Nick and Tesla's High-Voltage Danger Lab

by Bob Pflugfelder

  “Yeah. But if it’s invisible, how do we see it?”

  Nick cleared his throat.

  When Tesla turned toward him, she saw that he was holding up a bucket filled with discarded orange highlighter markers. The bottoms seemed to have been sawed off, probably so that Uncle Newt could remove the ink and use it to color his spray-on clothes.

  “Remember those cool jack-o’-lanterns Mom made one year?” he said. “The ones that seemed to glow under the right kind of light?”

  Nick pointed at a small wandlike device nestled in with a bunch of other techno doodads on a worktable nearby.

  Tesla grinned.

  “Proposition: You are a genius.”

  “Accepted,” said Nick.

  NICK AND TESLA’S

  SEMI-INVISIBLE NIGHTTIME VAN TRACKER

  THE STUFF:

  • 1 fresh highlighter marker

  • Scissors

  • 1 zip-top sandwich bag

  • 1 pushpin

  • Duct tape

  • 1 battery-powered black light (available at many hardware or party stores)

  • Pliers

  THE SETUP

  1. Using the pliers, squeeze the base of the highlighter marker. The stopper at the end (usually white) should pop out.

  2. Carefully remove the marker’s inner dye pack.

  3. Standing over a sink, cut the dye pack into three or four pieces and place them inside the sandwich bag.

  4. Add 1½ cups (237 ml) of water to the bag and zip it shut.

  5. Give the dye time to mix with the water.

  THE FINAL STEPS

  1. Use the duct tape to attach the bag of dye to the underside of the back bumper on the vehicle you want to track.

  2. Use the pushpin to poke a single hole into one bottom corner of the bag. As the liquid drips out of the bag, it will leave a trail of fluorescent dye that will glow under the black light. (A black light emits ultraviolet light, which is invisible to humans. But our eyes can see how the light reacts to certain vibrant neon colors, like the kinds in most highlighter markers.) The bag should last about 10 minutes, so don’t put the hole in it too soon.

  3. Follow the trail.

  Nick had never been on a stakeout before. It might have been kind of cool if he hadn’t been riding a purple paisley bicycle built for a girl half his size.

  There had been only one bike in Uncle Newt’s garage: an old-fashioned ten-speed buried under so many cobwebs it looked like a giant spider had tried to wrap it in a cocoon. Nick and Tesla flipped a coin for it, and Tesla won. Which was why Nick got stuck with the bike that belonged to DeMarco’s little sister. They’d been able to get the training wheels off, but the flowery basket on the handlebars wouldn’t budge.

  “Pedaling this little thing is killing my knees,” Nick said as he started another wobbly circuit around the cul-de-sac. He was hoping Tesla would offer to take turns on the ten-speed.

  Instead, she just cruised past him and said, “It was either Elesha’s bike or the Big Wheel.”

  “I know, I know,” Nick grumbled.

  He threw another surreptitious (he hoped) glance at the Landrigans’ driveway. They had to make sure they were in just the right spot when the van left that evening. Which is why they’d been riding around and around by the Landrigans’ front gate for the past twenty minutes.

  “So, how long are you guys gonna be visiting your uncle?” Silas asked. “A week or two?”

  “The whole summer,” Nick said.

  “The whole summer? Here?” said DeMarco. He looked like he pitied them. “Why?”

  “Our parents are government scientists,” Nick said. “They got sent to Uzbekistan.”

  “What’s in Oozebeckyland?” Silas asked.

  “Soybeans,” said Tesla. “Really well irrigated soybeans.”

  “Sounds thrilling,” said DeMarco, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Why couldn’t they take you with them?”

  Neither Nick nor Tesla answered. They just looked at each other, obviously thinking the same thing.

  Yeah … why not?

  “Whoa,” said Silas. “Here we go.”

  The white Siringo Bros. van was coming around the house.

  The kids sped up their circling, yelling bogus trash talk at one another as they fake-raced around the cul-de-sac.

  “Eat my dust!”

