LAUREL WINTER

FIGHTING GRAVITY


STUCK IN THE PRINCIPAL'S office for not listening again. He had to be the only
kid who regularly got sent there for not doing anything. No fist fights --
although his fists were big as some kids' faces. He'd tried it once, in
kindergarten, and his parents said never again fit in fit in you must fit in and
then they gave him the medicine that fogged him up and made it easy to forget
fists the size of faces.

Made it easy to travel off on a teacher's voice and end up somewhere above cloud
level.

Secretary sighed when she saw Flynn. Didn't bother to ask what he was doing
there. "Another one of those days, huh?"

Flynn gave the secretary a minuscule nod that tightened the big muscles at the
back of his neck. He settled himself down on a bench in the corner and opened
his math book. The principal didn't usually bother to talk to him anymore; there
was an unspoken agreement that he could use the outer office as an unofficial
study hall whenever one of the seventhgrade teachers got sick of his
daydreaming.

So he was in the office when the girl came in.

She had been fighting. One fist had a smudge of blood -- not hers on it. The
teacher who escorted her in, one hand on the girl's shoulder, looked wary,
uneasy, glad to shed duty once they were physically inside the office.

"This is Jillie Myers," the teacher said, dropping back a step. "She hit another
student in the nose. I have to get back to my class."

The principal was on the phone or something in the back office, so Flynn and the
secretary and the girl were alone in the room for a while.

She was looking at the secretary sullenly, so she didn't see Flynn right away.
Her wide neck rooted her head firmly on huge shoulders. She was proportioned
differently from the other students he saw continually, the tall, slender girls
and boys that made him despise his own form. Flynn's stomach clutched up and he
had a hard time breathing. He fumbled the inhaler out of his pocket and jammed
it in his mouth.

The girl turned toward him. Her eyes widened above heavy cheeks. Before she
could talk, though, the principal opened the office door and beckoned her in.

The secretary looked from Flynn to the office. "She looks like-- she's going to
be in trouble," she finished lamely. Then she began typing, fast and ragged, on
her word processor.

Flynn put his inhaler back and clenched his fists. They were about the same size
as the girl's fists, maybe a little larger, but they were pale and pudgy and
lacked the bloody smudge. He could feel the muscles in his neck and shoulders
going taut. She looked like him. That ugly beast of a person could have been his
sister. Aside from his parents, he had never seen anyone, in person or in
pictures, who resembled him. Her physical reality suddenly made his own body
undeniable. He was never going to "grow out of it."

"I have to go home," he said, dropping his book on the bench.

The secretary ceased her typing frenzy. "Are you feeling sick, Flynn! Would you
like to go to the nurse's office?"

Flynn knew that the other student, the one whose bloody nose had stained the
girl's hand, would be there, snuffling into a cloth. He clenched his fists
again. "No! I'm going home." The adrenaline in his system cut through the fog.

"I'll call your--" the secretary was saying as Flynn pushed out of the office
and ran toward the main doors.

He never ran anymore, he realized. Years ago, kids had made fun of him, the way
his body swung from side to side as he transferred his bulk from one muscular
leg to another. He'd forgotten how easy it was, how fast he could run for a
person of his size, how much he enjoyed it. Now he tried to forget the teasing,
the image they'd shoved into his mind of a bear's lumbering gait.

When he was off the school grounds, he slowed to a walk, puffing slightly,
patting his pocket to make sure his inhaler was still there, just in case. Even
though it was easy, he was still out of practice, and his muscles and lungs
wouldn't let him forget that.

Who was she? The question hit him again and again. Why hadn't he seen her
before?

It didn't take him long to reach home. Just long enough for the questions to
drive him crazy and the answers he made up to get very strange. She was there to
haunt him. She was an ogre girl from a fairy tale. She was the twin sister,
stolen from the hospital at birth, that his parents had never told him about.

That answer at least explained the sense of loss that was with him continually.

His parents were home, as he knew they would be, since they both worked there.
He went in the house, questions bubbling inside him. His mother came up the
stairs. Her eyes were narrow above her cheeks, like Flynn's own, like the girl's
had been before surprise had widened them. "What are you doing home from school?
The secretary called. You're not supposed to just leave."

