Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street (13 page)

“Run,” she yelled, and we wheeled around toward the entrance to the alley.

But Teardrop bounced up, so quick, and blocked our way. He reached into his jacket. We didn’t wait to find out what he was reaching for, just sprinted in the other direction, deeper into the alley. The shadows grew, and the alley got darker and darker, but not before I saw there was no way out: the alley ended in high chain-link fence topped with razor wire. I glanced back and saw two moving shadows in that narrow unlit trap: Teardrop coming fast, something shiny in his hand, and the big guy just behind, limping a little.

“No way out, schoolgirls,” the big guy called.

The chain-link fence, barely visible, just a gleam here and there, was only steps away. Maybe we could try to climb it, but what about the razor wire?

Help! Help!
Those screams didn’t get out, stayed inside my head.

Then Ashanti said, “Robbie! Take my hand!”

What good would that do? But I reached out, took her hand. Almost too late, because Ashanti was already rising off the ground! She squeezed my hand tight. I
squeezed hers even tighter. She kept rising, pulling me up with her into the air, over the chain-link fence, and higher.

From below, voices. “What the… ?” said Teardrop.

“Must be a hole in the fence,” the big guy told him.

After that came lots of swearing, but by then Ashanti and I were almost out of hearing range.

W
e weren’t flying, Ashanti and I, not in the way a bird flies, since there was no flapping of wings, or like a plane, because there was no engine roar, no sense of that tremendous thrust. In fact, what we were doing was very quiet, just a faint whisper of wind in my ears. It came to me: this was soaring, just like in my soaring dream, where I’d soared over Manhattan. This was Brooklyn: that was one difference. Another was that we weren’t way up high, over all the rooftops, but were more at the three- or four-story level, drifting along at a slow pace. Through a window I saw a woman having trouble opening a bottle of ketchup. A few windows down, a man in a wife-beater was admiring his biceps in a mirror.

But I noticed those things only in passing. I was totally caught up in this feeling of soaring, the best feeling I’d experienced in my whole life. We were in midair,
with nothing supporting us, wafting now over a bunch of forklift trucks parked behind a warehouse, where a foreshortened man sat smoking on a stool. If he looked up, he’d get a big surprise, but of course he didn’t. Why would he? Why would anyone?

“Wow,” I said. Totally inadequate, but I couldn’t think of anything better. I glanced over at Ashanti. There were tears in her eyes. We still held hands, but our arms weren’t spread as though we were gliding, because we weren’t gliding on a breeze or making any other kind of effort. We were just up there, period. I was excited, thrilled, full of joy, but strangely calm at the same time, my heart beating only a little faster than normal, and even that might have been a leftover from running in that alley and being so scared. Maybe that was the most amazing part of how I felt now: I wasn’t scared the least bit. The truth was I felt more confident than all the times I’d felt confident in my whole life rolled into one and multiplied by zillions.

“Let’s go higher,” I said.

“How?” said Ashanti.

“I don’t know,” I said, withdrawing my hand from hers in order to make one of those palms-up I-don’t-know gestures. Big mistake. The moment I let go, the soaring stopped, like someone had hit the brakes, and then came the sensation of the floor being whisked out
from under me—completely crazy, since there was no floor—and I started to fall.

“No!” I screamed.

And had barely got the word out before Ashanti reached down and grabbed me by the collar of my jacket. A slight lurch, like being in a souped-up dragster surging forward, although I’d never been in a souped-up dragster and had no wish to, and then I was back to soaring. Ashanti took my hand with one of hers, let go of my collar with the other.

“You all right?” she said, glancing over at me.

“Yeah.”

“Just remember—ray-gun beam operator, that’s you. Wingless flyer, that’s me.”

“It’s more like soaring,” I said.

“You’re correcting me? In this situation?”

“Sort of.”

Ashanti laughed. “You never quit, do you?”

Hey! Was that true about me?

We soared, but low, over Brooklyn. Our power was a powerful power, no doubt about that, and yet flaky at the same time. For example, it was already pretty clear that we weren’t going to be able to leap tall buildings at a single bound; the best we could manage was cruising around their lower floors. And cruising slowly, by the way.

“Can you make it go faster?” I said.

“How exactly?”

“I don’t know.” This time I skipped the hand-gesture part.

“Maybe I’ll try thinking it,” Ashanti said.

“Thinking ‘go faster’?”

“Yeah.” She closed her eyes tight. We didn’t go any faster.

That raised an issue in my mind. “Suppose,” I said, “that eventually we want to go down.”

“Like, to earth?”

“Just askin’.”

Ashanti tried the eyes-closed method again. We didn’t descend, stayed at the same altitude, three or four stories up.

“How about changing direction?” I said.

“Nope,” said Ashanti, after a few moments. We continued on our plodding course for a while and then started making a gentle right-hand turn around a building that had one of those seedy bars with blackened windows on the first floor and an old man at a computer in the higher-up window we happened to be passing. He looked up from the screen. An amazed expression crossed his face; he rubbed his eyes and looked again just as we passed out of sight. I glanced back, caught a glimpse of him shaking his head—as though to rattle the parts into place—and getting back to work.

“Did you make that turn happen?” I said.

“It must have just happened,” Ashanti said. “I was thinking left.”

