HOW IT FEELS TO FLOAT

Helena Fox lives by the sea in Wollongong, Australia, where she runs creative writing workshops for young people. She’s a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. Helena has traveled and lived all around the world, but of all her adventures, working with young ypeople and helping them find and express their voice has brought her the greatest joy. How It Feels to Float is her debut novel.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
A Chicago Public Library Best of the Best of the Year

“I haven’t been so dazzled by a YA in ages. . . . Biz’s voice is wild and rollicking, lyrical and hilarious, utterly authentic . . . There isn’t a false note.” —Jandy Nelson, author of I’ll Give You the Sun (via School Library Journal)

“[How It Feels to Float] explores intergenerational mental illness in a way that is nothing short of exquisite.” —PopSugar

“A profoundly moving story about grief, loss, and love that will take your breath away. Helena Fox is a writer to be reckoned with.” —Kathleen Glasgow, author of Girl in Pieces

“Give this to all your friends immediately . . . It tackles mental health, depression, sexual identity, and anxiety with beauty and empathy.” —Cosmopolitan.com

 “Lyrical and profoundly affecting, providing a nuanced account of the hereditary effects of trauma. Haunting.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Biz is smart, funny, and self-deprecating . . . [How It Feels to Float is] a masterful portrayal of mental illness that illuminates the complex interplay between emotional trauma and the mind’s subsequent recoil. And the writing is just beautiful.” —Booklist (starred review)

Themes

• Death and Grief

‘The dead leave us all the time, Sylvia.’ (p 126)

Discussion Point: Biz has never recovered from her father Stephen’s death. He never recovered from his father Martin’s death. Is grief surmountable? How should one endeavour to cope with grief?

Discussion Point: Stephen’s grief was exacerbated by having a child who reminded him of how fragile life can be. He worried constantly that Biz would be injured or die (p 48) in his hands. Every parent feels this to a certain extent, but Stephen’s feelings were extreme. How difficult must it have been for Stephen to feel this way for so long? How do you think Laura felt about and coped with Stephen’s prolonged feelings of fear and overwhelm?

Discussion Point: Have you felt so sad you couldn’t breathe? Has your throat hurt, your chest hurt, your bones? (p 104)

Partway through the book, Biz is toppled by fresh grief after her father disappears and she loses Grace. How does her grief here (and earlier in the book) affect Biz’s thoughts and her way of seeing the world? How does it change Biz’s behaviour and influence her decisions? How do you feel grief affects people’s mental health?

Discussion Point: Sylvia has dealt with Ronald’s death by embracing her memories of him (p 126). Laura also often talks about Biz’s dad and keeps mementos of him throughout the house (p 120). How are Sylvia’s and Laura’s coping mechanisms for grief similar, and how are they different? Do you think Laura has overcome her grief at the loss of Stephen? Has she actually, as Biz says, let him go? (p 135)

• Depression and Anxiety

‘Your father had a softness in him that went gooey after you were born,’ she said. He looked the same but parts of him had loosened. You can’t reconstruct a man like him, she said. You can try. He did try.’ (p 58)

Discussion Point: Read the passage describing Biz’s depression and visits to the psychiatrist (pp 101–5). Did her feelings make sense to you? Do you think these feelings are common? (Note: Teachers will need to be sensitive to their students’ experiences in this area and may choose not to explore this topic.)

Discussion Point: Biz contemplates suicide (p 94) and again later: The feeling of wanting to leave comes so suddenly, I can’t stop it before it hits. (p 115) Discuss the strategies Biz learns to use when confronted with such feelings. (Note: Teachers need to be aware of their students’ experiences in this regard prior to embarking on such an open discussion.)

Discussion Point: Bridgit’s skills at listening and encouraging Biz to speak about her feelings (p 106) are a positive step forward for her. How important is it to talk about your feelings to someone who genuinely listens?

At three in the morning when I can’t sleep, the room ticks over in the dark and all I have for company is the rush of words coming up fast like those racehorses you see on television, poor things, and when their hearts give out they are laid on the ground and shot dead behind a blue sheet.

At three a.m., I think of hearts. I think of candy hearts and carved-tree hearts and hummingbird hearts. I think of hearts in bodies and the rhythm inside us we don’t get to choose.

