Power to the Purple!

by Sophie Bell

  For the perfume rollout, she still needed a logistics person. Someone to update the spreadsheets and monitor the stock and oversee the product distribution. BellaBritney could barely count past eight. Even when she did, she shouted, introducing each number with a “Gimme a . . . !”

  That got old fast.

  As for K-Liz, Opal had administered the official BeauTek personality analysis—drafted by her mother, naturally. She’d told clueless Karyn it was one of those trivial online friendship quizzes that girls were always taking. The results of her profile confirmed Opal’s gut instincts: K-Liz would be better suited as a middle manager of the mutants.

  Maybe I can’t have Cher and her superbrain, Opal mused, recalling the way Cheri had freaked out about the Vi-Shush the other evening. And Albert Feinstein is no Ultra Violet. He is, however, captain of the mathletes . . .

  As Albert sucked rainbow sprinkles off his sticky fingers, Opaline glanced around the cafeteria. She could hear the cafeteria ladies chatting and clanging pots and pans back in the kitchen. But no one else was there: no other students, no teacher on duty.

  Just her and Albert.

  He was prattling on about something unimportant, like the math test later that morning. Or was it the chess date he still wanted to go on? Whatever! He sounded nervous, which was good.

  Opal needed him to be nervous. She needed that nervous energy. It fed her more than any humble breakfast buffet ever could.

  She leaned across the table, pretending to be interested.

  Albert worked up the courage to look back again. That was his second mistake. Because the same faint, foul smell from before suddenly made him feel quite queasy. And Opaline’s eyes seemed to be spiraling like pinwheels, warm chocolate brown spun through with sugary white injected with eerie pale orange that crackled like . . .

  “Oh, Albert,” Opal imitated, teasing him in a singsong tone as he began to sway back and forth in his seat. “You, ah, you have . . .” She wasn’t afraid to say it straight to his face! “You have a sprinkle on your mouth.” As she looked closer, all the amusement left her voice. “A purple one,” she added flatly. (That was his first mistake!)

  “I do?” Albert asked. But before he could say another word, Opaline licked her own pinkie finger, reached across the table, and placed it on the purple sprinkle. On his lips.

  “Shush,” she whispered, eyes spinning. And the electricity shot through her pinkie finger. To Albert’s puckered lips, outlined like a neon sign. To his golden-grill braces. And on through his entire nervous system, traveling all the way up to his brain. Where some corner of his mind, the corner of self-control, short-circuited.

  Opal heard the zzt! of the burnout. She breathed in the wisp of smoke wafting from his ears.

  “Shushed,” Albert droned back. “I am completely and totally shushed.”

  With her free hand, Opal swung a wide circle.

  “O na na,” she sang softly to herself. And she snapped her fingers up high. “What’s my name?” And she snapped her fingers down low.

  And finally she brushed the offending purple sprinkle away.

  When Albert Feinstein slumped back in his chair, his mind was no longer his own. He may as well have been a zombie. Okay, not a zombie, because zombies are gross and dead and decaying and stuff. But a slave to Opaline. A zombo.

  And the substitute math brain she needed.

  Fifty Shades of Purple

  STAY CALM. *DARK LAVENDER LACE* DEEP BREATHS. *lilac zebra stripes* I have not rainbowed. *periwinkle paisleys* I am not going to rainbow. *indigo camouflage* There will be no rainbowing. *burgundy strawberries* We’re just hanging out. *hot pink polka dots* He is cute, though. *crimson hearts* And kind. *fuchsia smiley faces* But no one must know. *plum exclamation points* No one must know!

  Five minutes before, Iris had excused herself from the small table in the quaint storefront café of Gelato Be Chilling Me. Now she was hiding in the bathroom, her face flashing through fifty shades of purple in fifty different patterns as she tried to burn off some of the ultraviolet energy that was threatening to bust out of her. She stared at herself in the mirror, blinking like a holiday display. She gave herself her sternest no-one-must-know warning glance.

  Because even though they were just hanging out, depending on how you wanted to define hanging out, Iris was (OMV!) on her first date with Sebastian. Who was sitting out at their table, probably wondering what had happened to her.

