Sydney’s Outer Banks Blast

by Jean Fischer

  “Hi, Sydney!” the twins answered in unison. The Kessler twins often spoke in unison, Sydney had noticed. They were so much alike that Sydney still had trouble telling them apart, and she had known them for six years. The Kessler family owned a house near Sydney’s grandparents’ place. She knew they lived there year-round since Mr. Kessler ran a company that made recreational water vehicles and racing boats.

  “What are you guys doing here?” Sydney asked.

  “Hanging out,” they answered together.

  “This is my friend, Bailey Chang,” said Sydney.

  “I thought so!” said Marilyn.

  “I thought so, too,” Carolyn echoed. “You’re one of the Camp Club Girls. Sydney talks about you guys all the time.”

  Bailey slid into the bench at the picnic table. “Nice to meet you,” she said. “We just finished climbing the lighthouse.”

  “You did!” the girls exclaimed.

  “I’ve lived here since I was five, and I’ve never climbed it,” said Marilyn.

  “I haven’t either,” said Carolyn.

  They both looked at Sydney as she slid into the bench next to Bailey. “Okay, I confess. I hadn’t either,” she said.

  Bailey couldn’t believe her ears. “What do you mean, you hadn’t either? You acted like you’d climbed it a million times.”

  “I’ve always wanted to climb it,” Sydney told her. “Would you have gone if I’d acted scared?”

  Bailey thought for a second. “Well, no,” she conceded. “But I wish I had known.”

  Two odd-looking bikes were propped against the picnic table. Each had two seats, two sets of handlebars, and two sets of pedals. “Are those your bikes?” Bailey asked the twins.

  “They’re tandems,” said Carolyn.

  Marilyn nodded in agreement. “Bicycles built for two.” She took a lick of the chocolate ice cream that was melting in her cone.

  “How come you each have one?” Bailey wondered. “Can’t you both just ride on one?”

  “One of them belongs to our brothers,” said Carolyn. “The other one is ours.”

  “We just dropped them off at a friend’s house on the Sound,” said Marilyn. “They’re spending the night there.”

  “And we’re taking their bike home,” Carolyn added. She popped the last bit of ice-cream cone into her mouth and Marilyn did the same with hers. “You can ride back with us, if you want to,” she said. “We have our brothers’ helmets you can wear.”

  Bailey looked at Sydney hoping she would agree.

  “Okay,” Sydney answered. “We probably should get home soon anyway. Gramps said Nate Wright might try to take a cluster balloon flight off the beach this afternoon. That’ll be cool to watch.”

  “Who’s going to do what?” Bailey asked. She looked at her reflection in the side-view mirror of one of the tandem bikes and smoothed her jet-black hair.

  “Nate Wright is going to do a cluster balloon flight,” said Sydney. “He ties a bunch of extra large helium party balloons to a chair contraption and sails up into the sky. Then he releases the balloons gradually to come back down.”

  “Why would he want to do that?” Bailey asked.

  Carolyn climbed onto the front seat of one of the tandems and put on her helmet. “Mr. Wright’s an inventor,” she said, pointing for Bailey to get on the back seat.

  “Well, sort of,” said Marilyn, picking up the other bike and climbing onto the front seat. “He’s kind of strange. He’s always trying to invent weird ways to get around. Lately he’s been experimenting with cluster ballooning.”

  “Mr. Wright’s a distant relative of the Wright brothers,” Carolyn explained. “Usually, people cluster balloon in the early morning when there’s no breeze, but today, he’s doing it in the afternoon.”

  “We saw his son on the beach this morning,” Sydney said. “What’s his name? Drake?”

  “Yes, that’s Drake Wright, Nate Wright’s son,” Marilyn said. “He’s a beachcomber.”

  “They call him Digger,” said Carolyn.

  “He picks up junk along the beach and digs stuff out of the sand. Then he sells it to people who sell it in their shops or use it for crafts. Driftwood and glass floats and old fishing nets and stuff,” Marilyn added. “And he hardly ever talks.”

  Carolyn gave her bike a shove with one foot and then started to pedal. Bailey held tight to the handlebars. She didn’t know what to do when the pedals under her feet began to spin.

