Power to the Purple!

by Sophie Bell

  “No, of course not!” Iris said. She could feel her fingertips throbbing with heat, and she took a deep breath to keep from solar-flaring. “But with all the freakiness on parade from the Mall of No Returns”—Iris’s gaze shot from lizardlike Karyn to Goth Cheerleader before landing on Opal again—“I thought you might want to reconsider my . . . offer.”

  “Ha!” Opal’s short, sharp laugh sounded more like a hacking cough. She leaned forward, so close to Iris that their foreheads were almost touching, and said in a voice too low for her new friends to hear. “You mean to join the Ultra Violets? And save Sync City from a mutant invasion?”

  Iris shoved her hands into her pockets, where they glowed through the gauzy cotton of her brand-new dress. Her eyes began to tear, and she scrunched up her nose: Something smelled so wrong—Opal’s shampoo? But that couldn’t be it: The stench was faint but foul, like sweat socks blended with brussels sprouts. What girl would ever wash her hair with that? “Yeah,” Iris said, trying not to breathe in any more of the funk, “that offer.”

  “Hmm.” Opal pretended to think about it, twirling a finger around a strand of her brown hair in mocking imitation of Iris. Then she snarked, “OMV, thanks!” and tilted her head from shoulder to shoulder. Behind her, K-Lizard and Goth Cheerleader did the same, snapping their hair back and forth robotically. “But no thanks,” Opal continued, dropping her voice so it rumbled like thunder. “We are never ever ever getting back together, UVs. Because guess what? I’m the one bringing that mutant invasion. And I’m going to make all the kids in our class serve me. And I’ve already got some superbesties of my own.”

  “You do?” Scarlet furrowed her brow. “Where?” She sprang straight up in a grand changement jump, scanning the hallway for more superheroes. Maybe they were invisible. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t see them.

  “Duh, Scarlet.” Opal rolled her eyes, then jerked her head back toward her hair-tossing posse. “You already know Karyn—”

  Karyn curled her thin lips into a smile, a forked tongue flicking out between her fangs.

  “—and this is BellaBritney.” Opal hitched her thumb at the dour cheerleader.

  “Bella—” Scarlet began.

  “—Britney?” Cheri completed.

  “Ugh,” the gothy Bella side mumbled through a half-mouth of black lipstick at the exact same moment the hyper Britney side cheered, “Yay!” with a wave of her single pompom.

  It was jarring, to say the least. Darth let out a disturbed squeak.

  “Those two?” Cheri said, astonished. (She wasn’t quite sure if BellaBritney counted as one whole or two halves or what.) “But Opal, sweetie, they’re not superheroes at all! They’re, like, the complete opposite, because they’re—”

  “O+2!” Opal boomed, drowning out the M word before Cheri could even utter it. The hallway shook, and if any teachers had bothered to look out from their classrooms they might have noticed a black storm cloud hovering just below the ceiling. “Opaline plus two,” she said, directly at Iris. “O+2. Dioxide. Maybe you’re familiar with it? It’s a key ingredient in sunscreen.” Opal snickered. “It blocks UV rays.”

  “In-ter-ception!” BellaBritney half-cheered again, as if she were at a football game.

  The beams from Iris’s fists intensified, and as she stared back at Opal, her pale blue eyes began to glow, too. “I don’t know, Opes,” she said, her voice in cool contrast to all the heat she was radiating, “The sun can be pretty strong . . .”

  Above the girls, the gathering storm cloud growled.

  From the bottom of the tote bag, Darth nudged up a pink polka-dot umbrella. Cheri opened it as a preventive measure. “Oh, Opal,” she pleaded, pinching her nose at the putrid stench she’d just detected drifting out from behind her ears. “I know you’re still steamed about our little misunderstanding over”—Cheri cleared her throat and tried to rush past the boy’s name—“Albert, but please don’t make it rain in here, okay?” she asked. “It took me forever to blow out my hair this morning.”

  At the mention of Albert Feinstein, Opal flinched. The four girls had promised to be BFFs, had even sealed it with a candle-wax pinkie swear. But then Opal caught Cheri kissing her crush . . .

  Opal scoffed. Clearly, “forever” didn’t last much longer than a blowout.

