Power to the Purple!

by Sophie Bell

  “True enough,” Scarlet said, pointing her toe and circling her leg in ronds de jambe. “So how do we do it? Especially after our smackdown this morning!”

  Cheri sighed. “I’d say we should fix her up with Albert, but alas!” To demonstrate her despair, she once again brought the back of her hand to her forehead. “We all know that equaled disaster last time I tried.” From his comfy spot on top of the couch, Darth sighed, too, and swished the tip of his violet-striped tail up across his eyes.

  Iris and Scarlet exchanged glances. Scar was tempted to make another joke about The Kiss That Changed Everything, but she concentrated on her grands battements instead.

  “Albert does like Opal now, though,” Iris said. “Did you see when he sent her that note in math this afternoon?”

  “Yeah,” Scarlet snickered. “And did you see the way she totally toasted it? That was hilarious.”

  “And kind of insane,” Iris added, shoving off from the marble table to set the egg chair spinning. “It’s crazy-dangerous for Opal to be running around Chronic Prep shooting off random lightning bolts. Remember what she said about taking over the class? Do you think she’s going to start electrocuting students?”

  “Oh swell no,” Scarlet swore, crossing in front of the flower window in chaîné turns. “What that girl needs is an intervention.”

  “Exactly!” Iris exclaimed with a clap of her hands. “Genius idea, Scar!”

  Still whirling, Scarlet asked, “Wait, what’d I say?”

  “We’ll stage an intervention!” Iris stated, grabbing her tablet to start jotting down the plan. “Maybe at Tom’s Diner . . . ?”

  “No, seriously?” Scarlet said, coming to a stop. Because she’d meant it kind of sarcastically.

  “Isn’t an intervention when everybody gets together and gangs up on you to tell you why you’re so terrible?” Cheri mused, shifting sides on the marshmallow sofa. “That might backfire as badly as my Albert makeover.”

  Scarlet thought of all the reality TV shows her parents watched. “An intervention is like when people have too much junk in their garages and their family forces them to get rid of it.”

  Ring pop jutting out of her mouth, Iris frowned. “When you both put it that way . . .” she trailed off. “I guess I thought we three could just sit Opal down and talk things over. Find out why she hates us so much and try to fix it.”

  Cheri frowned next. “I’ve tried to tell her sorry about Albert so many times,” she said, running a sequined hand through her hair, “but she just won’t listen.”

  Scarlet frowned last. “I never did say sorry for always borrowing her lunch, but”—she couldn’t resist another chance—“I didn’t think that was as big a deal as sucking face with her crush.”

  If those marshmallow pillows hadn’t been stuck to the sofa, Cher would have thrown one at Scar. The superdancer pressed a fist over her lips to hide her smirk.

  “Hey!” Iris said, pushing herself off from the table for another spin. “Isn’t Opal’s birthday coming up? How ’bout we throw her a surprise party?”

  Iris imagined balloons and streamers and ice-cream sandwiches, all in an Opal-esque color scheme of creamy vanilla, like her name, and dark chocolate, like her hair. Sweet!

  Scarlet imagined smashing a piñata stuffed with bubblegum and press-on tattoos. Score!

  Cheri imagined Darth in a tiny paper hat. So cute!

  They all perked up instantly.

  “A surprise birthday party intervention!” Cheri said, sitting up straight. “Maybe we can invite Albert. And those two boys at the window, too?”

  ?!?!?!?!

  Just as Cheri was saying it, Scarlet gave Iris’s chair a push with a tad too much oomph. She went careening toward the flower window, gripping tight to the fuzzy orange arms of the egg, her ring pop clenched between her teeth. With Scarlet pas-de-bouréeing behind her, Iris rolled right up to the window, pressing both palms against the panes. Plain as day she could see that the dark forms were not black swans at all. They were two boys in three-piece suits, hanging from bungee cords outside Club Very UV!

  Scarlet came nose-to-nose with the shorter one, nothing but the glass between them. Her mouth dropped open and her freckles practically jumped off her face in shock. The boy had freckles of his own, across the bridge of his nose. His mouth ran in a serious straight line above his square jaw. From underneath his crash helmet, tufts of salt-and-pepper hair stuck out. But Scarlet couldn’t see his eyes, which were hidden behind black sunglasses. Suddenly he snapped a camera, and she staggered back from the flash.

