Power to the Purple!

by Sophie Bell

  Iris beckoned the girls close. Cheri placed Darth on the ground as guard, tail locked and loaded, before joining the huddle.

  “Okay,” Iris said, keeping one eye on the captives. “The bad news is, they’re totally spies. This whole crying game has got to be an act—like, good spy–bad spy. The good news is, we destroyed the evidence.”

  “High five!” Cheri whispered, and the girls slapped hands down low.

  “But now what?” Scarlet hissed. “Should we take them prisoner? I carry the big one, you two share the Lil’ Spurt?”

  Iris and Cheri looked at her, astonished.

  “I don’t know!” Scarlet said. “We could keep them in my basement. Feed them Peach Melba on crackers!”

  “Yeah, because what your mom needs is two more boys in the house,” Iris joked, and all three girls burst into giggles in spite of themselves.

  From where the two agents hung on the tree, those girly giggles were more unnerving than the wedgie threat.

  “No, let’s set them free,” Iris said when she caught her breath. After their serious convo and intense spy-boy interrogation, it felt good to laugh. “We can’t ask them about BeauTek without giving away that we know about it, too. Hopefully they don’t know what they saw. We’ve got their names now—Bristow and Baxter. And maybe Candace has been tracking them by satellite MAUVe cam.”

  In agreement, the girls touched pinkie fingers, then straightened up out of the clutch.

  “We have it on good authority,” Cheri called to the thwarted spies as she picked Darth up off the ground, “that boys come and go.”

  “So before we spray you with a sample of our skunk’s newest perfume . . .” Iris said, twirling a purple ringlet around her finger.

  “You. Should just. Go!” Scarlet shouted.

  By now, Big Red was a big wreck. He had gotten his sobbing under control, but he panted and pawed at the air like a paddling dog. The tree branch bent with his weight. Lil’ Freckles did the talking for both of them.

  “We’ll agree not to question you further,” he said, “if you’ll just”—he cleared his throat—“get us down from this tree.” Then his face flushed tomato-red. Either he was completely embarrassed, or all the blood had finally rushed to his head.

  The Ultra Violets stood there wondering how, in fact, they would free the spy boys without using their superpowers when they heard the low hum of a hybrid motor.

  “Iris! It’s, like, fate!”

  Floating behind them were Sebastian and his punky hoverboard posse.

  If it was possible, the Black Swans turned an even brighter shade of tomato. With his suit cuff, Big Red tried to wipe the tears from his cheeks.

  “Oh, hi, um, hi!” Iris said, hoping her hair looked all right. Inside, her heart was butterflying. But she could feel Scar and Cher staring at her. And after the close call with the spy boys, she concentrated on keeping cool. “What are you guys doing here?” she asked. At least this time she could speak! “How did you find us?”

  Sebastian grinned, running a hand through the forelock of black hair that always fell in front of his eyes. Iris could see her bracelet on his wrist. OMV, do not beam, no one must know, do not beam! she repeated to herself.

  “I saw a rainbow and followed it,” Sebastian said in that same soft voice as before. “It seems like, wherever you go, there are rainbows.” Then he smiled even wider, like he couldn’t believe what he was saying. His buddy with the sideburns punched him on the shoulder, but Sebastian never lost his balance on his hoverboard.

  Donotbeamnoonemustknow-donotbeam! Iris screamed inside her head. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the UVs. Scarlet’s eyes were wide with alarm. “No!” Cheri mouthed—she wasn’t surprised one bit to see Sebastian there. It was the third scenario in her mental algorithm.

  “What’s up with these two in the tree?” Malik, the almond-eyed hoverboy, interrupted. “You guys all go to Chronic Prep, right? I guess you play some strange schoolyard games . . .”

  “Oh, no, we don’t know these boys, either,” Cheri said, acting innocent. “We just came across them.”

  “They said they were bird-watching,” Scarlet added. Her back to the hoverboys, she rubbed her hands together at the spies like she was fixing to pants them. Then she narrowed her eyes at Big Red.

  “Dudes, help a brother out!” he yelped. “Get us down!”