  “Save your breath for pedaling—you’ll need it!”

  “Real cool bike, Nick! What’s the matter? Your tricycle have a flat?”

  “Hey!”

  The gate started to swing open automatically as the van drew near.

  They’d have to time this operation just right.

  DeMarco broke away from the pack and doubled back toward the Landrigan place.

  “Shortcut!” he called over his shoulder.

  “Cheater!” the others yelled at him.

  They all pretended not to notice that the van was driving past the gate and would be easing out into the street any second.

  The big, scruffy guy—Frank—was behind the wheel. He honked his horn as DeMarco headed straight for him.

  It was up to DeMarco now.

  “Don’t worry. He can handle it,” Silas had said when they’d hatched the plan. “He’s doing X Games–type stuff on his bike all the time, and he’s only broken three bones.”

  That hadn’t reassured Nick much, but Tesla had nodded and said, “All right, DeMarco. Try not to break number four.”

  And now there DeMarco was, looking at the van in fake surprise, swerving to the left in fake panic, and then doing a very real wipeout with what sounded like a real scream.

  DeMarco’s X Games–type practice paid off. He ended up sprawling in the street right where he was supposed to: not close enough to the van to risk getting hit by it, but squarely in front of it so it couldn’t go around him.

  Frank hit the brakes, and the van screeched to a halt.

  “Waaaaaaaaa!” DeMarco wailed. He wrapped his hands around his right knee and began rocking and sobbing. “It hurrrrrrrts!”

  Tesla and Nick and Silas pedaled toward him furiously.

  “DeMarco!”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Is any bone sticking out?”

  They hopped off their bikes and gathered around their fallen friend.

  Frank leaned out the driver’s side window.

  “Would you get out of the way?” he said.

  “That’s real nice!” Tesla snapped at him. “You practically flatten an innocent kid in the street, and then all you have to say is, ‘Get out of the way.’ ”

  “Oh, all he’s got is a skinned knee. And you kids shouldn’t be hanging around out here anyway.”

  “This is a public street, mister!” Silas said. “You don’t own the road!”

  “Yeah!” Nick added. It just seemed like the kind of thing someone would say, under the circumstances.

  “I wa-wa-wannnnnnt my m-mommy!” DeMarco blubbered.

  Nick thought he was laying it on a bit thick, but now wasn’t the time for acting critiques.

  DeMarco’s seven-year-old sister Elesha stepped out around the van. She walked up to her brother and looked down at him gravely, shaking her head.

  “Mom’s gonna kill you if you messed up your bike.”

  DeMarco started crying harder.

  “Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” Frank groaned. He gave the horn two quick honks. “Move it! I’ve got somewhere I need to be!”

  “Okay, okay!” Tesla said. “What’s the rush? You got some old ladies to run over?”

  She helped DeMarco up, and he started hobbling toward the curb as the other kids moved their bikes. The second they were out of Frank’s way, he stomped on the gas and roared off up the street.

  Tesla turned to Elesha.

  “Did you get the drip bag attached to the back bumper the way we showed you?” she asked.

  “Of course. It was easy.”

  Elesha stuck out a hand, palm up.

  Tesla paid her t
hree dollars for hiding in the trees with the tracking dye, plus another two for letting Nick “rent” her bike.

  “Pleasure doing business with you,” Elesha said as she folded the bills and stuffed them in her pocket. She cocked an eyebrow at her brother. “Good acting, crybaby. Or was it acting?”

  DeMarco showed her his fist.

  “I’ll show you what real crying is, if you want,” he said.

  “Ha. As if you’d dare.”

  Elesha turned her back to DeMarco, flipped her cornrows over her shoulders and went sashaying away.

  “Your sister is one tough second-grader,” Nick said.

  DeMarco shivered. “You should meet the one in kindergarten.”

  Silas walked out into the road, crouched down, and wiped a hand over the asphalt.

  “I think there’s a little ink here,” he said. “But I can barely see it.”

