The Ultra Violets Page 6

  Psychedelic, Iris thought, blowing a bubble.

  Nearer by, in the eaves of a building across the way, a clutch of pigeons roosted. Twirling one amethyst strand around her finger, Iris wondered what it would be like if the birds were rainbow-colored, too. She closed her eyes and imagined it: pigeons with wings striped red, orange, yellow, green. That would cheer up the whole sky! As she pictured it, she felt like warm waves of light were streaming through her. Like she was riding a sunshine roller coaster! The sensation was so strange Iris opened her eyes again. And the violet aura that she didn’t know was glowing all around her vanished.

  “Whoa!” she gasped, giggling a bit. She blinked to make sure she hadn’t been dreaming, and realized her finger was still twisted around the strand of hair.

  “Nope,” she said to herself, releasing the ringlet. “Still purple. Not a dream.”

  Then she looked out the window again.

  Strutting and cooing along the edges of the opposite rooftop, the pigeons were no longer their muted blue-gray, but a riot of primary colors. Had they really been parrots all along? Or was it . . . ?

  “Was it me?” Iris whispered.

  Her skin tingled with goose bumps at the thought, and the hair at the nape of her neck stood on end. She watched, amazed and a little afraid, as the candy-feathered pigeons fluttered back and forth. Then—even though she was an artist, not a scientist—she decided to test out her theory.

  Iris looked above the pigeons, above the rooftops, to the cotton-puff cumulus clouds. The sunset had already tinged them a mauvey-pink. Iris fixed the image in her mind, closed her eyes, tugged on a tendril of her hair, and concentrated. Once again, she felt as if she were on some dizzying amusement park ride in her mind. Once again, the mysterious violet aura radiated from her. When she dared to stare again, she was one part thrilled and two parts freaked that the clouds had indeed turned the same shocking fuchsia she’d imagined them to be.

  And the fuchsia was wow.

  “Viomazing!” Iris breathed. Then she jumped on her bed and did a little dance of excitement, whipping her hair back and forth like a rock star.

  “But wait!” Iris whispered to herself, calming down a bit. “The birds and the clouds could be mirages.” Maybe the fading daylight, and all that pizza from last night, were playing tricks on her. Iris slid down to sit on her bed, and decided to try one more time, indoors. She glanced at the items around her: the easel, her messenger bag, a few boxes yet to be unpacked. Not much to work with. But . . .

  “I see a white wall,” she said softly as she twisted a strand of her hair, “and I want to paint it . . .” She lowered her eyelids for only a second. Her stomach did a little flip-flop. “Peonies.”

  A field of frilly crimson and yellow flowers now spread up to the ceiling.

  “Viomazing, viomazing, viomazing!” she said, jumping to her feet again. She swept her head from the wall of peonies to the fuchsia clouds and back again, her hair flying back and forth until she was truly dizzy.

  “Okay, okay,” she told herself, “must chill!” She dug her hands deep into the pockets of her overalls to keep herself from twirling around, took a few deep breaths, then blew another bubble.

  She was just wondering what she could “paint” next when she remembered: She had math homework. Fractions. Too bad she couldn’t color them solved!

  • • •

  “Ack!”

  The cry cut through Opal’s thoughts, and she got up and poked her head out her bedroom door to see what was the matter. In the kitchen, her mother was backing away from the grocery bags, her hands clutched up around her neck.

  “Mom?” Opal asked, edging out into the hallway. “Everything okay? You didn’t see a cockroach, did you?”

  “No, it’s—” Dr. Trudeau glanced over at Opal, then seemed to change her mind. “Um, yes, a cockroach,” she said, lowering her hands and brushing them toward Opal as if she could sweep her daughter back into her bedroom. “That’s all it was. Don’t worry, I killed it.”

  “Oh, eww.” Opal shuddered. “There was only one, right? Eww!”

  “Don’t worry,” Dr. Trudeau repeated. “I’ll clean it up. Sorry for yelling.” She swept her hands at Opal again. “Go on back to your homework. I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”

  Opal couldn’t help herself. Icked out as she was, she craned her neck, scanning the kitchen for the crushed remains of the bug. But she didn’t see anything.

