Party Trick

A The Missing Fanfiction

"That's stu-pid."

"You're stupid."

"Don't call me stupid, stupid."

"Not you, moron – Daryl."

"Oh, okay – hey, wait, who are you calling moron?"

"But it's a girl's game," said the kid with the hood of his skull-backed sweatshirt drawn almost all the way over his eyes, one aglet in his mouth, which he was chomping down on like a cow chews its cud.

"It's not."

"Come on, guys, let's just try it."

"Where'd you even learn this crap from, man? Your girlfriend?"

"I told you it was a girl's game!"

"Shut up, Daryl."

"Yeah," muttered Gavin Danes, thrusting one hand into a crinkly bag of potato chips. "Shut up, Daryl."

"He got it off the internet," said Antonio, not that helpfully.

Everyone mostly ignored him.

"Well, if you think it's so great, Gavin, you get to go first."

"I didn't say I thought it was great, jackass." Gavin licked salt from his fingers and smacked his lips before curling them into a sneer.

"He's scared," the kid hidden under his hood decided. "Everyone knows Gavin's scared to do stuff because he bruises, like, super easy."

Gavin's nostrils flared. "I am not!" He tossed the chip bag aside, spraying the carpet with crumbs, then sprawled out flat on his back. "C'mon, then." He clinched his eyes shut. "Do it already. I'm not gonna lie here all night."

The sweatshirt-clad kids gathered around him in a vaguely circular position. Gavin had to bite back a ticklish giggle he'd never have lived down when several pairs of index and middle fingers slid under his arms and legs; he did his best to make it look like he was just grinning sarcastically at their arguing voices all around him.

The closed eyes probably helped the effect some.

"Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary!" one guy blurted, too excitedly.

Gavin heard the slap of his friend being whacked upside the head. "Wrong chant, dork."

"Light as a feather, stiff as a board... Light as a feather, stiff as a board..."

"Ow, my finger! Why is the Gav-man so friggin' heavy?"

Keeping the rest of his body rigid, Gavin stuck out his tongue.

"You were supposed to wait for the rest of us before you tried to lift him!"

"Okay – so, on three, we try again. And Gavin, don't loll your head. You're stiff as a board, remember?"

Gavin sighed long-sufferingly, convinced at this point they'd never manage to lift him so much as a centimeter off the carpet.

"Light as a feather, stiff as a board..."

"Holy crap! We did it – we all picked him up at the same time!"

Gavin cracked one blue-grey eye open. He was impressed. "Yeah?"

"Shh!" hissed Antonio, worried he'd break the group's concentration.

"Me next – everybody lift me next!" one of the kid's crowed.

Antonio shushed him, too.

Disaster struck, then. The bedroom door of the kid whose house they were sleeping over slammed open, banging against the wall, his older brother in the doorway demanding to know what the hell they were all doing up here – their parents might be away, but Mom left him in charge.

They dropped Gavin like a hot brick. He landed hard on his hip. "Oof!"

"You okay, man?" Antonio checked, while the other boys punched one another or helped their host stare down his brother.

"I'm fine," Gavin told him, less than truthfully. He thought a bleed might be starting in the hip he'd fallen on. "Did they really all pick me up with just two fingers? Who cheated?"

It was going to be fine. Of course it was going to be fine.

Sometimes at home he didn't tell his parents for hours when he started bleeding. And he was always alright. They'd be going to sleep soon. He'd wake up and go home and – if it still hurt – he'd tell his mom then.

All the world was a hot cocoon.

Gavin's eyelids were heavy. He couldn't quite make himself open them. All he could see were glowing flickers of black and red. He could hear fine, though. He wished his friends would stop shouting and shaking him. He'd been fine when they'd all dropped off to sleep, on smushed cushions and sleeping bags with broken zippers. His hip had still felt hot when he touched it, but it only really hurt if he pressed down or moved too suddenly.

He hadn't thought it was that bad, even when he started to get that stormy feeling under his skin, that tenseness and tenderness in his joint.

Obviously, he'd been wrong.

If any of the neighbors had glanced out their windows, they would have seen a group of kids in skull sweatshirts dragging another, semi-unconscious purple-haired kid in grey pajamas by the arms, trying to hoist him up into a plastic cherry-red wagon.

It might have looked like some kind of creepy ritual, but the fact one kid couldn't stop hiccupping and – as the driveway was on an incline – the wagon kept rolling away from them just as they'd almost got a moaning, shivering Gavin loaded in it, rather ruined the whole scary movie illusion.

"The hell are you brats doing? It's three in the morning!" The brother came outside, shirtless and in his boxers, hands on his hips.

The hiccupping kid tried – without real ability – to explain, while the rest – except for Antonio – pathetically tried to block the wagon and Gavin's prone form with their insufficient backs.

