by Ginger Rue
Also, in another classroom we passed on our way outside, there was a boy who had fallen asleep at his desk, and three other boys were crowded around him, smiling. It looked to me like they were going to do something to the sleeping boy to embarrass him. So I sat him up in his desk and pulled his eyes open, because when time started again, the other boys would think the sleeping boy had suddenly woken up, and then they would probably scream in terror and embarrass themselves instead of him.
“Friend of yours?” Ford asked.
“Never seen him before in my life,” I replied.
“Then why are we taking time out of our mission?”
“As someone who can appreciate the beauty of an occasional nap at school, I just thought I should have his back.” I patted the boy’s shoulder. “Carry on, my good man.”
“To the bridge,” Ford reminded me.
When we got outside near the Dumpster, I asked Ford, “Is it still there?”
“Indeed it is,” Ford said. “My, but it’s a beauty. I do wish you could see it.”
“And you don’t see it when time isn’t stopped, right?”
“Correct. I’ve tested that theory on several occasions now. I come here often to search for the bridge when time is passing. No bridge.”
“Let’s try to walk across it,” I suggested.
“No way!” said Ford.
“Not by yourself,” I clarified. “Both of us together.”
“I doubt that will work. You can’t even feel it when you reach out your hand.”
“Well, we’ve got to try something,” I said.
Ford sighed. “I suppose so.” He reached out for my hand, and we took a few steps. “I can’t believe it!” Ford exclaimed. “I’m actually walking on it! This is incredible!”
I hated to break it to him, but the only thing I was walking across was a rotted-out stump. And from what I could tell, Ford was just stepping in dirt.
But then, a few steps later something changed.
I fell right into a hole. It wasn’t a big one. It was like maybe where a small tree had been pulled up. Ford would have fallen too, but I guess he got distracted—and brave—because he let go of my hand and kept on walking.
Right across the air!
16
A Short Walk on a Long Bridge
“Hey, Ford,” I called, trying not to sound too urgent. I didn’t want to freak him out while he was walking on a bridge that did not exist in our time period. “I don’t mean to alarm you or anything, but maybe you could come back this way?”
Ford didn’t seem to be listening. He was muttering words like “astonishing” and “remarkable.”
“Hey, Ford,” I repeated. “Why dontcha come on back this way now, okay?”
He turned around. “Aleca, what are you doing in that hole? Get back up on the bridge!”
“Yeah, that’s just the thing. There is no bridge. Not for me, anyway. Which is why you probably need to come on back and let’s do some figuring out.”
Ford suddenly realized he was walking alone on his out-of-its-proper-time bridge. He gasped and ran back to me.
It was only a few steps, but a few steps in a situation like this one seemed to be a lot.
“This is the most incredible experience of my life,” he said as he helped me out of the hole. “I don’t know what to make of it.”
“Me neither,” I replied. “We’ve got to get Aunt Zephyr on the case.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t teleport here immediately when you stopped time,” he said. “You’re supposed to be in big trouble if you do that again.”
“Yeah, well, like I told you, Aunt Zephyr isn’t exactly teleporting up a storm these days,” I said. “Did I mention that when she got back from Wyoming last night, she landed on our roof?”
“No,” said Ford. “But that doesn’t sound good.”
“She’s not in much of a mood to figure out Wonder stuff,” I said. “She’s all depressed.”
“Well, if there’s anything that should pull someone out of a depression, it must be something as exciting as this!” Ford suggested.
“Maybe you’re right,” I agreed. “Let’s get back to where we’re supposed to be. I’ll start time again, and then when I get home, I’ll fill Aunt Zephyr in on everything that happened here and see what she thinks.”
“And I’ll add all this to my data,” Ford said. “I’ll analyze it for any possible connections.”
“You do that,” I replied. Although, I didn’t know what good any of that would do or what it even meant, really. But I hoped Ford did.
