His father slid his palm back and forth across the top of the steering wheel. He tilted his head to one side and rifled air through his nose. “I don’t think so, Frankie. That woman … if her daughter—what’s her name? Jennifer?—if she’s so sick, then maybe it’s not such a good idea for you to be playing with her.”

“She’s not sick,” Frankie said. “Mom said she wasn’t sick.”

His father blinked and looked at him, one brow hitched up. “She is sick. You should know that, Frankie. She has an illness. It makes her very old, even though she’s just a little girl.”

“Will she get better?”

“I don’t think so,” his father said, frowning. “Plus, you saw what just happened. People like that, if you hurt them—even by accident—they’ll sue you. You know what that means? They’ll take you to court. The cops will come, and they’ll take you to court and make you give people like that a whole lot of money. And if you don’t have a whole lot of money, then what do you do?”

Frankie didn’t know the answer to the question. His father was looking past him again, out the passenger side of the car, at the sand-covered lawn and the row of houses beyond it.

“I don’t want to be on your team,” Frankie said.

His father pulled his focus in and looked at him as if he’d uttered a swear word. “Get in the house. We’ll talk about this later.”

Frankie stayed where he was.

“Go on,” his father said. “Get in the house.” Frankie didn’t move. His father reached down and unbuckled his seat belt for him. Then he stretched over, unlatched the passenger door, and shoved it open.

Frankie didn’t want to stay in the car; he didn’t want to go inside, either. He didn’t feel like doing anything his father told him to do.

Finally, growling under his breath, his father opened his own door and got out of the car.

But instead of going into the house, he walked into the middle of the yard and stood with his back to Frankie and the driveway. Surrounded by sand, he looked like a man standing on a beach.

A breeze moved through the open windows of the car. Frankie smelled salt in the air. He imagined he heard the sound of the ocean carried on the breeze. The citizens of Atlantis had been sad as they’d stood on the shore and heard their names called out, one by one, but his father didn’t look sad. He looked angry and impatient. He had his hands on his hips and was tapping a foot against the sand, as if ready to march into the waters of the Outer Sea the next time someone said his name.

Ground Control

1981