  Tesla stared off at the horizon. The sky was starting to go from pale blue to pink-streaked orange. Before long, night would fall.

  “Just wait,” Tesla said. “You’ll see it.”

  “I still don’t see it,” Silas said.

  It was dusk, and the world had gone gray.

  “The ink doesn’t glow in the dark, remember?” Tesla said. “We need this.”

  She pulled Uncle Newt’s black light out of her kitty backpack. It looked like a big blue test tube with black backing and a strap. When Tesla turned it on, the tube shined with a soft eerie light.

  Tesla knelt down and slowly moved the black light over the road. Nick, Silas, and DeMarco all leaned in over her shoulder.

  “I don’t know,” Silas said. “I still don’t … whoa!”

  Fluorescent orange splatters appeared in the black light’s glow.

  “Nice one, Nick,” Tesla said. She stood up and handed her brother the black light. “Now attach that to Elesha’s bike, and we’ll get going.”

  She pulled a roll of duct tape from her backpack and gave that to Nick, too. He started taping the black light to the front fender of Elesha’s bike, adjusting it so it would shine down and to the left.

  “Elesha’s not gonna be happy if she catches you doing that,” Silas said, glancing around nervously. “You’re supposed to be riding it, not customizing it.”

  “Remind me—why does the light have to be on my sister’s bike, anyway?” asked DeMarco.

  “Because of all our bikes, it’s the closest to the ground,” Tesla told him.

  “And remind me,” said Nick as he finished pressing down the last silvery strip of tape. “Why am I the one who has to ride this teeny little thing?”

  “Because you lost the coin toss. And it was your idea.”

  “Oh. Right,” Nick said. “I’m a genius.”

  He suddenly didn’t sound very happy about it.

  He got on Elesha’s bike and began pedaling awkwardly away. As he went, little beads of bright orange glowed below him on the pavement.

  Half Moon Bay was a small coastal town surrounded on three sides by thick groves of tall trees, so the road the kids ended up on wasn’t that busy. Their little caravan got honked at only once every, oh, sixty seconds or so. And the cars that whooshed by less than two feet from Nick’s hand weren’t going any faster than, say, thirty or so miles an hour. Fast enough to squish him, sure, but not so fast that the wind they whipped up knocked him over.

  It was quite a joyride. Nick spent most of the time telling himself he shouldn’t always be so quick to share his bright ideas.

  “What if he went on the interstate?” Nick heard DeMarco say behind him.

  “You and Silas said the van’s always gone about half an hour,” Tesla replied. “How far could he be going?”

  “A lot farther than I can go,” Silas wheezed. The last quarter mile had been uphill.

  “Look,” Tesla said, “even if the trail does lead to a highway, at least we’ll know which way the guy was going.”

  “Would that really help us?” Nick said.

  Either his sister didn’t hear him or she didn’t have an answer.

  “Hey!” Nick blurted out.

  The glowing trail had veered right, away from the road, and Nick had to swerve to stay with it.

  He coasted down a gently sloping drive into a small parking lot. Tesla, Silas, and DeMarco fanned out around him as they followed.

  The lot was deserted, and there was only a single building: a long single-level store built to look like a log cabin. A sign on the roof said GOLDEN STATE ANITQUES & COLLECTIBLES. A sign in the window said CLOSED.

  The fluorescent trail didn’t stop out front. Instead, it wound around to the back of the building, out of sight of the road. Nick started to follow it but then veered off when he saw headlights flash up ahead.

  “Someone’s coming this way!” he cried out. “We gotta hide!”

  The other kids followed as Nick cut over toward the antiques store. Just as they reached the front door, the Siringo Bros. van came around the side of the building. Nick half expected it to stop so that blustery muscle-bound Frank could pop out and demand to know why they’d been following him. But the van kept going. It went out to the exit, turned left onto the road, and headed in the direction they’d just come—back to the Landrigan place, presumably.

  So their tracking system had worked! They’d figured out where Frank was going.

  An empty parking lot behind a closed antiques store.

  Nick wasn’t sure if he should find that really, really mysterious or really, really disappointing.