• • •
I let Ford catch up with his class at recess, and I went back inside. “Aleca Zamm!” I said. And just like that, time started right back up. I could hear the boys screaming in the room where I’d opened the sleeping boy’s eyes real big. I felt good about that one. I walked into my classroom.
“Are you feeling better?” asked Mrs. Floberg.
“Better than what?” I replied. She looked at me funny, and then I remembered that I had made all those hacking noises so that I could be excused to the water fountain. “Oh, I mean, yes,” I said. “I am feeling much, much better!”
And I really was, because when I got home, I was going to get to fill Aunt Zephyr in on what had just happened with Ford’s bridge.
I couldn’t wait to see how excited she would be!
17
Saving Aunt Zephyr from the Soaps
That afternoon when Mom picked me up at the car-pool area, Aunt Zephyr wasn’t with her.
“Aleca, something seems very wrong with your great-aunt,” Mom said, sounding worried. “Do you know anything about it?”
I played dumb. “What do you mean?”
“She seems . . . well, depressed. She just moped around the house all day. It’s like the fire has gone out of her. Do you have any idea what might be the matter?”
“I can’t think of any reason why Aunt Zephyr should be depressed,” I answered. And see, I wasn’t really lying. I said it really carefully so that it wouldn’t be a lie, because my lying had been getting out of hand and I seriously needed to cut that out. And now that I had this new information to refresh Aunt Zephyr, I really did think there was no reason for Aunt Zephyr to be depressed. So I was technically telling the truth.
“Well, maybe you can do something to cheer her up,” Mom said.
When we got home, I saw what Mom meant. “See what you can do,” Mom whispered to me before leaving the room.
Aunt Zephyr was pretty much a wreck. She wasn’t wearing any makeup. Her hair was a mess. And she was wearing her plaid bathrobe and house shoes. She was watching, of all things, a soap opera.
“Hi, Aunt Zephyr,” I said.
She sort of grunted at me and kept her eyes glued to the television set.
“Aren’t you going to lecture me for stopping time today?” I asked.
“Meh,” she replied, shrugging.
Wow. This was serious.
I thought maybe I could ease her into a conversation. “What is that on TV?” I asked.
“The Corrupt and the Reckless,” she replied.
“Oh,” I said. And then I guess maybe I didn’t try easing into the conversation for long enough. I tried to start telling her about Ford and the bridge. She was not even interested. She shushed me so that she could hear the TV show’s dialogue, which was not even worth hearing, if you want my opinion.
I decided to try to be patient and give it another couple of minutes. I sat down and watched a little bit of the show with her. A doctor and a nurse were in a surgery room. The doctor was pointing a gun at the nurse. He was mad because she wouldn’t be his girlfriend.
“Aunt Zephyr,” I tried again. But she shushed me once more.
Finally I couldn’t help myself. “No offense, but this show is way dumb,” I remarked. “Because if you want someone to love you back, probably pointing a gun at them is not the way to make that happen.”
“Yes,” Aunt Zephyr agreed. “Bu
t I just like watching people with bigger problems than mine. It gives me some perspective. At least no one’s pointing a gun at me.”
“And during surgery!” I continued. “That’s got to break all kinds of doctoring laws.”
“I’m sure,” she replied.
“Aunt Zephyr,” I said, “this isn’t like you. You’re not the kind of lady to watch people do dumb things on TV; you’re the kind who is out doing them herself!” I thought about how that had come out. “I mean, not dumb things, but things,” I reassured her. “Things that aren’t dumb. Good things. Wonder-ful things! And, boy, do I have something wonderfully Wonder-ful to tell you about! Something exciting!”
“Oh, really?” She said it flatly, like she wasn’t convinced.
“Yes!” I insisted. “Ford not only saw his bridge today. . . . He walked on it!”
Aunt Zephyr turned her face away from the television. I could almost see a tiny bit of that sparkle in her eye again. Then she said, “Tell me more.”
I filled her in on everything that had happened.
