* * *
Staying busy is harder than it sounds.
At lunch, I tried to help my friends clear their trays, but they thought I was trying to start another food fight and wouldn’t let me. In class, I tried to help Mrs. Agnes hand out our division homework, but when I went up to her desk she thought I was trying to snoop again (even though I hadn’t done it before) and made me sit down.
At home it didn’t get any easier. As Mom and Aunt Jenna got ready for a “girls’ night out,” I offered to teach The Baby to jump rope, but did you know that babies cannot do this? I mean, how hard is jumping? I needed another way to stay busy.
Here’s what I did for the rest of the afternoon:
1. Braided my hair into seven parts.
2. Learned to wiggle my ears.
3. Made up a new dance move called the Hazy Bloom Jazz Lunge.
4. Tried to mind-control my fish.
5. Made a schedule for my first three days in space.
6. Tried to look happy, angry, and puzzled at the same time.
7. Spun around super-duper fast in my mom’s desk chair even though she always tells me not to because I’ll get hurt.
8. Got hurt.
That evening, I was trying to figure out something else to do to stay busy when Dad walked through the kitchen door carrying two paper bags. “Hey there, Hazel Basil. Help me unload these groceries?”
Bingo!
“Sure,” I chirped, and beelined over to him.
I started unloading the groceries at record speed.
Dad pointed to one of the bags. “Careful with that one. There are eggs in there.”
Eggs?
“Here, I’ll get them,” Dad said, reaching into the bag and gently pulling out the carton. “Got to be egg-stra careful with these guys,” he said with a wink. We totally have the same sense of humor.
Then he tripped over Mr. Cheese and the eggs went flying and, well, you can picture the rest.
I had finally figured out yesterday’s vision.
The good news is, cleaning up the icky egg mess was a great way to stay busy, busy, busy. Even if it was totally disgusting.
17
By Friday afternoon, I felt victorious (not a spelling word but I heard it on a TV commercial and enjoy saying it). I had managed to keep any visions from popping into my head for almost two whole days. It was nice to feel in control of my tomorrow power.
I plopped down on the couch next to Mr. Cheese and watched Milo flip the channels between a reality fishing show and a sitcom about triplets. Aunt Jenna was sitting on the floor playing patty-cake with The Baby while Mom skimmed through a magazine. She seemed happy to have her sister around.
Milo found another show and was now flipping back and forth between all three. I was about to yell at him to make up his mind when I felt it.
Arms prickly.
Goose bumps.
Hot and cold. Nuts.
It was another vision.
“No!” I shouted, trying to make it go away.
“No, what?” Mom said.
“Nothing,” I said quickly. I wished it were nothing. But before I could stop it, there it was, flashing through my head, a blur of colors, shapes, and lines all jumbled together:
Rainbow bubbles … green sparkles … a falling object, and … a fluffy pink cat?
None of it made sense. Except for one thing. If I was getting this vision today, then whatever it was about would happen tomorrow.
And tomorrow was the Spring Spectacular.
“Mom,” I said urgently as I stood up. “I need to go to Elizabeth’s.”
“Now? Why?” Mom asked. “Dad’ll be home soon with takeout.”
“But—but I need to tell her something!” I stammered.
“Can’t you just call her?”
“No, it’s too important! Bubbles! Green stuff! Fluffy cat!”
I sounded like I had lost it.
Mom studied me with concern. “Hazel, what’s gotten into you? You have been acting so strange lately.”
“Yeah,” said Milo. “Even weirder than usual.”
Aunt Jenna was looking at me, too, with an odd expression somewhere between a smile and a frown. It made me feel uneasy.
Now Mom was inching closer to me. “Tell us what’s going on.”
“Yeah, tell us,” echoed Milo.
The Baby was getting fussy and Aunt Jenna pulled him onto her lap.
The room was feeling smaller. They knew I was hiding something, and they wanted answers. Was this the right time to tell them? Would they even believe me? Would they think I was crazy? Would it ruin everything, like Elizabeth said? I gulped, not knowing what to do. I felt trapped.