  “Come on,” Tesla said, getting her bike rolling again. “Let’s see what’s back there.”

  What was back there was nothing. Just the rear of the store and a few more parking spots out of sight of the road and, picking up where the pavement stopped, lush forest thick with ferns, moss, and the tallest trees Nick had ever seen.

  Nick rode around in circles until he found the fluorescent orange trail again. It ended in a big glowing puddle. The kids stopped in a circle around it.

  “Is there anything special about this antiques store?” Tesla asked Silas and DeMarco.

  They both shrugged and mumbled “I dunno.”

  “There are lots of places like it around here,” said Silas. “But they’re for tourists, not kids.”

  “We’re not big antiques collectors,” said DeMarco.

  Silas nodded vigorously. “Yeah, really. Don’t you think old stuff is creepy? Like, you know those old porcelain dolls? The ones that are all white with the big staring eyes? They look like vampires or zombies or something. I heard one time that the hair on them is real. As in real hair from real people. Isn’t that the ickiest thing you ever—”

  “All right, Silas, thanks for sharing,” Tesla said. She waved a hand at the pool of luminescent water at their feet. “But maybe we should be focusing on this?”

  “Oh. Right.” Silas looked down at the puddle. “Sure is orange.”

  “And big,” said Nick. “Frank must have been parked here for a while for that much ink to drip out.”

  “But the store’s closed,” said DeMarco. “Why would he come here just to sit in his van?”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” Tesla said. She leaned over the handlebars of her bike, staring at something on the ground. “Shine the light over there.”

  Nick walked Elesha’s bike toward the spot Tesla was looking at. An orange shape began shining on the ground, then another, then another.

  Footprints. Big ones.

  They led from the puddle out toward the trees. The trail ended with a final footprint that shimmered brighter, and with sharper edges, than the rest. Bits of shattered plastic were mixed in with it, glowing orange. More footprints led from there back to where the van had been parked.

  Tesla squatted and picked up one of the bigger shards of plastic. She held it under the black light.

  “There’s something printed on this. Like a manufacturer’s name,” she said. “It looks like…SUSHAMI.”

  Silas scowled and scratched his head
. “Isn’t that, like, raw fish?”

  “I don’t think Frank drove out here just to stomp on a box of sushi,” said Nick.

  “No,” said his sister. “But he did stomp on something. Maybe something he got out of the back of the van.”

  Nick nodded. “Makes sense. He had to have gone around to the back, where the bag and the puddle were, or we wouldn’t be seeing these footprints.”

  DeMarco shook his head. “No. Does not make sense. Why would he come all the way out here just to bust up a sushami, whatever that is? He could do that back at the Landrigan place. And why do it at the same time every day?”

  Tesla opened her mouth to answer, then froze. It looked like she’d expected something brilliant to pop out, but it never showed up.

  “I have no idea,” she finally said.

  Nick stifled a sigh.

  They’d come all this way looking for answers, and what had they found? Some footprints and busted-up plastic.

  And more questions.

  The ride back to their uncle’s neighborhood was both easier and harder than before. Nick didn’t have to worry about keeping the black light pointed at the pavement anymore, so he could put a little more distance between himself and the road. And they were headed mostly downhill.

  But it was pitch black now, and though Elesha’s bike had reflectors, Nick would have been more comfortable with a flashing neon sign strapped to his back.

  KIDS BIKING!!!

  DON’T HIT!!!

  “Have you noticed that big black car?” DeMarco asked.

  “All the cars look big and black to me,” said Nick.

  “What big black car?” said Tesla.

  “Behind us. It’s been there for, like, a mile.”

  Nick looked back and saw Tesla and Silas looking back, too.

  About thirty yards behind them was a large, dark, boxy shape. It was cruising so slowly along the two-lane road that other cars were whipping around to pass it.

  “Looks like an SUV,” said Silas.

  “There was a black SUV—” Nick began.

  “—parked near the Landrigans’ house this morning,” Tesla finished for him.