  “Don’t try to steer!” Sydney told her. “Just keep your feet on the pedals and help Carolyn push.”

  Soon the girls were riding down Schoolhouse Lane heading for Corolla Light. They were almost to Highway 12—the two-lane road that was the main road for the Outer Banks—when Sydney’s cell phone rang.

  “Can we stop for a second?” she asked Marilyn. The twins steered their bikes to the side of the road. Sydney pulled her cell phone out of the pocket of her shorts. She flipped it open. “Hello?”

  “Sydney,” said a concerned voice that Sydney recognized as her grandfather. “Where are you?”

  “We’re biking home with the Kessler twins,” Sydney answered. “We should be there in about ten minutes.”

  “Come straight home, and don’t stop anywhere,” said her grandfather. “A bad storm is coming, and I don’t want you girls out in it.”

  “Okay, Gramps,” said Sydney. “We’re on our way.” She folded the phone and slipped it back into her pocket. “There’s a storm coming,” she said. “Gramps wants us home.”

  “The sky does look kind of greenish and black over there,” said Bailey, pointing to the right. “Do you guys have tornado warning sirens here?”

  “I don’t know,” Sydney answered. “If they do, I’ve never heard one.”

  “Me neither,” said Marilyn, steering her bike back onto the road.

  “I haven’t either. We don’t usually have tornadoes here,” said Carolyn, following her.

  “They go off a lot in Peoria,” Bailey said. “Sometimes, the sky looks ugly like this, and then we get a tornado warning.”

  Suddenly a bolt of lightning sliced through the black clouds.

  Whoosh! The wind picked up. The girls pedaled as fast as they could. By the time they got to their street, big droplets of rain started to fall. Then the rain turned into a rushing waterfall that spilled onto the girls’ helmets and soaked their clothing. The twins made a perfect turn into Sydney’s driveway, and Sydney and Bailey hopped off the bikes. Then the Kesslers sped off toward home.

  Sydney’s grandparents stood on the upper deck of the beach house. “Hurry!” Gramps called to the girls. “Come on up here.”

  Sydney ran up the two flights of stairs with Bailey close behind.

  Crash! At the sound of thunder, Bailey nearly tripped on the last step. She caught the railing and climbed up onto the covered deck.

  Bailey, Sydney, and her grandparents stepped inside the sliding screen doors and watched the storm from the safety of the family room. The fierce purple cloud was right over their heads now. To the south, near the ocean’s horizon, the sky was clear and the sun was shining. But north of the beach house, the scene was very different. A long, thin, white tail dropped from the cloud until it met the ocean. It turned brown as it sucked up water.

  Bailey screamed. “Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness! It’s a tornado!”

  “If they’re over the water, they’re called waterspouts,” Sydney’s grandmother explained. “Then when they come to land, they’re called tornadoes.”

  Bailey squeezed Sydney’s arm.

  “It’s heading away from us,” Sydney said as the cone swept out to sea. “Pretty soon it’ll dwindle to nothing.”

  Gramps added, “We’re safe here, but can you imagine being in a sailboat out in the ocean? A decent-sized waterspout could easily drop on one of those and smash a small boat to smithereens. In fact, that did happen. There are so many shipwrecks near the Outer Banks that folks have lost count.”

  “Maybe that’
s what happened to the sailors on the ghost ship,” Sydney suggested. “They got sucked into a water spout.”

  Bailey watched the long, coiling twister disappear. Beyond it, in the distance, two more waterspouts formed as the ocean carried the storm away. The back edge of the dark cloud passed over the beach house now, and the rain turned to drizzle. Bailey wasn’t afraid anymore. She thought the tumbling waves and the waterspouts were awesome.

  “Lake Michigan has waterspouts, too,” she said as the sun broke through the clouds. “I remember reading about them in current events, but I’ve never seen one. Very cool, although a bit scary.”

  “Look over there,” said Sydney. The end of a rainbow was barely visible near the beach opposite of where the waterspout had been. Its colors gradually became bright, clear ribbons of red, orange, and yellow, blue, green, indigo, and violet.

