The Ultra Violets Read online

  WRITTEN BY

  SOPHIE BELL

  ILLUSTRATED BY

  CHRIS BATTLE

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The Ultra Violets

  RAZORBILL

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Copyright © 2013 Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  ISBN 978-1-101-60418-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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  For Fiona Butterfly

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Not Quite New Girl

  Chapter 2: The Mall of No Returns

  Chapter 3: The BFF Ritual

  Chapter 4: Confess or Risk

  Chapter 5: Saturday = Crazy

  Chapter 6: Under the Fluffula Tree

  Chapter 7: MC Cheri

  Chapter 8: The Freaks Come Out at Night

  Chapter 9: Super-Vee-Duper

  Chapter 10: Amok, Amok, Amok

  Chapter 11: Girls Gone Gaga

  Chapter 12: We Need to Talk

  Chapter 13: Of Mothers and Mutants

  Chapter 14: Special of the Day

  Chapter 15: Mwah?

  Chapter 16: Shrieking Violet

  Chapter 17: Mwah Ha?

  Chapter 18: Red Rubber Balls of Doom

  Chapter 19: Worst. Hair Day. Ever.

  Chapter 20: Totally (School) Tripping

  Chapter 21: Mwah Ha Ha!

  Chapter 22: It’s So Not Over

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author and Illustrator

  Prologue

  {That Means It Happened Before Now. Four Years Before, If You're Counting.}

  IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY MORNING. OR A BRIGHT and sunshiny night. Overcast with a chance of gumballs and not a cloud in the sky. But what really matters is that it was a Wednesday in September. Or maybe a Monday in May.

  It was four years ago for sure, okay?

  The Setting: the Highly Questionable Tower, or HQT, a rock-crystal skyscraper carved out of the side of a snoozing volcano. At its top: the secret, see-through Fascination Laboratory, or FLab, on the forty-second floor. At its base: a twenty-four-hour fro-yo shop. Its location: smack in the center of the stainless steel, totally tubular, sci-industrial complex of SynchroniCity. Sync City, for short.

  The Actors: none. This isn’t a play! Whatever gave you that idea? It ain’t no party, ain’t no disco, ain’t no fooling around, neither. The girls wish it were that frivolous. What girls, you ask?

  The four best friends at the sleepover.

  Normally, a lab would be a very strange location for a sleepover. But all four girls’ moms were big-deal scientists who worked at the FLab, and were all out at the same big-deal party hosted by the mayor. Also, this is Sync City. Nothing about it is normal.

  “Candace. Hey, Candace? CandaceCandaceCandace-CandaceCandace? Look at me, Candace. Look!”

  Iris Grace Tyler, grape lollipop sticking out of her mouth, was practicing cartwheels, her blond ringlets tumbling with her like curly ribbons on a tossed birthday present. “RiRi,” as her friends sometimes called her, had hair so long and golden, you almost wouldn’t blame a jealous Rapunzel for running with scissors behind her.

  But Candace was more interested in the wriggly amoeba she’d squashed between two microscope slides. “That’s nice, Iris,” she tossed over her shoulder. Even though, for all she knew, it could have been the rare nasty cartwheel. Candace had just made an educated guess. Being a genius at fourteen, she was good at those. Being the babysitter of four seven-year-olds running wild in a lab, she probably should have been paying better attention.

  Iris finished flipping out and stood on two feet, stumbling a little to keep her balance. “Ta-da—whoa!” she said, with a shaky bow. “Sit still, you guys, you’re making me dizzy.” And she flopped down onto the lab floor next to her three best second-grade friends.

  Cheri giggled, the red-and-white stripes of a peppermint candy flashing between her teeth. “How can you be dizzy when you’re already Iris, Iris?” She paused to ponder this as she dabbed a sparkly coat of polish on her nails.

  Iris closed her pale blue eyes and crunched on her lollipop. When she opened them, the room was right side up again. “Why do we have to wait at the FLab?” She pouted. “It’s so metallic and brrr in here!”

  “AND there’s no TV!” Scarlet made a fist, even though she knew that punching out the creepy lab skeleton hanging in the corner would be kind of pointless, considering he probably wasn’t responsible for the lack of a plasma screen. She couldn’t pants him, either, because he didn’t have any clothes on (as the old saying goes, dead men don’t wear pants). Scarlet Louise Jones, also known as Scar Lo, sometimes Scar Lo Jo, and occasionally as SLJ, was master of the stealth pantsing. Just short enough that nobody saw her sneaking up behind them. Just freckled enough that everybody mistook her for innocent. Frowning beneath her licorice-black bangs, Scarlet took her frustration out on her bubble gum instead, snapping it in anger.

