Hazy Bloom and the Tomorrow Power

by Jennifer Hamburg

  Aunt Jenna laughed and said there was a word for my mood, which was jubilant, a word I instantly loved. I repeated it over and over. “Jubilant, jubilant. J-u-b-i-l-a-n-t!”

  I had to call Elizabeth and tell her right away about my tomorrow vision.

  Unfortunately, Elizabeth’s mom said my sidekick couldn’t talk because she was busy experimenting with cupcake recipes for the contest, and how was my cupcake research coming?

  Oops.

  It was possible Elizabeth was going to be a little bit mad that according to her detailed plan, this weekend I was supposed to be finding the best cupcake recipe and instead I was, well, not. But then I decided maybe she’d be so happy about the substitute thing that she’d forget all about it.

  13

  The next day, Monday, Milo’s alarm blared so loudly it knocked me out of his bed and onto the floor. He was still sound asleep. I was thinking about hiding his underwear in the freezer to get him back when I remembered the substitute. And I instantly felt a hundred times better. I got dressed from the pile of clothes on the floor, and it wasn’t until I was washing my face in the bathroom that I got a good look at what I’d put on, which was a stretchy yellow skirt I hadn’t worn since first grade and my brother’s Pokémon hoodie (how did that end up with my stuff?). It didn’t matter. Today was going to be great!

  At school, I eagerly peeked in the doorway of our classroom looking for the substitute. He wasn’t there yet. I skipped down the hall to tell Elizabeth the news, but as soon as she saw me, she insisted on speaking first.

  “We need to discuss your clothing situation,” she said.

  “I’m living in my brother’s room!” I said defensively. “But anyway, guess what?” I said. “We’re having a substitute today! For real live!”

  “How do you know?” asked Lila, who I guess had overheard me.

  “Yeah, how do you know?” Mapefrl said, drifting toward us. “Did Mrs. Agnes call you and tell you?” he asked sarcastically.

  “No. But trust me. I have my ways of knowing.” I winked at Elizabeth, because she knew how I knew.

  “Hazy Bloom, what’s wrong with your eye?” Elizabeth said.

  Okay, fine. I don’t know how to wink.

  Mapefrl was clearly trying to be extra-annoying today because then he said, “Fine. If you say there’s a sub, prove it.”

  “Prove it how?” I didn’t like where this was going.

  “Play a prank on the sub,” he said.

  I gulped. I have never played a prank on anyone before, unless you count distracting The Baby so I could eat his graham crackers or putting toothpaste in my brother’s soccer shoes. (But I only did that once. Okay, three times.) I certainly have never played a prank at school. Or on a grown-up.

  So I said, “No way, buster. Not doing it.”

  Mapefrl smirked. “I knew it. You’d never do anything like that. You’re too scared.”

  Okay, here was the thing: I wasn’t going to take that from Mapefrl. I wasn’t scared and I was going to prove it. Besides, the good news about playing a prank on a sub was that you couldn’t get in trouble with your teacher because they weren’t there, hence the sub (spelling word: hence, not sub). I snuck into the empty classroom and put together a prank plan. First, I was going to turn all the student desks backward. Then I would open all the windows. Then I’d flip on the radio in the back of the classroom so rock music would start blaring. Then I would take some old gummy fish from the bottom of my backpack and stick them on the teacher’s chair.

  I started putting my plan into action and turned the first desk around. This’ll show Mapefrl. It will be the best prank in the history of ever.

  Then Mrs. Agnes walked in.

  Uh-oh. For real live.

  * * *

  Here’s a question.

  How was I supposed to know that Mrs. Agnes was going to be there today, and that later in the morning her computer screen would go haywire and since the regular computer guy, Mr. Tennison, was on vacation in Aruba, a new computer guy who none of us knew would come in to fix her screen, and he was the one in the checkered shirt sitting at her desk in my vision?

  Also, where is Aruba? I wonder if it’s near Mozambique.

