by Sophie Bell
“Yeah.” Sebastian scuffed his sneaker against the bottom of his hoverboard.
“Totally crazy!” Bristow echoed. Apparently his bucket of chicken came with a smaller tub of mashed potatoes, which he was now shoveling into his mouth.
“Do you believe it?” the one named Baxter pressed. His pugnaciousness was making Sebastian uncomfortable. “That they’re supergirls?”
Sebastian stalled. He’d been thinking all afternoon about Iris at that girl’s birthday party, the way she’d put on such a light show. At the time he’d thought it was performance art. She’d said it was performance art. But now . . .
“Who knows, right?” he hedged, propping the board on its end and slowly spinning it around with dull slaps of his hand.
“We do,” Baxter stated, matter-of-fact.
“We know all kinds of stuff about those girls,” Bristow seconded, scraping the bottom of his mashed potato container with his plastic spoon.
Looking at the two other boys, Sebastian recalled finding them in the tree. He had been following a rainbow that ended there. Iris’s rainbow, it dawned on him now. She made it herself. The realization somehow thrilled and upset him at the same time.
“Like what?” he asked, his throat catching.
Bristow and Baxter exchanged glances. Sebastian thought he detected the shadow of a smile below the short kid’s sunglasses.
“That intel is top secret.” Bristow wiped his slick fingers on his blue satin sash. “Come with us and we’ll fill you in. But you can’t tell anyone.”
“Intel?” Sebastian repeated, puzzled. Before he could ask for an explanation, he heard his own name, called out as a question.
“Sebastian?”
A tingle of recognition heated his ears, and the short hairs at the nape of his neck stood on end. He looked away from the river, past the two boys, up into the park. On the crest of a small hill, he could make out the silhouette. The sun was behind him now, but the girl seemed to be glowing all by herself. He couldn’t quite see her face. But her curly purple hair was unmistakable.
Beside him on the promenade, Baxter followed his gaze. “You especially can’t tell your girlfriend,” he added when he spied the Ultra Violet. Above his black lenses one eyebrow arched up.
“I don’t have a . . . She’s not really my . . .” Sebastian stammered. What, exactly, did these two know about Iris? About him and Iris?
“So you guys weren’t actually bird-watching that day here after all,” he said softly, almost to himself. “You were . . . ‘gathering intel’?”
At the memory of being trapped in the tree, Bristow turned red all over again. Sebastian didn’t notice. His eyes were fixed on Iris on the hilltop.
She had stopped walking, as if she was hesitating, too. The silhouettes of her two friends soon appeared beside her. The short one with the ponytail grabbed her by the elbow, holding her back.
That seemed to animate Baxter for some reason, and his words took on more urgency. “Limited time offer, dude,” he said, giving Bristow a nudge toward the exit. “Now or never.”
Sebastian swallowed. He didn’t know what to believe. Or whom to trust. There was more than something odd about these two boys. And yet . . . had Iris lied to him? About everything?
With a decisive flick of his wrist, Sebastian released his hoverboard. It dropped down into a horizontal position and floated at his feet. Tearing his eyes away from Iris, he stepped aboard. And skated after Bristow and Baxter, out of the park.
• • •
From the crest of the hill, the Ultra Violets watched, stunned. The frivolity of their little picnic was instantly forgotten. Iris felt as if a stone were stuck in her throat, and her eyes filled with tears. She breathed in shallow, shaky gasps, struggling to stop herself from blubbering like a baby. She’d tried so hard to juggle being a superhero and just being herself with Sebastian. But now it was all falling apart, like she’d always feared it would. He must have seen her performance at the plaza. She was sure he’d seen her on the hill. But he didn’t answer back when she called his name. He didn’t even wave good-bye.
Standing beside her, Scarlet was in just as much turmoil. She was not about to cry—Scarlet didn’t do crying, not if she could help it. She did, however, have an overwhelming urge to run down the hill, run after the boys, and boot all three of them through the park gates like a bunch of soccer balls through goal posts. For the second time that afternoon, she clenched her hands into fists, her fingernails digging into the soft skin of her palms. She stomped the ground so hard that a bench on the orange brick promenade below popped out of its cement base.
