CHAPTER
1
Jimmy Joe Miller sucked on a stale piece of gum and dangled his baseball bat between his hands. Keeping to the thin shade cast off by the awning of Jameson’s Dry Goods and Feed, he squinted his eyes and surveyed Main Street—not a soul to be seen.
There wasn’t much to do on a stinking hot day like this in Lowland County, and Jimmy Joe was out scavenging for a boy his size or smaller with a mind to play ball. Of course, he could ask one of his four older brothers, but being the youngest meant they always bested him, and Jimmy Joe wanted to win. It wasn’t fun when you lost all the time, and it rankled him when they teased, which they did without mercy.
Taking the tip of his tongue, he fussed at his gum and then blew into it. A plump bubble took shape as a horsefly buzzed up, bothering him. In no time flat, Jimmy Joe was swinging his bat wildly at it, his face puffing and red.
“What in Sam Hill are you doing?” said a voice, unexpectedly coming out of nowhere.
Startled, Jimmy Joe dropped his bat and spun around to discover a girl inches behind him.
He didn’t like the look of this girl. She had sharp blue eyes that were hard to turn away from. Also, she was messy. She had on a pair of worn blue jeans with a rip over the left knee, and her T-shirt had stains: ketchup, by the looks of it. Her brown hair was arranged in tangled braids that were almost completely undone, with pieces of her hair sticking up about her head like they had somewhere else to be. Plus, she smelled bad. Well, he couldn’t actually smell her, but he was pretty sure that she’d smell like bird poop if he got close enough to get a whiff.
Also, she was floating three feet off the ground.
Jimmy Joe picked up his bat and took a step away from her. “Leave me alone, Piper McCloud.”
“Suit yourself.” Piper shrugged, then floated away and touched down on the steps of Jameson’s store. Jimmy Joe watched her take out a couple of sheets of paper. At the Community Notice Board she relocated a MASSEY FERGUSON TRACTOR FOR SALE from the center and placed her notice in the prime spot.
Jimmy Joe was careful to keep a safe distance.
There was an unwritten law in Lowland County not to go near Piper McCloud. She was strange—dangerous, even—and it could be catching. There was a very good reason why folks said this:
Piper McCloud could fly.
Piper’s parents, Betty and Joe McCloud, had tried to hide her when she was small, but the older she got, the more difficult it was to hide a girl who liked to fly. For a while Piper was sent away to a special school that was supposed to fix her, but, as far as anyone could tell, it only made things worse. Not only that, but when she returned from the school, she brought home with her a pack of friends, each one stranger than the next, and the whole passel of them holed up at the McCloud farm, where they were up to untold mischief, or so the good folk in Lowland County thought. They didn’t even have the decency to pretend to be normal anymore. Jimmy Joe’s mother, Millie Mae, in particular, was affronted by their disturbing behavior.
“It’s not right. It ain’t the way of things, and they know it,” Millie Mae would flap. “You mark my words, Jimmy Joe: no good will come of them kids. They’re wicked, and the stars above has their eyes on them.”
As Jimmy Joe watched Piper at the notice board, he could see no sign of her wickedness, only her ineptitude. She was dropping tacks willy-nilly, trying to pick them up and keep the notice on the board all at the same time. She might be able to fly, but she sure as heck couldn’t tack a piece of paper up on a board.
Watching her made Jimmy Joe feel antsy and superior. “You gotta hold ’em at an angle,” he called out. “Don’t drive ’em in straight like that or they won’t go.”
She took his advice, but her tack tumbled off again.
“Shoot.” Jimmy Joe threw his bat down. “Get outta the way! If I don’t do it, it’ll never get done.”
Snatching the tacks out of Piper’s hand, he pushed her aside and set about jamming one tack into each corner of the flyer. When he was finished, he stood back to take a look at his work, and it was only then that he read the words on the paper itself.
Flying Lessons
Have you ever wanted to fly?
Now is your chance.
I can teach anyone to fly.
I have years of flying experience. Beginners welcome!
Contact PIPER McCLOUD
Jimmy Joe felt tricked. “What’s this?”
“Flying lessons!” Piper said brightly. “I’ll start out with lessons, but maybe in time I can have a whole flying school!”
“No one wants your fool lessons.” He snatched up his bat and walked away. “No one cares anything about flying.”
“Sure they care!” Piper followed him, bubbling with excitement. “Who wouldn’t want to fly? You can get places faster and see things from up high that you can’t see when you’re on the ground. When the breeze is blowing, it lifts you up, up, up.”
There she went with all her talking. Jimmy Joe knew better than to listen, and he waved her away like she was a gnat. Or something lower than a gnat. “That’s not true. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
Piper flew over him and landed in front. He made sure not to slow down and that forced her to fly backward.
“I’ll tell you this,” she said. “One time I was flying over the Grand Canyon, and this condor with wings bigger than my whole body came flying up to me.” She spread her arms out wide, causing Jimmy Joe to get a vivid image in his mind’s eye of the bird and what it must be like to fly through the Grand Canyon.
“That condor wanted to get a good look at me, so I let ’em. That’s the truth. Another time, when I was flying over the Pacific Ocean, I saw something swimming way down low, and it was big and long, but it wasn’t a whale. It was something else. Something no one has ever seen before.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno.”
“What it look like?”
Piper checked to make sure no one was listening, and then she leaned in. “It looked like a sea monster.”
Jimmy Joe snorted and pushed her out of the way. “Stop making things up.”
“I could teach you flying tricks. I know lots of those.”
A fully formed picture of himself diving through the air exploded like a kernel of popcorn inside Jimmy Joe’s head, and suddenly his heart began to beat faster. Maybe he’d look good flying. “What kind of tricks?”
Piper threw her arms up. “All kinds. Whatever you want. I learned how to do this corkscrew that turns into a dive. It makes you dizzy, but it’s fun all the same.”
Those blue eyes of hers were sparkling now in the way she made them shine so that you couldn’t look away.
“Or, if you don’t want to go high, I can teach you to stay low to the ground and thread through trees. It’s tricky, and you gotta be real agile and keep your eyes open.” She took his arm, pulling him. “C’mon, we can start your first lesson right now!”
She was so close that her scent went right up his nostrils before he could stop it, but it wasn’t like he’d thought; she didn’t smell like bird poop or dirt or anything close to that. She smelled like getting a day off school when you weren’t expecting to. She smelled like catching a fly ball in your baseball mitt while everyone was watching and cheering. Her smell made him want to hit something.