The Ultra Violets Read online

  “Surprise!”

  Cher and Opal shook their glitter out of old plastic trick-or-treat pumpkins. But Scarlet, for that extra somethin’-somethin’, had loaded her Super Soaker for a hydraulic glitter blast. With zero windshield factor, she had a fifteen-foot range.

  Shiny foil squares floated down to nestle in Iris’s ringlets and on her shoulders. She pulled out her lollipop, and silver squares stuck to that, too. Throwing her head back like a diva, waving her lolly like a wand, she sashayed into the center of the room. Glinting pieces trailed behind her. Then she tossed aside her bag and spun around in place, looking like her own private purple mirror ball. The light caught the flecks in her hair, and the flashing reflections on the basement walls inspired the other girls to do a little disco dance, too. Glitter flew all over the place! Scarlet let off another blast from her Super Soaker to declare the end of the beginning of the party. The air-blown burst of glitter hit the ceiling and rained down over them.

  “You guys!” Iris exclaimed, flopping down on a sleeping bag dotted with tiny yellow Pikachus that must have belonged to one of Scarlet’s older brothers. (Pokémon: a classic now and forever.) “It’s not a surprise party if we all already know about it!”

  Changed into her ice-cream-cone pajamas, Cheri sat cross-legged on the Hello Kitty sleeping bag she’d brought herself. “We know, RiRi! But it is a surprise that you’re back . . .”

  “And, hello, it’s a surprise that your hair is purple . . .” Scarlet said, stalking the corners of the basement for invisible beasts to glitter-bomb into submission.

  “And,” Opal added, wishing she had a sleeping bag as cute as Cheri’s as she knelt down on a weathered Ninja Turtle one that had seen its share of campouts with Scarlet’s other older brother, “the last sleepover we had, before you left, was interrupted by goo, remember?”

  “So it’s a sleep-do-over,” Cheri concluded, proud of her joke.

  Opal smiled. Scarlet snorted. Iris’s pale blue eyes met Cheri’s vivid green ones and they burst into a glittery giggle fit.

  Scarlet joined the group, placing her glitter-soaker in the center of the circle and settling back on her other other brother’s Blueberry Muffin sleeping bag. He was the most open-minded of her brothers. Also the best cupcake baker in the family. To practice his ice-ice-icing, he had baked a batch for the party. Scarlet didn’t even have to ask. She helped by sticking Sour Patch worms, Gummi bears, and red-hot jawbreakers on top of the frosting. Now the cupcakes waited on a table against the basement’s back wall. Opal got up again from her turtle’s nest and wandered over to the table to admire them.

  “Hey, Opes, while you’re there, can you grab the popcorn?” Scarlet called.

  Opal picked up the bowl and was about to bring it back to the group when Cheri piped up. “Oh, and Opes? Would you be a lambie and bring me a pomegranate juice, too?”

  “Sure, Cher,” Opal said, shifting the bowl of popcorn to the nook of her arm and taking a juice from the table.

  “And a bendy straw, pretty please?” Cheri called after her.

  “Bendy straw,” Opal repeated softly, turning back to the table for a third time and tucking a couple of straws into her shirt pocket.

  “Oh, and apple-cranberry for me,” Scarlet added.

  Balancing the bowl of popcorn between her elbow and her hip, gripping Cheri’s and Scarlet’s juice bottles at their bases, with two bendy straws poking out of her pocket and a can of peach soda for herself in her other hand, Opal shuffled back to the sleeping-bag circle. Just as she was crouching down, she slipped a little. A few kernels of glitter-dusted popcorn fell to the floor, but Opal managed not to wipe out completely.

  “Eeks,” she gasped. Her heart was pounding, and she could feel her cheeks start to burn. What if she had spilled popcorn all over their heads? But no one else seemed to have noticed the near miss. Scarlet just picked the stray pieces off the carpet and popped them into her mouth.

  “Five second rule!” she said with a smile, plucking her apple-cranberry juice out of Opal’s hand.

  Settled in the circle, sitting atop their sleeping bags with their juices and sodas and bendy straws and a movie on MUTE in the background, the girls began to talk. The number-one trending topic was #ririspurplehair.