  I almost asked Mrs. Agnes but then thought better of it. The other kids had gone out for recess and she had just had a “little chat” with me about my supposedly snooping in her desk the other day and my attempted prank. I apologized like I was supposed to but I could tell she didn’t believe me. Then she gave me a “very stern warning” and said I’d better choose my actions from now on “very carefully” because I was on “very thin ice.” I wasn’t sure what ice had to do with my thinking there’d be a substitute, or why she was even talking about ice because it was spring. And then her comments reminded me about my ice-skating rink on Mars and how I’ll definitely need an effective advertising campaign to attract customers (Hey, I guess the word campaign does come up after all!).

  The point is, this was all my tomorrow power’s fault. If I hadn’t had any visions to begin with, my teacher wouldn’t be accusing me of being a snoop and I wouldn’t have wrongly thought there was a sub. For the first time, I wished the visions would just stop for a little while. Lately they had been causing nothing but trouble. Plus, Elizabeth kept reminding me about our cupcake plan and how we needed to stay on schedule because it’s “our dream” (her dream) to go to theater camp and therefore we must win. Great. Now on top of everything else, I had two days to get organized to make fifty cupcakes from scratch.

  The one bright spot was that I was the only one in my class who got the bonus word right on our surprise spelling test: jubilant.

  14

  After the substitute-who-wasn’t-a-substitute fiasco, I had no more visions for three whole days, and that was just fine with me. I used that time to get back on track with my space mission, break in my new rain boots (I actually kind of liked them now), and make cupcakes for the bake sale.

  Well, by “make cupcakes,” I mean that I took some of the ingredients from the pantry. The actual making part was what I forgot to do. I didn’t mean to forget, it’s just that on my way to get Mom so she could help me, I got distracted by an urgent matter, which was choosing an email address that I could check from Mars (Dad said I could get my own account when I turned ten, and who knows how long I’ll be up there hanging out in space? Especially if my ice-skating business takes off). The point is, I decided on the following: hazybloomisonmars@onmarsforreallive.com. Also, I completely forgot about the cupcakes.

  Suddenly, it was Wednesday night, and according to Elizabeth’s plan, we had to bring all our cupcakes to school the next day. Only, I had zero cupcakes to bring. And I couldn’t even quickly throw some together from a boxed mix (you do remember that rule, right? I hope so, for your own sake). I had a feeling Elizabeth was not going to be pleased.

  * * *

  “You didn’t make any cupcakes? None?” Elizabeth bellowed from her desk the next morning. I hadn’t seen her until now because Dad had driven Milo and me to school on account of us running a little late, which was completely Milo’s fault.

  Fine, it was my fault. I wanted to wear my purple stripy shirt and had to look all over the house ten times before finally discovering it wadded up in The Baby’s diaper drawer. Seriously, who puts away stuff in our house? The point is, Elizabeth was furious, just as I’d predicted.

  “Today is Thursday,” she whispered angrily because now Mrs. Agnes was handing out worksheets for our science unit on emperor penguins. “The carnival is Saturday! How are we supposed to make a cupcake tower without all the cupcakes? We can’t, that’s how!”

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “It’s just, I was working on my space mission and then I got another vision and—”

  “You got another vision?” Elizabeth’s expression went from angry and huffy to curious and maybe a little crazy, then landed right back on mad. It was fascinating. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded.

  “Because … I’
ve been waiting for you to stop yelling at me?” I thought a little witty humor might calm her down. It didn’t.

  She leaned forward and spoke to me like every word was a separate, important piece of information. “You. Need. To. Tell. Me. Every. Vision. Do you think you can figure out these things all on your own? Well, you cannot!”

  Mrs. Agnes snapped her fingers at us, then stared at me extra-hard to remind me about my very thin ice.

  We were quiet for a minute, not just because of Mrs. Agnes but because I was waiting for Elizabeth to decide which emotion she’d like to go with next. Finally she gave me a tiny smile. “So? Tell me about the vision. What did you see?”

  Ha! She just had to know. It’s like they say: “curiosity fed the cat when you let it out of the bag.” At least I think that’s what they say, although someone should tell them it makes absolutely no sense. Also, who are “they”?