“There’s got to be a way that you and I can see that bridge!” I told her. “Isn’t there anything we can do?”
“I wouldn’t have the first idea how to go about it,” she replied. “But I suppose we could make an attempt.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” I exclaimed. “Let’s attempt! Who knows what we might be able to do as Wonders if we put our minds to it? Can we please—pretty please with sugar on top—attempt?”
Aunt Zephyr grinned. “Little miss, I’m with you,” she said. “Attempt we shall!”
Turn the page for a sneak peek at Aleca’s next time-stopping adventure:
The Importance of Proper Footwear for Invisible Bridges
I didn’t see any good reason why we should wait until tomorrow to try to see Ford’s bridge, but Aunt Zephyr saw three good reasons.
First, it was dark outside, and she figured that if we were going to try to make seven-year-old Ford walk across a bridge from the past—one that didn’t exist anymore and that only he could see—we ought to wait until it was at least daytime to make it somewhat less scary for him. Second, she needed to rest up because her teleporting was way on the fritz and she’d had a hectic day of ending up in places she didn’t intend to go. Third, none of us could drive to school. You’d think that a lady as old as my great aunt Zephyr would have a driver’s license, but why drive when you can teleport? She’d never bothered to learn how to drive a car, so we needed to wait for Mom to take me to school the next day, since the bridge was just a few steps away from school.
I was so excited, I could hardly sleep the night before. The past few days—since I turned ten—had been pretty exciting. I had found out I could stop time just by saying my name, Aleca Zamm. That meant I was a Wonder, a person with a special, magical ability. Like my great aunt Zephyr and her brothers, who had also become Wonders when they turned ten. Before I knew I was a Wonder, I didn’t think there was anything special about me at all. But now here I was, feeling very special, what with my ability to stop time, my teleporting great aunt, and my new friend who could see stuff from the past and the future. Like this bridge we were going to try to cross. That is not exactly something just anybody gets to do every day! I could hardly wait to get this day started!
But since we couldn’t exactly depend on Aunt Zephyr to be able to teleport to school, we also had to come up with an excuse for why she’d be going with me. We decided we’d tell Mom that Aunt Zephyr was going to be giving a talk at my school about geography because she had been everywhere in the world at least twice.
“I suppose it should go without saying,” my mom said when we told her the excuse the next morning. “But you won’t be mentioning to the children that you teleported to these distant lands, will you?”
“Oh, Harmony!” Aunt Zephyr chuckled. “Sometimes we don’t tell people the whole story for their own good. Don’t you agree?”
Mom did agree. She just didn’t know we hadn’t told her the whole story. Because the whole story was that Aunt Zephyr would, technically, be lecturing the class about world geography, but nobody would hear it because time would be stopped and they’d all be frozen. But she would still give a short lecture, even if no one heard. That is what you call a loophole, and lately, I’ve learned how to find lots of those. When you stop time as much as I do, if you don’t want to get in trouble, you have to know where to look for loopholes.
I did wish Aunt Zephyr had toned down her outfit, but Aunt Zephyr rarely toned down anything. Not her outfits, hairdos, or even the things she said. It was kind of embarrassing walking into school with her that morning. She was wearing a dress with multicolored sequins the size of pennies all over it. And as if the sequins weren’t enough, the dress also had a lace collar and hem and big buttons down the front. She was also wearing a scarf in her hair, big hoop earrings, and high-heeled shoes with fringe that looked like fireworks exploding.
“Why is everyone staring at us?” she asked as we walked into the building.
“Because you are wearing every color of the rainbow and you are shiny,” I replied.
“I will have you know that this dress is from one of the biggest designers in Italy,” Aunt Zephyr said. “Obviously none of these children know fashion.”
“Obviously they’re only in pre-k through fifth grade,” I said. “And obviously you are not in Italy but in Prophet’s Porch, Texas. And obviously, it is eight o’clock in the morning and we are in a school. What did you expect?”