  “So . . .” Opal stammered, tucking a strand of her brown bob behind one ear, “your mom really let you dye it?”

  “Nope,” Iris said. She had never talked to anyone about her hair before, and she wasn’t really sure what to say. Except the truth.

  “You did it as an act of rebellion! Against the boarding school establishment!” Scarlet said, raising her fist in a salute. “Power to the Purple! That’s so rock n’ roll!”

  “No,” Iris said, almost apologetically, because that did sound like the kind of thing an artist would do. “I just . . . it just . . .” she faltered. “I woke up one day and it was like this.”

  Scarlet arched an eyebrow in surprise. Opal raised her two. “Oh, it’s just ‘naturally’ purple, wink-wink!” Cheri said, batting her lashes, which she’d just decorated with hot pink extensions.

  “No, really,” Iris said, running a hand through her curls and feeling self-conscious. “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.”

  That very first morning Iris woke up with purple hair, she was scared. She hid in the bathroom and cried in the shower and tried and tried to shampoo it out. But the suds just rinsed down the drain alone, leaving the purple behind. For one desperate moment Iris even considered cutting it all off, but the vision of a purple crew cut only made her cry more.

  Eventually, after she’d stood in the shower so long her fingertips began to pucker, she’d shut off the water and wrapped herself in her bathrobe. With the heel of her hand, she’d wiped the condensation off the mirror in an oval shape, and she’d faced her drenched ringlets. Wet, they appeared even darker, almost black. But not black. Purple. Deep purple.

  Iris had worked through the knots with a wide-tooth comb, her eyes tearing up again whenever she yanked on an especially gnarly tangle. Then she let her curls air-dry like she always did. They looked exactly the same. Shiny. Springy. Healthy. Just purple.

  Over pancakes, Iris had pretended like everything was breakfast-as-usual. Like having shocking purple hair was NBD. She knew her mom was already all preoccupied with moving and getting her job back at the FLab, and she didn’t want her to flip. To flip anything but pancakes. “Please pass the maple syrup,” she’d said, and her mother did.

  Mom hadn’t said anything that first morning, or any morning since. Maybe she just didn’t know what to say.

  And now, at the sleepover, Iris could see that her three best friends didn’t know what to say, either. But at least they were trying to understand.

  “You just woke up one day and it was purple,” Scarlet finally repeated.

  Iris could hear the skepticism in her voice.

  “Is there a history of purple hair in your family?” Opal offered helpfully.

  “No,” Iris said, struggling to remember her “own it” resolution. “Apparently I’m the first. Lucky me?”

  She bowed her head toward the middle of the circle so that the girls could see her hair was purple all the way to the roots.

  Scarlet propped up on her knees to inspect it closely. “That is crazy,” she stated bluntly, sitting back again.

  Cheri swatted her on the knee. “I think it’s blue-tiful,” she said as she lined up her nail polishes for the pedicure portion of the evening. “The color goes purrrfectly with your eyes.”

  “Thanks,” Iris said, wishing she could be as fashion-forward as Cheri. “I guess I’m sort of stuck with it.” She pinched the end of one of her ringlets and pulled it straight. “There are strands of all these different shades mixed together, from pale lavender to deep purple.�
�� She let go, and the lock of hair sprung back into a corkscrew. “The colors remind me of . . . of Claude Monet’s famous painting of water lilies!”

  (She could have also said Vincent van Gogh’s paintings of irises, but that would have been too obvious.)

  Because Iris was into art, she thought of comparisons to paintings. Because Scarlet was not, she thought, and then actually said, “The colors remind me of this bruise on my elbow.” She pushed up her sleeve to show the girls, pressing the spot with her thumb so that its yellowy edges throbbed.

  “Gross!” Cheri said as Opal grimaced.

  Scarlet didn’t mind. She had earned this particular bruise karate-chopping some stupid boy who had stolen a second-grader’s yo-yo, so in a way she was proud of it. “You have to admit it’s weird, though,” she continued, pulling her sleeve back down. “One day you’ve got hair like Barbie the doll. The next, like Barney the dinosaur!”