"I just --I wanted .... "Flynn's questions died. He had been stupid. "I guess I
don't feel well," he finished quietly.

"You can go to bed," his mother said, already turning to go back to work. "That
might help."

It wouldn't, Flynn knew. He climbed the stairs to his bedroom and lay down,
fully dressed, staring at the ceiling. With one hand, he touched his broad face,
his neck, the thick planes of his chest and stomach, his thighs, still quivering
from the run. That had been the one good thing about this confusion--
rediscovering running. He pinched the layer of fat on his leg and imagined it
melting away, leaving only muscle.

He pinched himself harder. Some daydream. Even if he did lose the fat, one of
his legs would still be twice the size of a normal boy's.

And if he couldn't even ask his parents questions, he surely wouldn't be able to
just go up and talk to some strange beast of a girl.

HE DIDN'T HAVE TO. She found him the next day, fogging through the hallway. His
parents had given him extra medicine that morning, just a precaution they said
it will help you feel better maybe we do need to increase your dosage now that
you're getting older and bigger.

His second period teacher sent him to the principal. He took his book and
started for the office, following a wall. Everything moved slower on the
medicine, that was why mornings were worse, why his first and second period
teachers were most apt to send him away. By seventh period, which was art this
year, he felt mostly normal. The art teacher even liked him, encouraged the
strange, wild paintings he came up with.

But it was still just second period when she found him. She was coming out of
the library with a stack of books held easily in one arm. "Hey," she said.
"Stop."

Flynn stopped. The medicine made him likely to do what he was told if he heard
it in the first place. "Who are you?" he asked.

She looked at him, then scanned the hallway with a smooth, slow twist of her
neck, not like the quick, furtive gestures of his classmates. "I've gotta talk
to you." She set the books down in the hall. "Come on."

Flynn followed, still carrying his Minnesota history book. When they got near
the office, he started drifting toward it, remembering his original destination.
"No," she hissed. "What are you --an idiot?"

The question made Flynn mad, woke him up a little.

They were just around the corner from the office, as close as they could get and
still be out of sight. The girl stuck her big face close to Flynn's. "I know you
don't know me, but I have to talk to you. I promise it's important."

He nodded slightly. Even fogged up, he remembered his questions from the day
before.

"I don't know this school very well yet," she said. "Is there someplace nobody
goes?"

Flynn fought the fog. "Uh, well, I -- "his voice trailed off.

"Did they drug you up?"

The way she said they pierced Flynn's confusion. Angry. Bitter. A word with
fists behind it. "Medicine," he said. "My parents --"

He could almost see her bite back her next words. After a silence, she said, "We
do have to talk. Let's get out of here." That slow scan of the hallway. Middle
of the period, no one around. She took his book and leaned it against the wall.
Then she peered around the comer.

Flynn's heart thrummed fast.

"Let's crawl past the office," she said. "Then we can make a run for it."

Running. That sounded good. Maybe he could run out of the fog. Would she run
like he did, like a bear? "Okay," he said, dropping to his knees.

They crawled into the open space, the office -- windows starting at waist-height
-- to the left, the main entrance directly ahead. Flynn just kept moving, right
arm and left leg, left arm and right. You never forget how to crawl, he thought,
even though you quit when you're so little. Like you never forget how to run,
even if they tease you out of it.

His muscles got tighter and tighter as they crossed toward the doors to outside.
As soon as they stood up to go through the door, the secretary might see them.
Or when they were outside, running.

Jillie reached her arm up and pulled the door handle. She pushed the door easily
with one hand. "Go," she said.

Flynn rose slowly and took off. She was right behind him, and then beside him,
and then in front. She hadn't quit running. Maybe no one had teased her or--
more likely-- she hadn't cared when they did. Or she had cared but pretended not
to. The last seemed right to Flynn.

And her running seemed right, suddenly. The side-to-side gentle swing as muscles
bunched and fired in powerful legs. She slowed down a little so he could catch
up. "Go this way," he said, breath catching a little. "There's a park."