Boys! she silently fumed. I should have locked up that dirty spy Jack Baxter back at Opal’s party when I had the chance!
Cheri cradled Darth in her arms, looking from borderline-emotional-trainwreck Iris to seriously-in-need-of-anger-management Scarlet, and said what all three girls were thinking:
“OMV, RiRi. Did Sebastian just blow us off for the Black Swans?”
A Brand-New Bombshell
“IN A WORLD WHERE SUPERHEROES GO PUBLIC AND the boys they like blow them off . . .”
Iris did this thing during their lunch periods at Chronic Prep where she made up fake movies, imitating a voiceover in deep, dramatic tones while she recorded mini-films of the cafeteria on her smartphone. She’d started editing them on her tablet, adding title screens and special effects. She’d even created a channel for them on GoobToob, where the kids in their class could watch the videos and post comments.
But today Iris’s smartphone lay on her cafeteria tray next to a grilled cheese sandwich gone cold. And Iris’s voice was muffled and colorless, because her head was on the table, buried in her crossed arms.
Cheri and Scarlet looked at her, concerned. Even Darth dared to sneak out of his tote bag and skitter across the table to lift up a lock of Iris’s hair and see if she was okay under all those ringlets. But still she didn’t shift. She just sighed heavily. As her breath escaped, it blew up a few strands.
It hadn’t been a bad day so far, their first back at school since they’d come out at Synchro de Mayo. Lots more kids came up to them, snapping pictures for their Smashface pages. Some eighth-grade girls on the cheerleading squad asked for Scarlet’s help with a new routine. And a whole bunch of boys lined up at Cheri’s locker bright and early in the morning to ask if she’d be their math tutor. Both girls just smiled—Cheri sweetly, Scarlet with a smirk—but didn’t agree to anything. And if a kid (or a teacher) was especially pushy, the girls would refer them to Candace, who had set up a separate e-mail account for just these kinds of requests. The prescient teenius had anticipated this very phenomenon and warned them about it. “You girls have to save your energies for real emergencies,” she’d said. “You can’t just use your superpowers to be popular at school.” Scarlet didn’t care much about being popular, anyway—and definitely not with cheerleaders: She remained a bit suspicious of them after her run-ins with Opal’s flunky, the two-faced BellaBritney. Cheri did care about her popularity. But she really had no interest in doing any more math for anyone.
Students had approached Iris that morning, too—or at least tried to. She seemed so distant, her periwinkle blue eyes staring off at nothing, that it was a bit intimidating. Those students who did risk venturing near found that, before they could actually reach her and open their mouths to speak, she disappeared. Vanishing right before their eyes. If they’d looked closely, they might have spotted a violet tendril here or there within the camouflage. But they were too freaked out and just turned and went the other way instead.
Now, at the lunch table, Cheri tried again to break through Iris’s fugue.
“Are you sure you don’t want to try texting him?” she suggested for the third time that day.
Iris shook her head no, her hair sweeping back and forth like a purple mop on the tabletop. “What if he doesn’t answer
? Then I’d just die! He HATES me now!” She let out a low moan.
“No way does he hate you,” Cheri tried to reassure her, talking toward the crown of her head. She glanced over to Scarlet for support, but Scarlet just shook her head no and stayed mute. Cheri may have been the supermathematician of the group, but it was Scarlet who thought there was a fifty-fifty chance Sebastian did hate Iris—or at least was super miffed at her.
If some boy lied to me, Scarlet reasoned, I’d be furious at him. In fact, Agent Jack hadn’t even lied about being a spy. He just WAS a spy. And that made her furious!
Struggling once again with her conflicted feelings for Jack—who, okay, had actually saved her life at Opal’s party, dirty spy or not—Scarlet thumped the table. It clattered against the floor, sending Darth skidding back into the safety of his tote bag and finally rousing Iris.
Her eyes were all red from crying. Her face was all red from pressing it into her arms. Her hair was all in knots, like she’d just woken up. She stared out over their small table. Past her cold grilled cheese sandwich. Beyond the cafeteria monitor and the huddle of jocks and Albert and the cool nerds. Until her red-rimmed baby blues met the equally doleful gaze of a brown-eyed girl.