I lay my hand over mine. There it is.

It beatbeats beatbeatbeats skipsabeatbeatbeat

beatbeatbeats.

A heart is a mystery and not a mystery. It hides under ribs, pumping blood. You can pull it out, hold it in your hand.Squeeze. It wants what it wants. It can be made of gold, glass, stone. It can stop anytime.

People scratch hearts into benches, draw them onto fogged windows, tattoo them on their skin. Believe the story they tell themselves: that hearts are somehow bigger than muscle, that we are something more than an accidental arrangement of molecules, that we are pulled by a force greater than gravity, that love is anything more than a mess of nerve and impulse—

“Biz.”

A whisper.

“Biz.”

In the dark.

“Biz.”

In my room.

I open my eyes, and Dad’s sitting on the edge of the bed.

“You need to stop,” he says.

What? I squint at him. He’s blurry.

“The thinking. I can hear it when you breathe.”

Dad’s wearing a gray sweatshirt. His hands are folded in his lap. He looks tired.

“You should sleep like you did when you were small,” he says. He looks away, smiles. “Your tiny fingers, tucked under your chin. There’s a photo . . .” Dad trails off.

Yeah, Dad. I’ve seen it.

“The one of us in hospital, after you were born—”

Yeah. The one just after Mum got her new blood and you fainted and they gave you orange juice. The one where Mum’s laughing up at the camera as I sleep in her arms. Yeah. I’ve seen it.

Dad smiles again. He reaches across to touch me, but of course he can’t.

That photo has been on every fridge door in every house I’ve ever lived in. It sits under a plumbing company magnet and beside a clip holding year-old receipts Mum can’t seem to throw away.

The photo was taken an hour after I came bulleting out of Mum so fast she had to have a transfusion. In the picture, I look like a slug and Dad looks flattened, like he’s seen a car accident. But Mum’s face is bright, open, happy.

All the other photos are in albums on our living room bookshelf, next to the non-working fireplace. The albums hold every picture of me Dad ever took until he died, and all the ones of me Mum took until smartphones came along and she stopped printing me onto paper. I’m now partly inside a frozen computer Mum keeps meaning to get fixed, and on an overcrowded iPhone she keeps meaning to download.

And I’m in the photos friends have taken when I’ve let them and the ones the twins have taken with their eyes since they were babies. I’m in the ocean I walk beside when I skip school and in the clouds where I imagine myself sometimes. And I’m in the look on my friend Grace’s face, a second after I kissed her, five seconds before she said she thought of me as a friend.

I blink. Dad’s gone again. The room is empty but for me, my bed, my walls, my thoughts, my things.

It’s what—four in the morning?

I have a physics test at eight.

My ribs hurt. Behind them, my heart beatbeats beatbeatbeats beatskipsabeat

beatbeat beats.

My name is Elizabeth Martin Grey, but no one I love calls me that.

The Martin is for Dad’s dad who died in a farm accident when he was thirty and Dad was ten.

I was seven when Dad died. Which means I had less time with Dad alive than Dad had with his.

There’s never enough time. Actually, there’s too much and too little, in unequal parts. More than enough of time passing but not enough of the time passed.

Right?

Ratio of the time you want versus the time you get (a rough estimate)—

1 : 20,000. 

Ratio of Dad’s time as the son of Martin : as the living father of Biz : as my dead dad, sitting on the edge of my bed telling me stories—

1 : 0.7 : ∞.

Monday morning, 7:30, and it’s so hot the house feels like it’s melting. Cicadas scream through the windows. The dog pants on the kitchen floor. I had a shower five minutes ago and already I’m sweating through my shirt.

“Ugh,” I say, flopping over the kitchen counter, crumpled uniform on, shoes untied.

Mum reads my face and sighs. She’s making breakfast for the twins. “Be grateful you get to have an education, Biz.” She waggles a spatula. “Not everyone’s as lucky.”

I peer at her. “You might have read me wrong, Mum. Maybe I meant, ‘Ugh. How I wish school lasted all weekend, I have missed it so very much.’ ”

I’m a month into Year 11, which is ridiculous because I am nano and unformed but I’m still supposed to write essays about Lenin and Richard III and urban sprawl. Year 11 is a big deal. We are only seconds away, the teachers say, from our final exams. The teachers can’t stop revving us up about our impending future.