“Young lady, it is not every day that I attempt something as monumental as merging Wonder abilities. This occasion calls for something special!”
“You sure nailed ‘special,’ ” I said. And I guess she had a point, even if everybody was looking at us like we were freaks. Because we were going to try to do something super amazing: tap into Ford’s power.
See, whenever I stopped time, Ford could see things from the past and the future, and the last few times he’d seen this really cool old bridge. He could even touch it and walk on it. But he was scared to walk all the way across it by himself. I couldn’t see the bridge at all, and when I’d tried to walk on it with him, I’d fallen. Not far, but still enough to know there was no bridge there for me. But Ford had kept on walking, and to me, it had looked like he was walking on air. I couldn’t stand it. I had to walk on that bridge too, and see where it went. So we’d cooked up this plan with Aunt Zephyr to see if we could figure out how.
“Hi, Aleca. Hi, Ms. Zephyr.” It was my best friend, Maria. She stayed kind of far from us and I didn’t blame her. The last time she’d been around Aunt Zephyr, Aunt Zephyr had rubbed noses with her. It is a greeting in one of the countries Aunt Zephyr likes to teleport to. Maria had been pretty weirded out (you would be too if a complete stranger with orange-sherbet-colored hair suddenly stuck her nose on your nose).
“Hi, Maria,” I said. “You’re probably wondering what Aunt Zephyr is doing at school today.” Well, here we go again, I thought. I was going to have to make up a story to tell Maria. I had been doing that a lot lately, and I felt bad about it. I couldn’t tell Maria the truth, because Wonder-ing is super top secret. That is because Aunt Zephyr says that Duds (regular people) might be scared of Wonders, or that bad Duds might try to hurt us in some way. So we could not tell anyone. Especially not people who could not keep a secret, like Maria. Maria is the best friend I ever had, and I so wanted to tell her that I had magical powers and so did my aunt and my new friend Ford, but Aunt Zephyr had forbidden it. I had to keep making up reasons for the strange things that had been happening. Lucky for me that Maria was so sweet and didn’t really have sneakiness radar. Otherwise she would have been hip to my scams.
“I was kind of wondering,” Maria admitted. She was eyeing Aunt Zephyr’s getup, and who could blame her? “Wow, don’t those shoes hurt your feet?”
“Yes, they absolutely do!” Aunt Zephyr beamed. “And thank you for noticing! I do hate to suffer for fashion and
not have anyone notice.”
“Wait,” I said. “You’re suffering? On purpose? Why in the world would you do that?”
“Why, vanity, of course!” replied Aunt Zephyr. “What other reason could there be? My toes are crammed into these things like useless knowledge in the brain the night before a big test. And every so often, one of my calves has a muscle spasm that would knock a professional wrestler to his or her knees! But these shoes complete my outfit in the most spectacular of ways. Don’t you agree?”
“I have some rain boots in my cubby if you want to borrow them,” Maria offered. I was just glad that the discussion of shoes had distracted Maria from her original question, about what Aunt Zephyr was doing at school.
“Here, Aunt Zephyr. Maybe you ought to have a seat on this bench and rest your calves and your crammed toes,” I suggested. “Maria, I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”
Once Maria left and Aunt Zephyr hobbled over to the bench, I sat down beside her and whispered, “Your shoes really hurt that bad?”
“Terrifically,” she replied.
“Aunt Zephyr, no offense, but what were you thinking?!”
“I already told you, I was thinking about how beautifully the fringe accents my dress!”
“No,” I said. “I mean, did you really think that this was the best day to wear uncomfortable shoes? The whole purpose of bringing you to school was to see if we could walk across Ford’s bridge. It would be hard to walk across a whole regular bridge in those things, but this is a magical bridge! Don’t you think it would be best not to have to worry about uncomfortable feet at a time like this?”
“Hmmm,” Aunt Zephyr pondered. “I guess it was pretty silly of me.”