Holly Black

by Geektastic (v5)

  “Yeah, yeah, let’s do that one.”

  I awake at five AM to cries of M30! M30! Hurry! coming from all directions. Tabitha is just waking up, too. My first thought is to protect her from my morning breath. My second is that I can’t believe Tabitha Bell fell asleep in my arms. Her smeared makeup and tousled hair look so sexy I literally can’t bear it. If Charles Messier were alive he’d be getting the mother of all thank-you notes from me.

  A bullhorn sounds. “C’mon, everyone! You’re almost at the finish line! Don’t give up now!”

  Our eyes meet. She narrows hers. I narrow mine. She grins. I grin back. In unspoken agreement, we throw off the sleeping bag and take off in a run. We may have missed most of the Marathon, but we are NOT ones to miss a challenge. I reach my scope first, and am glad I had the foresight to put the dew cover on before we left. Tabitha grabs for the star charts and frantically presses buttons on her GoTo. I search for Capricornus, and then use the eyepiece to starhop down the chain of stars off to its left. I barely have time to move the scope before the coming dawn obliterates the pattern of stars I just left. I don’t think I’m going to make it in time. All over the world people are looking for M30 right now and I’m going to miss it. I risk stealing a glance at Tabitha to see her progress. She feigns a yawn and says, “Will you hurry up, already? Some of us are ready for breakfast.” I turn back and peer into my eyepiece again, but I know it’s hopeless. My scope just isn’t powerful enough to cut through the light.

  I hold up my hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, you win. You found it and I didn’t.”

  “Wanna see it?” she asks coyly.

  I hurry over and put my eye to the rubber eyepiece. Her scope is so powerful the globular cluster glows, even in the twilight of dawn. I can even make out the colorful double and triple stars that surround the core. “Thank you, it’s really beautiful,” I say, not caring if that sounds corny. I might have to change my opinion of computerized scopes. And who knows, maybe my mom was wrong. Maybe I won’t have to wait till college to come into my own.

  A little later the man with the bullhorn comes by with a stack of certificates. “So how’d we do?” he asks, his magic marker at the ready.

  “We made it to the finish line,” Tabitha proudly announces.

  “Wonderful!” the man booms. I shake my head at Tabitha admonishingly.

  She reaches out to stop him from handing us a certificate. “But we missed the eighty objects before it.”

  “Ah,” he says, tucking the papers back under his arm. “Well, I’m sorry it wasn’t a more successful night for you. You can always try again tonight if you’re not too exhausted.”

  Tabitha whirls around to face me. “You mean it’s not just once a year? I’ve been crazed all week when I could have done this later on when I was more prepared?”

  “There’s a block of a few days when there’s no moon out that’ll work,” I admit. “But it wouldn’t have bought you much time. Most people chose last night because, well, it was a Saturday night.”

  “So what do you think?” the man asks. “You up for coming tonight? A bunch of us will be here again.”

  I look at Tabitha. “What do you think?”

  She contemplates for a minute, and then says, “Well, I never did get to see the Ring Nebula….”

  I feel a grin spreading across my face. “We’d have to miss school on Monday. We never miss school. But it is for a good cause….”

  “Definitely an educational pursuit,” she adds, slipping her hand in mine. “And this time we’d actually do it though, right?” She blushes and the pink on her cheeks match the approaching sunrise. “I mean, we’d do the Marathon this time. And not for our college apps, but just because it’s fun?”

  I smile. “I knew what you meant. Yes, we’d really do the Marathon this time. Well, except for between midnight and two when no new objects rise or set.”

  “What would we do during that time?” she asks teasingly.

  Instead of answering, I lean in to kiss her. I’m a few inches from her lips when I hear the guy with the certificates clear his throat. I’d totally forgotten he was there!

  “So you’re in, I take it?” he asks wearily.

  I quickly un-pucker and step back. “We’re in.”

  “We’re definitely in,” Tabitha confirms.

  “Teenagers,” the man mutters. He shakes his head as he walks to the next group.

  We turn to each other and laugh.

  “What should we do now?” I ask.

  Tabitha picks up my star atlas and settles into one of the beach chairs. “I’m going to read this cover to cover so by tonight I’ll be able to teach you something. What are you going to do?”

