by Lisa McMann
“Maybe it’s jammed.” Maria looked at the bracelet again. “If I touch it, is it going to, like, do anything to me?”
“I don’t think so.”
Gingerly, Maria examined the bracelet. “What’s this pentagon-shaped symbol with the logo inside?”
“What are you talking about?”
Maria pointed. “Here.”
Charlie squinted at it, barely making it out in the darkness. “No idea.”
Maria shrugged and tried to undo the clasp. She yanked and tugged and even tried to bite it, but nothing happened. Then she tapped the screen. “What’s the deal with this?”
“I don’t know. There’s never been anything on it. I haven’t been able to get the buttons to work either. I think it just needs one of those little watch batteries. I was planning to buy one this weekend.”
“Hmm,” said Maria. When they passed under another streetlamp, she held up Charlie’s wrist and pressed her cheek against Charlie’s arm, trying to peer under the face of the bracelet. “It doesn’t look like there’s a place to put a battery.” Then Maria attempted to twist the bracelet around Charlie’s wrist, but because of its oval shape, it couldn’t rotate. “I doubt you’ll be able to slip it off either.”
“I haven’t tried with soap yet, but I don’t think it’ll budge . . . unless I slice off my thumb first.”
Maria cringed. “Ick.”
“I’m going to see if I can find something to cut it with.”
“Good luck,” Maria muttered. “This thing is solid metal. Don’t do anything stupid that would cut your hand off.”
“That would solve the problem, though,” Charlie said.
Maria smiled and let go of Charlie’s arm. “Yes, but then you’ll probably have to sit out soccer for the season.”
“Not the way I heal,” Charlie said. “I’ll be out a day, maybe two, tops.”
“That would be really funny if things weren’t so awful.” Maria grew serious. “Are you going to tell your parents?”
Charlie was quiet for a long moment. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “They’ve got a lot going on right now. My mom’s working all the time, and my dad’s trying to figure out his new job. . . . They’re a little too busy for me right now, I guess.” Charlie’s face clouded, but then she added, “I don’t want to bug them with this if I can figure it out myself.”
Maria squeezed Charlie’s shoulder, faced her, and made a promise. “Whatever happens, Charlie, I’m here for you. I’ll help you get through this.”
Charlie felt a wave of relief. She had never needed a friend as much as she did right now. It was exactly what she’d hoped to hear.
CHAPTER 17
Minor Mishaps
Charlie felt a lot better after talking things through with Maria, and now she had the weekend to figure out what to do. She was glad she didn’t have to worry about school stuff for a few days. But she had a lot bigger worries than homework.
She stopped by her dad’s study after she cleaned up. Her father was typing intensely and didn’t notice her standing there. “Dad?” she asked tentatively, not sure if she should be bothering him.
He stopped and looked up with a weary smile. “Hi.”
“Working hard on a Friday night, huh?”
“I’m trying to get ahead so next week isn’t so hard,” he said, sitting back in the chair. “Turns out I’ve really got to brush up on my biology before I can teach it—Imagine that.” He chuckled. “It’s been a long time since my days in the lab.”
“How old was I?”
“Just a baby.”
“Are you sad you left that job?”
“Not at all.”
Charlie dropped her gaze and said in a softer voice, “Did you just get tired of staying home or something?”
“No, I loved it.” Charlie’s father was quiet for a moment. “I was very lucky to get to spend all that time with you and Andy when you were young, and to be there for you when you got home from school. But you don’t need me as much anymore. And I think it was time for all of us to try something new.”
“I guess.” Charlie flashed a forlorn smile and traced her big toe along the wood floor in a pentagon shape. “I hope you relearn biology fast.”
“I’m trying, honey,” he said.
“When is Mom coming? Isn’t she supposed to be home by now?” Charlie tried not to sound too whiny or impatient, but her mom was never on time. It was getting really annoying.
“She’s running late. But I told Andy I’d stop working at eight so we can get the TV set up. He wants to watch that sea monster movie while we wait for her to come home. Want to join us?”
Charlie wrinkled her nose at Andy’s idea of a fun Friday night. “Yuck. No, thanks. I’ve got stuff to do.”
“Next time you can pick the movie.”
“Thanks.” It wasn’t much consolation. She went to her bedroom and closed the door, then got on the internet and searched “How to get a bracelet off.”
The number of results was absurd. Clearly this was a huge problem for a lot of people. Somehow that didn’t make Charlie feel any better.
She clicked on the first link, a video, and watched as a woman put a plastic vegetable bag from the grocery store over her hand and threaded it under her stuck bracelet, then slowly guided the bracelet to come off her hand.
Charlie paused the video and went to the kitchen. She rummaged around for a plastic bag.
“What are you doing?” called Andy, who was lying half upside down on the couch, playing his DS.
“Nothing,” she said, and ran back up to her room. She closed the door again and rewatched the video, trying to copy what the lady was doing. The bag threaded under her bracelet without too much trouble. But when it came to sliding the bracelet off, it wasn’t happening. “Your hands are really small, lady, you know that?” said Charlie, frustrated. “Or mine are giant beefy ones.”
