Free Flying in Place by Susan Palwick

to hear him.
    But I’d been right, hadn’t I? It wasn’t safe to dress like that. It wasn’t safe to go out in leaky boats with boys you hardly knew who were staring at you. It wasn’t. It wasn’t. She should have known better. She could have kept herself safe so easily: by wearing a sweatshirt and not going out in the boat, by keeping her eyes open, by using her common sense. It would have been so easy for her not to get into trouble and she’d ignored all the signals, and there was no easy way out for me at all. If wearing a sweatshirt would have stopped the breathing I’d have worn ten of them at once, but it didn’t matter. He’d just wait until I fell asleep and then he’d come into my bedroom and it would start all over again, no matter how many sweatshirts I had on.
    I wanted to stop thinking about it, wanted to stop thinking about everything, but sleep was impossible, and there wasn’t anywhere else I could go. Or was there? Could I leave my body now, even though it wasn’t dawn?
    I could, and I did. The sudden absence of pain was as welcome as the first cool dive into the lake on a hot summer’s day. Out of my body, I felt better than I ever had inside it.
    I floated effortlessly to the ceiling and spun so it became the floor. Did I have to do that, though? Why? Why did I have to stand on anything, if I could fly? I did an experimental cartwheel—I couldn’t land wrong and get hurt, since all my nerve endings were down on the bed—and discovered that it was easy. So I did a back flip and a handstand. They probably wouldn’t have looked very graceful to anyone watching me, and even without a body I’d never do them as well as Ginny had, but they were a lot more fun than studying or being scared.
    “Pretty good,” Ginny said behind me as I was in the middle of a somersault, and if I’d been in my body I’d have fallen on my head and split my skull open,
    “No, really,” she said as I scrambled to turn around, “that’s not bad at all, for somebody who’s just starting out. You need more practice, that’s all.”
    “What are you doing here?” She was still wearing her silly Snoopy pajamas, and when I yelled at her she picked up a piece of her hair and started chewing it. “I didn’t call you! I don’t want you here! You’re a hallucination!”
    “You didn’t call me the first time, either.” She looked even more real than she had before; less fuzzy around the edges, somehow, as if whatever was showing this film of her—God? my imagination?—had adjusted the focus on the projector. “And I’m as real as you are. I told you that before.”
    “You told me a lot of stuff. Not that any of it made any sense.”
    She shrugged. “Well, maybe I have to come back until it makes sense. Anyhow, here I am.”
    “Here you are. Why would anyone want to be here after being in heaven?”
    She looked surprised. “I don’t know. This is where I lived. I was happy here, wasn’t I?”
    “That’s what Mom says. You were happy here, but I’m not. Want to trade places?”
    She shivered and shook her head, “Can’t do that. It’s not my body down there; it’s yours.”
    “Yeah, it sure is. Would you want it if you had it? It’s ugly and clumsy, and right now it’s got blood all over it.”
    Ginny looked at her feet. “You shouldn’t talk like that. You did that back flip pretty well, really you did. You’d get better if you practiced.”
    “Sure,” I said, thinking of my conversation with Jane about Tennyson. I wondered if Ginny felt as embarrassed as I’d felt then.
    What was I thinking? She couldn’t feel embarrassed; she couldn’t feel anything, any more than balloons or pumpkins could. She was dead, and I was imagining her. But I kept talking anyway, because she’d said something nice to me. “Not having to worry about gravity helps. So you remember gymnastics now, huh?”
    “Gymnastics,” she said, and her face lit up the way it had when I’d said her name. “I remember