  The other boy wore black sunglasses, too. He was much bigger than his partner-in-spy: taller and broader. The straps of his bungee harness stretched thin under his weight. The buttons of his suit jacket strained across his stomach, threatening to pop. As Iris stared at him, she actually worried his cord might split and send him plummeting. Even if that would serve him right for spying!

  He didn’t take any pictures. He just balled his hand into a plump fist and shook it at Iris.

  How rude!

  Iris came to her senses and powered up quick. Fanning her fingers out in V’s just like she’d done for the secret handshake dance, she whipped off two ultraviolet flares way too intense for mere sunglasses. The big boy raised his arms and the little one ducked his head as the sunbursts exploded against the crystal window. Hoping they were temporarily blinded, Iris got to work painting a solid black curtain in the air. She concentrated hard, but it was taking a long time—the window was so wide! Shorty kept clicking his camera, aiming all over the place. Like a pro volleyball player, Scarlet jumped up to block his every shot. Finally, fumbling with their ropes, the Blob Boy fixed whatever had gotten them stuck in the first place. Crinkly carrot-red hair puffed up from his helmet as both boys dropped out of sight.

  The whole scene had lasted seconds at most, but the girls were shaken.

  “O . . . M . . . V,” Cheri said slowly, approaching the window with Darth in her arms. “Two boys spying on us, and they weren’t even cute.”

  Scarlet leaned her face against the cool windowpane, breathing hard. “The short one was, maybe,” she panted. “But I’m still going to totally kick his butt when we catch them.”

  “We’d better report this to Candace,” Iris said, abandoning her half-drawn black curtain and dashing to the table to video-call their erstwhile (you know!) babysitter. Scarlet, brimming with even more energy than usual, backflipped off the window. But she launched herself with so much strength that instead of a soft landing in the beanbag, she hit the wall ten feet above it. “Owie,” she muttered as she slid down—although, in a weird way, pounding into the wall made her feel a bit better. Or at least calmer.

  On Iris’s tablet screen, Candace came into view, the camera angle warping her geek-chic glasses way out of proportion. Below her blunt baby bangs, her forehead loomed enormous (when it really wasn’t).

  “What’s up, UVs?” she said in a low voice, looking over her shoulder to make sure none of their moms in the FLab noticed.

  “Candace!” Iris gasped. On the other side of the computer, she probably looked all twisty, too, with big blue kewpie eyes and purple ringlets spiraling out in every direction. “We were planning Operation Get-O when we caught two boys bungee-spying on us!”

  “Um, what?” Candace whispered, glancing over her shoulder again so that all Iris saw on the screen was the back of her head. And the stainless-steel teeth of the swizzle spork Candace almost always had in her hand. “You’ve been bungee jumping in the ghetto?”

  Iris tried again. “No, Get-O!” she said. “A party intervention to win Opal back. And two boy spies in black!”

  “Me and the protozoa will be right there!” Candace called, clearly NOT in response to Iris, before leaning in closer to the screen. “Probably not a good idea to throw a birthday party for spy boys,” she advised. “You can’t
trust ’em.”

  “Spies, or boys?” Cheri asked, wheeling the fuzzy egg chair back to the table with Darth seated on its cushion, enjoying the ride.

  “Huh?” Iris spluttered at the screen. “No, the party is for Opal. We—”

  “Girls, we’ll have to video-chat later,” Candace cut her off. “The FLab’s got a minor crisis on its hands, and the web is going nuts about some rumored olfactory weapon. It’s all over PuffPo. Er, nothing to fret about, though!” she said, forcing a funhouse smile at the screen and reaching forward to fold it down. “I’ll check my MAUVe cam footage for the spy kids. In the meantime, set the flower window to SHADY, okay? Coddington out!” was the last thing the girls heard.