They didn't stop running until they were in Flynn's place, a grove of spruces
that were planted a little close together, branches overlapping, with a bare,
brown-needled space in the center.

There was plenty of room for a person of Flynn's size, barely enough for two. An
intruding branch pricked him in the back.

The running had dissipated most of the fog. He felt about the way he did in
fifth period. Now it seemed crazy to be out here with this girl, who came to the
principal's office with bloody knuckles, that he didn't even know. His breath
started coming quick and shallow.

She must have seen the unease, because her expression bittered up. "Look," she
said, as if she'd said it before, "I won't hurt you. I just needed to talk to
you."

Flynn scrunched back a little farther, spruce needles spiking through his shirt.
"Okay," he said.

She looked at him soberly. He could see her deciding what to say-or maybe what
not to.

"Okay," she said carefully. "Uh, like do you feel different from most people?
Really different?"

Flynn felt his lips twist into a scornful expression. "Oh, not at all. I'm just
like everybody else. What do you think?"

Her gaze dropped to her own hands, clenching and unclenching into fists. "I
think you never fit in, not once. And there was nothing you could do about it."

For a moment, they both just sat there. Flynn wanted to cry, but he wasn't going
to let himself.

"I'm sorry," she said quietly.

"Who are you?" he whispered. "Why are you like me?"

"This is going to sound stupid," she said. She took a gulp of air. "We don't
come from Earth. We come from another planet."

"That is stupid," he said. "I was born here. I've always lived here."

"I don't mean 'us,'" she said. "I mean people like us. Our parents. We're not
from Earth."

Flynn put his hands up over his face and bent forward. The words made so much
sense it was scary. No wonder he didn't look like the other kids in his school,
the spindly, scrawny kids whose heads bobbed up and down on their little necks
when they nodded, the kids who didn't run like bears. "Ohmigod," he said,
straightening up. He wasn't even the same species as those people. He started to
rise. "I have to tell my parents."

She gave him a look. "Do you think they don't know?

Flynn stopped. The words slashed through his mind. Of course they knew that's
why they were so anxious for him to fit in why they gave him the medicine they
knew they knew and they didn't tell him let him think there was something wrong
with him that he wasn't like everyone else.

This time he did cry, tears running down over the wide, thick cheeks that maybe
were attractive on a different planet but not here. Here he was ugly, didn't fit
in, and they didn't tell him why.

By the time he'd finished crying, the medicine had worn off completely, or near
enough to it. Flynn made a fist and pounded at the ground, gouging a hole.
"Dammit, dammit, dammit."

Jillie just watched until he stopped. They were both flecked with dirt and pine
needles. "How did you know all this?" he asked."

I found some stuff," she said. "Pictures and things."

They came from a planet with heavier gravity than Earth, she told him. Lots of
other similarities, though, which maybe explained why even though they seemed
different-- they were remarkably like humans. Human enough to pass but not
enough to fit in.

"Why did they -- I mean we -- come here?" Flynn asked.

"Why did the Pilgrims come to America?" she asked in turn. "Why did the Romans
go to England? Why did Cortez go to Mexico."

History had never been Flynn's strong point; for some reason it was usually in
the morning. "The Romans went to England? Oh, yeah." He thought for a minute.
"They didn't all have the same reasons," he said.

"That's the way it was with us," she said. "I mean the ones who came to this
planet. Some of them were trying to get away from our planet and some of them
wanted to see if the Earth was worth taking over and stuff."

She kept talking, but Flynn tuned out. The medicine wasn't quite gone maybe, and
his thoughts took him out of the conversation. Why had his parents come here why
didn't they tell him why he was so different what the hell was going on?

Jillie's hand closed gently over his arm. Flynn realized he was crying again,
just a little. "What am I going to do?" he said.

She shrugged, her shoulders bunching up. Flynn flinched, as people did when he
shrugged. He hadn't realized until this moment how menacing the movement looked.
Stop it, he told himself. I'm not one of these puny Earth people. "Dirt people,"
he said out loud, liking the taste of the words.

