ET- Making Elliot Float

Except that Elliott had started to float out of his chair.

  It was E.T.’s fault, of course. His drunken wave-length was still acting up, bouncing around the principal’s office, and finally, as seen now, buoying poor Elliott upward like a loose cork.

  Elliott gripped the arms of his chair with all his might and forced himself back down; the principal didn’t notice, thought the boy was merely squirming.

  “. . . this fairy-tale approach to life you and your friends have is costing you valuable time. Do you see what I’m driving at?” He went on jawing, oblivious of Elliott, captivated by his own drone. “. . . the world is a known quantity, son. Stop looking in the cobwebs. Stop daydreaming about things that don’t exist. This, I think, is the root of all your problems.”

  The root of Elliott’s problems was that he was being uprooted from the gravitation of Earth. The tipsy wave was under his bottom again, playfully bearing him upward with a force that now broke Elliott’s grip on the chair. Without further notice, he floated up to the ceiling of the principal’s office.

  The principal was cleaning his glasses, gaze averted as he held the lenses to the light and droned on. “. . . predictable behavior, my boy. Do you know what tremendous advances have been made because mankind found that matter behaved in predictable ways?”

  He looked toward Elliott’s chair.

  Elliott was not there.

  He was floating at the ceiling, a fact discerned a moment later by the principal, whose eyeballs grew considerably more convex at the discovery. He pressed back deeply into his swivel chair, tightened fingers popping a lens out of his glasses. A lifetime of clichés seemed to be raining over him in a shower of tinkling noises, as if a skylight had collapsed on his head. His nose was swelling—perhaps it was going to bleed—and his mind felt like a sock suddenly turned inside out. He signaled for silence, but no one was speaking. It was just a boy, floating on the ceiling that made his ears ring as if anvils were going off in them, as if multitudes were shouting, as if a train had just passed over him, wheels clickety-clacking.

  He collapsed deeper into his chair and, like Harvey the dog, a whining noise escaped his lips.

  Elliott slowly descended into his chair once more.

  “May I go now, sir?”

  “Yes, yes, please go . . .” The principal waved him away, and swiveled slowly toward the window where the sunlight danced. Then he swiveled back, opened his Confiscated Drugs drawer and swallowed a handful of Quaaludes.

- E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in His Adventure on Earth, chapter 13