  Lil’ Freckles put his hands over his sunglasses over his eyes and shook his head in shame.

  “Would you?” Iris asked, flitting her gaze back and forth at Sebastian. She was afraid to look at him for too long. And dying to look at him for hours. She could feel her temperature rising and was sure she was going to break out in rainbows any second now. She couldn’t let him know about her superpowers. About the painting, the camouflage, the ultraviolet rays. She couldn’t let him know that she was the rainbow!

  She had to get out of there.

  “Yes, would you?” Scarlet repeated, then did her best impression of Cher. “Those great big boys are way too heavy for us lil’ girls to lift!” she said, dragging out the lil’ as long as she could.

  “But that time we saw you behind the ice cream shoppe,” Douglas, the hoverboy with the hint of facial hair, began, “weren’t you the one carrying—”

  “I said they’re too heavy!” Scarlet silenced him with another tremorous stamp of her foot.

  “No worries,” Sebastian said, speaking only to Iris. His buddies zoomed over to the tree and began to unhook Lil’ Freckles. “And then maybe after we could—”

  “I’ve got to go now!” Iris blurted out. The low end of the color spectrum, the reds and oranges, were already throbbing from her fingertips. “So much homework!” she fibbed—and poorly, she was sure. At a loss for words once more, she leaned forward on her tiptoes and gave Sebastian a kiss on the cheek. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, lowering her eyelids to hide the ultraviolet.

  Then she ran down the grassy knoll, aiming her erupting rainbows into the dandelions and clover so that he wouldn’t see them.

  No One Must Know

  “AND THAT’S WHEN WE SAW THE BLACK SWANS!”

  Scarlet paused at this point in her story (which, BTW, is also our story) to quaff a slug from her mug of butterbeer. All this talking was making her thirsty. (You too? Go ahead and grab a drink of water, then. It’s okay. We’ll wait.

  *waiting*

  *waiting some more*

  Back now?

  Back to it!)

  “The Black Swans, huh?” Candace muttered, peering down her nose through her big black-framed glasses as she scrolled through screens on her smartphone. “Cool. Did they play an all-ages show at the pier or something? I would have thought they were too rhythm-and-bluesy, too old schoolsy, for you girls.”

  Scarlet looked across the table at Cheri. Cheri flared out her plaid pink fingernails in a shrug. Iris poked Candace in the shoulder with the long swizzle spork that came with her triple berry parfait. (Candace had left her own spork back at the FLab, so as not to arouse suspicion at Tom’s Diner. From whence that original spork had come. From where, you ask? From whence!)

  “Candace, are you even listening?” Iris wondered aloud. The girls were used to Candace being a tad absent-minded in a professory way, but that afternoon she seemed more distracted than usual. “The Black Swans are not a band!”

  “They’re a theory. About unpredictable phenomena,” Cheri explained helpfully. “And ballerinas?” she added, turning back to the Ultra Violets’ official superdancer.

  “They’re spies!” Scarlet hissed with such urgency that the foam flew off the top of her butterbeer.

  Candace snapped her head up from her phone screen and her glasses slid down farther, past the tip of her nose to the top of her lip, where they sat like a plastic mustache. “Gotcha,” she said, her glasses bopping as she spoke. “The spy boys.” Sh
e squinted, stealing another glance at her phone. “Remember I told you not to trust them? Cute as they may look in their three-piece suits.”

  “We didn’t!” Scarlet protested, banging her tankard on the table so hard she heard the glass crack. “And they don’t!” She couldn’t speak for Iris, who practically broke out in rainbows at the mere mention of Graffiti Sebastian. And Cher seemed almost above the charms of boys. But Scarlet herself would never let one get in the way of their supermission. Even if that sullen, stubborn Lil’ Freckles was stil’ a lil’ on her mind. Hanging upside down from the fluffula tree like a holiday ornament, he’d never cracked. While his right-side-up partner had squealed like a pig! So respect, Frecks, respect. She had to give the lil’ guy that much.

  Scarlet’s thoughts were interrupted by a towering column of hair. She immediately covered the mouth of her glass with her hands.