Iris and Opal stared at each other across the cafeteria.
Scarlet and Cheri stared back and forth between them, nervous.
“Opal’s sitting all alone,” Cheri noted. Now that she was superpopular yet again, she could afford to feel a degree of sympathy for the ex-bestie who had uninvited her to her party.
Scarlet was unmoved. “Serves her right. She did try to brainwash the entire class!” she said, punching her thigh to keep from pounding the table again. “Owie,” she muttered immediately afterward, massaging the sore spot.
“You said she cheered for me, right?” Iris asked listlessly, never once shifting her focus. “You said she complimented your dance?”
“Um, yes?” It was the truth, but Scarlet had the distinct feeling that, at this exact moment, the truth was the wrong answer.
“I’m going to go talk to her,” Iris said.
“What?” Cheri exclaimed as Scarlet objected, “No!” Both girls started speaking at once, trying to persuade Iris against it.
“Maybe text her instead,” Cheri said. “Even if you do get more bees with honey, that’s a hornet’s nest you don’t want to poke in person, I don’t think.” She wasn’t sure if those two expressions went together. Based on the scowl on Scarlet’s face, she suspected no. “Plus, RiRi, you have a major case of bedhead, FYI,” she whispered. “Not to upset you more, but I’d want you to tell me if I did.”
“We shouldn’t engage the enemy,” Scarlet stated more directly. “Next thing you know, the whole cafeteria will be hit by a lightning storm, and then we’ll all get detention!” Scarlet was on her longest non-detention streak ever, and she did not want to break it.
“Don’t forget, she did try to electrocute you in the park,” Cheri added, rummaging in her tote bag for her polka-dot umbrella just in case. “That afternoon after your date with—”
Darth popped up from the bag to wave his tail in front of Cheri’s face before she could finish the sentence, but it was too late. The reminder of the date with Sebastian just depressed Iris more. And deepened her resolve.
“What else have I got to lose?” she said with a melodramatic toss of her tangles. She stood up from the table, ran a hand through her hair—which only made it messier, though Cheri didn’t dare mention it twice—and strode across the cafeteria.
She sat down opposite Opal without asking, propped her chin in her hand, and stared some more, a pale ultraviolet aura humming around her. Opal began to blush a bit under the periwinkle spotlights, but she didn’t blink. Every now and then, threads of amber ran through the brown of her eyes. Sensing the tension between the two girls, the other kids in the cafeteria began to skirt their chairs away from the epicenter of the encounter. But they still looked on, curious.
“Hi, Iris,” Opal said at last, not sure if she should smile. “Your hair looks nice,” she tacked on before she could help herself. From the day Iris returned to Sync City with her purple hair, Opal had hopelessly coveted it. She thought she’d be over it by now, but there it was again, the very first words out of her mouth.
“No, it doesn’t,” Iris said flatly back. She hadn’t even bothered to wash it that morning, and Cheri had just told her it was basically a rat’s nest of knots. “So don’t lie right to my face.”
“I’m not!” A spontaneous thunderclap punctuated Opal’s protest, much to her chagrin. Whenever she and Iris got together, things always seemed to spin out of control.
“Then why are you being nice?” Iris challenged. “Scarlet told me she saw you in the crowd at Synchro de Mayo. She told me what you said.”
Opal shifted in her seat, glancing around the rest of the cafeteria. Everyone was ogling them, but as she went to ogle back they all looked away—Albert Feinstein hurriedly returning to the game on his player; Julie Nichols whispering to Emma Appleby, who bobbed her head as she chewed her thumb; Brad Hochoquatro shooting his balled-up brown paper lunch bag into a trash can.
“I just . . .” Opal faltered.
“And where are your substitute besties?” Iris pressed on, too impatient to wait for Opal to answer. “Your O+2 crew?”
Opal tugged down the sleeves of her dress, her fingertips clutching the cuffs. “I’m not totally sure,” she said. “After Karyn lost her tail, I think she got sent to some physical therapy place. And remember how I used to go to that all-girls’ academy?”
