The Ultra Violets Read online

  As she geared up, she eyed the distance from her starting point to the wall on the other side of the room and considered calling Cheri on videochat. I bet she could calculate it with just one look. Even as the idea crossed her mind, Scarlet realized how crazy it would have sounded just a few days ago. Cheri, a math whiz: inconceivable! But even minus Cheri’s mathleticism, Scarlet knew the jump was at least the length of three sleeping bags. Which was pretty long.

  In bike helmet, elbow guards, kneepads, and bare feet, Scarlet sat down on the bottom step of the basement stairs. She opened a bag of Sour Gummy Babies and bit the head off one. “No pain, no gain,” she said aloud, to nobody but the poker-playing dogs. If she practiced, she was pretty sure she could train herself to manage her jumps and bolts and maybe even her pirouettes. It couldn’t be any harder than riding a skateboard, could it? After all, that was a toy; this was her own body—even if, these days, it felt out of her control.

  Upstairs, the thunder crashed.

  Scarlet thought more about it all as she ate a few more babies. Rumbas and waltzes are probs pointless, she reasoned. But maybe this leap-across-rooms-in-a-single-bound thing could be useful . . .

  • • •

  To be honest, if Cheri had her choice of special talents, she would not have chosen math. She hadn’t told this to the other girls because she could sense that Opal . . . well, the whole topic of special talents seemed to stress Opal out. And Cheri couldn’t blame her: It was totes whack that all of a sudden Iris was practically a walking rainbow, tiny Scarlet was a tiny dancer, and she could solve trigonometric ratios in her head.

  Seriously, though, why couldn’t she have caught Scarlet’s fever—her dance fever—instead? It’s not like she could slow-jam algebra! And Scarlet didn’t care one byte about dancing. She probably didn’t even remember this anymore, but Cheri would never forget: Once upon a time in second grade, Scarlet had vowed that absolutely not would she go to prom. “Oh swell no!” she’d said. Cheri could still hear Scarlet’s pipsqueaky voice like it was yesterday—no, really, she could: She’d recorded Scarlet on her smartphone and backed it up on a portable drive. But that wasn’t the only reason she’d never forget. The other was because she, Cheri, had been planning her prom dress since way back then. And what did you do at the prom?

  Duh. You danced!

  Cheri sighed. She was in between clandestine pets for the weekend, so she didn’t have any warm puppies to snuggle. She had snuck Jaws back into the shelter, and when everyone else went mental over his pale purple coat, courtesy of Iris, she played dumb. The little lavender bulldog caused such a sensation, though, that people lined up to adopt him. He’d already been taken to a new home. Would his new family still call him Jaws? Cheri wondered.

  But puppy withdrawal wasn’t all that was troubling her that Friday night. Only since she’d started blowing everyone’s minds with her math brilliance did she realize people actually expected her to be dumb, not just act it for the sake of a pastel-colored bulldog. And this made her kind of mad, though she wasn’t sure why. After all, it’s not as if she got her insta-math skills by studying hard or anything ludicrous like that! Oh swell no, Cheri thought. In fact, it was all quite backward: Answers would come to her in a flash, and then the steps would rewind in her mind to the beginning of the problem. By the time her brain had followed the steps back to the start, she understood. But it was a bit like learning in reverse. Like knowing how a story ends before you even read the first chapter of a book. And not because you’d already seen the movie.

  “Something wrong, kitten?”

  Seated at the kitchen table across from her, Cheri’s father was elbow-deep in snail mail. But when he heard Cheri sigh, he stopped balancing the checkbook. It fell onto the table, barely covering the electric bill.

  “Daddy,” Cheri asked, “how come, sometimes, you want to be good at something, but no matter what, you’re not? And other things, things you might not even care about, you’re good at without even trying?”

  Cheri’s dad took a sip of his coffee before answering.

  “Well,” he said, his hands wrapped around his coffee mug, “we don’t get to choose our gifts, kitten. If we did, I’d be pitching for the Sync City Protons!” His eyes lit up at this fantasy. “Curve ball!” he called out, throwing a crumpled bill toward the trash bin. He missed.