  “You know what, Cher?” she said, stepping closer. “I don’t even want Albert anymore. I just want what’s mine. What you took from the Vi-Shush!” With a swing of her hand and a snap of her fingers, Opal commanded, “Karyn!”

  K-Liz snaked out her reptilian tail, coiling it around the handle of Cheri’s tote bag.

  “Give me back that skunk!” Opal shouted.

  “OMV, what?! Never!” Cheri cried, bashing at K-Liz’s tail with her polka-dot umbrella.

  The thunder boomed. Iris whipped her hands out of her pockets, already powered up. Scarlet pirouetted into a kickbox, knocking K-Liz off her feet.

  And that was how the bang began.

  (Go back to the first page just in case you’ve forgotten!)

  Why O Why?

  ARE M&M’S AND SKITTLES FIRST COUSINS? HOW MANY licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Is some old lady somewhere still sucking on the original Everlasting Gobstopper? Does Chocolate Mountain melt over summer vacation in Candy Land? And why is Mars the only planet to get its own candy bar? Wouldn’t Jupiter want one, too?

  These are the questions that have tormented philosophical trick-or-treaters since the dawn of time. And now, for the Ultra Violets, a new imponderable was added to that list:

  Why did Opaline Trudeau, once as sweet as a Pixy Stix, turn into such a Sour Patch Kid?

  “Every time I try to explain about Albert,” Cheri bemoaned, “she just cuts me off with a sudden rain shower!” From beneath the frilly canopy of the schoolyard fluffula tree, Cheri glanced up at the midday sky. There wasn’t a cloud in sight.

  “Well,” Scarlet said, hopping little balletic temps levé jumps in place, “you really shouldn’t have kissed him.”

  “I didn’t kiss him!” Cheri cried, her cheeks blazing in protest. “He kissed me!” Right there, as a matter of fact, beneath that very fluffula tree.

  “Tomayto, tomahto!” Scarlet answered in arabesque, struggling to keep a straight face. Deep down she knew that Cheri really hadn’t meant for Albert Feinstein to kiss her—on the contrary, Cher had been trying ultra hard to give the boy a stealth makeover for Opaline! But since Albert had kissed Cher, no way was Scarlet going to miss out on all the many opportunities to tease her about it.

  “Maybe, from Opal’s point of view,” Iris mused, examining the ends of one violet tendril, “who kissed whom might be splitting hairs.”

  “Alas!” Cheri sighed, blowing a strand of her own berry-red waves out of her eyes, raising an arm to her forehead, and falling back against the trunk of the legendary tree with all the theatricality of an actress. “I can only say sorry so many times! Twenty-three, at last count!”

  From a branch above her, Darth practiced his dramatic swoon, too.

  “I hear you, Cher,” Iris said from her spot on the squat Plexiglas wall that bordered the yard. “I think the Albert thing was just . . .”

  “ . . . Opal’s breaking point,” Scarlet finished, balancing en pointe herself.

  “Right,” Iris agreed. She began to ultra-doodle, painting imaginary blue butterflies in the air with her pinkie finger. “We just have to remember, we have to believe, that the old Opaline, the real Opaline, is still somewhere behind those clouded eyes.” Iris said it as a reminder to herself as much as to her friends. Since Opal had gone evil, she’d electroshocked Iris twice, teamed up with mutants, and shattered Iris’s lollipop peace offering after the showdown in the Vi-Shush.

  Then there was the prune juice rumor just that very morning.

  And the threat against the entire student body of Ch
ronic Prep?

  Oh, and she wanted to steal Darth!

  OMV.

  “The way she’s behaving is not totally under her control,” Iris continued, trying to keep her thoughts from going all sour-pruney, too. “She had a bad reaction to the Helio-goo.”

  “On a deoxyribonucleic level!” Scarlet intoned, imitating Candace’s serious scientist voice.

  When they’d last met with Candace, their erstwhile (ahem) babysitter, in the rock-crystal Fascination Laboratory on the forty-second floor of the Highly Questionable Tower, the Ultra Violets had pledged to bring Opal back from the dark side. Because she really was one of them. Even if these days she kept acting like a superbrat.