  I sit down across from her. “I’m going to watch you read that cover to cover.”

  “I don’t think that will be a very exciting use of your time.”

  “Oh, yes, it will,” I argue.

  “Whatever you want,” she says with a shrug, and opens the first page. For the next four hours I watch her face as she teaches herself thousands of years of astronomical history. I watch as the patterns of the stars take up residence inside her head. When she turns the last page, she pushes the book into my hands. “Thank you, Peter,” she says so earnestly I want to scoop her up and run around the field with her.

  So I do.

  In her eighth grade yearbook, Wendy Mass was bestowed the dubious honor of Most Likely to Solve Rubik’s Cube because she spent so much time fiddling with it instead of paying attention in class. Always fascinated by the night sky, she took Astronomy 101 in college. It was so complicated that she never got higher than 45 out of 100 on any exam. Fortunately, neither did anyone else and the professor graded on a curve. She got an A! She loves writing about astronomy now, and tries to make it so easy to understand that the reader will fall in love with it, too.

  Wendy is the author of eight novels for young readers, including A Mango-Shaped Space (about a girl with synesthesia), Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life, Every Soul a Star, and Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall. She lives in northern New Jersey, where she can be found staring up at the sky with her telescope, or down at the ground with her metal detector, hoping to find gold. She can do Rubik’s Cube in less than two minutes.

  Text by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci. Illustrations by Hope Larson.

  IT’S JUST A JUMP TO THE LEFT

  by libba bray

  “How did she get ahead of us?” Agnes whispered to Leta.

  “I can’t believe her. She came earlier than us on purpose,” Leta said.

  Five people up in the line, Jennifer Pomhultz, in a rabbit-fur jacket and side ponytail, executed a perfect step-ball-change while her older sister and a handful of others applauded.

  Leta sneered. “There’s the dance move. I knew she’d do it. Like we’re supposed to care that she got a callback for Six Flags.”

  “I don’t care. Do you care?” Agnes asked.

  “You can’t imagine how little I care.”

  If there was anyone Leta and Agnes hated, it was Jennifer Pomhultz, and for very good reason. For six months, Leta and Agnes had a Friday night routine: At eight o’clock, Leta went to Agnes’s house. At nine, they started getting ready—plumping their lips with Bonne Bell Lipsmacker, experimenting with eyeliner, torturing their hair (Leta’s was shoulder length, stick-straight, and brown; Agnes’s, long and blond and wavy-thick) with curling irons and Aqua Net. By eleven-fifteen, their parents would drop them off at the Cineplex for the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Leta and Agnes would take their places in the long line that snaked from the box office around the side of the Cineplex and into the back alley. Waiting in line was as much a ritual as the movie itself, and the girls delighted in singing along to “The Time Warp” and comparing props—toast, bags of rice, newspapers—with the other moviegoers. Rocky Horror was their church, and they were devout. But Jennifer Pomhultz had only been coming for a few weeks—anyone could see she didn’t even know
the lyrics to the songs—and already she was acting as if she’d been a Rocky devotee for years. She wore a stupid hairdo and too much blusher and a jacket made from bunnies. Maybe that’s what ninth graders did, but Leta and Agnes didn’t have to approve.

  “Look at her! She’s trying to be Magenta. Last week, she was Janet.”

  “You just don’t do that. You don’t switch characters,” Leta agreed. “God, she is such a fake.”

  “The fakiest of the fake,” Agnes said, and she slipped her arm through Leta’s in solidarity.

  Leta and Agnes had been best friends since third grade when they’d both been hall monitors and discovered a mutual love of horse models. But now, Leta and Agnes were fourteen and in the second half of eighth grade, and that demanded certain concessions. A deal was made, terms agreed upon and sealed with a vow said over the Ouija board: By summer, they would give up TeenBeat magazine and start reading Cosmopolitan, which they had only glimpsed in the drugstore. They would buy at least one pair of cool jeans from the mall. And before the school year was out, Leta and Agnes would each have their first kiss.