  “See?” said Sydney’s grandmother. “God is sending us a message, just like He did to Noah on the ark. He’s telling us we don’t have to worry about the waterspout. It won’t hurt us. A rainbow is God’s way of saying, ‘I promise.’”

  “Let’s go stand in the end of it!” Bailey was already out the door and running down the stairs toward the beach. Sydney followed, but by the time they got to where it looked like the rainbow ended, they realized it was out over the ocean.

  “You can’t touch it,” Sydney explained when she caught up with Bailey. “Rainbows are sunlight bouncing off raindrops. I’ve chased them before, but you can’t catch them. They move with the rain.”

  Bailey looked at her sand-caked feet. “Hey, look!” she said. “I’m wearing sand shoes.”

  She dropped to her knees and began scooping wet sand into a big pile. “Come on, Syd, let’s make a sandcastle or something.”

  Sydney sat near her friend and helped form sand into a mound. “You know, don’t you, that the tide will come in and wash it away.”

  Bailey patted the sand with both hands, sculpting it into a tower. “I don’t care,” she said. “Building it is the fun part.”

  “I see something we can use,” said Sydney. A cylinder-shaped container was half-buried in the sand nearby. Sydney went to get it. “This’ll work,” she said. “We can put wet sand in here and mold it into turrets.”

  The container that Sydney found was a tall, insulated coffee mug. The top was screwed on so tight that she couldn’t get it off. She tipped the mug, and water dribbled out of the tiny hole on top. She shook it, and the inside rattled.

  “Something’s in here,” she said. Sydney shook the mug again, but nothing fell out. She shook it harder. Still nothing. Then she peeked into the hole.

  “I can’t see anything,” she said. “This is kind of gross. We should wash it or something.” She walked to the water’s edge and swished the mug in the ocean. Then, once more, she looked inside. Nothing. She turned the mug upside down and shook it hard and fast.

  A beam of light jiggled across the sand!

  “Bailey? I think it’s glowing!”

  “Huh?” said Bailey, who hadn’t been paying attention.

  “It’s glowing. The mug is glowing!” Sydney repeated.

  She turned the mug upright. A bright beam of light streamed out of the tiny opening. She put her eye to the opening, but the light was too bright to see what was inside.

  Bailey put her hand a few inches above the tiny hole. A small circle of light reflected on the palm of her hand.

  “Weird,” she said. “What do you think this is?”

  “Beats me,” Sydney answered. “I’ve never seen a coffee mug that lights up.”

  “Me neither,” Bailey replied. “Maybe it’s not a coffee mug at all. Maybe we’ve stumbled onto something else.”

  “Like what?” Sydney asked, handing her the mug.

  Bailey sat down and chewed her lip, a nervous habit that she vowed to break. “Like, maybe, some sort of secret weapon,” she said. “Something the UFO left behind.”

  “If it were a secret weapon, we’d probably be dead by now,” Sydney told her. “Your imagination is getting away from you again.”

  The girls sat for a few minutes pondering the odd gadget and then—

  “Hey, the light went out!” Bailey exclaimed.

  UFO!

  The object was indeed strange. It seemed to light up only after Bailey or Sydney shook it for a while. Then, it cast an eerie glow for about five minutes and went dark. They brought it back to the beach house, and Sydney put it on a metal bookshelf in the guest room. She had the idea that they might try to dissect it later.

  When the Camp Club Girls met in their chat room after supper, Sydney told them about the mug.

  Kate: A coffee mug that glows from the inside? Why would you need it to light up inside?

  Alexis: Maybe it’s so you can see how much coffee’s left.

  McKenzie: But you have to shake it to make it light. That doesn’t make sense, because if there’s hot coffee, you’ll get burned when it leaks out of the hole on top.

  Elizabeth: I think you can close the hole. My mom’s coffee mug has a flippy thing you turn to open and close the hole. Oh, and by the way, the kind of mug you have is a travel mug. Some of them aren’t supposed to be submerged in water. At least my mom’s can’t.

  Sydney: Maybe it got dropped in the ocean and the salt water wrecked it or something, and then it washed up on the beach.

  Bailey took the laptop from Sydney.

  Bailey: Hi, Bettyboo. Hi, everyone else.

