by Sophie Bell
Behind his fly aviator frames, though, Albert only had eyes for Opaline Trudeau.
Wait! you’re thinking. Isn’t this the same boy who crushed on Cheri while Opal was crushing on him? Yes, that’s the correct recap! A+! But like a dollar in a vending machine, change happens. After Cheri not-so-gently declined Albert’s advances, he decided that such a glamazon might not be the girl for him after all. For while Albert was kind of a rock god on the outside, on the inside he was still a math geek.
And his geek heart now beat for the mysterious Opaline Trudeau.
Opaline didn’t blind Albert’s glasses with shiny lip gloss and sparkly nail polish and sequined headbands like Cheri Henderson did. Quite the opposite. With her perfectly linear part and her chocolate brown hair pinned back at precisely equidistant points in simple barrettes, with her plain white shirt buttoned all the way up to its sweet Peter Pan collar, Opal reminded Albert of an eleven-year-old version of his very first librarian. So prim and proper, it was driving Albert crazy. In a good way. In that way.
Opaline Trudeau was like the trickiest brainteaser ever, and Albert Feinstein was dying to solve it.
His mathlete mind was whirring in overdrive with all these nonnumerical thoughts as he took his seat in math class after recess. He watched, enraptured, when Opal entered the room and glid (our spelling!) to her alphabetically dictated desk way at the back (and just in front of that artsy Iris Tyler with her purple curls). Albert caught Opal’s eye, and one quizzical look from her caramel brown orbs sent his lenses into a fog. As Mr. Grates began his rhyming lecture about “relative coordinates” at the front of the class, Albert decided an old-school move would be most romantic (at least that’s what his mom always told him). Sure, he could have tried texting Opal, or besmashing her on Smashface, or sending her a direct tweek.
But no. He was going old-school!
He took his best blue pen from the secret pocket protector he still wore on the inside of his T-shirt. While Mr. Grates got jiggy with integers, Albert tugged a blank page from his notebook as quietly as he could. He folded the sheet. Used his protractor to map an expertly symmetrical shape. And then traced the outline with the ballpoint until the border was thin enough to tear.
It was a heart-shaped note.
On it, he wrote:
Me + U = Saturday Chess?
It was the most elementary equation he could think of.
Then he added a circle. Two decimal points. And a sideways parenthesis:
Applying the principles of aerodynamics, Albert folded his paper heart into a paper plane. With Mr. Grates out of sight—on the floor of the classroom doing the caterpillar—Albert set his note in flight. For a second he feared it would be intercepted by that horn-headed dolt Duncan Murdoch. But it landed directly on Opaline’s desk.
Albert pivoted back around in his seat, pretending to pay attention. And buzzing with anticipation!
Behind Opal, Iris was, naturally, curious about the note. But after the prune juice rumor and their morning duel, she chose to keep a low profile. Even before “the change,” Opal could be sensitive about boy-girl stuff. And when it came to Albert Feinstein, there wasn’t just math; there was history. So Iris didn’t say a word. She tried to be subtle as she peered over Opal’s shoulder. But Opal bowed her head, her straight brown hair swinging down like a curtain closing on her desktop. Iris couldn’t see a thing.
Opaline was not in a happy place. She hadn’t been, really, ever since all this drama started with the Ultra Violets. She couldn’t understand why. She had superpowers now, just like Iris, Scarlet, and Cheri. With a snap of her fingers and a spark of electricity, she could shock mutants like K-Liz and BellaBritney into obeying her every command. And she was wearing the most stunning—no, seriously, stunning—new BeauTek scent. Yet a crabby camper was she.
So when Opal saw Albert’s sweet, sketched smiley on his ragged valentine, for a moment her heart lifted and, behind the shadow of her hair, she smiled, too. She remembered the sleepover at Scarlet’s house, where she’d confessed her crush on the mathlete captain. She imagined what it might be like to hang out with Albert, playing chess or just sudoku, maybe sharing a peach soda. For that fleeting instant, his paper heart open on her desk, its creases carefully smoothed out beneath her fingertips, it all seemed possible again.