Then, from Aunt Jenna’s lap, The Baby said: “Blah-blah beefrechenutz.”
Look, I don’t know what beefrechenutz means to you, because to me it sounds like someone spitting out cheese puffs. But at that moment, Mom whirled around and stared at The Baby in amazement.
“Oh my goodness,” she marveled. “He just said his first word!” Everyone turned to look.
This was my chance to escape. “Be back in a jiff!” I chirped and ran for the door.
On the way to Elizabeth’s I felt a surge of relief knowing my sidekick would help me think through my vision and figure it all out. I couldn’t wait to see her.
But when Elizabeth opened the door, she didn’t look like she was in sidekick mode. For one thing, she was covered in flour. “Hazy Bloom, what are you doing here?” she said, kind of not nicely.
Words started flying out of my mouth. “I just had another vision about the Spack Springtacular! I mean, the Sping Spricktacular! You know what I mean. Anyway, I saw a bunch of green sparkly stuff, some kind of rainbow-bubble thingy, and another thing falling down, I’m not sure what it was. Oh, and a pink fluffy cat! Seriously, that one has me stumped. So what do you think?” I looked at her, anxious for her answer.
And then Elizabeth looked at me and said, “I’m sorry, Hazy Bloom, but I can’t help you right now.”
I looked at her in disbelief. “But—but this is important!”
“I know, but we were right in the middle of—”
“We? Who’s we?”
“Hi, Hazy,” a voice called.
It was May.
“What’s she doing here?” I said. I realized that didn’t sound very polite. But I wasn’t feeling very polite because my sidekick was making me mad.
Elizabeth pointed to May. “She’s my new partner for the cupcake contest.”
“What?” I said very loudly.
“You’re on the cleanup crew now,” she said, like I didn’t know that.
“But—I need your help!”
Elizabeth looked at me with squinty eyes. “Well, I needed your help for the cupcake contest. And you didn’t help at all! You did nothing!”
I glared at her. “Excuse me for being a little busy with my new superpower! That you were more excited about than me!”
“Well, not anymore!” Elizabeth said, all huffy.
“That’s it. You’re so not my sidekick anymore.”
“Fine!” Elizabeth yelled.
“Fine!”
“Fine!”
May whispered, “I’ll go check on the batter,” and tiptoed away. It’s possible she was slightly confused by our conversation.
But it didn’t matter because I was already storming away back to my house. I was furious. Elizabeth couldn’t just decide to stop being my sidekick because of some stupid bake-sale cupcakes. How dare she! She knew how important my tomorrow power was! I guessed she just didn’t care anymore.
I stomped back home to find Aunt Jenna sitting outside on the front porch.
Between you and me, she was the last person I wanted to see. Except for Elizabeth, because I never wanted to see her again. Well, and Milo. And Mapefrl. And Mrs. Agnes. And The Baby, depending on my mood. But after all those people, definitely Aunt Jenna.
Yet there she was, her head tilted up toward the sky, emitting
some kind of strange gurgling, singing noise from the back of her throat.
I was still furious, but seriously? That was just too weird to ignore. “What are you doing?” I asked her.
“Birdcalls. Want to learn?”
“No thanks,” I said.
But instead of walking past her into the house, I sat down next to her. I don’t know why, I just did. We sat there together for a while in silence, which was actually quite peaceful and calm. Then it got really boring.
“Fine, I’ll learn,” I said.
So over the next half hour, while we waited for Dad to get home with dinner, Aunt Jenna taught me the art of birdcalling. At first I felt silly, but after I got the hang of it, I was gurgling and singing as loud as can be. Soon, we were having a hilarious birdcall conversation that ended with both of us cracking up so hard we fell onto our backs laughing. It was fun. And it definitely got my mind off Elizabeth. At least for a little while.
I turned and smiled. “Thanks, Aunt Jenna.”