  “Everything peachy here, girls?” their waitress asked, cocking an eyebrow at Scarlet. The white streak in her bride-of-Frankenstein beehive inched up above it. “You pounding that mug for a refill, hon?”

  “Thanks, but we’re good,” Candace answered for the table. As she spoke, her glasses fell farther still, and she had to catch them in her teeth to keep them from splashing into her tea. “Just having an animated conversation,” she explained, her jaw clenched. The waitress’s beehive loomed over her like a giant blurry Oreo.

  “Moms, if you’re that hungry, let me bring you a menu,” the waitress said, pivoting on her orthopedic sneakers and heading back to the counter. “Don’t go eating your glasses. They’ll give ya indigestion.”

  Candace spit out her spectacles. “Why does she always think I’m your mom?” she said, wiping the lenses on her lap. Then she looked in the general direction of Cheri and winked. “How would that math add up?”

  The girls smiled. Candace was the only grown-up (well, almost grown-up) they could talk to about their superpowers. Tapping into her connections at the Fascination Laboratory—the place from whence (from whence!) the life-altering, power-activating Heliotropium goo had come—she had promised to protect them, no matter what. She’d also promised to help them save Opaline from the dark side. The last time they’d been at Tom’s Diner, Opal had been with them.

  Now her space in the red vinyl booth sat empty, like a mouth that was missing a tooth.

  But the UVs couldn’t dwell on that today. They only had a few more minutes before Candace had to report for her job assisting their actual mothers at the FLab. So they picked up their discussion right after the beehived waitress dropped off a menu at the table.

  “The Black Swans said they had a file on Scarlet,” Iris explained, opening the menu and peeking out over it. “They knew about her history of pantsing!”

  Scarlet’s reputation for pantsing was kind of legendary, and Candace had heard about it plenty. At the FLab, Dr. Jones was forever complaining about the detentions her daughter received because of her aggressive behavior. “Well, we’ve all got skeletons in our closets, don’t we?” Candace said, thumbing through screens on her smartphone again.

  Cheri stopped midsip of her strawberry milkshake. “We keep Skeletony out in the open in Club Very UV,” she said. “He makes a great decorative accent. And coat rack.”

  Candace considered this. “You’re right, Cher,” she said, putting her phone down and reaching across the table for some sugar. Or so she thought. “Sooner or later, closeted skeletons have a way of coming out.” Then she poured what was really a packet of black pepper into her chamomile tea. As the girls looked on, curious, she borrowed Iris’s swizzle spork and gave it a stir. “And if these Black Swans have a file on Scarlet, they most likely have files on you two, too.”

  It was a sobering thought. Iris tugged on a ringlet. Cher chewed on a thumbnail. And Scarlet tossed back the rest of her butterbeer in one gulp.

  “At least they don’t know what they saw,” Iris said, trying to think positive.

  “They thought we were birds.” Scarlet twirled a finger round and round at her temple. “Cuckoo!”

  “And Scar crushed their camera,” Cheri added.

  Scarlet frowned.

  “Well, you did,” Cheri said.

  “It was an accident,” Scarlet grumbled.

  “A happy one,” Candace interjected, “if that camera had pictures of you girls getting superfreaky on it.” She ran a hand through her hair, and her blunt bangs stood up like a picket fence across her forehead. “Remember,” she said, lowering her voice and leaning across the table, “you three are scientific wonders. We still don’t know what’s going on at the Mall of No Returns’ mutant factory, and now these boys are spying on you. They could be from the government—”

  Scarlet’s mind filled with images of secret agents probing them like aliens.

  “Or the military,” Candace continued.

  Iris flashed back to her years at boarding school and shuddered.

  “So no one must know about your powers,” Candace stressed. Then she took a sip of her tea and began coughing violently. “Spicy!” she croaked as an explanation, grabbing Cheri’s untouched glass of water instead.

  Iris sighed deeply, her eyes brimming watery blue. It didn’t take a teenius to figure out what she was thinking. But as it happens, Candace was a teenius. And as ever, she had been keeping track of her three supercharges by satellite. By Miniature Aerial Unmanned Vehicle, to be exact. Or MAUVe, to be brief. Like an eye in the sky, the homemade camera drone tracked the girls. Candace just had to log on to the secret frequency she’d set up to see their (almost) every move.