But then she looked up. At Albert’s trendy new haircut and T-shirt, at his thick hip-hop b-ball sneakers—as if he were an actual athlete, not just a mathematical one. It all seemed a bit fake. Albert may have been a geek before, but Opal had liked him just the way he was: with his high-waisted khakis, his proud pocket protector, and his shirt buttoned all the way to the top, just like hers.
Albert wasn’t showing any signs of mutantism. But, her heart sinking back down to the pit of her stomach, Opal wondered if he might have changed into a different kind of monster. The phony cool-boy type.
And as she was wondering this, she watched the dazzling Cheri Henderson, in her desk right across the aisle from Albert, turn to him and flash her sticky pink smile as they exchanged homework.
It was as if, on her stroll down memory lane, Opal had tripped and skinned her knee. All the hurt of that treacherous kiss, the kiss between Albert and Cheri, shot through her again. For a second she thought she might be sick. She closed her eyes and brought her hands to her throbbing forehead. Then, hiding her shame behind her hair, Opal hurriedly folded Albert’s note back into its airplane shape. On its side, in heavy black lines, she scribbled a circle of her own. But instead of dotting the eyes and curving a smile, she scratched a jagged black lightning bolt across the O. Just like the logo on her tracksuit.
Air Opaline, she thought bitterly.
On her smartphone, she tweeked Albert a curt message:
From @onlyopaline to @albertfnumbers: Got ur note. Hav ur ansr. Incoming!!!
Albert felt his phone hum inside his secret pocket protector, right next to his heart. He fumbled to fish it out and check the text. Then, hopes high, he twisted around in his seat.
Opal met his puppy dog eyes. She could sense the milky clouds passing over her own, and she blinked to clear her vision. Albert grinned wider as she batted her lashes at him. Or so he thought! The, ahem . . . fool . . .
With a crisp jab of her wrist, Opal sent Albert’s love note back into the air. Mr. Grates was facing the whiteboard, plotting a graph. But some of the other kids noticed and followed its flight path as it soared just below the diode lights. The plane peaked, then began to waft down toward Albert. He could make out the lightning-bolt O scrawled on its side. But just before he could catch it and read whatever Opaline had written back to him, something odd happened.
Seemingly out of a nowhere, like a live wire on the loose, a thin volt of electricity cracked across the classroom. It singed the crown of Brad Hochoquatro’s afro and grazed Emma Appleby’s raised hand before—kzzzt!—it hit its target.
The scorched paper airplane crumbled to pieces in Albert’s grasp.
From behind his charred glasses, Albert sighed, more besotted than ever. So this is what it meant to be love-struck! He bet Opal’s reply had been full of promise. Before some freak faulty wiring in the LEDs obliterated it!
Albert may still have had smoke in his eyes. But from where she sat, Iris’s view was crystal clear. That was no faulty wiring, of course. It was Opal herself, shooting her trademark lightning bolt straight across the classroom.
Opal’s not just mean, Iris thought, recalling Cheri’s prediction about things getting worse. The girl’s a fire hazard!
Welcome to the Club
“WE IN THE CLUB, THE PLACE BE PACKED, IF YOU’RE A UV then this is where it’s at. Where my girls, where they at? The kids go crazy when the mutants get smacked!”
Behind the closed door of Iris’s bedroom, Scarlet bounced on the bed. Her tutu hung low across her hips, gold doorknocker hoops swung from her ears, and Iris
’s rhinestone stylus took the place of a microphone in her hand.
“Scar, your English is atrocious!” Cheri declared from her spot on the carpet, where she was dusting her silver mani with a sequined pink topcoat. “And you already know where your girls are at—we be right here. I mean, we at right here. No, I mean, we are. Ooh, now you’ve got me doing it!”
“Sorry,” Scarlet said sheepishly, getting down with her bad self from the bed. “I thought we should have a theme song for the Ultra Violet clubhouse. To go with the secret handshake dance!”