“You’re welcome, Hazy Bloom,” she said. I decided Aunt Jenna wasn’t so bad after all. Although I don’t know why you’d ever want to call a bird.
18
The Spring Spectacular looked, well, spectacular. The fifth graders had decorated everything in springtime pinks and greens and yellows, and everywhere you looked there were giant, colorful paper flowers, making it feel like we were in an enormous garden. There was a Ferris wheel, food stands offering candy apples and caramel corn, and rows and rows of carnival games. Kids, parents, siblings, and teachers filled the athletic field, some strolling along taking it all in, others darting excitedly from one thing to the next. Opposite the carnival entrance, a large, dome-shaped tent had been set up for the acrobats to perform in. It looked so different from our regular school field, it was hard to believe this was the same place where our gym teacher makes us do push-ups, which by the way are the dumbest things in the world because I have never ever seen a grown-up stop what they were doing and say, I think I’ll do a push-up. I’m so glad I learned how to do them in school! The point is, the carnival looked amazing, but I couldn’t enjoy any of it because I was picking up garbage with Mapefrl.
“You get that one, Hazy. It’s a half-eaten hot dog.” He pointed at the ground.
“Why do I have to?” I asked defiantly.
“Because I just picked up the pretzel covered in mud,” he said.
I sighed like a grown-up, adjusted my plastic gloves, then picked up the hot dog and threw it in the trash. I wanted to find the kid who dropped it on the ground and say, See? How hard was that? Pick it up, drop it in the trash! Sheesh.
I looked around with envy. Everyone else was having so much fun. At the face-painting booth, Lila was carefully painting a rose onto a little girl’s cheek. At the petting zoo, Derrick laughed as a miniature goat nibbled out of his hand. At the haunted house, which managed to look pretty spooky even though it was just a pop-up canopy with black plastic hung over it, Milo was wearing his ghost costume, daring people to come inside. And on the very other side of the field, carefully stacking one hundred cupcakes onto a cupcake tower, was Elizabeth.
We hadn’t spoken since our fight yesterday. And even though it was only a day, I really missed her. I wondered if she missed me, or if she was just happy I wasn’t bugging her about my tomorrow visions. But that wouldn’t make sense. She loved my visions. She was fascinated by them (spelling word: fascinated, not them). She asked me the right questions, helped me organize my thoughts, and even figured out things that I couldn’t. She was, well, the perfect sidekick. Now I didn’t even know if we were friends anymore.
Mapefrl poked my back with his plastic-covered hand. “Come on. Help me put a new bag in the can over there.” We were heading toward a garbage bin that was overflowing with trash when a couple of older kids charged past us. One of them was wearing a plastic hat covered in glitter, which was attractive (the hat, not the kid) yet extremely irritating (the hat, not the kid) because every time he moved, a glob of glitter fell off the hat and sprinkled all over the ground. Great, I thought, more stuff to clean up. I bent down to scoop it up. And that’s when I realized something about the glitter. It was green. And sparkly. My heart pounded in my chest. Green sparkles.
I needed to follow those kids.
“Hey, where are you going?” Mapefrl called out, clearly annoyed that I was walking away.
“I see a mess over there!” I called. Well, fibbed might be a better word. But I was on a mission to prevent doom. The garbage can would have to wait.
I hurried through the crowd, trying not to lose the glitter-hat kid. He was way ahead of me, but I saw him heading toward the acrobat tent. Lots of other people were gathering there as well. I guess the acrobats were about to perform.
On my way to the tent, I passed through an archway of colorful balloons and despite my fierce determination to keep track of the glitter-hat kid, I couldn’t help but stop and admire how cool it looked. Perhaps I could create something just like it to put in front of my Mars ice-skating rink. Who wouldn’t want to enter a rink through something so festive? It was like running through a rainbow of bubbles.
Rainbow bubbles. Another piece of my vision, solved! I believed I was getting closer to the doom.
