The Ultra Violets Read online

  “The candle wax.” Opal thought back to the tingly sensation on her skin. “The purple candle wax.”

  “What candle?” Candace asked. “The blogs did report that any remaining serum was condensed into waxlike columns. Did you come into contact with it?”

  “Candace?” Iris squeaked. “How do you spell . . . ?”

  “Heliotropium? H-e-l,” Candace began quietly, glancing over her shoulder to make sure the bouffant waitress wasn’t jotting this down on her notepad, “i-o-t—”

  “Eliot Ropi!” Scarlet hissed, thumping the table with her tankard again. “Obviously not your mom’s coworker, Iris!”

  “So it is all my fault,” Iris whispered, her voice wavery. “I found a candle in one of our moving boxes. I brought it to the sleepover . . .”

  Her voice trailed off and the girls sat stunned in their diner booth. Iris pictured them on a screen somewhere, looking stunned from a satellite view. All the hilarity of the ballet had faded away, replaced by the worry that something might be seriously weird with them. The last drops of Opal’s hot cocoa had gone cold, a scummy skin on its surface. Scarlet drained the dregs of her butterbeer, which tasted sickeningly sweet. “Blurgh,” she grimaced. “Buzzkill.”

  “The point is . . .” Candace tried to rally the girls. “The point . . . what is the point?”

  “That we’re genetic freaks?” Cheri’s lower lip started to tremble. “I can’t be a genetic freak, not yet! I’ve never even kissed a boy! Or designed an app! Or—”

  “Girls, no, chill,” Iris said, remembering to be brave and standing up to speak to the rest of the table. Her butterfly sleeves fluttered around her. “We’ve got to get a grip. Other than a few funny, um, talents, we’re fine! No one can even tell! Except for me and my hair, and most people think that’s fake.”

  “Exactly, that’s right, Iris,” Candace said from behind her dripping eyeglasses. “There’s no need to panic. But—”

  “But?!” all four girls cried back at her. If there was a “but,” then there probably was a need to panic.

  “But,” Candace repeated calmly, patting Iris on the shoulder so that she’d sit down again, “we need to be careful. This has to be our secret.”

  “Why?” Opal asked.

  “Because . . . well, for one thing,” Candace began, keeping her voice low and leaning toward the center of their booth. The girls huddled in to hear her. “We don’t yet know the extent of your powers. Everything you can do.”

  “Or can’t, in my case,” Opal said glumly. The pearls stitched on her sleeve cuffs scratched against the tabletop.

  “And secondly,” Candace continued, ignoring Opal’s comment for the moment but pausing before she spoke again, “we also don’t know who else might be interested in . . . examining you.”

  “EXAMINING US?!” the girls cried out together again, slamming back in shock against the padded benches.

  “Shh, shh, shh, shh!” Candace picked up Iris’s swizzle spork and waved it like a magic wand at each one of them, trying to quiet them down. She should have made them all order the calming camomile tea!

  Noticing the commotion, the bouffant waitress sashayed over and took out her notepad again. “Can I get anything else for you girls?”

  “No, thank you,” Candace answered for the table. “Just the check, please.”

  “You got it, Moms,” the waitress snapped, totaling up the bill, tearing it from her notepad, and handing it to the babysitter. “Tip not included.”

  Candace scowled after her as she walked away, then dug in her bag for her wallet.

  “It’s just,” she addressed the four girls again as she counted out the money, “you’re unique. One of a kind. The only known, uh, ‘specimens’ with this sixth element, with Heliotropic DNA. And so”—she picked up the swizzle spork again, giving each girl a warning glance before she finished her sentence—“it’s possible that, you know, scientists or the government or whoever would want to, er, probe you.”

  She raised the spork sharply, silencing the girls before they could cry out the P word.

  “Probe is what they do to aliens,” Scarlet whispered.

  “So we’re genetic freaks and we’re aliens?!” Cheri whimpered, chewing her thumbnail.

  “Semantics,” Candace said, her thoughts turning off down a side road. She scratched absentmindedly at her bangs with the spork. “An argument could be made that they’re one and the same.”