  When Sebastian called and asked her to meet up, Iris had rainbowed insanely, all over the place. But luckily, at the time, she was high up in Club Very UV. Sebastian couldn’t see her. (They weren’t on video chat: He’d made an old-school phone call, which Iris found totes charming.) And as far as the rest of Sync City could tell, it was just a beautiful natural sight. People thought rainbows were beaming down on the buildings. Not shooting up from one of them.

  That afternoon, once Iris had finally powered down, she had a heartfelt convo with Cheri and Scarlet. She worried whether it was fair of her to go out with Sebastian when she knew she could never ever be completely honest with him. She could never ever tell him her secret identity as a superhero.

  “It’s just one date,” Cheri had said with a flip of her berry-red waves. “Don’t overthink it!” Of course, as she was saying it, Cheri was already overthinking it big-time, running a complicated spreadsheet in her mind about all the possible things that could go wrong on the date, and how Iris should deal if they did.

  “Every time you feel like you might start rainbowing or glowing ultraviolet,” Scarlet had said while crossing the floor of the clubhouse in chaîné turns, “just give yourself a thump in the arm! That always helps me.”

  Iris didn’t follow that advice exactly—it sounded too painful! But she did quit lollipops cold turkey two days before, so that she wouldn’t be too hyped up on candy. And she searched online for meditation tips. It said that whenever she felt her thoughts wandering—or, in her case, her temperature rising—she should focus on her breathing and repeat her mantra.

  “OhmV,” she repeated softly in the restroom of the gelato shoppe.

  Probably what had helped her the most, though, was something completely random that Iris remembered out of the blue from the cover of a fashion magazine. She’d seen it at the dentist’s office, on the table in the waiting room. Next to the photo of a glamorous actress, a headline read: Want to Keep Him Interested? Keep the Mystery Alive!

  I can do that! Iris realized with relief. Maybe keeping secrets would be a good thing? If that’s what it said in magazines!

  Iris took one last look at herself in the mirror. Face: pattern-free. Eyes: pale blue. Hair: wild violet. Check check check! It was as Zen as she was going to get.

  Sebastian was waiting by the front door, all tall, dark, and awesome. He smiled when he saw her, and his shiny black hair fell into his eyes as usual.

  “Hey,” he said, flipping his hoverboard off up the floor and holding the door open. “Everything okay?”

  “Viomazing,” Iris murmured. She thought about coming up with more of an explanation, but she remembered again about keeping the mystery alive. So she just smiled back. “Thanks again for the ice cream.”

  As she said it, though, something caught her eye.

  Something past Sebastian, way in the back of the shoppe.

  Gelato be kidding me, she thought. Not now!

  Time froze like ice cream as Iris quickly took in the scene. By the counter, a bearded man in a motorcycle jacket was leaning over a little boy, who was bawling his eyes out. At first Iris thought the man was trying to steal the boy’s double-dip waffle cone. But as he crouched closer, a snout of matted gray-brown fur came into focus. And bristly twitching whiskers. And four long incisor teeth that looked sharp enough to gnaw through . . .

  The boy let out another fearful sob.

  A mutant! Iris could feel her ultra
violet rising. And now it had absolutely nada to do with Sebastian. Time started melting again as Iris met his eyes. She had to think fast. Of all the scenarios on Cheri’s first-date spreadsheet, “encounter with a biker rat” was not one of them!

  “Oopsie,” Iris said with a shrug. “I forgot my rhinestone stylus in the restroom.”

  “Your rhinestone stylus?” Sebastian repeated befuddledingly (not a real word, but a good one). “But why were you using it in—”

  “Meet me outside, okay?” Iris cut him off with her sparkliest smile. “Back in a flash!” And then, because she didn’t know what else to do, and the seconds on the symbolic ice-cream clock were dripping away, and a giant mutant biker rat in the back of the gelato shoppe was about to have two scoops of little boy with a cherry on top, because of all that, Iris stretched up her hand and . . . tousled Sebastian’s shaggy hair? Before spinning him around by the shoulders and giving him a gentle shove down the steps.

