45

THE RAINBOW GIRL AND THE FLYING TRAPEZE

The next day I was pretty psyched coming home from school, not just because it was Friday but because Halley and I were going to work on The Magic Box. I was pretty close to threatening her that if she didn’t tell me what was inside it, I wouldn’t be friends with her anymore. If it could save a whole planet, the magic had to be something that could spread, like a song that made you feel taller when you heard it. My phone blipped.

Aunt Jeanie. It was a sticker of a cartoon cat waving its paw. I waved back to her with a dopey-looking dog. She wanted to take me to dinner next week. I was sort of afraid to sit down with her. I didn’t want to know about Leo, about what was happening with him with the counseling or whatever. I just didn’t want to think about him. To remember the way he kicked Flip. But I texted, Sounds great.

Halley and Flip were waiting for me on the steps outside the Lorentzes’ apartment building. She was smiling but looked tired. She patted the step next to her, and I sat. “Mom’s freaking out up there. Mercurious is trying to calm her down. I had to get outside, you know? See what you got yourself into, Coffin? Welcome to the drama.”

“What’d I do?”

“Why do you always think it’s you?”

“It just usually is, is all.”

“Not this time.” She took out her phone. The screen was chart after chart of all these numbers in columns with weird headings like T-Cells and Alpha-fetoprotein.

“What does it mean?” I said.

“It’s back. Look, don’t freak, because I’m not. I’m totally kicking this thing’s butt. I am, Ben.”

“You so totally are, I know,” I said, but I didn’t know anything.

“I knew just now for sure when the doctor called,” Halley said, “but I knew the day of our bookstore tour. I woke up feeling different that morning. It’s like this weird warmth in my lower back.”

“Is that how it felt the first time, last winter?”

“No, that time I woke up with blood in my pee and this stomachache that wouldn’t go away. I had to go straight into surgery. It was a six-pound tumor. I made the doctor show me a picture of it. I couldn’t believe it was inside of me. It looked like a giant’s fist, gray with black veins. So look, the chemotherapy I’m going to take this round is a brand-new medicine, and it’s a lot stronger, which is awesome, because it’s going to completely burn the bad stuff away. It’s also going to make me feel pretty sick for a while—like sicker than I’d normally get. I have to start the chemo right away, tomorrow, so I need you to take me to Luna Park today.”

“Right now?”

“We’ll just bring Flip back upstairs, then we’ll go. There’s no better time. It’s already October, and it’ll be closed for the season by the time I’m back to a hundred and eleven percent. I want you to fly with me.”

“Fly?”

She grinned. “We need to take a ride on the Boardwalk Flight.”

• • •

It was basically a mix of skydiving and a slingshot that threw you two hundred feet into the air at a speed of sixty miles an hour. The attendant strapped us into the safety vests. “I probably should have told you, but I’m terrified of heights,” Halley said.

“Which is why your heroine from The Magic Box is a trapeze artist,” I said. “Makes perfect sense.”

“It does, if you really think about it,” she said. “I might barf all over you.”

“This would have been good to know before we got on the ride.”

The cable whipped us upward—and backward by our ankles—to the top of the tower. Halley screamed and laughed. “Holy ship, my stomach!”

“Oh boy.”

“Do not let go of my hand, Ben Coffin!”

“I won’t, I promise, even though you’re breaking my fingers. Uh-oh, here we go.” We swung down toward the boardwalk and then up toward the sun.

“Don’t let me fly away! Hold me!”

“I am! I got you!”

“And I got you! Ben?”

“Halley?”

“We’re flying! We really are! This is so freaking spectacular!” And it was. It was.