  “Go on,” her mother urged, stepping in front of the grocery bags like she was guarding them. “Don’t you have math homework to do?”

  “Almost finished it,” Opal said. But she went back into her room anyway, and had nearly closed the door again when she heard her mother muttering to herself.

  So she peeked out the crack.

  Over the open lid of the trash can, Opal’s mom was holding a fish by its tail. At first Opal couldn’t figure out why her mother would throw out a fish she’d just bought at the supermarket. But as the fish, hanging from Dr. Trudeau’s fingertips, spun in a slow half circle, the light glinted off its eyes.

  Its three flat, gluey eyes.

  Opal clasped a hand over her mouth to keep from gasping out loud. In the next second, her mom dropped the fish into the garbage, knotted the bag, and headed out of their apartment, probably to the disposal chute in the hallway.

  Disturbed, Opal closed her bedroom door and turned to stare out her window. For an instant she could have sworn the clouds were hot pink. She wished she had a lollipop or a piece of gum or something, as if the sweet taste of candy could erase the hideous sight of the triple-eyed fish from her mind. Instead, she tried to focus on her math homework. Fractions.

  She struggled through the problems like she would on any other Saturday, all the more distracted by the freaky fish flashbacks. When she crossed the room to get a book from her backpack, she walked. She didn’t jitterbug, jeté, or pirouette. She just walked. And when she stared at her wall, it was the same color as always: beige.

  Though her pinkie finger did still have a flush of purple from the wax droplet.

  After she finished her homework, Opal unbuttoned the top of her shirt collar, took the barrettes out of her hair, and combed out her brunette bob. The static electricity in the air sparked up the strands until they were nearly as wild as Iris’s had been last night at the sleepover.

  But still ordinary old brown. She frowned at her pale reflection in the mirror.

  Opal didn’t know what had been happening with Cheri, Scarlet, and Iris that afternoon. But gradually her thoughts began to shift from the icky Frankenfish to Iris’s glorious purple hair. Iris twirling around like a miniature glitter tornado overshadowing everything else in its path. Iris ordering her to bring popcorn and bendy straws to everyone else at the party. Iris forcing her to confess her crush on Albert Feinstein! The thought of the teasing that awaited her on Monday made her cringe.

  Opal had spent the last four years exiled at the all-girls’ academy. But that was then. Now she was in a new school. A school with boys! Hardly anyone remembered her from before. This was her chance to start over. To be somebody besides “the shy one.” The brown-eyed girl in the button-up shirt.

  But with artsy Iris and her purple hair getting all the attention, would anyone even notice she existed?

  Good thing Opal wasn’t caught in the middle of another round of that painful party game, because then she just might be forced to confess this: Opal was beginning to wish Iris had never come back to Sync City.

  Under the Fluffula Tree

  THE DAY WAS MONDAY. THE MOOD WAS MANIC. Maybe a group of big-haired ladies back in the 1980s sang it best: “You wish your bed was already made.” Before they walked like Egyptians into the vaults of music videos, bangles clanging around their wrists.

  Scarlet had yet to strut Egyptian-style, though she had mo
onwalked much of the way to school, sometimes moving so fast she thought she could smell smoke wafting up from the burning rubber soles of her canvas Converse kicks—a style of sneakers even more retro than that eighties hair band. As she waited for the other girls by the fluffula tree behind the gymporium, Scar kept one hand on the low Plexiglas wall that bordered the yard, just in case she felt the urge to spin off into another dance solo.

  The curved solar panels of the lopsided-egg-shaped Chronic Prep building looked dull and dark this early in the morning. As the day went on, the screens would rotate, shifting positions to follow the sun and lifting to reveal the recycled bottle-green glass of the school’s windows. It was a very energy-efficient, eco-friendly building. But Scarlet still thought it resembled a gigantic kiwi fruit, dropped in a nest of feathery trees by, she liked to imagine, a monster pterodactylus soaring over the skyscrapers of Sync City.

  Iris called the school building “organic.”

  She arrived next. Scarlet could easily pick her out of the sea of school kids thanks to her vibrant hair. Though after only a couple of days, Scarlet had already grown used it. She could hardly remember what Iris looked like BTP.

  “BTP?” Iris asked when Scarlet said this to her.