Jillie laughed. "Funny isn't it."

"What are we called?" he asked.

"The Calessa," she said.

"The Calessa." Maybe his parents had spoken that word when he was younger,
before they knew they had to be careful. It sounded at once strange and
familiar. "The Calessa."

Anger mixed with relief and fear and sheer happiness. There was nothing wrong
with him. He wasn't different. They should have told him. What was he going to
do now?

He asked the question again out loud.

"You can come to my house," Jillie volunteered. "I'll show you the pictures."

Flynn ached inside. To see images of people he might grow up to be like, not the
stick figure humans. His parents didn't count right now; Flynn was too angry.
"Yes," he said. "I want to come."

They didn't run to Jillie's house. It was too far and the new knowledge had made
Flynn tired and numb. When they got there, Jillie had to tug his arm to get him
up to the porch. "It's okay," she said.

After Jillie unlocked the door, she said, "Wait here a minute, okay?" Then she
disappeared through a doorway. Flynn heard stairs booming under her weight, a
short silence, more booming as she returned.

They sat at the kitchen table with pop and honey bread. Flynn couldn't even
swallow. The pictures were thin rectangles, flimsy and strong at the same time.
Thick, stunted bushes. A sky with too much lavender mixed in. And people like
them.

It must be a hot place, Flynn thought. The brawny people in the pictures wore
skimpy shifts with slits up the sides, or loose, bunchy shorts. Some of the
children-- boys and girls both -- wore nothing at all. Jillie started to take
the pictures away at Flynn's gasp, but Flynn stopped her. "No," he said. "I want
to see them."

It was possible to be embarrassed and repulsed and exultant at the same time--
to look at the pictures with human standards of beauty and dress, and a new
standard, built into his bones.

"This is my mom," she said shyly. The picture showed a group of people sitting
in gritty sand, laughing. A woman lounged on the left side of the picture, one
thigh showing through the slit in her garment. Her head tilted slightly back.
Her hair was the same color as Jillie's, reddish-brown, and her eyes were mere
slits with the strength of her open-mouthed laughter.

"She looks nice," Flynn said. He took a huge breath, let it out. "Why doesn't
she tell you?" he asked.

Jillie looked at her hands, spread flat against the table, as big as plates. "I
think people -- our people -- are after my more. We keep moving around. We'll be
somewhere for a while and bang, we'll just move. No warning."

"Why?" he whispered.

"I'm not all the way sure," she said, "but I think she doesn't agree with some
of the people, about taking over the planet and stuff."

Flynn's head swam, not with the effects of medication, but with too many strange
new ideas. He spread the pictures out on the table and just let himself look,
not thinking.

Tried to, at least. The thoughts came anyway. His people. Maybe they should take
over this dirt planet and these dirt people. Then see how well the dirt kids fit
in. See them trying to run like bears.

The picture he held crinkled at the edges, he was gripping it so hard. "I'm
sorry," he gasped, dropping it. As soon as he let go, the picture flattened out.
"What are these made of?"

Jillie shrugged. "Beats me," she said. "Nothing from Earth."

"Can I have one?"

She looked hesitant for a moment, then shook her head. "I don't think that's a
good idea. What if your parents found it?"

Flynn spread the pictures out on the table and studied them harder than he'd
ever studied for school. They made him feel a little queasy, but he wanted to
memorize them, soak up the lavender sky, and the way the people sat and stood
and smiled. He could tell that they liked the way they looked.

Jillie's fingers entered his field of vision, scooting the pictures into a pile.
"I'd better put them away now."

Flynn followed her downstairs, into her mother's bedroom, dark and cool. "On our
planet," she said, "the houses are sunk underground, to protect us from the
heat."

She said our planet so easily that Flynn felt a hot surge of jealousy. He looked
around, his eyes adjusting immediately to the gloom. The room looked much like
his own parents' bedroom, with thick drapes hanging over the windows. Jillie put
the pictures in one of the dresser drawers, way to the back and underneath the
clothes.