Iris gave a reluctant nod. She didn’t want to agree with Opal about anything, not even their history. But Opal had gone to an all-girls’ academy at the same time that Iris was away at astronaut-offspring boarding school. After four years apart, the two had reunited at Chronic Prep. In that very cafeteria, in fact.
“Well, BellaBritney is going there now,” Opal explained. “She said her parents hoped the discipline would teach her two selves to cooperate with each other.”
Iris was silent. Now that they were actually talking, instead of blasting each other with sunrays and lightning bolts, she almost felt sorry for Opaline, too.
Maybe Opal sensed an opening, a hint of the girl who had tried more than once to patch up their friendship. Swallowing hard, she took a chance. “Anyway, those two were more like my, um, followers than my friends,” she mumbled. “Not like how it was with you and . . . and the Ultra Violets.”
Knock me over with a peacock feather, Iris thought. If Scarlet hadn’t already warned her about their convo in the crowd, Iris might not have believed her ears. Is Opal . . . eating mumble pie?! She felt her mouth starting to smile. Until her brain reminded her heart how bummed out she was over Sebastian, and her lips set themselves straight again.
But Opal had seen that suggestion of a smile, and it was all the encouragement she needed. In a wavery voice, it all came spilling out.
“Iris, I know I’ve done some things, some bad things . . .”
“Like leading a mutant uprising?” Iris scoffed. “Or zombotomizing our entire class?” Mockery didn’t come naturally to Iris. But she’d been zapped too many times by Opaline to let her guard down now. She slumped back in her chair, her arms folded across her chest. “Yeah, those were pretty bad all right!”
Opal grimaced. Not that she could blame Iris, but her sarcasm came as a bit of a shock: She was usually lollipop-sweet. Opal didn’t expect this to be easy, though. And she couldn’t stop now.
“I’m sorry,” she confessed, as simply and sincerely as she could. Above just their table, it started to drizzle. Iris’s ultraviolet heat evaporated the spritz before it could mist her, although the humidity still made her snarled hair double with frizz. Opal stayed dry, too—the rain she created, even unconsciously, respected her. But Iris thought she saw water in her eyes.
“Once you
guys got superpowers,” Opal said, “all of a sudden you were so sparkly, and Cheri was so brilliant, and Scarlet so graceful—it just wasn’t fair! Because I was there that night in the FLab, too! And because . . .”
Opal’s voice broke, and the drizzle turned to droplets. As they splished against the tabletop, she paused, bowing her head and rubbing her temples. When she looked up again, the rain let up a little.
“And because I think I needed to feel powerful way more than any of you three,” Opal continued in a deliberately calm tone. “Scarlet was brave to begin with. Cheri was already popular. You were confident and artistic. I wasn’t any of those things—”
“Oh, Opal!” Iris blurted out, her heart softening. Opal held up a hand. Only so that she could keep talking while she still had the nerve. Iris did wince at the threat of a lightning strike, though.
“So when I finally grew them—grew superpowers—I guess it went to my head,” Opal explained. “To have mutants, or the captain of the mathletes, at my command . . .” She trailed off, her gaze drifting over to Albert again. “Well, you know the rest,” she said with a small shrug.
Iris stayed quiet this time, waiting to see if Opal was finished.
She wasn’t.
“I miss you guys.” Opal traced a finger through the puddle that had pooled on the tabletop. Tiny volts sparked off the water as she touched it. “Scarlet with her bad attitude, Cheri even when she’s ditzy, and . . . and . . . I know you’re mad at me, Iris, but you most of all. Will you take me back?”
It was a bombshell nearly as mind-blowing as the one BeauTek had made to package Opal’s poison perfume. Iris’s eyes widened in disbelief and her pupils shrank to dots, so that all Opal could see were two mesmerizing discs of violet-blue. Like a kaleidoscope, Iris’s face flashed through umpteen different emotions in a riot of colors. Each pattern passed by so quickly, Opal couldn’t focus on a single one. It was like watching a dream. The type of dream you don’t understand at all when you’re in it and, when you wake up from it, you can’t remember a thing about. Just the sensation of it. That it was beautiful.