  “Seriously, what did your mom say?” Cheri asked. “My mom can’t even handle a little lip gloss. Did yours completely freak?”

  “Surprisingly, no,” Iris answered as she considered her choice of nail polishes. “Which is weird. I guess she was just so wrapped up with moving back to Sync City and everything that . . . maybe she thought I was ‘acting out’? IDK.”

  “Oh, yeah, I get ‘acting out’ all the time!” Scarlet said in sympathy.

  “That’s funny,” Opal said. “If I turned purple from head to toe, I don’t think my mom would even notice.”

  The four girls fell silent again, some of them wondering what colors to paint their toes, and some of them wondering when they were going to play Pants-Pants Revolution on the XY-Box, and some of them wondering how much longer they’d have to wait before eating a cupcake, and one of them secretly wishing she had something as special as purple hair, too.

  “Anyway,” Iris said softly, “enough about my hair. Let’s get this party started?” She fumbled in her messenger bag, pulled something out, and placed it in the center of the circle. “Look what I brought.”

  It was a candle, lavender-blue.

  “Ooh,” Cheri cooed, sitting up on her sleeping bag as Scarlet dashed to the laundry room, flicked off the lights, and came back with a box of matches.

  “I found it in one of our moving boxes,” Iris explained, her eyes adjusting to the dark. “It must have belonged to one of my mom’s coworkers because it was labeled ELIOT ROPI. But the label was already torn, so I peeled the whole thing off.”

  “Let’s light it, all make a wish, then blow it out together!” Cheri said, as Scarlet struck the match. She touched it to the wick, which quickly burned down to the wax. The flame sprung up, glowing not the warm yellow of a typical candle, but more like a lavender-white. A powdery vanilla scent began to fill the basement.

  The four girls knelt around the flame thinking up their wishes, their faces cast in candlelight.

  “I have an idea,” Opal said in a hush, the pale flame illuminating the hollows of her eyes. “Let’s all wish to be Best Friends Forever, and then seal it with a drop of hot wax!”

  The other three girls were silent for a second, and Opal started to worry that her idea had been too weird. Until Iris said, “That would be so cool.”

  “You mean, so hot!” Scarlet corrected.

  “Like a BFF ritual!” Cheri gasped.

  “We have to do it fast,” Scarlet said, her freckles tiny shadows on her candlelit face, “because if my mom comes down and sees us playing with matches . . .”

  “Okay, okay,” Iris said, picking up the candle. “Opal, it was your idea. You first!”

  Suddenly Opal was scared, too. But Iris was right. It was her idea. She couldn’t chicken out of it.

  She stuck her trembling pinkie finger into the center of the circle as Scarlet and Cheri leaned in to watch. “Opal, make a wish,” Cheri whispered.

  “Iris, don’t light our hair on fire,” Scarlet added. All four girls started giggling, even Iris. “Shut up!” Iris said, the candle shaking in her hands.

  Opal hid her face in her shoulder, wished, and waited. Then she felt the soft, warm liquid drip onto her fingertip. It was as if the oil seeped right into her skin, and the heat spread up her arm and all throughout her body. Opal had never been kissed by a boy, but she imagined it might feel something like this. For a brief moment, there in the dark basement, she was completely happy.

  “Okay!” Iris whispered. “Don’t rub it off yet!” As Scarlet and Cheri giggled and squirmed, Iris poured drops of lavender wax onto their pinkie fingers, too.

  “It makes me feel all tingly!” Cheri squealed, while Scarlet just wrinkled her nose.

  “Now do me!” Iris said, passing the candle to Opal.

  Opal gripped the thick candle in her small hand, trying not to splash it. It was hard with the wax drop already dry on her other pinkie finger. Above the flame, the two girls’ eyes met, and Iris smiled as Opal tipped a small bead of wax onto her pinkie finger, too.

  “Now press them all together,” Scarlet commanded, as Opal placed the candle back in the center of the circle.

  The girls joined their sticky wax pinkies above the flame. Upstairs, they could hear the floorboards creaking as someone walked into the kitchen. But in the darkness they didn’t see all the glitter floating up from the floor and hovering in mid air around them.