  “What’d you do that for?” Sebastian laughed, stumbling out into the sunshine. The sun felt warm on his face. But not nearly as hot as Iris’s hand had felt in his hair. Every time he started to think she was quite a serious girl, she’d do something kooky. Like graffiti a wolfman on the monorail wall, or paint a flower instead of saying her name. Which was all very strange. And super-intriguing. She was like a riddle wrapped in a mystery tied up with curly purple ribbons, that Iris. Sebastian stood on the sidewalk in a bit of a purple haze, pushing back his hair and trying to get his head straight.

  On the corner across the street, a clown with a bunch of heart-shaped balloons for sale was blowing a fierce saxophone solo.

  Sebastian may have been lost in his thoughts, with the saxophone serenade of a street clown as his soundtrack. But Iris was already in the back of the shoppe.

  She lowered her eyes, which by now were blazing the whitest ultraviolet. She inched along the counter, getting as close as she could to the nasty biker rat. She was radiating so much heat that all the gelato turned to sugary soup in the containers behind the counter, but that couldn’t be helped. With a hair-thin beam from her pinkie finger, she speed-painted the dollop of melting ice cream on the crying boy’s cone into the hissing face of a tomcat.

  “Eeek!” the ratman squeaked, skittering back a step. The boy dropped his weird feline ice cream and ran off to find his mommy.

  Iris aimed her scalding-hot ultraviolet eyebeams at the ratman’s kneecaps. His jeans burned through to holes in an instant, and his skin started to sizzle. With a shriek he tumbled to all fours and scurried out the back door. Just as a waiter, way too late, went running behind him with a broom. And slipped in the ice-cream mess the little boy had made.

  Gelato be spilling he? Iris thought, and tried not to giggle. Under the circumstances!

  Sensing that her eyes were still beyond the pale, Iris kept her head down. She hid her glowing hands in her pockets as she stepped around the puddle of waiter and went out the back, too. The charred ratman was just peeling out of the parking lot on his rumbling motorcycle. To what sounded like the wail of a fierce saxophone solo? How odd. But Iris didn’t chase the mutant. She just took a moment to “OhmV” and to power down again.

  When her eyes no longer burned, Iris glanced around the parking lot. Sebastian’s name was still spray-painted on the dumpster, her purple namesake blossom beside it. That made her smile.

  She walked around the side of the building to meet Sebastian out front. He was balancing atop his hoverboard, searching for her.

  “Hey!” he said as she approached. “Did you see it?”

  “See what?” Iris asked, linking her arm through his and steering him away from the café.

  “All these people came running out of the ice cream place, screaming about a giant rat!”

  “Ew, really?” Iris said, trying to sound surprised. And feeling a bit bad that she was lying. “No way! How gross!”

  “But at least you got your stylus, right?” Sebastian nudged his shoulder against hers as he said it, trying to read the expression on her face. But it was hidden behind all her purple curls.

  “My stylus?” Iris said, then remembered. “Oh, my rhinestone stylus!” She patted her messenger bag. “Yup, it’s back where it belongs.”

  As they continued walking along to the wild howl of the clown’s saxophone, it occurred to Iris that keeping the mystery alive was going to be exhausting. Hopefully worth it. But exhausting!

  Black Balloon

  {*Because Iris’s Date Shouldn’t Have Ended Like This}

  EXCEPT FOR THAT PART WITH THE MUTANT RAT AND THE melting ice cream, it was a great date. Iris kept her rainbowing under control without ever having to smack herself in the arm. And she handled a mini-crisis that even Cheri’s graph hadn’t predicted!

  Iris and Sebastian had spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the Kitchen Sync neighborhood. They talked about the good and the bad of graffiti. About what role an artist should fill in society. Sebastian let her try out his hoverboard, holding her hands to help her keep her balance. He let her try on his tattered steampunk top hat, too. And he bought her a blue heart-shaped balloon as a souvenir—when the street-corner clown finally finished his raging sax solo!