He saw Gavin. Of course he did. "Shit," he swore. "What's wrong with him? He diabetic or something?" He was trying to remember whether they had orange juice in the fridge. They were all out of Chips Ahoy.

"He's a hemophiliac," Antonio said.

"Where's he bleeding? I don't see no blood."

"Inside," Antonio told him, swallowing and looking back over his shoulder. "He's bleeding on the inside."

"We were gonna wheel him home."

"He only lives six blocks from here."

The brother told them they were idiots – the kid needed a hospital, what were they, blind – and, scrambling back inside, reemerged a second later with his parents' car keys. He helped his younger sibling's bewildered friends load the sweating kid into the back of the minivan, but the whole time he was muttering how much trouble they were going to be in – how much trouble he was going to be in – and it wasn't fair, because it wasn't his doing; Gavin Danes from six blocks away wasn't his friend, he'd never said two words to the kid before today.

"Why" – he smacked the steering-wheel – "does everything bad happen to me?"

"Chillax," squeaked his little brother, voice breaking. "We'll just leave him outside the emergency room. We don't have to say anything. His parents think he was at Greg's house tonight." Greg's parents weren't away from Liston on a business trip.

Most of the kids looked relieved, but Antonio blanched and – when he was sure no one in the van was looking at him – took Gavin's clammy hand in his own.

"Come on, man, just leave him!"

Antonio hesitated. They'd put Gavin in front of the automatic doors at the front of the ER – someone would see him any second.

"Screw it, I'm not taking the heat for this shit – if he wants to stay that's on him," and their friend's brother was turning the key in the ignition and the other kids were starting to roll the van door closed.

"I'm sorry," croaked Antonio, and – springing away – ran like he was Indiana Jones, jumping into the van just before the door shut entirely.

"I'm fine, Mom – God!" Gavin protested, leaning his head back against the flat hospital-room pillows.

But Mrs. Danes was furious. Any mother would be panicked to get a call her son was found unconscious outside of the Emergency department at Saint Thomas. The mother of a hemophiliac just about had her heart stop, losing track of her own movements, having no memory of picking up her purse or getting into the car, or her husband – currently filling out paperwork in the waiting room – only having one shoe on, and said shoe being a flip-flop, when they left the house...

"Who left you bleeding?" she demanded. "Was it Greg?" She fished in her purse for her cellphone, not sure she even had it with her. "I'm going to call his parents and give them a piece of my mind."

"Uggh, Mom, don't," begged Gavin, bringing a hand to his eyes and dragging it down his face melodramatically. "Stooooppppp."

Ever since the light as a feather, stiff as a board, hip-bleed incident, Mrs. Dane hadn't let Gavin sleep over any of his friends' houses. Dad said overnight gatherings were a privilege he'd shown he wasn't responsible enough to enjoy. She said his friends were juvenile delinquents and she didn't trust them not to murder him in his sleep. She could hardly have been more disguised with their actions if they had literally stabbed Gavin with a rusty knife before leaving him outside the ER.

But that didn't matter anymore, Gavin thought, looking at the Elucidator in his hand.

The one he'd borrowed from Angela.

Soon, as soon as he could get confirmation his sister had finally moved to Liston, he'd put in Gary's code and go to the future.

In the meantime, he thought he'd play around with his new toy a bit. Unfortunately, he hadn't worked out how to use most of the features. They were all, he was starting to think he'd have to admit, rather beyond him.

But he had figured out how to do one thing. One thing he was really, really excited about.

If he was going to leave this time, and his former friends, he was going to go out with a bang.

The best prank in the history of pranks.

He stuffed the Elucidator deep into the pocket of his baggy cargo pants, pulled his skull sweatshirt over his head, and – taking a deep breath – prepared to climb out his open bedroom window.

Antonio wouldn't be there – ever since he'd gone back to his native time and relieved his former life as Walks With Pride, he thought he was too good for them, always hanging out with this nerdy African American kid Brandon instead of them now – but all Gavin's other friends from the night they'd dropped him would be.

It took some smirks and casual manipulation – after assuring them of course he wasn't going to miss hanging out with them just because his mommy said no – to get them to agree to play that silly game again, after all look what happened last time, but in under fifteen minutes their fingers were beneath him again and he was biting the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning.

This was going to be so great.

"Light as a feather, stiff as a board... Light as a feather, stiff as a board..."

If they couldn't lift in succession very well, Gavin's friends certainly could gasp in sync when they saw him levitating above their fingertips.

"The hell?"

Eyes opening slowly, Gavin turned his head to the boy nearest him, the one whose brother had driven him to the ER that disastrous night. "You really gotta try this."

By the way everyone ran out of the room, you would have thought Gavin's head had spun all the way around and he'd started spewing pea-soup and that he'd said, "I see dead people," instead of, "You really gotta try this."

Gavin's shoulders were shaking in midair. He reached into his pocket and touched the Elucidator and gently floated down to the safety of the carpet...

….light as a feather...