  “Dad, be serious,” Cheri said.

  “Okay. I guess you could say our gifts choose us,” he continued. “What matters is what we do with them. Does that make sense?”

  “Maybe,” Cheri said. She figured she might as well make the most of her mysterioso math thang: At least it would help her help Opal hook up with Albert. Happiness! Plus it would also help her help her report card hook up with an A+, she hoped. She got up from her seat and gave her father a hug in his chair. Over his shoulders she could see all the bills spread out across the table.

  “Oh, and Daddy?” Cheri straightened up and turned toward the refrigerator to pour herself a glass of chocolate milk. “If you pay an extra ten dollars a month for the next six months, you’ll pay off that credit card and save fourteen percent additional interest.”

  Cheri flounced out of the kitchen. “Goodnightie!” she called over her shoulder. “I’m off to my room to paint my nails.” She didn’t see her dad staring after her, his eyes crossed in astonishment and his coffee going cold in its cup.

  • • •

  Peonies. Iris had “painted” her bedroom wall in peonies again. Something about the rain that Friday night made her crave the cheerful, fluffy flowers. She remembered how they used to make them out of tissue paper in kindergarten class. Now, with nothing but her thoughts, a tug of her hair, and a twitch of her pinkie finger, Iris had covered her walls with the exploding blossoms. In cotton-candy pink, intense magenta, and pure white—with a hint of red around the edges of the petals.

  She sat back on her bed, found a blueberry lollipop in a pocket of her overalls, and admired her work. Every night that week, she had practiced with a different landscape: a pebbly beach, a red-sand desert, a snowy pine forest, the surface of a moon. And every morning, before her mom knocked on her door and came in to check on her, she mind-wiped the wall clean again.

  She was an artist, Iris told herself, pulling one of her ringlets straight and examining the multi-violet shades of the strands. Artists were supposed to be different. Artists couldn’t be afraid of the strange; they had to embrace it!

  She looked back at the big peony blossoms covering her bedroom wall. Just for fun, with a few blinks, she drew button-eyed and wide-mouthed smiley faces in their centers. The laughing flowers looked so cheerful, Iris had to smile, too.

  But why did my hair turn purple? The question haunted her. It wasn’t enough that it just had; there had to be a reason. And why can I change the colors of all these other things?

  A part of her wished she could ask her mom. At least talk about it. The woman was a scientist, for goodness’ sake, working in that big crystal lab high above the fro-yo shop. But something in her gut told her not to. Her mom had already ignored the purple hair. If Iris told her she could turn clouds fuchsia and dogs lilac, the woman might just have a nervous breakdown.

  Whatever the reason, Iris had to admit it was kind of cool to have a . . . Iris giggled at the word that came to mind. It sounded so cartoon-geektastic! And yet it fit. It was the only word that fit . . .

  “But what can I do with it?” Iris said to herself as she stared at the riot of giant grinning peony blossoms bursting from the wall. Okay, it would be a blast to create banners for the gym or backdrops for the school play or whatever. But Iris already liked to do that stuff the old-fashioned way, with paintbrushes and colored markers.

  “There must be something more,” she said, crunching on her lollipop. “There’s got to be more I can do. With. My. Superpower.”

&n
bsp; She giggled again. Even if it was true, that word was ridiculous.

  • • •

  So the door to this chapter closes with—wait! The door isn’t closed yet. It’s open a crack. Peer back through, back to that rainy night in Sync City. Each girl was safe as houses (as that expression goes, though it applies to apartments, too, don’t worry). Outside, however, down on the city streets, things were getting creepy. Creepy-crawly.

  The weeping willow on the other side of the Joan River still cried its amber tears. The lipsticked cattails still smiled their mocking smiles under the acid-yellow lights of the Mall of No Returns. The three-eyed Frankenflounders swam along with the currents, flashing one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish in the dark waters.

  And up on land, a thin man in a trench coat scraped at the door of the twenty-four-hour diner. The rain had soaked his brown overcoat, and it resembled a large, wet, paper bag. A matching brown hat was pulled low on his head.