Then she closed the drawer and turned back to face him, in a powerful, fluid
motion. Flynn realized he was alone with a girl of his own species, for the
first time. There wasn't enough air in the room.

Jillie backed up a step. And stopped. One of her hands raised just a fraction,
reaching toward him, and dropped again. "We'd better go upstairs," she said. "My
mom wouldn't like it if --"

Then she turned and ran up the stairs before Flynn could do more than taste the
idea of if.

Flynn paused for one second, then pulled the drawer open and fished through
silky underwear for an alien picture. He couldn't tell which one he got, didn't
dare turn the light on to see. He shut the drawer as quickly as he could without
making a noise and went upstairs, with the photograph tucked into his shirt.

Jillie squinted at him as he came into the kitchen. "What took you so long?"

Flynn knew from frequent and painful experience that he was not a good liar, so
he said nothing, just looked at the floor, fighting an urge to scratch at the
crinkly place where the picture touched his skin.

"Listen," said Jillie. "You'd better go pretty soon. My mom gets off work pretty
early."

He nodded, although the idea of meeting the big, smiling woman wasn't at all
frightening-- until he thought of pawing through her drawer, messing it up, and
stealing one of her secret pictures. Then his throat dried up. He went to the
table and gulped down the pop that he hadn't been able to drink earlier.

"I've got to go," he said. Surely Jillie could see the outline of the picture
through his shirt. "See you at school." It seemed like a lame thing to say to
someone who had just revealed that you were an alien, but he couldn't think of
anything better, so he left.

When his mother gave him his medicine the next morning, Flynn tucked it into his
cheek, next to his gums, and drank the glass of water. Later, he spit the slimy,
partially dissolved pills into the toilet, gagging at the taste. The familiar,
unwelcome wooziness began, but it wasn't as bad, maybe, as usual.

He was right. By the time he spotted Jillie in the lunchroom, highly visible
amongst the slim Earth kids -- dirt kids, he reminded himself he felt normal. Or
as normal as anyone who wasn't on his own planet ever did. The idea that he was
an alien-- no, that the people who lived on Earth were aliens -- was
intoxicating. He returned the arc of Jillie's wave with a wilder, more exuberant
arc of his own. Kids ducked on either side of him.

"Hello," he said, as he approached her table. Did she know about the picture?
His face flared up, he could tell, but that was probably normal. Everyone in a
wide circle around them was giggling, staring or whispering. "Flynn's got a
girlfriend," he heard someone say. "And she's one big mama," said someone else.

Jillie casually clenched one big fist and the whispers and giggles -- if not the
looks -- subsided.

"Hi," she said. "How are you?"

"Okay."

"You didn't have to take --" her voice trailed off.

Flynn lowered his. "I spit it out," he murmured.

She gave him a nod. "Good."

After that, there was a considerable silence while they both pretended to eat
the cooks' idea of beef nachos. Then the lunch period was over, and Flynn had to
go to his fifth period class. It was like being on a double dose of medicine:
his thoughts were so jumbled up, orbiting the ideas Jillie had given him the day
before -- and Jillie herself.

They had lunch together every day that week, gradually falling into a rhythm of
conversation, sometimes teasing, sometimes cryptically serious, discussing
themselves and their world in such a way that no one but them could have known.
The few kids who hung around long enough to catch part of it just shook their
heads and rolled their eyes and walked away, apparently even more convinced that
they were both weird.

And maybe, from an Earth perspective, they were. Flynn caught himself breaking
out into wide grins at odd times during the days: whenever he did something
different from one of the other students, like holding his pencil between two
fingers instead of three. He could just imagine telling Miss Rogers, who had
worn herself out trying to instill a proper pencil grip when he was in first
grade, "But this is the way we do things on my planet." He felt wickedly,
secretly good.

Except when he thought about the stolen picture.

It was tucked into the toe of one of his dress shoes, which he never wore, in
the back of his closet. And it was the worst of all possible pictures to have
taken. Somehow, in the darkness, his fingers had snatched the picture of
Jillie's more, the one that she would be certain to miss the next time she
flipped through the pictures.

