Magonia(14)

I’m Googling. “This happened when?”
“Twelve hundreds. The townspeople cut the rope and kept the anchor. Made it part of the church door.”
“That’s a fairy tale.” Something occurs to me. “What does he say happened to the sailor?”
Jason looks at me.
“The sailor drowned,” he says.
I meet his eyes.
“In the air. He drowned in the air. So, keep telling me about the ‘not-relevant’ situation. You haven’t been drowning for sixteen years in air or anything.”
I feel shivery. There’s something stressfully specific about that anchor story.
“Actually, I’m pretty sure what I saw outside Mr. Grimm’s window was a helicopter.”
“Right. That’s why you freaked out. It’s not like you don’t have personal experience of helicopters. You definitely never got life-flighted out of a field trip in fifth grade, because you stopped breathing at the fake safari theme park.”
I roll my eyes.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,” Jason Kerwin says, at which point he’s busted for Trite.
“Hamlet. Really?” I say. “I’m not Horatio. This is med side effects, feather in lungs, early death.”
“Hamlet’s all about hallucinations and meltdowns and early death. Not that you’re dying. Because you’re not.”
He spins around and stirs some more.
I’m now even grouchier than I was. I feel shaky, like a dog wanting to whirl and get loose of water. My skin feels like Spanx. I don’t really know how Spanx feel, but my mom has a pair, and she tells me they’re torture devices specifically designed to cause women to lose circulation all over their bodies. My skin? Feels exactly that way.
“I don’t get it,” I say finally, after I bite the insides of my cheeks for a while. I don’t quite know what I’m upset about, but I feel inclined toward slapping and also toward collapsing. “Are you saying you think I’m hallucinating?”
Jason just considers me.
“Or are you saying there’s actually a ship in the sky looking for me? From this, this—Magonia place?”
I test that out by mumbling it.

“I’m saying you must have read some of this stuff somewhere, and it’s been rattling around in your brain, and now it’s showing up. You saw a cloud formation, and your brain filled in the gaps.” He pauses. “A ship in the sky isn’t the worst hallucination you could have,” he says. “You could be hallucinating everything on earth being on fire. That happens to some people. After the drugs kick in.”
“Please tell me more about drug side effects,” I say. “I know nothing about drug side effects.” I can’t shame him. He doesn’t believe me. I don’t believe me either. Why don’t I want to be hallucinating? Hallucinating isn’t horrible. It’s absolutely a more palatable idea than ships in the sky yelling your name.
“Sometimes people hallucinate even worse than that,” he goes on. “You—the stuff you’re hallucinating? It’s like, a Disney movie. It’s some kind of Peter Pan plus E.T. hybrid.”
I’m disgusted by the implication that I’m having a children’s hospital hallucination.
“So you think this is brain melt,” I say to Jason. “Fine. Whatever.” I say something mean. “You’re one to talk about brain melt.”
“I am,” he says, so calmly I feel instantly bad. “I know about what brains do when they get screwed up.”
“How do you even know about Magonia?” I wish I didn’t sound whimpery. “You didn’t read the Annals of Ulster for fun.”
“Remember when I was building the UFO? Magonia’s an early version of UFO stuff.”
“Your moms would have hated that UFO.”
Jason’s mom Eve is a biologist who used to be an ecoterrorist. She would say anti-ecoterrorist, because she thinks people who ignore the damage they do to the environment are the terrorists. But regardless, she was once a person who chained herself to trees and in at least one case, for which she was arrested, seriously damaged a bulldozer, using a wrench. You wouldn’t think this looking at her. She looks like a mom. I guess that’s how it works.
She now writes academic articles about farming practices, and the way we’re messing the world up in order to make an economy out of food-buying. An essay she wrote about the irresponsible farming of bananas actually made it so I don’t eat bananas anymore.
“The UFO would have been made of recycled materials,” Jason says. “They wouldn’t have minded that. Taste this.”
The éclair’s full of hot air, and it burns my tongue. I’m staring at Jason with a bit more wide-eyes than I’d prefer. He’s pleased with himself.
“Yep,” he says. “Not much I don’t know about UFOs.” He pauses, then takes pity on me. “Also, when you got busted in Mr. Grimm’s class yesterday, swearing about ships in the sky, I Googled ‘ships in the sky.’”
I swear again. This time at him. With relief.
“Basic search. On my phone. You’d have done it if you weren’t quote side-effecting unquote to no clear purpose. You don’t usually invent things out of nowhere, Az. I tend to believe you when you say you’re seeing a ship sailing through the clouds.” He’s not looking at me. “So, yeah, I think you saw . . . something.”
I’m flooded with relief again, a lot more of it. And something that I guess must be gratitude.