The girls had considered making the basement of the Jones’s bluestone townhouse their hangout. But with three older brothers as well as her mom and dad, Scarlet worried about privacy. It was just Iris and her mother in the Tylers’ mod apartment, which had a way more sparkly view. The glass-windowed wall of Iris’s bedroom looked out across the spires and skyscrapers of Sync City. In one direction, the girls could see the HQT and its rock-crystal laboratory, the FLab. That was where Iris’s mother—all three of their mothers—spent most of their time, experimenting. In the other direction, across the Joan River, stood the mucus-yellow Mall of No Returns—the place where BeauTek, right at that very minute, was probably manufacturing mutants. And who knew what kinds of weird makeup and creams! Even though the mall was not a pretty sight, the Ultra Violets had to keep an eye on it.
But it was the secret door that sealed the deal about the clubhouse.
What secret door, you ask?
Iris hadn’t noticed it at first, either. Because it was hidden behind the big stuffed headboard of her bed. But the Sunday after the showdown at the Vi-Shush, she’d been dancing on her mattress, too. (Not superdancing, like Scarlet. Just dancing-dancing, Iris-style!) And when she went to nudge the bed back into place, she couldn’t quite push it flat against the wall. There was a curious little lump in the patterned velvet wallpaper.
Being an artist, Iris was intrigued . . .
Being an artist, Iris had a sharp pair of scissors . . .
And long story short, with a snip here and a rip there, she had soon cut around the edges of a narrow door that had been covered up by the wallpaper. The pretty patterned damask was still in place. Iris just trimmed it off the doorknob. That was the lump. Kind of like the princess and the pea, if the pea were a doorknob and the princess had been sleeping standing up against the wall. So maybe not like the princess and the pea at all.
For such a modern building, the doorknob was oddly old-fashioned: a white ceramic oval with a spiky purple blossom painted on it. Even more odd was what Iris discovered behind it . . .
“Well, word up, my homegirls,” she now said, squeezing behind the big stuffed headboard of her bed and opening the door, “to CVUV!”
Bumping into each other as they got in line, Scarlet and Cheri burst into giggles.
“What’s so funny?” Iris asked over her shoulder as she started up the spiral iron steps on the other side of the door.
“You said ‘word up’!” Scarlet’s snort circled through the stairwell.
“You called us”—Cheri could barely catch her breath—“‘homegirls’!” Splaying her hands at her sides to keep from smudging her nails, and with Darth snuggled in the tote bag on her shoulder, she had to take the spiral steps extra slowly.
“Okay, fine!” Iris said as she parted the beaded curtain at the landing. “I’ll leave the rapping to Scarlet.”
“And to birthday presents,” Cheri said with sudden seriousness as she slipped through the beaded strings after Scarlet. “It’s always thoughtful to rap presents.” Which only made Scarlet and Iris giggle all over again. Springing from a triple pirouette, Scarlet soared across the wide-open space. “Club Very UV!” she belted out, and cannonballed into a shiny beanbag.
Iris, getting into the silly spirit, did a spontaneous handstand.
From her upside-down point of view, she thought she saw a dark figure dart past the windows, even though they were many, many, many stories up above the street.
A black swan? she wondered.
But when she cartwheeled right-side-up again, the twinkling towers of the skyline were all she could see.
It hadn’t been long since Iris had stumbled across the secret door and discovered the small corner loft, and it still took the girls’ breath away, it was so magical. The outer walls were carved entirely from clear rock crystal, same as the FLab. And the room jutted out at jagged angles into the air, like a giant rhinestone blossom that had sprouted right from the side of the sleek apartment building.
“It’s like we’re standing inside a flower!” Cheri had marveled.
“It has awesome acoustics!” Scarlet enthused. She was working up the courage to audition for the school musical and needed a place to practice where her brothers wouldn’t tease her.
The room itself was almost empty when they’d found it. Just a few pieces of furniture had decorated the space: an egg-shaped swivel chair in a fuzzy orange fabric; a funny-looking sofa made up of lots and lots (and lots) of round white cushions, like marshmallows, pieced together on a slim steel frame; three wheeled stools; and, opposite the sharp petal window, an oblong black marble table.