  Sebastian had offered to walk Iris all the way back to her apartment building, but she’d politely declined. She told him she was supposed to meet Cheri and Scarlet in Chrysalis Park, which she wasn’t. The truth was, Iris just wanted some alone time, to mull over the date and maybe sketch a few impressions on her iCanvas. Since she didn’t want Sebastian to think she was blowing him off, she fibbed a little. A little more than she already had that day. And she worried again if “keeping the mystery alive” was really just a clever way of saying “be a pretty little liar.”

  Iris shook out her curls. “No one must know,” she said into the wind as she leaned against the latticed Plexiglas fence that bordered the orange brick path of the park. With the string of her heart-shaped balloon wrapped around her wrist, she fished in her messenger bag for a lollipop. Blueberry, her favorite.

  It tasted so sweet. And the Joan River looked so lovely at dusk, the sea creatures flashing their primary colors beneath the water’s surface, the frothy caps of the deep green currents kissed with sunset tangerine. Suddenly Iris was overwhelmed with wonder at the magic of everything. Of ice cream melting in a bowl, of the endless patterns of purple in the world, of Sebastian’s tapered fingers holding her on the hoverboard, even of the clown’s saxophone symphony! It was all so strange and beautiful, Iris thought she might cry. Her heart swelled, and she imagined it soaring as high as the blue balloon in the river breeze, and she wanted to send out a triple rainbow like a love letter in the sky to all of Sync City, her home.

  But she reminded herself she wasn’t supposed to do that. That there had been way more than the average number of rainbows lately as it was!

  Instead, Iris closed her eyes for a second or three and twirled her pinkie finger around one of her purple ringlets. When she opened her eyes again, the orange brick path was cheerful yellow.

  She began skipping, she began spinning, she began easing on down the bricks, her blue heart-shaped balloon floating above her head.

  But as she neared the park gates, the silhouette of a familiar figure slowed her in her tracks. Yes, Iris could tell as she stepped closer; it was definitely her. Arms folded. Hair pulled back tight in barrettes. Peter Pan collar.

  “Hello, Iris,” Opaline said coldly.

  Iris was in such a buoyant mood, she took a crazy chance. She threw her arms wide open. And she wrapped Opal up in a big bear hug. Like nothing had ever gone wrong between them.

  Like they were still best friends.

  “Hi, Opaline!” Iris whispered, right in her ear. “I miss you.”

  It’s hard to describe what happened next. Here goes:

  Opal began to melt. Not like the Wicked Witch of the West
in The Wizard of Oz, even though she was standing on a yellow brick road. Not even like the ice cream at Gelato Be’s café. Just on the inside, when she felt the solar warmth of Iris’s embrace. She let the tough knot of anger that was always in the pit of her stomach loosen. And Iris’s ultraviolet light beamed around both of them, enveloping Opal like a safe cocoon in Chrysalis Park.

  But then . . .

  (Didn’t you just know there was going to be a “but then”?)

  But then Opal stopped feeling and started thinking again. About O+2 and zombo Albert and her birthday party. About Cheri turning her down and stealing her pearl collar. About Scarlet dancing in the dark at the audition. And most of all about Iris. About purple sunshiny Iris, who she blamed for everything.

  A storm cloud formed above the two girls. Opal clamped her hands on Iris’s shoulders and concentrated all her powers on sending out wave after shockwave of electricity. Both girls’ hair stood on end, Iris’s doubling in length as her curls snapped straight as live wires. With the high voltage coursing through her, she quaked so hard her teeth clattered. A sudden tsunami of sorrow threatened to engulf her, and the putrid scent of Opal’s strange perfume made her gag.

  Iris hadn’t wanted to hurt Opal. The exact opposite! But now she had no choice. She could feel every nerve in her body vibrating. If she didn’t get free from Opal’s electric grip, she was afraid she might have a seizure!

  So Iris concentrated all of her powers and started burning back, blazing hotter than the sun. Passersby didn’t know what was going on—night had been just about to fall, and all of a sudden they were bathed in broad daylight?

  The two girls stood locked together like that, Iris convulsing with Opal’s electric currents, Opal baking under Iris’s ultraviolet heat, until finally the blue heart-shaped balloon burst in midair. And like an exploding atom, the two girls split apart.