  Once inside, he crouched in a corner booth. He never took off his hat, never even lifted his head when he ordered a slice of shoofly pie. The beehived waitress brought it to him, letting the plate clatter on the table, but still he did not look up. He waited until she was far enough away, back behind the counter teasing her bouffant, before he tasted the sweet molasses cake. As he bent low over it, two spindly green claws shot out from the sleeves of his damp coat. The sharp spines on their edges stuck into the pie and lifted it up to his twitching mandibles. As they sliced through the pie, his one compound eye shot from left to right, and the antenna on the other side of his head slipped out from beneath the hat. With a third tarsal claw—he had four in all—he quickly shoved the quivering feeler back under his hat, then threw a few dollars on the table and scuttled out into the rain again. If the waitress had been paying attention, she might have noticed a pair of pale green wingtips sticking out below the hem of his trench coat.

  But the waitress didn’t notice because she was too busy clearing the table.

  “Humph,” she humphed to the fry cook behind the counter. “Talk about your eat and run. Didn’t even leave a tip.”

  Here’s a tip, waitress: Thank your lucky stars. Because no, the customer had not left a tip. But at least he had only eaten the pie.

  Super-Vee-Duper

  “NO, FOR REAL.”

  “Across the whole room?”

  “Get out!”

  “Ooh, ginormous flower blossoms!”

  “But someone’s going to patch up the Saint Bernard, right?”

  “Your dad’s credit card bill. Yawn.”

  “What about you?”

  • • •

  These are some of the things you say when you are hanging out in the park after school, in what, when you looked back on it later, could be considered the first unofficial meeting of the unnamed group of girls with untested superpowers. Or maybe it’s the second unofficial meeting, if you count the sleepover. Let’s leave the math to Cheri.

  The girls were in Chrysalis Park, sitting atop a small hill—nay, call it a grassy knoll—looking out across the river. After little snippets of whispered conversations all day at school, they were finally free, and ready to face the truth. The truth of what some might call their weirdness, but we might call their awesomeness.

  “This is soooo cray-cray,” Cheri said as she sat down next to Opal on the park bench. Her clandestine pet of the day was an energetic terrier mix the animal shelter had nicknamed Smelly Barkson. Now that they were out of school for the afternoon, Cheri could let the scruffy pup out of the bag to frolic on the hilltop alongside them. She’d decided Smelly would look stunning in a teal blue. She was just waiting for the right moment to ask Iris.

  “True that,” said Scarlet. At the peak of the grassy knoll, they were out of sight of the other people in the park, so she was letting herself spiral around the bench like a spinning top.

  “Hello, Scar, you’re making me dizzy,” Cheri said as she followed the blur of her rotating ponytail.

  “Hello, Cher, are you sure you weren’t already?” Scarlet said. But then she realized that might have sounded mean, so she added, “Just kidding, algebra girl!” and came to a stop.

  From where Iris stood, she could see across the river to the garish yellow complex on the other side. The cattails sprouting up on the muddy bank in front of it looked like they were wearing lipstick? That couldn’t be right! “Hey, Opal,” Iris said, “isn’t that where your mom works?”

  “BeauTek, yeah,” Opal said, glad the conversation had changed from special talents, of which she had zero. “It’s kind of an uggo building. It used to be a shopping mall.”

  “A shopping mall . . .” Iris repeated. She gave her long lilac ringlets a toss as if to shake the strange place out of her mind and turned to face the other three. The light breeze off the river lifted her hair off her shoulders. “But back to more important things,” she said, clenching her fists at her sides to contain her excitement. “We . . .” she began in a low voice, taking a step toward the bench.

  “Have . . .” Cheri continued, getting to her feet, and getting on board Iris’s train of thought.

  “Superpowers!” Scarlet shouted, breaking into a rockin’ air-guitar solo. The three girls joined hands and jumped around in a circle, screaming and laughing and generally acting goofbally. It was a good thing Iris and Cheri each had a firm grip on Scarlet, because who knows how high she would have shot into the air otherwise. Smelly Barkson scampered around with them, nipping at the bright purple laces of Iris’s lace-up boots. Only after they’d calmed down from their mini freak-out did the three girls realize Opal was still sitting on the bench, silent, watching them.