  “Iris,” she said gently, clearing her throat and pushing her peppered tea aside. “I know you’re crushing hard on that hoverboy with the top hat . . .”

  Iris looked up at Candace, blinking back her tears.

  “But if every time you see him you start glowing like a spaceship—”

  “Overdue spurt.” Iris cut her off with a shake of her purple curls, changing the subject. “That’s what the short spy said, right?”

  Scarlet nodded vigorously. “He said he was contractually due to grow.”

  “Remember the creepy Build-a-Girl Workshop on level A of the mall?” Iris said, putting the pieces together. “I bet BeauTek can Tall-a-Boy, too!”

  “Excellent deductive reasoning,” Candace said, letting the topic of Sebastian drop. If she knew the girls at all, she knew she could count on Iris. “Sounds like those Black Swans have signed a contract with BeauTek. Maybe in exchange for a lil’ nip-tuck? I’ll do some research”—she peered at her phone for the umpteenth time—“see what I can find out. And if you run into them again . . .”

  The UVs sat up straight, awaiting instructions.

  “Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter-accusations. And see what else you can find out.” Candace tilted her head toward Scarlet. “Without resorting to wedgies.”

  “By any means necessary!” Scarlet said in her own defense.

  At that moment, the beehived waitress returned to the table and refilled Scarlet’s butterbeer. “On the house, kiddo,” she said between snaps of her gum.

  “Er, peachy,” Scarlet replied, embarrassed. “Thank you?” She’d already had enough of the sweet brew, but she guzzled more down right away. She could see the crack she’d knocked into the glass now and was afraid the syrupy amber liquid would seep all over their table.

  “I’ll take the check, please,” Candace said, adding to the girls, “I’ve got to get to the FLab.”

  “Moms,” the waitress griped good-naturedly as she tore their bill off her notepad and slapped it on the table. “Don’t be in a rush to get flab. In my experience, it gets you!”

  To make her point, she gave her rubbery butt a slap, then sashayed away, swinging her hips.

  “That waitress is très weird,” Cheri said, eyeing the bill. “But we should still tip her. Three dollars and sixty
cents—twenty percent.”

  “What’s up at the FLab, anyway, Candace?” Iris asked, scraping out the last bits of her berry parfait with a grape lollipop. Her swizzle spork seemed to have disappeared from the table.

  “Yeth, whath’s on your smarthphone that’s more faschinating than our shtory about being shpied on?” Scarlet asked, her tongue thick with a coating of butterbeer caramel.

  Candace looked around the booth at their three open faces. “I’m so proud of you guys,” she said. “I know it hasn’t been easy adjusting to life as secret middle-school superheroes.”

  “Thanks, Candace.” Cheri accepted the compliment. “But you didn’t answer the question.”

  “Right again, Cher,” Candace said. “I didn’t. Because I don’t want to add more stuff to what you’re already dealing with.”

  The girls sat up even straighter. At precise ninety-degree angles to their seats, Cheri could have calculated. Scarlet arched both hands above her head in fifth position.

  “What more stuff?” Iris dared to ask, the stick of her grape lollipop jutting out of her mouth.

  Candace picked up the swizzle spork (ah, there it is!) as she’d done many times before. She held it aloft as a warning, to keep them from speaking. “Big Red and Lil’ Frecks may not be the only spies,” she said. Then she sneezed—a side effect of the pepper.

  “Gesund-wha?!” Scarlet whispered, ignoring the swizzle spork of silence and sweeping her arms down.

  Candace waited a moment more, debating whether to tell them. But she knew knowledge was power: She couldn’t leave the UVs in the dark. “I’ve been checking a hidden camera,” she said grimly. “Someone’s been sabotaging the FLab.”

  The Theater of Hard Knocks

  NOT PEACHY.

  That’s what everything was. Unpeachable. The opposite of peachy. The anti-peach. Muchas gracias, beehived waitress, but no amount of butterbeer refills could quench the Ultra Violets’ worries.