And then what would she do?

In all his thinking, he couldn't think up an answer to that question. She
wouldn't accuse Jillie of taking it, because she thought Jillie didn't know.
What would she do? He couldn't ask Jillie himself, because she would know
immediately that he was the culprit. What would she do?

She would pull Jillie out of school and leave town with no forwarding address,
running again. She would pull Jillie out of school and out of his life and maybe
Jillie was a figment of medicine dreams and he wasn't an alien --

But no, because the very afternoon Jillie didn't show up for lunch and he got
sent to the principal's office for pounding his fist on his desktop in fifth
period, he asked the secretary if Jillie was in school. She looked at him
uncomfortably, lowering her voice, as if this were something she wasn't supposed
to tell him but she couldn't help doing so, "Jillie's mother withdrew her from
school this morning."

"Where did they go?" he asked, leaning close in to her, his voice an echo of her
low whisper. "Where did they say they were going to go?"

"They didn't say." The secretary was leaning back in her chair, her face pale,
and Flynn realized he was clenching and unclenching his giant, alien fist almost
in her face.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I didn't mean to -- I just wanted to know where they
went."

She patted his arm gingerly. "That's okay," she said. "It's hard when a friend
moves away."

Hard wasn't the word. Hard meant nothing. Hard was like marshmallow compared to
Jillie leaving. Hard was jelly, whipped cream, slimy rotten cucumbers next to
losing her and the secret conversations of a shared evolution.

The only thing that made it possible to stay alive...and let the skinny, scrawny
dirt-kids live...and not scream his knowledge at his traitorous parents, was
running. Flynn ran everywhere, his muscular legs swinging. "Beat that, Jillie,"
he would shout, smearing sweat from his face, not caring who heard, hoping she
would.

And then the letter came. Addressed to Flynn, but his mother opened it. "Who is
this from?" she asked, holding it out to him when he ran home from school one
day.

Flynn just read, his running muscles cramping with sudden stillness. The sweat
from exercise was mixed with fresh, cold sweat. It was a dumb letter, a very
smart letter. Dear Flynn, how's it hanging? Having a terrible time -- wish you
were here. No, wish we both weren't. Ha ha. Next time, don't take so many
Pictures. Your friend, Jay

He just stood there, reading it over and over. "Who is it from?" demanded his
mother.

He was still not a good liar, but he made himself be. "Probably just a joke," he
said. "The kids at school pick on me all the time."

His mother nodded. "I thought it might be something like that." She turned to go
downstairs. No I'm sorry they pick on you, kiddo. Things will get better. Maybe
mothers from his planet were different from Earth mothers. Maybe they didn't
care about their kids, whether or not they were hurt or miserable or-- no, that
couldn't be. He thought of the picture of the smiling woman, hidden in his
closet. It wasn't all mothers. Just his.

Later, after allowing himself one peek at the picture, he tucked the letter into
the toe of the other shoe. He'd studied it for clues, all the while knowing they
wouldn't be there. If there was something Flynn could figure out, then so could
his parents, and maybe they were the ones that Jillie's more was running away
from.

That night, as he lay in bed, he tossed thoughts around in his head. Most of
them dropped to the floor of his mind and cracked like rotten eggs. Maybe he
could call the FBI or NASA or someone and tell them there were aliens on Earth
and he was one of them. Wrong. If anyone found out about him, he'd be stuck in
the hospital and tested and maybe even dissected. Maybe he could run away and
find Jillie and her more. Fool. In which direction? Sure they were big, but not
that big. Maybe he could confront his parents and -- His head wouldn't even let
him finish that one.

He fell asleep with no solutions, his mind cluttered up with the shells of
broken ideas. But in his closet, in his shoes, there was the picture of a
smiling woman on another planet and there was the letter from her alien
daughter. He had the image of Jillie's wicked grin in his head, an image that
would never crinkle or tear, and he had himself, living proof of a species that
could handle more Gs than Earth could ever put out. He knew who he was and where
he was from and that there was at least one other person like him.

Which was a whole lot better than before.