  “It is a bit brrr and boring.” Cheri lifted her head from her mani-in-progress. When a stray strand of her berry-red hair fell across her nose, she crossed her emerald eyes and tried to blow it away. “They have a strict no-puppy policy at the door!” she complained between puffs. “This place is the anti warm-and-fuzzy!” Imagining litters of soft labradoodles and silky-eared spaniels scampering beneath the Bunsen burners, Cheri heaved a deep peppermint sigh. The stray auburn strand hovered in the air in front of her face for an instant before falling right back down onto her nose. “But,” she said, sending an air-kiss to the baby boy skunk in a cage on the shelf, “they do have a skunk! As soon as my nails are dry, I’m taking Darth Odor out of his cage.” Cheri Henderson never met a puppy, a pony, or a glitter nail polish she didn’t immediately-and-madly love. But as of this sleepover, her heart belonged to the FLab’s accidental mascot, Darth. She waved her shiny fingertips at him, and the skunk squeaked in excitement, blink
ing back at her adoringly.

  Scarlet eyed the little skunk with suspicion. He might have been cute, but he was still a skunk. To be on the safe side, she pinched her nose. “Why is there a skunk here again?” she asked in a nasally voice.

  “Mmm, your moms said they’d been doing some tests on scents as defense mechanisms in nature,” Candace mumbled as she twisted a knob on the microscope. “But skunks only spray when they’re threatened. So we’re perfectly safe.”

  “He’s so tiny and cute, I bet he smells like cookies!” Cheri said.

  Even though Scarlet seriously doubted that, she let go of her nose. And made a mental note not to bully the skunk by accident.

  From behind the microscope, Candace talked on about the scentsational world of skunks. Cheri was fascinated because Darth was adorable. Scarlet listened hard so that she’d be prepared in case of a stink attack. And Iris, who always packed colored pencils, was absorbed in her portrait of the baby skunk. Opaline saw her chance to sneak away. She got up from the group and padded over to the giant crystal windows. The truth was, Opaline Trudeau found Scarlet Jones just as scary as the skeleton. Maybe even scarier. She was loud. And she was a stealth pantser. Who was to say she wouldn’t pants Opaline? Plus, the thought of sleeping over in this spooky lab made Opaline nervous. What if she had a nightmare and screamed out loud and woke everyone up? What if she wet her sleeping bag? She was going to have to use the bathroom at some point, even though the sound of flushing toilets made her blush all the way up to her amber-brown eyes. But Opal didn’t want the other girls to know how uncomfortable she felt. “At least the view is pretty,” she whispered, so softly she didn’t think anyone would hear. Her breath formed a small foggy spot on the crystal windowpanes as she stared down at the twinkling city, then up at the gritty charcoal clouds circling the massive antenna on the FLab’s domed roof.

  “Super pretty!” Cheri chimed in from behind her, holding up her newly sequined nails to admire them.

  Candace twirled around on her stool at the long lab table to face her babysittees. First she pushed her plastic goggles up on top of her head. Then she pulled the one-eye magnification loupe down on its elastic strap: It jutted out from her pointed chin like a giant robot-wart. Then she propped her thick black-framed glasses on top of the goggles. She rubbed her eyes and squinted. Candace may have been a teenage genius, but she hadn’t figured out how to cure her severe astigmatism. (She’d do that later, in senior year.) Suffice it to say, without her glasses, the girl was blind as a bat.

  “Hey, girls,” she began, propped on her seat, hands on her knees, speaking not to the girls but in the general direction of a supply cabinet. “I know it’s a drag to be stuck in the FLab when your moms are out partying at the mayor’s gala—drag being the oppositional force exerted upon an object in motion, FYI.”

  The girls just blinked at her.

  “But you can all hang together. With a baby skunk! That’s fun, isn’t it? How many second-graders can say they had a sleepover on the forty-second floor in the FLab?” To demonstrate the width of funness, Candace flung her arms wide open, missing a row of test tubes by exactly three millimeters.

  “It’s flabulous!” Iris sang, throwing her arms open, too. Cheri and Scarlet burst out laughing, and even Opal had to smile. Scarlet could be scary sometimes, but something about Iris always made her feel safe.

  The Highly Questionable Tower was indeed a highly questionable spot for a sleepover. Exhibit A: the skeleton, Skeletony, looking out at the lab with his one citrine-green gemstone eye. Beside him was a cluster of strange chambers. Some stood tall enough for a grown-up to fit inside. All had coiled wires connected to their lids. Gnarly instruments, vacuum-sealed jars, gleaming vials, and stiff cardboard boxes crowded the shelves. Iris noticed skulls-and-crossbones stamped on some of them. That meant whatever was inside was poisonous. Their moms had positively forbidden the girls from touching a single item in the FLab, warning they’d ground all four of them for a month if even one of them dared.

  But they couldn’t help looking. And that night, whenever the dark clouds parted, random shafts of moonlight would shine through the rough crystal walls to the glass jars on the shelves, revealing their contents. Opal had yelped when she saw what she thought was a piglet with a crocodile tail coiled up in the murky water of one jar. But Iris gave her hand a reassuring squeeze and told her she bet it was really just a jumbo jar of pickles her mom had forgotten to bring home.

