Sunday
Okay, so let me just say right away that none of this was my fault.
I know that is exactly what a person says when something IS their fault, but this time I really mean it. I did not ask to wake up on a floating island in the middle of nowhere with my entire family and Rowley Jefferson standing next to me in his pajamas. I did not plan any of this. And I definitely did not sign up for whatever is currently happening.
Let me back up.
The last thing I remember before all of this started is going to sleep in my own bed, in my own room, with the fan on and the door mostly closed because Mom always leaves it open a crack which lets in the hallway light which makes it impossible to sleep. I had everything exactly the way I like it. Blanket pulled up, pillow at the right angle, the little star projector Rodrick borrowed from me and never gave back finally returned so the ceiling had those blue dots on it.
Then I woke up here.
"Here" being a stretch of grass that should not physically exist because it is sitting on a giant chunk of rock floating in the sky about a thousand feet above the clouds.
When I first opened my eyes I thought maybe I had just rolled out of bed in a weird way. That happens sometimes. But when I sat up and saw open sky in every direction and felt warm wind coming from literally nowhere, I realized this was not a normal morning situation.
Mom was already standing up and looking around with this expression she gets when she walks into a new house on one of those home renovation shows she watches. Like she was impressed but also taking mental notes.
Dad was on his knees patting the grass like he was checking if it was real. He did this for a while.
Rodrick was still asleep.
Manny was sitting cross-legged about ten feet away, looking out at the clouds like he had been there for hours already. He had this calm look on his face that honestly bothered me more than the floating island situation did.
And then there was Rowley, who I have not explained yet.
Rowley Jefferson is my best friend, or at least he was before this whole thing happened and I am still deciding. He lives two houses down from us and somehow ended up here too, which I do not have an explanation for. He was wearing his pajamas with the cartoon robots on them and he was already smiling.
That is the thing about Rowley. The boy wakes up on a sky island in an unknown dimension and his first instinct is to SMILE.
"Greg," Rowley said. "This is AMAZING."
I told him to please calm down.
So here is what I know about where we are, based on about an hour of looking around and also listening to Dad list every possible safety concern out loud one by one.
We are on a floating island. Not a metaphor. An actual island sitting in the sky. The ground is real grass and real dirt and the edges drop off into open air. Below the edges there are clouds, and below the clouds there is nothing visible, which I chose not to think about for my own mental health.
The island we landed on is connected to other islands nearby through a series of bridges. Some of the bridges are stone, smooth and wide enough to walk across comfortably. Some are wood and rope, which Dad immediately said we were not using. One of them looked like it was made entirely out of woven vines and it stretched out over a gap that had to be at least two hundred feet across.
The light here is strange. Not bad strange, just strange. It is warm and golden all the time, like late afternoon, except it does not seem to be coming from any specific direction. There is no sun that I can see. The light just exists. It comes from everywhere and nowhere and it makes the whole place look like someone adjusted the brightness setting to eleven.
The trees are huge. Not like slightly bigger than normal trees. I mean enormous, with leaves the size of doors and fruit hanging off the branches that are bigger than my head. Some of the fruit I did not recognize. Some of it looked like regular fruit but the wrong size and the wrong color.
The air smelled like something I could not name. Like rain and something sweet and also something that was almost like the ocean but not quite.
Rowley said it smelled like a dream.
I said it smelled like a field trip, which is not a compliment.
About two hours after we arrived, we met the locals.
I had seen something moving between the trees on the far side of the island, but I figured it was animals and I was not ready to deal with animals on top of everything else. Then a group of about six of them came out into the open and I realized they were not animals.
They were people. Mostly.
They were human-shaped and human-sized and they had faces and clothes, so that part was fine. But they also had wings. Big feathered wings, folded against their backs, the kind that would definitely clear out an entire aisle if you were walking through a grocery store. The wings were different colors on different people. One had deep brown wings, like a hawk. One had pale gray. One of them, who looked about my age, had wings that were kind of a blue-gray color that shifted a little in the light.
They looked at us the same way we looked at them. That is, with a lot of confusion and also some amount of fear.
Dad stepped in front of everyone in a way that I think was supposed to be protective but mostly just put him closer to the winged strangers, which did not seem like a great strategy.
The winged people said something in a language I did not recognize. It sounded smooth and a little musical, like they were talking and humming at the same time.
Mom immediately responded by smiling very wide and saying "Hello! We come in peace!" which is not something a normal person needs to say but apparently when you are standing on a sky island facing people with wings, normal rules do not apply.
The one with the blue-gray wings tilted their head. They looked at me specifically, and I realized I was still in my pajamas. My pajamas have a repeating pattern of small cheese slices on them because I got them as a gift from Aunt Loretta and they were the only ones clean that night.
I want to be very clear that I did not choose to be first-contact-representative of the human race while wearing cheese pajamas. That is just what happened.
The winged people did not seem hostile. Confused, yes. A little amused, also yes. Hostile, no.
They made a gesture with their wings, sort of half-open and angled forward, which Mom immediately decided was a greeting and copied by holding her arms out at a similar angle. The winged people seemed to find this very funny. Two of them made a sound that I am pretty sure was laughing.
Then Rowley walked forward, held out both arms exactly like Mom, and said "Hi, I am Rowley!" in a cheerful voice.
The blue-gray wing person smiled. Actually smiled, like a normal smile. And then they made a sound that might have been their name. It was short and soft and ended with a kind of exhale.
"Nice to meet you," Rowley said, very seriously.
And just like that, Rowley had a friend.
I had been standing six feet away with my arms crossed in my cheese pajamas and I had zero friends.
This is how every situation in my life goes, by the way.
By the time it started to get dark, which did not involve the light actually changing much but instead just a kind of slow blue shift in the sky and the clouds below the island starting to glow faintly, we had been taken to the main part of the island where the village was.
The houses here are built high up. Some sit on raised platforms. Some are built directly into the thick upper branches of the giant trees. There are walkways strung between them, narrow paths with rope railings, and the winged people move between them easily, sometimes half-flying between one level and the next with just a single push of their wings.
We were given a large open building near the center of the village to stay in. It had a roof and walls but no real door, just an open arch facing out toward the main path. The floor was smooth dark wood and there were sleeping mats laid out, which Mom immediately called rustic and charming.
Dad called it a security risk.
Rodrick had woken up by this point and spent approximately four minutes taking in the situation before deciding it was, and I am quoting him directly, "actually pretty sick."
Manny walked straight to the far corner of the room, sat down on a mat, and went to sleep. He had not said a single word since we arrived. Not one.
I sat near the arch and looked out at the village and the lights beginning to glow in the clouds like water beneath the island and the soft wind moving through the giant trees, and I tried to figure out what was happening.
I came up with nothing useful.
Eventually I lay down on a mat that was actually more comfortable than it looked and stared at the ceiling, which had carved patterns in the wood that I could not make out in the dark.
Tomorrow, I decided, I would figure out a plan. There had to be a way to fix this. There was always a way to fix things if you were smart about it, and I like to think I am pretty smart about things.
I fell asleep before I came up with anything, though.
So that was day one.
Not my best day ever, but also probably not my worst, which honestly says a lot about my life.
[SKETCH: Greg standing in cheese pajamas, arms stubbornly crossed, while Rowley waves enthusiastically at a winged villager in the background. The villager is waving back. Several other villagers are watching Greg with polite confusion.]