  The Ultra Violets fell silent for a moment, each considering the trouble with Opal and her scary talk of taking over the school. Then Cheri looked from Scarlet to Iris. She hesitated a moment more, and Darth scampered down from the tree branch to her shoulder to give her some moral support. Cheri ran her sparkling silver fingernails through the little skunk’s purple-striped tail as she said, “I still believe in the inner Opal, too. But . . .”

  Iris and Scarlet waited, Iris’s doodling pinkie paused in midair, Scarlet’s arms outstretched in second position.

  “But the probability is,” Cheri stated, “that the Opal drama is going to get worse. Much worse. Before it gets better. If it ever gets better.”

  Iris’s blue eyes flashed with alarm. “What do you mean, Cher?”

  “And how do you know?” Scarlet demanded, arching one arm above her head in third position.

  Cheri glanced at Darth.

  U gotz to tel dem, he said, nodding his stripy skunk head.

  “I sort of . . .” She began over. “It’s hard to explain, but . . .”

  Iris leaned forward, listening intently, as Scarlet dropped her other arm to her side in fourth position.

  “My brain computated the odds,” Cheri said, blushing again. Her mom and dad, as well as the girls’ doofy rapping math teacher, Mr. Grates, would disagree if only they knew, but Cheri still thought her arithmeticulous superpowers were neither the coolest nor the funnest. Plus, they had also added to the problems with Albert! Which, minus, had subtracted one friend! And—

  “Earth to Cheri,” Scarlet prompted, both arms now raised in fifth position. “We’re waiting!”

  “Okay,” Cheri said, cradling Darth in her arms. She raised her eyebrows at the girls, almost as if she were apologizing for what she was about to say. And then she live-streamed the data:

  “Calculating the estimated number of mutants in Sync City, their allegiance to Opaline, and the degree of importance she must derive from bossing them around”—as Cheri spoke, an electric green pattern of numbers and symbols scrolled down her eyes, just like programs on a computer monitor, and her hair suddenly seemed to shine with a magenta tint—“the dominant outcome for the ten most likely scenarios is that Opal will lead, um, what did she call it again?”

  “O+2,” Iris said somberly.

  “Yes. She’d rather be alpha-girl over a bunch of mutants than work with us. So there’s no O in team.”

  “But how can you possibly calculate something like that?” Scarlet spluttered. Having rotated through the basic arm positions in ballet, she’d saddled up and started to ride a pretend pony, Gangnam-style. “How can you calculate how Opal feels?”

  “EQ,” Cheri said, her eyes clear green and her hair just auburn again. “It’s like IQ, but for emotions. No matter how I adjust the EQ percentages in the equations, the probability comes out the same.” She sighed, hugging Darth close for comfort. “Sorry, guys.”

  “But surely, as brilliant as your superbrain may be, Cher, we can’t predict everything!” Iris said, her voice strained with worry. How could they possibly win Opal back if the math already told them the odds would never be in their favor?

  “True,” Cheri allowed, because people were the most difficult problems to solve, even with the most advanced computer programs. “There could be a black swan.”

  “A black swan?!” Scarlet repeated, straightening up. That very pas de deux from Swan Lake was the first ballet she’d ever superdanced, at home in her own basement. And with her licorice-dark ponytail and dove-gray eyes, she thought she quite looked the part.

  A black swan?! Darth exclaimed. Having ebony fur himself, he found the idea of a big black-feathered bird intriguing.

  “Not an actual black swan,” Cheri said, stroking Darth on his nose. “Or a black swan ballerina,” she added to Scarlet. “A black swan is the name for this, like, idea where something totally strange happens. Something you didn’t count on happening. Something that you never even knew could happen. Until it does. And then it changes everything.”

  Crestfallen, Scarlet squatted back down again and resumed her Gangnam dancing with vigor. “Oh,” she said. “So I guess that means I can’t dance Opal back to being good.”

  “Sorry, Scar,” Cheri said, frustrated afresh by her brainy superpowers. “They call it that because nobody thought there could be such a thing as a black swan, until they saw one and realized there was.”

  “Like us!” Iris said thoughtfully. “Whoever would have imagined we’d become purple-powered superheroes till we did?”

  “I can definitely be the black swan,” Scarlet countered, still stuck on the ballet. “I can do that adagio in my sleep.”

  “Whoa!” From her perch on the Plexiglas wall, Iris began to quake. “Hey, Scar, take it easy!”