Plus a shaggy pink fake fur rug in the middle.
The girls had no idea who the furniture had once belonged to, or how long it had been there. Based on the amount of dust they wiped off, it must have been decades.
To prettify the place, they’d strung the beaded curtain where the spiral staircase opened onto the floor. But the wrought-iron steps actually curled all the way to the ceiling. The first time Iris showed the room to Scarlet and Cheri, she worked up her courage, climbed to the top, and opened the hatch, popping her head out like a prairie dog. The high winds practically blew her corkscrews straight as she checked out the roof. It was wide and flat. Just to the side of the hatch, a red light blink-blink-blinked.
“That’s for pilots,” Scarlet had said knowingly. “And aeroscooterists and maybe even the Wonkavator. So that they see the tops of buildings in the dark.”
The second time Iris climbed up there—with Scarlet keeping a firm grip on her ankle, and Cheri keeping a firm grip on Scarlet’s ankle below her, and Darth wrapping his tail around Cheri’s ankle at the bottom of the chain—Iris reached across and painted the blinking red lightbulb with a sheer blue wash.
And now the light flashed violet.
They could see it from inside, through the crystal of the ceiling. “It’s our signature color!” Iris had beamed, pleased.
It hadn’t been easy to get ol’ Skeletony, the former FLab skeleton they’d rescued from the Vi-Shush, up that spiral staircase. And maybe okay definitely they’d bumped his bony skull once or twice, knocking loose a tooth or two. “Oopsie,” Cheri had muttered as molars clattered like coins down the iron steps. Now Skeletony had a gappy grin to go with the citrine gemstone glinting from one eye socket. Cheri added a pink feather boa left over from some long-ago talent show. In the corner of the room, Skeletony cut a very dashing figure.
The beanbag from Scarlet’s place had been less of a haul, since it was so squishy. She’d also scavenged strings of old holiday lights from her basement. When the girls turned them on, the inside of Club Very UV was almost as sparkly as the Sync City skyline. And positively more rainbow-bright!
All we need now, Iris thought, is a mirror ball. She was keeping an eye out for one.
On the marble table they propped their laptops or tablets and textbooks. Above it Iris had tacked their portraits—three blown-up smartphone photos she’d custom-colorized. She’d made herself mostly purple, of course. A magenta glow surrounded Cheri’s smiling face. And Scarlet shone with a rich eggplanty shade called aubergine.
There was still enough space on the wall for a portrait of Opaline.
Iris raced to the center of the pink fur rug. “Secret Handshake Dance!” she declared. Cheri and Scarlet rushed to join
her, and they stood in a row. “Ultra Violets ready and—
“Pinkie touch, hair brush, twirl three times,
bunny hop, cat claws, V’s across your eyes!
Shoulder shimmy, booty shake, twirl three times,
catch the bus, catwalk, V’s to the sky!”
It was a very jazzy handshake. And Scarlet’s first foray into choreography.
“Okay, Ultra Violets!” Iris said, pretzeling her legs beneath her as she dropped into the swiveling egg chair. “First order of business: Operation Get-O!”
Boys in Black
{*Halfsies Because Chapter 5 Was Already Too Long to Fit in This Part, Which Is Very Important}
“OPERATION GHETTO?” CHERI ECHOED, DRAPING herself diva-like across the marshmallow couch. “But I thought we were going to bring Opal back before we did any community service–type stuff.”
“We are!” Iris nodded, her violet curls bobbing. “That’s why it’s called Operation Get-O!”
“Ohhhh,” Scarlet said, getting it. Pumped from the handshake dance, she was freestyling in front of CVUV’s massive flower window. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw a couple of dark shapes swoosh by.
Two black swans?! she wondered.
“But what about the mutants?” she asked, turning her attention back to their plan. “Shouldn’t we be trying to stop them?”
“I’ve thought about that, too,” Iris said, twisting a grape ring pop on her finger. “But they go hand in hand—or claw, or tentacle, or whatever ew the mutants have.” She shuddered. “If we get Opal back on our side, it will help us control the mutants, right? They obey her every command!”