  Anyway, I answered her. “Eggs,” I said. “That’s what I saw. A carton of eggs.”

  “Interesting,” Elizabeth said, even though a carton of eggs was the most uninteresting thing I could think of in the whole world, for real live. “I wonder what it means?”

  I wondered the same thing. The vision had come just as I was drifting off to sleep last night, and I had been sure it meant we would be having eggs for breakfast. But this morning when I’d asked, Mom had said we were all out.

  So really, when else would I see eggs? I told all of this to Elizabeth, who nodded very thoughtfully but then just said, “Hm.”

  In my opinion, hm is not a very sidekick-y thing to say, but that’s just me.

  But then, Elizabeth pointed out the window, a slow smile forming. “I think I solved your egg mystery,” she said.

  There, in the athletic field behind our school, a group of fifth graders were starting to set up for the Spring Spectacular. At the far end, three kids were unloading a bunch of egg cartons from a giant crate onto a small red wagon. One of the kids was holding a sign: EGG TOSS.

  In case you don’t know what an egg toss is, it’s a game where you throw an egg back and forth with someone and try not to break it or you’ll get gooey egg yolk all over the place, which has never happened to me because I am an excellent egg tosser. (I mean egg-cellent egg tosser. Ha-ha.) The point is, I was suddenly in the mood for an omelet. Also, my vision was now making a little more sense. I had found the eggs. But what about them? Was there going to be an egg accident? An egg emergency? I hadn’t wanted another vision, but now that it had happened, I needed to find out what it was all about. After all, it was kind of my job as a possible superhero.

  “Hazel and Elizabeth, please get away from the window and back to your desks,” Mrs. Agnes snapped. I turned to her.

  “Mrs. Agnes, may I have a hall pass? Bathroom.”

  Elizabeth looked at me, alarmed. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Preventing doom,” I said, all superhero-y.

  “Now?”

  “Yuppers,” I said.

  “You can’t!” Elizabeth insisted. “You could get in big trouble, Hazy Bloom. And I don’t want anything getting in the way of us winning the cupcake contest and going to theater camp. It’s our dream!”

  (Her dream.)

  Anyway, I’m not exactly proud of this, but here’s what I did next: I ignored my sidekick. Maybe I was growing into my superhero role, but at that moment I knew something was going to happen with the eggs, and it was up to me, Hazy Bloom, to figure out what it was and how to stop it.

  Also, I really did have to go to the bathroom.

  15

  I crept out of the girls’ bathroom and looked up and down the hallway. Empty. Time to make my move.

  I ran toward the door that led outside to the field. I hesitated—was I making a mistake? I didn’t want to do anything to get in trouble again and fall through the very thin ice—whatever that meant. On the other hand, I knew that I had to take drastic steps to prevent doom.

  I pushed open the door and made my way over to the three kids, who had just finished unloading the last egg carton onto the wagon. I could now see that one of the kids was Milo’s friend Kingston, who was like the fifth-grade version of Mapefrl (I call him Fgvomapefrl). Here’s why: instead of helping the other two kids stack the eggs, or arrange the eggs, or pull the wagon with the eggs, or do anything helpful with the eggs, Kingston was pretending to crack the eggs over another kid’s head.

  When he saw me, he called out: “Hey, Milo’s sister! Only fifth graders allowed!”

  Their teacher came over. “Young lady? Shouldn’t you be in Mrs. Agnes’s classroom?”

  I thought fast. “Oh, yeah, but we’re doing a science lesson and … um, we needed some … dirt.” I pointed to the ground.

  “Oh, what’s the lesson about?” the teacher asked with interest.

  I paused. “Penguins,” I said. I have no clue why anyone would need dirt for a lesson on penguins. But it was all I could think of.

  I bent down and scooped up a handful of dirt, then realized I had nothing to put it in, so I just stuck it in my pants pocket.

  The teacher arched an eyebrow. Then she carried on with the carnival setup.

  Kingston was now bothering a girl painting a ticket booth by dangling an egg over her head. I remembered that girl from a project she once did with Milo. She was nice.

  “Stop it,” the girl was saying, waving him away with her paintbrush.