This is a big deal! say the teachers of English, science, art, maths, music, geography, and Other Important Subjects in Which We Are Not Remotely Interested But Are Taking So We Can Get a Good Mark.

You need to take it seriously! 

You need to be prepared! 

You need to not freak out, then have to go to the counselor because we’ve freaked you out! 

I open the fridge. “I’m going to sit in here, okay? Just for a minute. Let me squat next to the broccoli.”

Mum laughs. She’s making banana pancakes. Billie and Dart drool over their waiting plates. The twins have the morning off school. They’re going to the dentist! They love the dentist—it’s where Mum works, so they get extra toothbrushes, and as many little packs of floss and toothpaste as they can carry in their hands.

“Are they ready yet?” says my brother, Dart, six years old.

“Come on, Mum! I’m starving todeath,” says my sister, Billie, nineteen minutes younger than Dart.

“Give me a second,” says Mum. “A watched pancake never boils.”

She flips one over. It looks scorched. Mum doesn’t love cooking.

I can’t see how she can be anywhere near a stove in this heat. I grab some coconut yogurt and grapes out of the fridge.

“Did you study for your test?” Mum says.

“Absolutely,” I say, and it’s true, if you count watching YouTube videos and listening to music while reading the textbook studying. I don’t know if I’m ready—there’s the lack of sleep thing, and the not-having-spoken-properly-to-Grace-since-I-kissed-her thing, which makes today impossible and complicated before it even begins.

I hug Mum goodbye and smooch the twins’ cheeks as they squirm.

I grab my bike from the shed, ride it for thirty seconds before I realize the front tire is flat.

Ah, that’s right.

When did the tire go? Friday? No, Thursday.

Shit, Biz! You had one job.

A magpie laughs from a nearby tree. His magpie friend looks down, then joins in.

I could ask Mum to drive me but I know what she’d say: “Do I look like a taxi, Biz?”

I could skip school, but then I’d miss my test and ruin my impending future.

I shove the bike back in the shed. And start walking.

I live with Mum and the twins in Wollongong, in a blue-clad house on a street wallpapered with trees.

We moved here a couple of years ago, after moving to a lot of other places. We’re one and a half hours south of Sydney. The city is not too big, not too small; it’s just right for now, says Mum. The city sits beside the sea, under an escarpment. The sea pushes at the shore, shoving under rocks and dunes and lovers. Craggy cliffs lean over us, trying to read what we’ve written. The city is long like a finger. It was a steel town once.

There, that’s the tour.

When I was seven, Mum, Dad, and I lived up north, near Queensland—in the Australian jungle, Mum likes to say. She says the mosquitoes were full on, but I don’t remember them.

I remember frogs click-clacking at night in the creek at the bottom of the hill. The house was wooden; it had stilts. The backyard was a steep tangle of eucalypts and ferns and figs and shrubs.

You could see hills like women’s boobs all around. I’d wake up and hear kookaburras. Light would come in through my curtainless windows and lift me out of bed. I’d run in to Mum and Dad’s room and jump on them to wake them up.

I had a puppy. I called him Bumpy.

Our street is flat now. It goes past a park where I walk the dog and he sniffs the shit left by other dogs. I can walk to school in fifteen minutes or I can walk straight past it and go to the sea. Or, if I want to be a total rebel, I can go the opposite direction and in fifteen minutes end up in a rainforest, under a mountain, gathering leeches for my leech army.

On the walk to school, the cicadas keep me company. They scream from one huge gum tree to another. I pass the community center. I pass the park. I get to the end of the cul-de-sac and wait under the bleaching sun to cross the freeway.

Traffic bawls past. I can feel my skin frying. I can feel cancer pooling in my freckles. I can feel the road tar melting under my feet as I scurry across the road.

Past the freeway there’s a vet, a pub, and a train station. Every day I have to cross the train tracks to get to school. Every time I think,What if the signals are wrong, and a train comes out of the blue and hits me as I cross?

