (This prevents my eyes from getting all watery from the rushing air. The “might have been crying” look isn’t good for a girl with a job like mine.) I put my hand on my back pocket to make sure the envelope full of money is still there. When I feel its bulge, I let out a long breath. The boss would’ve had my head on a plate if I didn’t get the money from Ronnie this time. Apparently, I’ve been too “lenient” with giving the guy extensions.

  I leave the city far behind, sailing over fields of corn, purple quarries, and a tree-covered mountain range (the Appalachians?). I spoke too soon when I said it was warm: the air’s gone crisp, and goosebumps have popped up all over my skin. Shivering, I glance at my watch. It’s 4:32 pm, and I was supposed to be back at 4. The boss is going to skin me alive.

  A brown cloud of smoke billows from a factory, and I swerve to avoid it. (If there’s anything I’ve learned over the years, it’s that you don’t fly through air the color of crap.) I’m getting close to my destination. Sure enough, the flat, complicated landscape of Reading, Pennsylvania, looms. The city of Reading has no towering skyscrapers, but is an intricate maze of squat, square buildings, rectangular apartment houses, and the occasional church with its cross sticking up.

  The Tower, a structure the color of red clay, sits on top of a green hill just outside the city, so that you can see it from almost anywhere in Reading’s streets. (You can always tell people who’ve never been to the city before, because their eyes catch on the Tower every few seconds.) I can’t blame them. Constructed in the early 1900s, the Tower is supposed to look like a battle castle of the Shogun Dynasty of Japan. It looks like a bunch of log cabins stacked on top of each other, each cabin smaller than the first, creating a pyramid effect. The roof of each cabin flares outward, and a single chimney slices through all of the roofs to leak smoke into the atmosphere. Because the Tower basically screams, “Look at me!” to anyone within a ten mile radius, you’d think this would be a bad place for a bunch of criminals to gather and do business. But the people I work for seem to think that breaking the law in a highly visible Japanese battle castle is the best way to avoid getting caught.

  Stretching my body into a straight line, I zip over the streets of Reading, the hum of traffic just touching my ears. When I reach the Tower, I tilt my head downward and plunge like an arrow. These sorts of nosedives are my favorite thing to do while flying. The air crashes against my face. My T-shirt billows around me. I feel like every ounce of gravity holding the Earth together is pouring into me, and the clenching of my stomach and roaring in my ears are symptoms of having more power inside me than any human being ever before. It lasts only a few seconds, before the arrival of the ground forces me to pull up. I lift a little and drop to my feet.

  “I hate it when you do that, Sammie. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it,” mutters Jiminy, from where he’s leaning against the white picket fence that surrounds the Tower. Jiminy is a 260-pound, bald, muscle-bound guy who looks like he would joyfully beat the crap out of your grandpa but really isn’t so bad. In fact, the boss likes him because he looks like a rabid dog but acts “civil.” (That’s not to say Jiminy couldn’t tear a guy in half if the situation called for it. I’ve seen him take out seven other guys with no other weapon than a mechanical pencil.) He lumbers toward me. “Get over here! Hug me before I smack you!”

  I walk across the grass and let him wrap his arms around me. Tightly. “Jiminy, you’re gonna kill me.”

  “Damn right I am.” He pulls away from me and shakes his head. “You’re 45 minutes late. The boss is livid.”

  I cringe. “He is?”

  “Of course he is. You’re lucky he had to fly to Sweden or you’d be getting an earful. Or worse.”

  “Wait, he’s in Sweden?” My mood lifts.

  “Get inside. Come on.”

  I follow Jiminy through the wide oak doors of the Tower and into the lobby. Because the Tower was constructed to be a luxury hotel, the lobby is, well, luxurious. A thick maroon rug swirling with gold embroidery covers the floor, while the walls rise in rich, red mahogany panels. In the center of the room, a golden elevator glimmers. A polished wooden counter sits at the far end of the room, behind which a man with slicked black hair shuffles cards.

  “Third level, Sammie,” calls the card shuffler. His name’s Evan.

  I press the number three for the elevator. “Thanks.”

  “You’re late, Sammie,” says Evan.

  “I’m aware.”

  Jiminy crosses his arms while we wait. “Why are you late, anyway?”

&nb
sp; “Ronnie held me up. You know I have to choke the money out of that guy.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “You’re not having any problems like before, are you?”

  I feel my eyes darken. Before I have to say anything, the elevator doors lurch open. Jiminy and I get inside and remain silent as the elevator climbs.

  The doors open into a wide, airy room with hardwood floors and lots of windows, so that it’s almost like the room is walled with blue sky. Each window reveals another breathtaking view of Reading, bathed in the deep yellow light that comes just before sunset. Two brown, leather couches face each other in the center of the room, with a glossy antique coffee table between them. On one of the couches sits a man in a crisp black suit.

  “You may go, Jiminy. I won’t be needing you,” says the man in a smooth voice.

  Jiminy gives me an encouraging smile and pats me on the shoulder. I step out of the elevator, and the doors slide shut behind me.

  “You’re late,” says the man.

  His name is Lederman. (He’s one of those criminals that goes by his last name only, as if he’s way too cool to have people him calling him the same name his mama did.) I happen to hate Lederman. He has a way of talking to you that makes you feel like something disgusting he stepped in.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Sit.”

  I walk to the leather couch across from Lederman and sit. The corners of his mouth droop as he scrutinizes my face, my T-shirt, my dirty sneakers. I find myself smoothing my jeans with my palms.

  “Still 17, I see,” he says with distaste.

  “Yeah, aging. It takes time.”

  “You have blood on your neck.”

  I touch my neck and a feel long, thin cut, crusted over with blood. Darn. Ronnie got me.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “I hope not. If you can’t handle your assignments—

  “I can handle it.”

  He frowns at me, his eyes dull with impatience. “Excellent. I have another assignment for you.”