  Leta hoped hers would be with Tom Van Dyke, who worked behind the concession stand. Tom was a high school junior and beautiful, with shaggy brown hair and heavy-lidded brown eyes, which reminded Leta of Tim Curry, who played Frank-N-Furter. Tom drove a red Camaro and played drums in marching band. Often, when she had been banished to the bench during gym class—Toni Benson deliberately hit her in dodgeball and Coach Perry did nothing about it—Leta consoled herself by imagining she was Tom’s girlfriend. In these fantasies, Leta cheered him on during halftime concerts as he marched across the field in measured beats, taking his place as part of a perfect formation—a sunburst, a castle, or the Crocker High School mustang, which was their mascot. Sometimes she closed her eyes and imagined Tom kissing her in the rain over at the Frankenstein Place, and she was as beautiful as Susan Sarandon, who played Janet.

  “Is he here? I don’t see him,” Leta said as she and Agnes pushed past the pimply-faced door guardian who asked for tickets and checked IDs, turning away anyone who wasn’t seventeen. Leta and Agnes had been granted a pass from the theater manager who used to go to A.A. meetings with Agnes’s mom.

  “He’s behind the counter, same as always. Get to it,” Agnes answered, and Leta felt her heartbeat quicken.

  Tom’s hair shone in the glow of the popcorn machine. “Can I get you something?” he asked.

  “Can I have a Sprite, please?” Leta felt she should say something more, to keep the conversation flowing like she’d read in a TeenBeat article, “Snag Your Crush!” “I really want a Coke but I have an ulcer? And my doctor said I can’t drink Coke anymore because it gives me a stomachache?”

  Tom jiggled the cup under the stream of pale, foaming soda. “Bummer.”

  “It’s the same with popcorn, bad for my ulcer,” Leta continued. “I had to have a barium swallow. They call it a ‘delicious strawberry milkshake’ but it’s like drinking strawberry-flavored chalk. I almost barfed it back up.”

  “Hey, Tom, I can cover for you if you want time with your girlfriend,” the other guy at the counter snickered, and Leta’s face went lava-red.

  “Shut up, Marco. That’ll be a dollar twenty-five,” Tom said.

  Quickly, Leta dropped her change on the counter. Agnes pushed her toward Theater 2. “Smooth move, Ex-lax. At this rate, you’ll never get kissed. Come on. I don’t wanna get stuck in the back with the virgins.”

  Leta and Agnes settled into their seats, third row center. When the lights dimmed and the familiar red lips and white teeth glowed on the screen, the audience erupted into cheers, and Leta felt that surge of excitement in her belly, the thrill of sitting in the dark with strangers sharing an experience that made them all seem like friends. She and Agnes sang along to every lyric. They threw toast and shouted comebacks. But once Columbia was on-screen, Leta was alert, her feet miming the steps below her seat, her hands making small motions on her lap. Only once did she look away, her eye drawn by a flash of gold on the front row. There sat Jennifer Pomhultz wearing her sister’s gold-sequined baton twirler’s outfit with fringe at the shoulders. So Jennifer hadn’t come as Magenta at all but as Columbia, and Leta felt a surge of panic mixed with hatred as Jennifer also imitated Columbia’s moves. Leta elbowed Agnes and pointed.

  Agnes’s mouth hung open in disbelief. “That bitch!”

  Someone on their row—a virgin—made the mistake of starting up the battery-powered carving knife way too early. Its electric growl disturbed the mood, and the audience pounced with a chorus of shushing.

  After the movie, Leta and Agnes waited out front for Mr. Tatum to come pick them up. It was brisk in the parking lot—the flatlands of Texas could be surprisingly cold in winter. Leta crossed her arms to stay warm and brooded over Jennifer Pomhultz. “I can’t believe her. She can have anyone else, but Columbia’s mine.”

  Agnes waved it away. “Don’t worry about it. By next week, she’ll be Riff Raff.”

  But Leta did worry. That’s why she had an ulcer. Even now, her stomach burned with acid, and she wished she’d brought her Maalox along.

  “Hey, aren’t you Diana’s sister, Agnes?” A guy with dark hair and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt walked up to them, tossing his cigarette in the parking lot on the way. Leta recognized him from her brother’s high school yearbook. His name was Roger, and he raced motocross. “I’m Roger. I’ve seen you around.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen you, too.” Agnes said it really cool, but she was smiling in a way Leta had never seen her smile before.