  Scarlet had been so obsessed with Swan Lake, she hadn’t quite realized just how hard she’d been stomping the yard. Every step she took sent vibrations across the ground. The Plexiglas wall wobbled, nearly uprooted from its posts, while feathery crimson leaves floated down from the shaken fluffula tree.

  “Eep!” Scarlet squeaked, dropping to the grass and wrapping her arms around her knees to keep them still. “I’ve been noticing,” she confessed, her freckles like teeny poppy seeds above the pouf of her red tutu skirt, “that I might not totally know my own strength. Er, yet.”

  “I kn-kn-kn-know!” Iris’s voice wavered along with the Jell-O-ing wall. “I s-s-saw the w-w-way you th-threw around K-Karyn!”

  “The other day I dropped my phone,” Scarlet said, her fingers still drumming a techno beat across her kneecaps. “And I lifted up the couch with one hand to get it.”

  “The whole couch?” Cheri was astonished. “Did anyone see?”

  “No, luckily,” Scarlet said. “But I’ve got to be careful, because we’ve got to keep our powers secret! Imagine what new chores my mom might make me do if she knew!” Scarlet did not want to get stuck picking up her three brothers’ grungy beds while her dad vacuumed beneath them on Saturday mornings.

  “Hey!” Iris realized, jumping down from the wall to sit by Scarlet. “Maybe that’s the black swan idea you meant, Cher! Maybe, if all our powers are still developing, then Opal’s could still turn good!”

  “Mmmaybe . . .” Cheri said, spreading out her tote bag like a picnic blanket to sit on. Though she wasn’t so sure. And by that logic, wouldn’t it also mean that any of them could still turn bad? What a terrible thought! Cheri shook her head to knock it out of her stupid supermind! Darth, the only one who’d heard it, swished his purple-striped tail right along with her.

  Scarlet wondered if music was playing that only Cheri and her skunk could hear. “Um, Cher?” she asked, staring at the shimmying auburn fringe. “Are you okay?”

  Cheri realized what she was doing. “Aftershock?” she offered from behind a curtain of hair, because she didn’t want the other UVs to know what had really set her off. She tried to get their conversation back on track and her hair back in place. “Why, Iris?” she said, borrowing her brush. “Are your powers still changing, too?”

  Iris beamed a big smile, and it was as if the sun shone right out of her eyes. “Check this out,” she whispered. Wit
h a deep breath, she closed her eyes and flung herself back against the grass. As Scarlet and Cheri watched, she seemed to vanish. Her arms, her face and her clothes all picked up the pattern of the lawn. All that remained were hints of her purple ringlets. When she blinked her periwinkle eyes open again, the blue stood out like two bright bird eggs in the green blades.

  “Oh. My. Crazy. Violet,” Cheri gasped. “Just like a chameleon!”

  “Cool!” Scarlet said, tumbling to her feet again.

  “Camouflage.” Iris sat up, turning back to all her normal colors. “Maybe being able to blend in will come in handy.”

  “Yeah!” Scarlet agreed, rocking a little hip-hop on the grass. In the distance, she could see the other kids starting to line up as recess came to an end. “To spy on mutants!”

  “Or on Opaline?”

  Cheri was the one who said it. But it was what all three of them were thinking.

  Geek Love

  TO THE LIST OF QUESTIONS THAT TORMENT PHILO-SOPHICAL types, let’s add another. A question that’s more Valentine’s Day than Halloween. A question you might see stamped on a jumbo pastel candy heart:

  Why do fools fall in love?

  A simple answer might be that almost everybody falls in love sooner or later, and some of those everybodies, sorry to say, are fools. But other of those everybodies are not fools at all. They’re brilliant. They’re geniuses. They’re even mathlete captains.

  Thus brings us to the curious case of Albert Feinstein.

  Remember what Albert looks like? No? Good, because he doesn’t look like that anymore. He looks a lot better, merci to Cheri and her stealth makeover that led to the seismic unfortunate fluffula tree kiss-off. In fact, Albert was now one of the most stylin’ boys in the sixth grade. His sandy-blond crew cut had grown into a touchably tousled mop, his braces glinted with a grill of gold, and he had finally mastered the art of walking in unlaced high-tops. Lots of girls liked him now—not Cheri, and not the UVs, not in that way. But other girls.