A woman walked against the signal once. Not here, but close enough it might as well be here. She was in a rush, they said; she ignored the ringing bells, the dropping barrier. She got halfway and thought better of it. She turned back. The train came.

Every time I cross the tracks, I think of her and try not to think of her.

I’ve traced and retraced her last moments in my head. I have googled her and I know the names of her family, the job she had, the music she listened to, and the last concert she saw before she died. I can feel the tightness of her skin when she saw the train, and how sweat sprang up a moment before the train hit—

step

and how our pupils widened

step

and turned my eyes to black

step

and in that infinite, molecular moment, I can’t remember if I meant to cross, or have paused on the tracks and am waiting here—

“Hey, Biz.”

I turn my head. Dad’s walking beside me, barefoot, in his running shorts and KISS T-shirt.

“Do you remember your first train ride?”

No. I don’t remember that, Dad. 

“It was a steam train. You were four. We went through a rainforest! We went really high up a mountain, and visited a butterfly sanctuary. And you flapped around like a monarch. You were beautiful.”

Is that right, Dad? 

“You should flap around. Try it, Biz; it’ll shake off the frets.”

I look down. I’m over the train tracks and past the station. I’m on the path; it opens in front of me, green grass on both sides, the sun beaming.

I think of butterflies. I think of flying.

Dad laughs.

He’s gone by the time I reach the school gate.

I walk into physics just as Ms. Hastings is handing out our tests. Ms. Hastings gives me ayoung lady, you’re late look. I give her a tell me about it and have you noticed I’m swimming in a pool of sweat look. Ms. Hastings raises an eyebrow. I sit at my desk.

Ms. Hastings lays our tests facedown. She does the regular threats: “You must not look at anyone’s work!” and “Put away your phones!” and “Your time starts now.”

We flip our pages over.

Turns out, I am ready for the test. My brain fires up and the neurons make my hand move and the formulas come out like good little ponies at a show.

Most of my tests are fairly easy, which isn’t me boasting; it’s just a statement of fact. Mum says I might have a photographic memory, which is good for Mum because she often forgets her PIN numbers and passwords.

Mum could be right. All I have to do is look at something and it sticks. Sometimes, the image repeatrepeatrepeatrepeats, like a GIF I can’t turn off.

The room fills with the buzz of numbers.Pi scuttles over our papers, theorems talk to themselves. Ms. Hastings looks at her phone—probably at some friend skydiving or snorkeling in the Bahamas, while she’s trapped in here with us.

The bell rings.

“Time’s up!” calls Ms. Hastings. We hand in our tests. Next class is English.

I don’t chat or dawdle in the corridors; I slip between the crowds, a fish weaving. In fifty-five minutes I’ll have to speak to Grace.Just keep swimming, Biz.

Mr. Birch stands like a flamingo in front of the class, one foot scratching the back of his leg.

“Okay, everyone,” he says, “today we’ll be writing about the ego. That is, your alter ego. Consider your readings over the weekend, and the work of Plath in this context.”

A collective groan from all of us. We’ve done Plath now for three long weeks and no one is a fan. I mean, we all “feel” for her, but at this point we’ve read her and analyzed her and discussed her and it’s like peeling an onion until there’s no onion left.

“I want you to write a description of your alter ego, due at the end of the day,” Mr. Birch says, ignoring our protests. In case we don’t remember what he’s just said, he writes it on the whiteboard, his blue pen squeaking. He then sits at his chipped desk behind his PC, doing paperwork.

We hunker down to do the assignment. That is, some of us do the assignment; some of us daydream. The new boy pulls out a book and reads it behind his laptop screen.

Fans flick-flick above us. A trickle of sweat moves down between my boobs. I stare at my computer.

I don’t much like to write about myself. It’s not my thing, discussing any part of me. Over the years, Mum has suggested we go see people because Dad is dead, but then we put it off. I did sit with a man once, when I was seven and a half, in a room with yellow-painted walls and framed cat pictures. The man had round glasses like Harry Potter. He laid out paper and blunt coloring pencils and said to draw, so I did. Then he hummed and ha-ed and said, “I’ll just speak to your mum now, okay?” and when Mum came back out, her eyes were really red, so I didn’t draw for anyone else after that.

The cursor blinks on, off.

I take a breath, and dive in.