  “Oh, I forgot!” Iris keyed a code into her smartphone that instantly cast the club’s windows in an eerie ultraviolet light. Candace could sometimes seem scatterbrained, but only because she always had a million different things on her mind. She actually was a total teenius, and between her and Cheri’s supercomputer mind, they’d tricked out CVUV with tons of hi-tech gizmos. So many that the girls hadn’t memorized them all yet! When the window was programmed to SHADY, they could still see outside. But no one could see in.

  “It’s totally like you predicted, Cher,” Iris said, erasing the curtain she’d painted with broad sweeps of her hand. “Black Swans. Two of them! We already have our work cut out for us with Opal’s threats, and now some boys are spying on us, too?”

  “I don’t think they got much evidence.” Scarlet rubbed her sore shoulder. “I think I blocked most of the shots.”

  “Awesome,” Iris said. “It’s ultra that you did that, Scar. But how did they find us? If we’re not even safe in Club Very UV . . .”

  Standing beneath her own portrait, Iris leaned back against the table, arms folded across her chest, chewing on the remains of her ring pop. From her beanbag crash pad, Scarlet anxiously punched the palm of her hand. Cheri broke the silence with a simple question:

  “But the surprise party’s still happening, right?”

  Paint My Name, Paint My Name

  OH, IT’S HAPPENING, ALRIGHTY. IT’S ALL HAPPENING. The rise of O+2 at Chronic Prep. Opaline’s ominous stench. Bungee-jumping spy boys in black. Crisis mode at the FLab—whatever that meant. And a city crawling with mutants. See? Stuff happens, whether you want it to or not. But the Ultra Violets passionately believed that there were few problems in this crazy world that an ice-cream surprise party couldn’t solve. Even when that surprise party was doubling as a birthday intervention to get their ex-bestie back from the dark side.

  Phase one of Operation Get-O found Iris hanging out downtown on Saturday afternoon. This corner of the city was known for its quaint cafés and bakeries, organic vegetable markets, and gourmet food shops. All the top chefs shopped there for the best ingredients, which is how the neighborhood got its name: Kitchen Sync. Iris had been taste-testing exotic ice-cream flavors for the past hour. Now she was waiting for Scar and Cher to meet her so that she could share the results and they could all decide which would make the best sandwiches.

  All those ice-cream samples hadn’t completely soothed Iris’s worries about O+2 and mutants and spy boys. But she was trying to stay hopeful about throwing Opal a party. And it was so exciting to explore a different part of Sync City! She’d even dressed up for the occasion. On her wrists she’d piled bunches of the beaded friendship bracelets she’d either made herself or traded with Scarlet and Cheri. A teensy blue heart-shaped sticker decorated one cheek. And on the ends of a few of her purple ringlets she’d fastened peacock feathers. Peeking out like a lace slip from beneath the lavender strands, the iridescent teal fringe looked viomazing.

  Now, standing in front of the Gelato Be Chilling Me Ice Cream Shoppe, Iris breathed in the crisp air. It was perfumed with all sorts of yummy Kitchen Sync scents: cinnamon and saffron and star anise. She sighed with contentment, closed her eyes, and tried to forget all her troubles. All the aforementioned happening stuff. After an hour spent sampling ice cream, she was feeling even sweeter than usual, and for that fleeting moment life seemed delish. A breeze rustled through the fluffula trees, and it sounded like a whisper.

  Like someone was whispering just to her.

  Saying Psst! Psst! Irisss!

  Iris’s eyes fluttered open again, and she tucked a peacock-festooned curl behind her ear. Yes, there it was again, she hadn’t imagined it! Psst, psst, Irisss!

  Her UV radar on alert, she scanned the street. No, no sign of mutants. She scanned the sky. No, no sign of Candace’s satellite MAUVe cam. And yet the whissspering persssisted!

  Pssssssssst! Irisssss!

  With hesitant steps, holding tight to the messenger bag strapped across her shoulder, Iris rounded the corner of the gelato shoppe and inched along the side wall. The whissspering grew more insissstent with every step, until she reached the back of the building.

  Keeping super still, she peeked into the parking lot.

  His back to her, a tall, skinny boy balanced on a hoverboard, tagging a battered dumpster. A threadbare black top hat poked out of his messenger bag. The frayed hem of a striped T-shirt hung above his jeans. He gave a vigorous shake to a can he was holding. Pssst, psirissst! went the spray-paint as he colored.