  Elizabeth: You know I don’t like being called Bettyboo.

  Bailey: Just kidding, Beth. I have a theory about the mug. It was half buried in the sand. I don’t think it washed up on the shore. Someone put it there. I think it’s some kind of secret weapon.

  She bit her lip hard and waited for someone to reply.

  Alexis: Something like that happened in one old alien movie I saw.

  McKenzie: Why would you think it’s a weapon?

  Bailey: I don’t know. It’s too creepy to be anything ordinary.

  She pushed the laptop back to Sydney and went to get the mug from the bookshelf. She grabbed the handle, but the mug wouldn’t budge.

  “Hey,” she said. “It’s stuck.”

  “What do you mean?” Sydney asked.

  “It’s glued to the bookshelf, Bozo,” said Bailey. “I can’t pick it up!”

  “Oh for goodness’ sake,” said Sydney. She set the computer on the twin bed, where they had been cyber-chatting, and she went to help Bailey.

  Sydney grasped the mug’s handle. Bailey was right. It was stuck. She pulled hard. The mug let loose, almost catapulting her backward.

  “See?” said Bailey. She examined the spot where the mug had been. “I don’t see any glue or other sticky stuff.”

  Sydney moved closer to inspect the bare spot. All at once, the mug shot out of her hand and stuck itself to the shelf. “It’s a magnet!” Sydney gasped. “Look at this.” She yanked the mug away from the metal shelf and then let it fly back. “I didn’t notice it when I put the mug here before.”

  “Way cool!” Bailey squealed.

  Sydney hurried back to the laptop to tell the girls. When she looked at the screen, she found a string of messages.

  Alexis: Syd? Bailey? Where are you?

  McKenzie: Hey, did you log off without saying good-bye?

  Kate: Where did everybody go?

  Sydney: Sorry. Bailey went to get the mug, and we found out it’s a magnet! It was stuck to my metal bookshelf.

  Kate: DANGER! DANGER!Do not—I repeat—DO NOT put that mug anywhere near the computer.

  Bailey was just about to plop down on the bed next to Sydney with the mug in her hand. “No!” Sydney yelled. She shoved Bailey off the bed and onto the floor.

  “Hey!” Bailey protested. She sat there looking startled. “What did you do that for?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Sydney. “Kate just wrote that the mug is very dangerous—”

  Bailey shuddered and flung the coffee mug over her shou
lder. It landed somewhere across the room. “What’s the matter with it?” she asked nervously.

  “You didn’t let me finish,” said Sydney. “It’s dangerous to put it near the computer.”

  Sydney told the girls what had just happened.

  Alexis: Well, at least now you know that it’s not a bomb. The way you two are messing with it, it would have gone off by now.

  Bailey joined Sydney on the bed. She read what Alex had just written.

  Bailey: Not funny. Why is it dangerous to put a coffee mug next to a laptop?

  Kate: I read a magnet will kill the pixels on your computer screen, so it’s best to keep the mug away from it. Can you take a video with your cell phone?

  Sydney: No, but I can with my digital camera.

  Kate: Good. Stand away from the computer and shoot a video to show us what you do to make it light up.

  Sydney retrieved the mug from a corner of the room.

  “You hold it,” said Bailey. “I don’t want to touch it.”

  “It won’t bite you,” Sydney answered. She got her digital camera out of her dresser drawer.

  Bailey took the pink camera out of Sydney’s hand and turned it on. She switched the button to VIDEO MODE. “All set,” she said. “Ready?” Bailey pushed another button and started recording. “The case of the mysterious cup. Take One!”

  Sydney held the mug and shook it hard, but nothing happened.

  “It stopped recording,” said Bailey. “The LCD says, ‘OUT OF MEMORY.’”

  “My camera only takes a forty-five-second video,” Sydney answered. “Don’t start recording as soon as I shake it.”

  Bailey deleted the first video, and the girls tried again. Sydney shook the mug hard and fast, but again, the time ran out before anything happened.

  Sydney sighed. “Hang on a minute. I’ll shake the mug to see how long it takes to light up.” Sydney shook the mug hard, but it wouldn’t light. “Bailey, I think you broke it.”