Inside the tent, the glitter-hat kid kept bobbing in and out of sight, making it hard to keep track of him, especially in such a big crowd. Then it got harder because the lights darkened. Someone whispered for me to sit down, so I grabbed one of the last seats left, in the second row. The glitter-hat kid was just one row over, right in the front. Next to him was a teenager holding a tie-dyed backpack. With a picture of a cat.
Pink, fluffy cat.
Okay, fine, it wasn’t exactly a pink fluffy cat. It was more of a hairless, creepy-looking kitten, if we’re being honest. But hey, maybe I had remembered that part wrong. The point is, everything from my vision was quickly coming together and I felt like I was in the right place at the right time. For what, I had no idea.
19
Lively music played as eight acrobats tumbled onto the stage. They were wearing the costumes from the poster. Behind them was the backdrop with the lightning bolt. While they were leaping and flipping and twirling through the air, I looked around wildly, trying to spot clues regarding the doom. But I came up short. It wasn’t until halfway through the third routine that something made me sit up and take notice.
At that point in the show, one of the acrobats playfully tumbled into the audience and took the green-glitter hat from the kid. The kid I believed had something to do with the doom! He laughed as the acrobat put the hat on her own head, then hopped back onstage. Then the other acrobats started passing the hat to one another in a series of stunts, including one where a performer did a full backflip with the hat staying completely on his head! My first thought was: I could totally do that. My second thought was: now the glitter hat was onstage. And that meant something bad was probably going to happen there.
My eyes darted around. Was something going to tip over? Collapse? Break? Also, would doing that backflip hat trick get me on TV? I needed to focus. I squinted and glanced up at a sparkly disco ball rotating above the stage. Actually, it wasn’t rotating as much as kind of swaying back and forth. I hoped it didn’t fall. That would really distract me from preventing doom. Then I remembered the final part of my vision: falling object. Anxiously, I looked at the acrobats, then back at the swaying disco ball. And right there and then, I knew what was going to happen. The disco ball was going to fall. I jumped up from my seat and ran for the stage.
As I got closer, I tried to think of all the ways I could get up to the disco ball in time:
1. Ladder (don’t have one).
2. Jumping (too short).
3. Flying (can’t).
4. Magic (not real).
Onstage, the acrobats were forming a human pyramid. I checked the disco ball. It was swaying faster now. There was no time to wait. I climbed onto the stage.
Needless to say
, the acrobats were a tad surprised to see a third grader standing there in the middle of their show. But then, all of a sudden, one of them lifted me up into the air! Everyone in the audience gasped. Someone clapped her hand over her mouth like she could not believe what she was seeing. And what she was seeing was me being lifted to the top of the pyramid! I felt weightless, like I was floating. I felt … like I was in space! Little had I known I would be doing this kind of preparation for my Mars mission!
Before I knew it, I was at the tippy top of the pyramid, and I didn’t know what to do. So I started to perform. I stuck my arms in the air. I lifted one leg up behind me. I started doing the Funky Chicken. And guess what? Everyone cheered!
And then I realized I was directly under the swaying disco ball. This was my chance! I stretched my arm, trying to reach it, but instead I batted it away, making it sway even more. Then the worst thing happened, for real live. I slipped, which caused me to scream, which caused the other acrobats to scream, which made the entire pyramid wobble like crazy. And then we all went toppling down.
I should probably leave the performing to Elizabeth.
One of the acrobats helped me up and asked if I was hurt, and when I said no she started shouting at me to get off the stage, which I think was a rather abrupt change in tone after being so worried about me one second before. But then the other acrobats joined in, and soon they were all yelling at me to get off the stage. Then the audience starting booing. Someone started throwing popcorn. It was noisy, it was chaotic, it was completely out of control. The point is, I don’t think astronauts have to deal with this kind of thing. Also, I still had to prevent the doom.
“The disco ball,” I yelled desperately, pointing. “It’s going to fall.”
Hazy Bloom and the Tomorrow Power Page 5
