Free Flying in Place by Susan Palwick Page A

a lot about gymnastics. I remember the uneven parallels: I used to get black and blue where I hit the bars, but the dismounts were like flying, and if you landed right it didn’t even hurt. And I remember the balance beam. I used to pretend that it was a high wire and I was performing at the circus.”
    “The circus,” I said, disgusted again. Here she was talking about stuff I’d just heard; she must be my imagination. “You went there with Mom, didn’t you? She’s never taken me.”
    “Yes,” Ginny said, but a shadow crossed her face. “She liked it. We both like the acrobats.” She shivered then, and chewed her hair again for a minute, and then said shyly, “Do you want me to show you how to do a triple somersault?”
    “No. Why should you teach me how to do that? It won’t do me any good once I’m back in my fat ugly body. You might as well teach me how to fly.”
    “But you are flying,” Ginny said. “Your mind is, anyway. And I didn’t have to teach you how to do it. You figured it out by yourself, just like you did with the cartwheel.”
    “Great. So I’m the next incarnation of Wonder Girl, and the next time I go to the lake and somebody hassles me I can drag them up to cloud nine and dump them on top of a tree or something. You’re as bad as Myrna Halloran, you know that?”
    “No, I don’t know her,” Ginny said seriously. Her face brightened again, “I remember the lake, though. It was pretty there. I used to go sit on that old dock on the western shore when no one else was around—”
    “You did? You did ? So do I!” Idiot, I told myself, of course she does. She’s you. She’s your imagination. What else would she do? More suspiciously, I said, “Mom never told me you did that.”
    “She always thought I was at the library,” Ginny said, wrinkling her nose. “I studied at the lake sometimes, but mostly I just watched the fish.”
    Just like me. What a surprise. “Minnows, right? The ones that make shadows on the bottom—”
    “And the birds that peck in the sand looking for things to eat.” She grinned, and I realized that I hadn’t seen her smile before. One of her upper front teeth was chipped. Mom had never told me about that, either, and it didn’t show up in any of the family photographs. Well, so I didn’t want to think she was perfect. But how had I come up with the pajamas?
    Ginny was still babbling about the lake. “And I used to see owls sometimes at dusk, and bats and raccoons, and once I saw a fox come to the water to drink. A big red one. It was beautiful. Have you ever seen a fox?”
    “No.” Just boys. “There aren’t so many animals around now, I guess because there are more people or something. Just the birds and the fish, and sometimes deer. But not very often.”
    Ginny chewed her lip for a minute and then said, “Do you want to go there, to the lake? We can go there, if you want to.”
    Oh, sure we can. “Won’t people see us?”
    “No, silly. There won’t be anybody else there. We won’t really be there, not in the world. Just in our heads, sort of. It’s hard to explain.”
    “You’re kidding.” I knew all of this was completely crazy, but I felt the same surge of lightness as when I’d left my body, I wanted to believe in her. I did, I did. “We can go to the Sake, just like that? You mean I can go to the lake and there won’t be anybody there? I can go there whenever I want to, just by leaving my body?”
    “It’s not that different from daydreaming, is it? But if you stay out of your body for too long, you may not be able to get back.” Ginny frowned and picked up a strand of her hair again, tugging at it with thin fingers. “I don’t think I should have told you.”
    “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be careful. But look, can you take me into your room, too? So I can see it? I really want to see your room.”
    “No,” Ginny said. “It doesn’t work that way. I can’t take you anywhere you haven’t been. If we go