Meanwhile we were drifting by one of those rooftop water towers. Stairs led from the roof to the tower, and on the top step was perched an owl, huge and snowy white. I’d never seen an owl before in real life, but there was no doubt about it. The owl watched us. Weren’t owls supposed to have yellow eyes? This owl’s eyes were a very pale and faded shade of blue, kind of… kind of like the eyes of the homeless woman, except for the bloodshot part. It spread its enormous wings—I’d had no idea that owls were so big—and slowly flapped away.

“I thought for a second it was going to say something,” I said.

“This is crazy enough already,” Ashanti said. “Better start thinking of some way to get us down. I’ve got dance at seven thirty, and I can’t miss it.”

“I didn’t know you took dance.”

“Let’s discuss it later,” Ashanti said. “Think.”

“What if you breathe out, completely empty your lungs?”

“What good will that do?”

“You know,” I said. “Like balloons.”

Ashanti pursed her lips and breathed out. Nothing happened; we kept drifting along at the same altitude,
passing a sign with one of those blinking arrows pointing down to the store entrance below.

“Balloons, huh?” said Ashanti.

She really could be very aggravating, but was this a good moment for sending back a little aggro of my own? Probably not. I kept my mouth shut.

“Why does this… thing have to be so wacky?” Ashanti said, and as soon as she said it we started to drop like a stone.

We both screamed in total fright. Down, down, down we plummeted—the canal seemed to be below us now, and it was rising at warp speed, but the moment before splashdown, we suddenly leveled out and drifted over the water at a leisurely pace.

“I think I’m going to puke,” Ashanti said.

I looked down at the target area, slimy yellow-green water kind of reminiscent of puke itself. “Try burping,” I said.

“Why?”

“Sometimes it heads puking off at the pass.”

Ashanti tried burping. “Hey! It worked.” She turned to me. “Thanks.”

“Any time.”

We skimmed over the canal, staying dry by inches, and, barely moving now, came to a stop on the street running parallel to the water. Not on the street, exactly: we hovered about six inches above the pavement.

And stayed there. The street—same street we’d been on before, I noticed, with the Red Goat on the corner—was deserted, a good thing, since we seemed to be stuck in midair. We stood straight up, kind of flailing at the ground with our feet, to no effect. Ashanti even tried grabbing me by the shoulders and pushing down, but all that did was make her rise.

“What’s the opposite of jumping?” I said.

“Huh?” said Ashanti.

“If we could figure out the opposite of jumping, we could get down.”

“We can’t figure out the opposite of jumping,” Ashanti said, “for the simple reason there’s no such—”

And then like a balky old elevator, we were in motion again, settling gently down on planet Earth. The street felt strangely hard against my feet, and my body felt strangely heavy. We stood there. The city seemed silent, which was impossible. After a while, normal sounds started up.

“Did that really happen?” Ashanti said.

Could it all have been some sort of hallucination for two? I reached into my pocket, pulled out the wad of drug-dealer cash.

“It really happened,” I said.

Down at the end of the block, a battered old van pulled up in front of the Red Goat. Duke, the guy with the shiny bald head and full beard, still dressed like it was
summer, got out and went into the bar. A few moments later he returned with Big Nanny on his shoulder. He slid open the side door of the van and lifted Big Nanny inside, then reentered the Red Goat.

One thing about Ashanti and me, there were these moments when we thought as one. Like now: without a word, we were on the move, running down the street, full speed. We skidded to a stop beside the open van. There was Big Nanny, facing out, her mouth slightly open. From up close, she looked kind of mean. I shoved the cash into Big Nanny’s mouth, and we took off.

Ashanti and I found a subway station a few blocks away. We hurried down the steps, swiped our cards, and in a minute or two were seated side by side in a half-full car, two schoolgirls backpacking tons of homework after a long day. No one gave us a second look. They didn’t have a clue.

W
e got off the train at the stop three blocks from our street and walked home, fast at first, and then, when Ashanti realized that dance was no longer even a remote possibility, slower. We stopped outside her place.

“What are we going to do about telling people?” I said.

“Like who?” said Ashanti.

“Parents, for example.”

She shook her head. “Who’s gonna believe us? ‘Hey, everybody, Robbie and I were soaring around town last night, but forget any demonstration, because we can’t make it happen. You just have to believe us.’”

I thought it over. “Got ya,” I said.

I let myself into the apartment, slipped off my backpack. “Hi,” I called. “Anybody home?” I kind of knew someone
was home; you can sense that. But no one answered. I went into the kitchen.

And there were Mom and Dad, seated at the table, both busy with their laptops. They looked up, their heads moving as one when I came in. I got that uh-oh feeling.

“Sorry if I’m a little late,” I said.

“If?” said my mom. She looked tired, with purplish patches under her eyes.

“I said I was sorry.”

My mom turned to my dad. I started to feel I’d walked into a play that they’d rehearsed for and I hadn’t. Did the next stage direction say I should open the fridge and start rooting around? Probably not, but I was hungry—famished, in fact, absolutely starving. I wondered whether this power of ours—mine and Ashanti’s although Tut-Tut certainly shared it, too, in some way, and also maybe Silas as well—demanded extra calories. It was a question I would have liked to ask my parents; impossible of course, as Ashanti had pointed out.

“Robbie?” my dad said. “Can you leave that for later? We want to talk to you.”

“All right,” I said, maybe not clearly, since I was talking around a mini burrito from Paquita’s—our go-to Mexican takeout place—left over from who knows when. I sat down at the table.