  It was as if a thousand flavors of ice cream swirled together in Iris’s stomach and all the sugar rushed to her head. She couldn’t see the boy’s face. But she just knew. It all came flashing back to her. That time in the monorail car. The daisies he’d painted. The funny wolfman she’d drawn with just her superpowers when he wasn’t looking. The wolfman she’d drawn with a top hat . . .

  OMV! Iris thought. Just then the boy hovered a bit to one side, and she could see what he’d spelled out in phat kaleidoscopic letters. It was Iris who whispered next.

  “Sebastian.”

  Hearing his name, the boy pivoted around. The top hat nearly toppled out of his bag and a shock of black hair fell across his forehead as their eyes met.

  OMCV! Iris felt just like the ice cream she’d eaten. All melty inside. And totally frozen! She flattened herself against the side of the building, but she couldn’t seem to move. Should she stay? Should she go? What would a true artist do? What should she do?

  Such indecisiveness really was not like her.

  Before she could ask herself any more questions, Graffiti Boy appeared before her, floating on his hoverboard like some hipster vision.

  “Purple Girl!” His voice broke a bit as he spoke but was still as soft as the whispering spray paint. He cleared his throat, and his dark eyes were shining as he said, “So, now you know my name. What’s yours?”

  Iris’s heart was beating so hard she was sure the teensy sticker was throbbing on her face! She opened her mouth to answer, and . . . nothing came out. Sebastian arched an eyebrow at her, confused. But Iris managed to smile. Her brain freeze eased a bit. She stepped out into the parking lot, toward his painting, her peacock feathers wafting behind her, and he followed. With a playful twirl of her pinkie finger, she silently asked him to turn around.

  “Oh, okay,” he said, getting her meaning (and maybe remembering their monorail paint-off, too?). “I’ll close my eyes and count to ten.”

  Ten seconds didn’t leave Iris much time! She powered up, the ultraviolet beams radiating through her—and surely burning off whatever remained of all that ice cream! Concentrating on the rusted dumpster, blinking her periwinkle blue eyes for just a second or three, she pictured three deep purple petals that had a touch of sunshine yellow on the inside. (Iris knew that her namesake flower was actually more complicated than that, but she only had ten seconds!)

  “Ready or not!” Sebastian warned, and spun around on his hoverboard again just as Iris was pretending to put her own (nonexistent) markers back in her messenger bag. “Hmmm,” he said, eyeing the flower, then Iris. “Very pretty.”

  Iris blushed pink. Still, what were
the chances that a hoverboarding graffiti boy would know—

  “Iris!” he said with a snap of his fingers. “Is that it? Did I get it right?”

  Iris smiled so bright she must have been blazing ultraviolet, but she couldn’t help it. Sebastian flew a little closer, just above the ground, took out the tattered top hat, and with the same gallant bow he’d given her in the monorail car, tipped it. “Cool to meet you again, Iris. At last.”

  He offered his hand. Trembling, she took it. When their fingers touched, he flinched, her skin was so warm. Holding his hand, Iris was finally ready to say something. Say anything! She gulped. He was the one on the hoverboard, but she felt like she was flying.

  No, wait, she was flying. Or at least airborne?

  “Gelato be kidding me, RiRi!” Scarlet growled in her ear. The pint-size Ultra Violet had picked up Iris and thrown her over her shoulder as if she were as light as her peacock feathers. Iris had been in such a graffiti ice-cream haze, she hadn’t felt a thing! She never even noticed Scarlet and Cheri arriving in the lot behind the ice cream shop.

  “Iris!” Cheri hissed in her other ear. “You’ve got to hide your high beams! We could see flashes of rainbows from the street!”

  Just then, two more boys on hoverboards swooped in alongside Sebastian. “Yo, dude, we’ve gotta go!” one said urgently, glancing with almond-shaped eyes at the three intriguing girls. The other one revved the engine of his board and scratched nervously at what were really just the suggestions of scraggly sideburns. “Yeah, Sebastian, the minor crimes squad is scouring Kitchen Sync!” he explained.