  “Before The Purple,” Scarlet explained.

  Iris offered Scarlet her first lollipop of the day, then dropped her messenger bag on the ground and hopped up to sit on the thick plastic wall. Her long legs swung back and forth in their lace-up boots. “How was the rest of your weekend?” she asked. “Hope it wasn’t too much of a chore cleaning up after the party—which, BTdubs, was the best! Your bro bakes crazy good cupcakes.” She unwrapped a lollipop for herself and gave it a tentative lick. “Oog, lemon!” she said through puckered lips. “Too tangy for a Monday morning. But can’t let good candy go to waste.”

  “Never,” Scarlet agreed. Hers was watermelon, and she sucked on it contemplatively—as much as Scarlet was up to contemplating anything on a Monday, and as much as anyone could contemplate a lollipop. She was really just stalling a little, while she debated whether to tell Iris about her dances with turtles and the Swan Lake pas de deux.

  As Scar Lo mulled it over, the crowds appeared to part, and Cheri skated through, looking fresh as a daisy, even for a Monday. A gold sequined headband sat like a simple crown atop her strawberry-auburn hair, and her waves bounced off her shoulders as she rolled up to the wall. The clandestine rescue pet of the day was a plump bulldog pup, and she’d dressed him to match, with a little gold headband of his own. They looked like a duo out of a Greek roller disco comedy.

  (What, you’ve never heard of a Greek roller disco comedy? The most famous being Sophocles’ Electra Slide.)

  “Cher,” Scarlet teased, interrupting this fanciful tangent, “all you’re missing is a toga.”

  “I think it looks fab!” Iris said. “I’ve got to try wearing a headband like that. Though I don’t know if I could handle the roller skates.”

  “Oh, they’re motion-sensitive and GPS-programmable,” Cheri explained, pressing an app on her smartphone. “Furi,” she said to the screen, “retract wheels.”

  “Okay, wheels retracting,” her phone answered back in a pleasant robotic voice. Scarlet and Iris heard the clicks as Cheri’s skates were locked back up inside her platform sandals.

  “See? Très easy.” Cheri straightened her gold sequins. “Also très easy: this headband, which I made myself. Iris, I can make you a silver one to set off the purple. And a red one to go with Scarlet’s black hair, I think. And for Opal, pearly white. Wouldn’t that be pretty? Where is Opal, anyway?”

  “Not here yet,” Scarlet answered. She hadn’t felt any uncontrollable urges to bust into a hustle, even after that fanciful tangent about disco dancing. So she began to relax. When Rhett Smith and his gang edged a little too close to the girls’ gathering spot, she straightened up, folded her arms across her chest, and tilted her head to one side, daring him to cross the invisible border into fluffula territory.

  “Hey,” Scarlet said, turning back to Iris and Cheri. “What happened to your hot dog?”

  “Salami? He’s back at the Helter Shelter, waiting to be adopted,” Cheri said with a sigh. If she could, she would have adopted all the stray animals in Sync City. Her mom had major allergies, so she couldn’t even adopt one. Instead, she tried to rotate all the dogs and the occasional pot-bellied pig at the shelter where she volunteered, giving them each a day out to see the world beyond their cages. She hadn’t lost a pet yet. But she did have to keep it all on the hush-hush, since you really weren’t supposed to “borrow” animals from Helter Shelter. Or bring them to school. That’s why it was clandestine. She could have called it the downlow dog of the day, too. But clandestine meant the same thing as secret and sounded more sophisticated. Downlow dog sounded like a yoga pose.

  Keeping Jaws the bulldog on a very short leash, and keeping one eye over her shoulder for teachers monitoring the schoolyard, Cheri casually asked the other girls, “Did you finish the math homework?”

  Iris groaned. Scarlet was just glad she hadn’t asked about the sleepover cleanup.

  “I thought it was hard,” Iris said, giving the wall light kicks with her heels. Scarlet nodded in agreement.

  “Well, three out of two people do find fractions difficult,” Cheri said.

  “Is that a fract?” Scarlet asked. “You thought it was tough, too?”

  “Funny thing about those fractions . . .” Cheri began, ushering Jaws back into her tote bag after he’d peed on the fluffula tree. Then she noticed Opal approaching.