  Secretly, Iris wasn’t so sure.

  Against this soothing backdrop of giant pickles and boxes of do-not-touch stuff, Candace wrapped up her pep talk: “And since I’m here, I can finish my advanced chemistry homework using all this cool, high-tech equipment!” She gave a tip of her head to the cabinet, thanking it for its undivided attention. Then she spun back around and groped blindly across the tabletop until her hands came upon a big beaker bubbling with a gelatinous liquid. As she held it aloft, it flashed red, then blue, then red again. “I am so getting an A,” she declared, squinting at the strange-’n’-smokin’ substance like she was mesmerized by it.

  Opaline’s eyes widened in wonder. But Scarlet was not impressed. “Wow,” she said, stifling a yawn. “Warm blueberry Jell-O. How exciting. For you.”

  “Wait, I’ve got an idea!” Iris piped up, springing to her feet and waving her arms in bhangra Bollywood flips. “It’s fun,” she said, looking at Scar. “Not scary!” She smiled at Opal. “And super-sparkly,” she promised Cheri.

  “Sparkly’s my favorite!” Cheri squealed. Her sequined nails reflected the light as she clapped. “What is it?”

  “We could put on a talent show!” Iris announced. “Right here in the FLab! And perform it for our moms when they come to pick us up.”

  “Brilliant idea, Iris,” Candace said. Being a teenius, she knew brilliance when she heard it. (In this particular case she just couldn’t see it, because she still hadn’t put her three layers of glasses back on.) She placed the flashing beaker back down on the countertop, unbrilliantly close to the edge, between a bunch of steaming containers. For dinner they’d ordered Japanese takeout, and all the other vats of chemicals nearly camouflaged Candace’s quart of spicy udon noodles. A pair of chopsticks poking out of the soup was the only way to tell it apart.

  As the girls watched, Candace peered at the cluttered lab table, picked up a can of solvent strong enough to melt rubber, and raised it to her lips.

  “Nooooooo!” they screamed together just before she took a sip.

  “Common mistake,” Candace said nonchalantly, putting the solvent back down and finding her chopsticks. “Mistakes are a vital part of any scientific process!” She fished a piece of broccoli out of her soup. A drop of broth dribbled down her chin and pooled in the robot-wart magnification loupe. “I’m not exactly sure what it is your moms do up here during the day, but this lab has got EVERYTHING! I guess when you’re Sync City’s top research scientists, you get to have the most advanced equipment and, like, a virtual supermarket of formulas and chemicals! And as your babysitter, I can borrow those chemicals to test out my theory of . . .”

  At this point, the four girls zoned out. Admit it, you would have been bored, too, if Candace started lecturing you about biomolecular compounds and cold fusion and a theory of everything that was based on vibrating guitar stringzzzzzzzz—humph, whazzat? Dozed off for a moment there. Where were we?

  Talent show!

  The girls knew their moms worked on some sorts of uber-secret projects. But with cartwheels to turn and bullies to pants and skunks to snuggle and toilets to avoid, their moms’ experiments didn’t exactly make their lists of Top Ten Interesting Things.

  Instead, Cheri took Darth Odor out of his cage, and the four girls huddled together to plan their performance.

  “I’m going to be the ninja princess guarding the temple,” Iris growled, dropping into a tiger’s crouch and scanning the lab fo
r hidden dragons.

  “How delicious!” Cheri beamed, squeezing the little baby skunk. “Because I’m going to be the ninja princess inside the temple, having tea and strumpets with my special guest, Darth!”

  Stretching a neon green salamander Silly Band from her wrist, Scar Lo gathered her black hair into a sumo topknot and folded her arms across her chest. “I’m going to be a samurai warrior! Hi-ya!” she shouted, chopping down an entire line of invisible invaders. “Opal, what about you?”

  “Um, I don’t know,” Opaline mumbled, toying with the zipper on her hoodie. “What do you guys think I should be? Schoolgirl in a sailor suit?” Iris might not think a talent show was scary, but to Opal, performing in front of her friends was as upsetting as a public toilet. In their kindergarten musical about the first Thanksgiving, she’d played the part of the baked potato. Mean Duncan Murdoch told her she looked like a dog turd in her costume, and she cried and forgot her one line about melted butter.

  Ever since then, Opal much preferred being in the audience.

  “Candace. Hey, Candace? Candace-CandaceCandaceCandaceCandace?” Iris began again. “Look at me, Candace! Watch this!” And after three warm-up jumps, she leaped into the air with an especially spectacular ninja Rockette roundhouse kick. A kick higher than Iris herself. Higher than the stool Candace sat upon, higher than the laboratory countertop. Just not higher than the big honking beaker of blue-red goo sitting on its edge.

  Her toe clipped the lip of the glass container, and it teetered on the edge of the counter, threatening to take a dive.