She set aside the bag and read another article, then went back to the kitchen to see if she could find liquid soap, ice, glass cleaner, and cooking oil. But no one had hooked up the ice maker yet, and there was no glass cleaner anywhere that Charlie could see. It was probably still packed. And instead of cooking oil, all she found was some oil and vinegar salad dressing in the fridge, left over from a take-out meal. She grabbed that along with a bottle of soap, hid it under her shirt, and ran back to the stairs.
“Now what are you doing?” asked Andy in a bored voice. He was still upside down on the couch, trying to pick up his water glass from the coffee table and drink from it without spilling.
“Nothing. Leave me alone,” said Charlie. She ran up the steps to the bathroom that she shared with Andy and locked the door, then put the soap and salad dressing on the counter. She tried the soap first, lathering it generously over her wrist and hand and pushing some under the bracelet, letting the excess drip into the sink. Then she pulled on the bracelet with all her might, trying to slide the thing off. But it wouldn’t go.
Where’s my superstrength now? she wondered. She rinsed off the soap, then opened the container of salad dressing. It stank. But it was oily. Breathing through her mouth, Charlie poured the concoction on her arm above and below the bracelet, then massaged it in. Little flecks of herbs and spices freckled her skin. She tried again to remove the bracelet.
Andy knocked on the bathroom door. “What are you doing?”
Charlie gasped and dropped the container on the counter, half of what remained spilling out. “Go away!”
“I’m sooo bored.” She heard a series of dull thuds, like the sound Andy’s forehead might make thumping against the door.
Charlie picked up the salad dressing container and set it in the sink, then grabbed a wad of toilet paper to wipe up the counter. “Go bother Dad! I’m busy.” She cleaned up the spill, then looked at the toilet paper. What was she supposed to do with it now? Hastily she threw it in the toilet and flushed.
“Why does it stink like cheese and dirty socks?”
“Ugh
, GO AWAY,” Charlie yelled again. “Why don’t you call one of your new friends?”
“Oh, hey,” said Andy, “that’s a good idea.” He left.
By now the bathroom sink was coated in salad dressing, and so was a good portion of Charlie and the bracelet. She strained to slide it off, but the more she tried, the redder and more painful her wrist became. At one point her hand slipped and she splattered salad dressing over the bathroom mirror.
“Good thing we don’t have any glass cleaner,” she muttered. She looked at the bracelet, and then at her smelly, slimy self, and decided she’d had enough. The bracelet wasn’t going to come off this way. The internet was flat-out wrong.
Charlie cleaned up the bathroom, smearing the dressing on the mirror using Andy’s towel to get off the drips. She opened the window to air out the stink, then took a shower to clean off the rest of her and the bracelet. When she was done, she brought everything back to the kitchen, unnoticed by Andy, who was finally sitting with her dad watching that movie.
Back in her room, Charlie’s mind returned to something she’d thought about while trying to get the bracelet off: What had happened to her amazing strength? It was gone.
She looked around her bedroom, wondering if she could test the bracelet somehow without anyone noticing. Her bed and desk had been hastily set up last weekend when they moved in. But everything else was still in the garage. Charlie had been wanting to move her bed to the other side of the room, but her parents were never around to help her. If the bracelet was working, Charlie wouldn’t need help. She closed her bedroom door and pushed the desk into a corner. And then she took a good grip on the foot of her bed and lifted as hard as she could.
It made a squeaky noise and moved about an inch. With a huff, Charlie set it back down. She tried again, and it barely budged.
“What the heck,” she muttered. Her strength had definitely stopped working.
Having to change her room around the old-fashioned way was much less appealing, so Charlie decided to skip that for now and test her speed instead, to see if that part worked.
“Going for a walk,” she called to her dad in the family room. “I’ll stay in the neighborhood.” She slipped outside and began jogging just to see if anything had changed. When she didn’t notice anything special, she sped up, then started sprinting. But her speed was its usual pace. Had she somehow turned off the bracelet? Or perhaps it needed to be recharged. But how?
Maybe everything was solved and life was back to normal. It was funny—a part of her was a little disappointed.
Charlie’s phone vibrated with a group text from her mother.
“I’m on the way home!” it read. She’d sent it to her dad and Andy too.
“You were supposed to be home three hours ago,” said Charlie. She pushed her phone back into her pocket without answering. She’d let her dad and brother respond.
With her thoughts on her parents and Andy, Charlie slowed to a walk. Tonight was supposed to be the first full evening that everyone was home since they’d moved. And obviously that hadn’t happened—at least not yet. It definitely wouldn’t happen often now with their mom’s schedule. Or their dad’s—apparently starting in the middle of the semester wasn’t easy for him either. Almost overnight, life at home had become really different.
Andy was the lucky one. He’d had no trouble making friends in the neighborhood and at his new school, which kind of bugged Charlie because it came so easily for him. But even he had complained a few times about their parents being too busy—it was tough for both of them. And all of them were just trying to get through a long first week in Arizona.