  Iris cleared her throat and gave the babysitter a poke in the arm. “Um, Candace? Not helping.”

  “Right, right,” Candace said, focusing again on her four charges. “Girls, listen. It’s getting late. It’s been a wild night. I don’t know what the future will bring.”

  “That’s super comforting, Candace,” Scarlet muttered.

  “But even though you’re almost too old now to need a babysitter, you’ve got me. And,” she said, looking at a tearful Cher, “I’ve got you, babes!”

  Iris nodded to her three best friends. “Candace can help us, guys! She works at the FLab. She can find out more about this Heliowhatchamacallit and stuff.”

  “Totally,” Candace said. “Think of me as your . . . as your fairy godmother.” She circled the spork at Opal as if she were casting a spell. “Bibbidi-bobbidi-booyah!”

  The image of their former babysitter, the brilliant teenius with blunt bangs and geek glasses, as a doddering fairy godmother made the girls smile in spite of all the serious info they’d just downloaded.

  “So code of silence on this convo, okay?” Candace urged them. “But you’re going to figure this out. And I’m going to help you. AND . . .”

  The girls sat up straight, steeling themselves for whatever new and terrifying truth-bomb Candace was about to drop.

  “Bring it on, fairy babysitter,” Scarlet said. “And what else?”

  Candace smiled at them determinedly. I may not have my doctorate degree in astrogenetics yet, she thought to herself. But the evidence is clear: Something did happen to these girls that night four years ago. I was their babysitter, and it’s in the babysitter’s bible: I’m responsible. Iris has purple hair. Scarlet is dancing. Cheri is a mathematician who can commune with animals. And who knows what’s in store for Opal?

  Candace made a decision right there and then. Whatever happened, whatever was going to happen, she would do everything in her power to protect the girls. She had their backs. And their purple hair, their dancing feet, and whatever other weird mutations they had yet to get!

  “And you are not freaks,” she said proudly. “You four are freakin’ fantastic!”

  “We’re viomazing!” Iris shouted, springing to her feet again, her purple curls bouncing up around her. She fluttered back down just as suddenly, all butterfly sleeves. Then she looked to her right and linked pinkies with Candace, turned to her left and linked pinkies with Scarlet. The other girls did the same, Cheri and Scarlet linking pinkies across the table and Opal joining with their trusty teenius.

  Just like before, Iris could feel the energy coursing through them. She could see that Scarlet was defiant, and Opal still disappointed, and Cheri a little bit scared. Her head told her that maybe she should be scared of all this spooky alien DNA stuff, too. Strange things were happening in Sync City, things the girls had only gotten a glimpse of. Drooling mutants roamed the streets, the park, even the schoolyard.

  But that night in the diner, Iris’s heart raced with excitement. Who knew what the four of them could do? And four good friends can handle whatever bad comes their way.

  Of Mothers and Mutants

  CANDACE WAS ASSISTING AT THE FLAB, AS SHE DID most days after school. The Mothers Jones, Henderson, and Tyler were currently researching whether the centrifugal force exerted by clothes dryers generated a compressed black hole that was to blame for a pandemic of disappeared
socks. To test their theory, they’d digi-tagged multiple pairs before tossing them into the spinning chamber. Up on the wall opposite the rock-crystal windows, a massive three-dimensional grid mapping out Sync City glowed electric green. But as of yet, none of the missing socks had popped up on it.

  “It’s got to be a case of too much fabric softener,” Iris’s mom concluded grimly.

  “No doubt,” Scarlet’s mom agreed, making copious notations on her WiFi clipboard.

  “I’ll prep the next batch with no softener,” Candace offered, “as a control group.” In her crisp white lab coat, with her short straight bangs and her black square glasses, she looked very professional (though still no way near old enough to be anyone’s mom). In one hand she held a stray striped sock. In the other, Iris’s swizzle spork from the diner. Candace had taken it by accident; she must have stashed it in her bag with her wallet? But anyway, she found that brandishing the twirly utensil helped her feel confident. Her high IQ brain knew it was totes illogical to give inanimate objects that kind of emotional importance. But she didn’t care. It was just a stupid parfait spork, after all!

