Georgie was seven when he decided to disappear.
He’d told his friend Tommy at school that he was going to do it one day, just up and come apart and float away, never to be seen again.
Tommy, always serious, had looked at him with his beady, red-rimmed eyes and had simply stated, “That’s impossible. People can’t just float away,” and had gone back to digging. The hole Tommy and Georgie had been working on was slow work, especially since they’d carried the dirt away in their pockets, not wanting to leave a mound for a teacher to find, but Tommy said they’d eventually dig a tunnel out of the schoolyard and they’d escape forever.
Georgie had rubbed his dirt-stained jeans and said, “We could spearmint.”
Tommy was always going on about spearminting. He read a lot of books and was going to be a scientist. Or so he said. To Georgie, being a scientist sounded like one of those jobs his daddy would say was for wussy college folks who didn’t want to break a nail.