As Charlie turned back toward home, she saw her mom walking up the street from the bus stop. Finally! Charlie quickened her step and followed her inside. Her annoyance with her mother melted a little now that she was actually here. Charlie hesitated, then snuck into the living room and squeezed onto the couch between her mom and the cats to watch the rest of the movie. Her mom kissed Charlie on her head and put her arm around her.
This was what it was supposed to be like. Charlie could worry about getting the bracelet off tomorrow. For now she was just happy that her family was together.
CHAPTER 18
A Mind of Its Own
The entire Wilde family planned to get up early the next day so they could tackle the boxes in the garage. Charlie set her phone alarm for 7:00 a.m. and was in a deep sleep when it went off. The music blasted at top volume, and Charlie almost jumped out of bed. She lunged blindly for the phone to silence it, and then she collapsed into her pillow again and rested there for a moment, catching her breath. When she got over the shock and remembered who she was and what day it was, she turned on her bedside lamp and looked at her phone. The screen was cracked.
Charlie gasped. “Oh no!” Her wrist was warm under the bracelet. Her strength had returned. But her phone! Luckily it hadn’t shattered, and it still worked. But she’d have some explaining to do when her parents found out. She’d only had the phone since the beginning of sixth grade, and her parents had warned her that if she lost it or broke it, they wouldn’t replace it, so she’d better be careful. She’d done so well with it—until now. That stupid bracelet was going to make her look really irresponsible if she wasn’t careful. She had to find the tools today so she could get the thing off.
Until then she would have to be very careful not to break anything else. From that point on, Charlie tiptoed around the house trying not to touch anything, which was very hard to do, and also made her look weird. She cringed when she pictured herself trying to handle anything fragile. Today was about to get interesting.
After breakfast Charlie and Andy headed out to the garage while their parents cleaned up the dishes.
“I’ll start with my stuff,” Charlie said, thinking that if she broke anything, nobody else would have to know about it. When Andy opened the door, Charlie darted around him. Apparently her speed had returned, too.
“What the—” Andy said. “Um, excuse me.”
“You’re excused,” Charlie replied with a smug grin. She forced herself to walk carefully through the aisles to the back where her boxes were. A few sat open from when she’d searched for her soccer equipment, and the empty package that had held the bracelet was there, too. Charlie picked it up and examined it for a second time. It was just as she remembered. No return address. And no other clues.
Charlie pulled the note from inside, reread it, and tried to figure out whose handwriting it could be. She had to admit that none of her friends wrote like that—all loopy and old-fashioned—but maybe they had their parents send it or something. She pulled out her phone and texted Amari carefully so she wouldn’t crack the screen further. “Hi! I miss you!”
“Ack!” came the reply. “At the Laundromat with my dad. Pipes froze, and the one connected to the washer exploded and flooded the basement—you shoulda seen it.”
“Yikes!” wrote Charlie.
“Yeah, it’s a mess—check my photos online. How are you?”
“Better. I was wondering if anybody from the team might have said something to you about that bracelet I mentioned.”
“Nope. But why don’t you just group text?”
“Okay, yeah. Good idea.”
Charlie started a group message with all her friends from her old school, which kept her phone buzzing with replies for the next several minutes. It was fun to hear from everybody, but they fired lots of questions at her about how she was liking the new school.
“Ahem!” Andy called from the opposite corner of the garage. “You’re not getting much done over there.”
Charlie abandoned the flurry of responses and questions, and put her phone and the note that had accompanied the bracelet into her pocket. “Worry about your own junk.” She discarded the packaging and gingerly lifted the top box from one of her stacks. It was filled with outdoor things: jump rope, skateboard, sidewalk chalk from when she was five—stuff like that. She moved the box to the corner since it would st
ay out here.
She peeked at the next two and found clothing in them. Keeping them stacked, she carried them both into the house. Andy passed her in the kitchen on his way back to get another load.
“Must be full of feathers,” Andy said, pointing to her load.
“Like your head,” replied Charlie.
Andy made a face and skirted around her. “Why are you walking so weird?”
“Why are you even allowed in the house?” Charlie said, and then they both cracked up. Andy was annoying sometimes, but he could take an insult as easily as he could give it, and that was cool.
Charlie continued on methodically, worried about bumping into things for fear of breaking something. She saw her parents coming down the stairs to get more boxes and let them pass before she went up to her room.
“That’s the way,” her mom said approvingly. “We’ll have this done by lunch if you keep that up.”
“If we get pizza again, I’ll pass,” Charlie muttered. She never thought she’d be tired of fast food, but after a week of mainly eating takeout, Charlie longed for her dad’s special recipes. Maybe he’d be able to cook something now that it was the weekend.
In her room she emptied the boxes of clothes into her dresser drawers, broke down the cardboard, and went back to the garage.
Andy made a few more obnoxious remarks while she continued unpacking. Her phone buzzed continuously with responses from her friends, all saying they didn’t know anything about the bracelet and asking even more questions, so she kept having to stop to answer. As much as she liked hearing from them, she wished she had picked a different time to text everyone. She let the phone vibrate while she took another trip up the stairs.
Every time she passed Andy, he made another remark about the way she was opening doors or moving boxes. It had been funny the first few times, but now it was starting to get annoying. He didn’t know when to quit.