  Cheri’s mom, Dr. Henderson, returned to the room wrapped in a terrycloth bathrobe, with her hair up in a towel. “The pressure in those decontamination showers takes the wave right out my hair!” she declared, knocking at her water-logged ear with the palm of her hand.

  Candace sensed an opening. She had to find out whatever she could about Heliotropium for the girls. Maybe there was an antidote. Maybe she could cure them!

  “Yes, those showers are fire-hydrant strength, aren’t they?” Candace said, trying to sound casual as she sorted an all-argyle load. “I bet they could blast the pigeon poop off a building from a hundred feet below!”

  “Interesting you should mention pigeon excrement,” Iris’s mom mumbled, peering into the dryer, her head spinning round and round with the socks. “Per my observations, the bird droppings down the side of my apartment building appear to be primary-colored. Rainbow-streaked, one might say. A phenomenon I find quite anomalous.”

  Oh sugarsticks, Candace thought. Iris’s pigeons! What if Dr. Tyler was on to her daughter’s color-changing? Candace had to throw her off the trail. “Maybe the birds have added leprechauns to their diet,” she suggested, blinking innocently from behind both her glasses and her plastic wraparound safety goggles.

  The other two moms tittered at this joke, but Dr. Tyler was not amused. “Don’t be ludicrous, Candace,” she said drily. “I suppose next you’re going to tell me that the sky is pink.”

  Not the sky, Candace thought wryly, but some of the clouds. She pressed on with her covert questioning.

  “Do you think the showers are strong enough to rinse off, um, say, Heliotropium?” she asked. “Hypothetically speaking.”

  “Heliotropium!” Cheri’s mom exclaimed. She’d been squeezing water from her hair, but Candace’s query stopped her mid-rub, and a droplet splashed onto the lab table. “I think you’ve been reading too many comics, Candace,” she continued, kind of condescendingly. “There’s no such thing.”

  “Because if there were,” Iris’s mom stated from her spot by the sonic dryer, “even momentary superficial epidermal exposure to such a highly unstable liquefied hybrid compound would result in irreversible subcutaneous genetic alterations.”

  So even though it supposedly doesn’t exist, Candace thought cynically, its impact is documented? Of course it existed! Candace had stood in this very FLab four years ago, holding a beaker of it in her own two hands. She’d cleaned it off that cute baby skunk!

  Those mothers were lying right to her face.

  And, Candace realized, as Dr. Tyler’s multi-syllabic blather sunk in, the effects are “irreversible.” Permanent.

  Sugarsticks.

  “What Dr. Tyler means,” Dr. Henderson was explaining in that possibly condescending way again, “is that, from the second it touches your skin, there ain’t a hot tub on earth strong enough to wash Heliotropium off DNA!”

  “If it existed,” Dr. Jones added hurriedly, avoiding Candace’s begoggled glare and scanning the digital matrix for sock distress signals instead. “Which it doesn’t.”

  “So then you haven’t noticed any”—Candace cleared her throat—“Heliotropic-type symptoms here in Sync City?” Scarlet had told her Dr. Jones had walked in on her spontaneous Swan Lake solo. And Dr. Tyler had to see her daughter’s purple hair every single day. “Or, like, at home?”

  The moms exchanged glances. Then all three broke into the titters.

  “Oh, Candace,” Scarlet’s mom said with a tight smile, “you really are adorable.”

  “Or ‘adorkable,’ as the kids say,” Cheri’s mom chimed in, framing the word and her wet head with annoying air quotes.

  “And curiosity is the hallmark of a top scientist,” Iris’s mom stated, back to her typical serious self.

  “But you’ve got to stop reading those conspiracy blogs!” Cheri’s mom exclaimed, definitely condescendingly, as she attempted to comb a gnarly knot out of her damp hair. “They’ll give you nightmares.”

  “Now be a dear,” Scarlet’s mom directed, obviously trying to change the subject, “and dash down to the fro-yo shop for us, would you? When you come back, you can bag and tag the lint for analysis.”