  “Oh, Opal,” Iris said, feeling slightly embarrassed by their public display of nuttiness. “It’s no big deal, really. I mean, it is cray-cray, like Cheri said, but it’s not as if purple hair or straight As in math—”

  “Or mega-dancing,” Scarlet piped in.

  “—really makes much difference,” Iris continued. “Maybe the straight As! But you’re already so good in math it’s not like you need a so-called superpower.”

  Truth be told, Opal was a tad irked by the other girls’ hysterical outburst, but she bit her tongue. If she did have a superpower, she wouldn’t be so silly about it—coloring puppies and rapping with teachers and twirling around trees. She’d take it seriously. “No, it’s fine,” she said quietly. “It’s just, you know.”

  “I do know,” Cheri said, sitting down next to Opal again, putting a hand on her shoulder, and looking into her eyes. “But you never DO know, Opal! All this stuff just came out of the blue—”

  “Out of the purple,” Scarlet interjected.

  “Out of the violet,” Iris said, because she had decided there was no better color to describe her hair.

  “Yes, out of the violet,” Cheri continued. “That doesn’t mean something still might not change for you.”

  “Whatever,” Opal said. The fact that Cheri was being so kind only seemed to make her more angry on the inside. She blinked to keep from crying on the outside. “It’s fine, really. It’s all good. I think we—” Opal turned away and dabbed her eyes with the cuff of her shirt. She could see the curious yellow BeauTek corporation just across the river, and she wondered what her mom was working on while she sat there in the park. “I think we should test out what you guys can do with your new, you know, ‘superpowers.’”

  Cheri gave Opal a hug and gave Smelly Barkson a wink. As if in response, the little dog jumped up on Opal’s lap and licked her on the chin. “Don’t you worry,” Cheri said to Opal, visions of Albert Feinstein and her wild romantic schemes swirling in her head. “Special things are in store for you, too. Even if they’re not the color purple!”

  Scarlet paced in front of the be
nch impatiently. “Ixnay on this chick flick,” she said. “Roll credits, please!” Opal wanted to check out what they could do with their super abilities? After all her crash tests in the basement, Scarlet would be more than happy to oblige.

  Opal and Cheri settled back on the bench, Opal with her legs crossed at the ankles and her hands folded in her lap, Cheri twisted sideways, hugging her knees to her chest. Using her science textbook as a cushion, Iris sat down on the grass next to them. From her messenger bag she pulled out her iCan, a lollipop, and her rhinestone stylus, just in case she felt inspired. “Showtime, Scarlet!” she said, tapping a faint drumroll with the stylus.

  Scarlet pretended to hold out the corners of a pretend skirt—Scarlet didn’t do actual skirts—and curtsied to her audience of three plus dog. They clapped politely, and Cheri giggled. The idea of Scarlet in a skirt was stranger than any of the strange things that had happened recently. But Cheri stopped laughing when Scarlet nodded at her sternly, then folded her arms out in front of her and dropped into a crouch.

  She kicked out one leg, then the other. One leg, then the other; onelegthentheotheronelegthentheother! Faster and faster, kicks to the front, then to the side, then to the front, then to the side! She started to turn in place as she kicked, squatting all the while. She flung her arms out and doubled her kicks, two to the front, two to the back, two to one side, two to the other, all while crouched like a Cossack and hopping on the opposite foot. She spun so fast and kicked so hard, her feet started to drill a little hole in the dirt, and pebbles flew up from the ground. At first Smelly Barkson tried to keep up with the little dust devil, running in circles around her and yapping happily. But soon the terrier grew so tired she lay down on the grass next to Iris and put her paws over her eyes.

  Just when the girls started to worry that she might kick her way six feet under, Scarlet straightened her legs. Flipped up onto the back of the park bench. Dropped down into a split behind Opal and Cheri. And then snapped back up again and really did rocket into the air. No, for real!