  Mr. Tatum was late as usual, and for a half hour they stood around talking and trying to stay warm. Roger made fun of Agnes but it was really a compliment, and when Agnes fake-punched his arm, Leta could see she wasn’t insulted at all; she was thrilled. At last, Leta saw Mr. Tatum’s old white Buick edging into the lot from College Drive. Mrs. Tatum had taken their new car when she left to “find herself” on an ashram last year, leaving Agnes and her sister Diana in the lurch with a dad who was no more than a shadow in their house.

  “Your dad’s here,” Leta warned, and Agnes moved away from Roger.

  “So, you wanna go see a movie tomorrow or something?” Roger asked Agnes.

  “Sure. Okay.”

  Mr. Tatum drove up and honked the horn. He sat in the driver’s seat staring straight ahead. Agnes jotted her phone number on the back of an old napkin and offered it to Roger with a smile that gave Leta an uneasy feeling in her stomach, like the climb on a roller coaster when you’ve glimpsed the first steep drop but there’s nothing to do but hold on till the end.

  Dammit, Janet

  Two weeks later, on a Saturday, Leta spent the night at Agnes’s house. Aggie’s grandmother had suffered a fall, and her dad was in Kansas arguing with the siblings about what should be done. This left Agnes’s older sister, Diana, on duty, but she’d gone off with her friends. In exchange for the girls’ silence, she’d promised them one monumental favor, no questions asked, to be collected at a future date.

  Leta and Agnes enjoyed having the house to themselves. They pretended they were stewardesses sharing an apartment in New York City, where they entertained rock stars and heads of state. Leta said her name was Astrid Van Der Waal, and she was also a Swedish princess. Agnes called herself Agatha Frank-N-Furter until Leta objected, so she changed it to just Agatha, like Cher, and said she was a spy. When they tired of that game, they cooked Tuna Helper in a small black pan, adding in canned corn because it was a vegetable. They scooped it all up with Doritos and washed it down with lemonade concocted from water and neon-pink powder in a jar. They’d lost count on the spoonfuls and the lemonade was puckery tart. It left a coating on Leta’s tongue that made everything taste slightly off.

  “You know what you say to corn?” Leta said, giggling.

  “No, what?”

  “See you later!” Leta laughed so hard some of her Tuna Helper fell out of her mouth. When Agnes didn’t laugh, Leta explai
ned, “See you later? Because corn comes out in your poop?”

  Agnes rolled her eyes. “You probably shouldn’t say that around guys. They’ll think you’re gross.”

  Leta felt confused. They always laughed at poop jokes. Always.

  “Guess what?” Agnes said. “Roger invited me to a party.”

  Leta took a bite of Tuna Helper. It still tasted like lemonade powder. “When is it?”

  “Friday night.” Agnes did not look at Leta when she said this.

  “But that’s Rocky Horror night.”

  “Yeah, sorry. I’m not gonna be able to go this weekend.”

  “But we always go to Rocky Horror on Fridays. And Jennifer’s still dressing as Columbia. I need you as my wingman. You have to come.”

  Agnes glared. “Oh, Leta, grow up.”

  They spent the rest of the night not speaking. As she lay in her sleeping bag, her mind going over and over the conversation like a rosary, Leta noticed that Agnes’s horse models weren’t on her shelves anymore. Instead there was a dried-out rose in a vase and a new poster of some motocross champ she’d never heard of. When Leta’s mom came for her on Sunday morning, Leta packed her stuff and ran out to the car without even saying good-bye.

  THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES

  “Who in here has heard of the band Steely Dan?”

  Leta’s student teacher, Miss Shelton, looked out hopefully at the class. She had on her flared jeans, feather earrings, and kimono top. Her long blond hair hung down straight as a sheet of ice, and her magnificent boobs were pushed into a canyon of cleavage that had every boy in class sitting at attention.

  Tracy Thomas raised her hand. “Will this be on the test, Miss Shelton?”

  “No, Tracy,” she said with a wink.

  Miss Shelton had tried to get everyone to call her Amy on the first day, but their teacher, Mrs. Johnston, had looked up from her Texas history essays wearing an expression like she’d just swallowed an egg. “I think Miss Shelton will be best,” she said with a smile. But today, Mrs. Johnston was out doing teacher in-service, and Miss Shelton was holding up an album cover that had a photo of a red-and-white ribbon streaking down the middle, like the remnant of a torn American flag.