  “Sure thing,” Candace said through gritted teeth, placing a laundry basket on the long lab table and picking up her bag. As she walked to the elevator, she jabbed the spork into her thigh to keep from losing her cool. Emotions were an irrational response for a future scientist, she reminded herself. Otherwise she just might have screamed.

  • • •

  Moments later, riding the rock-crystal elevator down to the fro-yo shop, Candace remembered that she wasn’t a full-fledged scientist yet. So she did allow herself a small scream of frustration. How could three such brilliant women be so blind? Their daughters were developing superpowers right before their eyes, and they refused to see it. “Mothers in denial,” Candace muttered. It sounded like the name of a play by some intense Russian dude with a beard. Probably was. But it was also the truth. The truth that the moms couldn’t handle.

  Grown-ups could be so closed-minded.

  Then I guess it really is on me, she resolved. College applications. Interning at the FLab. And being the secret guardian for a fierce foursome of supergirls. But I can do it. I got the girls into this Helio of a mess. So it’s my job to keep them out of trouble. I’ll just have to keep investigating on my own.

  She tapped the spork in the palm of her hand thoughtfully. Later that night she’d definitely have to log on to see what her fave bloggers were buzzing about.

  As the elevator descended, Candace stared out the see-through walls at the skyscrapers and spires of Sync City. The afternoon sun cast the cityscape in gold, and the light-emitting diodes started to flicker to life. Every so often, a silver-helmeted aeroscooterist zipped past, navigating between the buildings and the birds. Candace could just imagine Iris looking out at the same view and marveling at the utter sparkliness of it all.

  But this afternoon Candace noticed something new. The elevator moved so swiftly, and she was speeding down from so high up, that she only caught a glimpse and wasn’t sure what of. Strangely shaped shadows, skulking toward the river in lumbered, clumsy gaits. Dotted here and there throughout the city’s streets, but all moving in the same direction. Almost as if they were answering the same call.

  Huh, Candace thought. Must be some big concert on the piers tonight.

  That’s what she thought. What she felt, in the pit of her stomach, was uh-oh. Even though she knew the gut check was not a scientific way to measure anything at all. She felt uh-oh because, despite what the beehived waitress at the diner might have said, Candace was nobody’s mother. And she wasn’t in denial.

  • • •

  Candace could
n’t see exactly who—exactly what—was stumbling toward the river. Into the river. Onto the ferryboats and across the bridges.

  But even if she could see, she still wouldn’t know what she was looking at.

  A “man” in a paper-thin trench coat with spindly green claws, one bulbous eye, and bright green wingtips sticking out above his shoes?

  A waddling “hippowomanus” with thick gray skin, webbed feet, and stumpy tusks jutting up from her bottom jaw, chomping at the air as she grunted, “Hungry, hungry . . .”?

  The lawyer in a three-piece pinstriped suit and silken ascot, his lips stretching to hide his five rows of shark teeth? A long-necked dental hygienist with three Adam’s apples beneath her pelican beak? The pig-nosed, pink-faced chef? The squat little piano teacher with paws like a three-toed sloth? Two middle-grade boys: one sprouting the rounded horns of a cow, the other whipping out a frog’s tongue? A two-faced cheerleader! (No, really: Her hair hid the second face on the back of her head, but her second nose still stuck out. And up.)

  And on the other side of the river, greeting them as they stumbled under the acid-yellow archway into the Mall of No Returns, Develon Louder, president of the BeauTek Corporation. With Opal’s mom, Dr. Trudeau, standing by her side, trying not to tremble as she logged in each new arrival on her tablet.

  What was that your gut said again, Candace?

  Uh-oh.

  Special of the Day

  CUE THE DEEP BASS MOVIE TRAILER MAN VOICE:

  “The brains. The beauties. The jocks. The rebels. And the recluses.”

  Really it was just Iris, imitating a deep bass movie trailer man’s voice. She aimed an imaginary camera, framing an overhead shot of the cafeteria that spanned every corner and every clique.

  “Before this day is over,” she intoned, “they’ll break the rules. Bare their souls. Take some chances. And touch each other in a way they never dreamed possible.”