  “Stop it!” Kingston mimicked. He might be even more annoying than the original Mapefrl, and that’s saying a lot. The other two kids were totally encouraging him, too. Or maybe I should say, “egging him on,” ha-ha. Okay, fine, this was no time for jokes.

  The teacher told Kingston to “cool it” and he finally stopped tormenting (spelling word) the poor girl and got back to his actual job of pulling the wagon. They were now headed up the small but steep grassy hill in the middle of the field that in kindergarten I called “Roly-Poly Guacamole” because first of all, it was fun to roll down, and second of all, I was really into Mexican food at the time. But now there were three annoying boys pulling a wagon of eggs up it. At least the nice girl was safely back to painting.

  The teacher told the kids she was going inside to get some supplies, and as soon as she did, the boys dropped the handle of the wagon right there at the top of the hill. Then, Kingston popped open an egg carton and he and his friends started throwing eggs back and forth.

  Kingston had his back to the wagon, and the other two kids had run down to the bottom. With each throw, Kingston inched closer to the wagon, which, may I remind you, was stuffed with cartons of raw eggs. One slip, and he would send the wagon careening straight back down the hill … right into the nice girl’s ticket booth.

  “Pop-up!” called one of the boys from the bottom of the hill, flinging an egg high into the air. The other boy cackled as Kingston took a giant step backward, his arms stretched up, and I knew this was it. He was going to knock the wagon down the hill and into the ticket booth—and I couldn’t let that happen. So I did what any superhero would do in this situation.

  I screamed. “Nooo-oooooooooooooooo!” Then I closed my eyes, waiting for the sound of a wagon crashing and eggs exploding everywhere.

  But there was no crash. No exploding. Instead, I opened my eyes and saw Kingston staring at me. He was holding the egg the other kid had thrown. I guess he’d caught it after all. Which means I got another vision wrong.

  “What is wrong with you?” he yelled. The other kids were now looking at me, too, with bewilderment (spelling word but not really the point in this humiliating moment).

  I stammered, trying to figure out what to say.

  That’s when I heard loud, angry knocks coming from inside a classroom. My classroom. I squinted and saw Mrs. Agnes standing at the window, gesturing angrily for me to get inside.

  I believe I had just fallen through the very thin ice.

  16

  As a consequence of sneaking outside during class, I was taken off the bake sale a
nd put on the cleanup crew with Mapefrl. I also had to stay inside during recess, which was completely unfair.

  I watched through the window as everyone else ran around having fun while I sat inside with Mrs. Agnes and her dumb fabric apple. I turned to her. “Mrs. Agnes, I’m sorry I snuck outside during science, but it was to prevent doom, for real live!”

  “Doom?” Mrs. Agnes looked at me like I was a Martian, even though I, of all people, understand that Martians are completely fictional. She was clearly not interested in my excuses.

  Then there was the issue of Elizabeth. “Didn’t I tell you not to go outside this morning, Hazy Bloom? Yes, I did!” she blustered later at lunch when I finally got out of my prison sentence with Mrs. Agnes. “Now … it’s just me!” she said, pointing to herself to remind us who “me” was. “How am I supposed to finish making the cupcakes, decorate them all, and arrange every single one around the cupcake tower so they’re perfectly spaced and attractive from all angles, all by myself? It’s impossible!” She pushed away her lunch tray in a huff.

  I looked at my friend. Elizabeth wanted to win that contest so badly. Now she wouldn’t win or go to theater camp. All because of me. I felt terrible.

  Then I felt mad. But not at Elizabeth. At my tomorrow power. Between getting accused of snooping, mistaking the computer guy for a substitute, and trying to prevent egg doom when there was no doom, it seemed like all my power did lately was get me in trouble. What had started out as fun and exciting was becoming a great big aggravation (spelling word). In fact, it was ruining everything. I was fed up.

  That’s why right then, I made a decision: No. More. Visions. I would stay so busy, there wouldn’t be time for a vision to pop into my head. And if one did, I’d be so busy I wouldn’t even notice. All I had to do was stay busy, busy, busy.