  “Too bad we don’t have Albert Feinstein to help us with our math homework,” Scarlet snickered.

  “Shush it, Scar,” Cheri said, flapping a hand at her to lower her voice. “Opal was kind of sensitive about that at the sleepover.” Cheri still planned to launch Project Nerd Makeover—she just hadn’t had a chance to tell the others yet. She hadn’t had a chance to tell them about her mysterious amazing math moment, either.

  “I thought it was cute, her confession,” Iris added hurriedly, before calling out, “Hey, girl!” and waving Opal over.

  Opal was wearing her Monday button-up, which looked a lot like her Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (and Saturday . . . and Sunday) button-ups. Her chocolate brown hair was back in its prim barrettes. They were pulled so tightly from Opal’s forehead, Cheri wondered if the strain didn’t give her headaches.

  “Hey, all,” Opal said, but her smile was twisted with suspicion. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the other three had been talking about her.

  “Hey-ey,” the other three chorused, which only made Opal more mistrustful.

  After a pause, Iris cleared her throat and said, “Opes, before you got here, we were talking about the math homework. Did you do it?”

  Just the mention of the word “math” and Opal blushed fierce as the leaves on the fluffula tree. But she tried to act nonchalant. “Yes,” she answered, “on Saturday afternoon. I think I did okay.”

  “’Cause Cheri was saying that ten out of nine people find fractions impossible,” Scarlet added, resisting the urge to dance or make a snarky remark about Opal’s crush on Albrainiac.

  “Right.” Cheri had climbed up on the squat plastic wall next to Iris. Jaws sat in the tote bag between them, his head poking out of the top. “In fact, as I was starting to tell Iris and Scarly . . .”

  She waited, making sure no one else was eavesdropping on their convo, then whispered:

  “Something weird happened to me on Saturday.”

  “Me too!” Scarlet and Iris echoed immediately, and the three girls all started gabbling over one another while Opal watched in silence. But before Cheri could explain any further, Scarlet felt a rhythmic wave building inside her. “Oh no!” she blurted out, but it was too late. Her right hand arced up over her head and her left flared
downward. Snapping her fingers and tossing her ponytail, she proceeded to dance a flamenco around the fluffula tree. She spun and stomped so quickly none of the other kids even noticed. After she’d circled the trunk, she came to a stop, hugging the tree to steady herself and digging her heels into the grass.

  Cheri, Iris, and Opal stared at her, stunned.

  “Ugh!” Scarlet uttered in frustration, turning around slowly to face her friends. “Sorry to interrupt you, Cher, but this . . . this is my weirdness from the weekend. I—” Despite the pirouettes and moonwalks, Scarlet scould scarcely scomprehend it herself! She lowered her voice and said somberly, “I seem to be spontaneously dancing.”

  The three girls burst out laughing.

  “You guys!” Scarlet shouted, daring to stomp her foot, even though that might have set off a whole new round of flamencoing. “It’s so not funny! It’s bizarro! I danced the basement clean in ten minutes flat! And then I performed both the girl and boy parts from a ballet I don’t even know!”

  “In a tutu?” Cheri asked. “I def want to get me a tutu. Who needs a tutu? You do, and me, too . . .”

  As Cheri continued her beat poem to tutus, Iris tried to reassure Scarlet. “No, it’s great,” she said with a kind smile. “It’s, um, graceful, Scar.”

  “What good is graceful?” Scarlet grumped.

  Opal couldn’t help rolling her eyes: Scarlet thought she could dance. “What about you, Iris?” she heard herself asking, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer. “What’s the weirdness that happened to you this weekend?”

  “Okay,” Iris said from her seat on the wall, leaning forward to tell her story. “Oh, wait!” She leaned back again, dug down into her pockets, then held a hand out to Opal. “Lollipop?”

  Opal peered at the pop. Dark Chocolate Raisin. Her favorite. “I’d better not.” She could practically taste it. “The doctor says candy might make me hyper.” She cast a glance at Scarlet, who had polished off her watermelon lollipop right before her impromptu flamenco performance. Scarlet looked at Opal, too, then gladly grabbed the candy out of Iris’s hand.