  “BFFs!” Scarlet shouted, then blew out the candle. The glitter wafted back down to the ground

  “Hey!” Cheri said. “I barely finished my BFF wish.”

  “Sorry!” Scarlet yelled, running back to the laundry room to turn the lights on again. She waved her arms back and forth to clear the smoke from the room. “Thought I heard my dad.”

  “Well, I thought that was simply delicious!” Cheri declared, hugging her arms to herself. Most of the candle oil had been absorbed into their skin, but she rubbed the little bits of wax that remained. Then her gaze landed on Scarlet’s glitter-soaker on top of the Blueberry Muffin sleeping bag. “Hey,” Cheri said with a twinkle in her eye, “new topic! Hot topic!” She reached out to the water gun and with a flick of her wrist set it spinning on its side. “To tell you all the truth, I dare us to play Confess or Risk!”

  Confess or Risk

  SCARLET ROLLED HER EYES AND OPAL SHIFTED nervously on top of her sleeping bag.

  “I don’t know, Cher,” Opal mumbled, anxious all over again. What if she picked “confess”? She didn’t want to admit she was a teensy bit jealous of Iris’s wild purple hair. But she didn’t want to lie, either. And “risk” could be worse! Who knew what crazy challenge Scarlet might ask her to take?

  Iris sat up straight on her field of Pikachus. “Everyone already knows my secret,” she said, almost like she had read Opal’s mind, but not exactly. “It’s growing out of my head!”

  Scarlet was attempting a handstand. “As long as we play videogames after,” she agreed, staring at the upside-down movie. All talk, no action always made her restless.

  “Then you spin first, RiRi!” Cheri said to Iris, leaning back from the glitter-soaker and moving the bowl of popcorn out of the line of fire. “Because you’re the guest of honor.”

  Opal held her breath. Scarlet tumbled back down onto Blueberry Muffin. Cheri crossed her fingers, hoping the soaker would land on her. And Iris gave the toy a vigorous twirl. Little bits of glitter spewed out of it as it spun. And when it finally came to a stop, the gun was pointing right at . . .

  “Yay, Opal!” Iris said, clapping her hands. Then, imitating the fake solemnity of a talk show host, she held out a fresh lollipop like a pretend microphone and asked, “Opaline Trudeau, Confess or Risk?”

  Opal again considered her options. She could always lie. But how would she get out of a dare? “Confess,” she gulped.

  “Then confess this! What boy do you
like at school?” Iris asked mischievously.

  Whoa. Didn’t see that one coming. Probably should have! But Opal was so caught off guard, she just blurted out, “Albert Feinstein in math.” Then she clamped one hand over her mouth.

  “Albert Feinstein?!” Scarlet shouted loud enough for all three of her brothers upstairs to hear. “The mathlete captain? The nerd? You are not for real.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Scar,” Cheri said. She believed in love. She believed that there were as many amazing types of love as there were of nail polish colors. And she especially believed in love against the odds, be it Romeo-Juliet, cobra-mongoose, or nerd . . . er, nerd? “Brainiacs have their charm,” she declared in defense of Albert. “Le geek, c’est chic!”

  “Maybe,” Scarlet retorted, “but do they have the muscle power to carry your books home?”

  “Never mind that,” Cheri said, her toes curling in anticipation. “What are the top three things you like about Albert, Opal? Is it the way he belts his khakis just under his chest? Or buttons his shirt all the way up to his chin? Or is it the vintage pocket protector? Don’t leave out a single detail!” She giggled, tucking her ruby auburn hair behind both ears, all the better to hear Opal with.

  “Wait, who is this boy?” Iris asked, unwrapping the lollipop and dipping it in the popcorn. “Did I meet him yet? Is he cute?”

  Opal wanted to perish on the spot. She wanted to crawl into a shell and never come out. She realized ruefully that she was sitting on one, not that a Ninja Turtle sleeping bag could save her from her embarrassment now. She looked from Cheri to Scarlet to Iris, speechless.

  “Knock-knock, girls!” came a call from the top of the staircase.

  Saved by Scarlet’s mom, Opal thought with relief, her shoulders relaxing slightly.