Power to the Purple!

by Sophie Bell

  Opal fell to her knees with a hideous shriek. Iris staggered back, still twitching, and erupted into tears.

  “Opal,” she managed to sob through rattling teeth, “what is wrong with you?” She gasped for breath. Teardrops spilled from her ultraviolet eyes, evaporating the instant they touched the hot skin of her cheeks. “I was trying to be nice!”

  “That’s your problem, Iris!” Opal screamed back, looking at the sore red blisters Iris had burned into the palms of her hands. “Nobody asked you to! Your niceness makes me sick!”

  Iris straightened up. Trembling, she looped the trailing string of the balloon around her fingers until its burnt remains were in her fist. My first-date souvenir from Sebastian, she thought. A black-and-blue heart. As she tucked the tattered scraps into her messenger bag, her real heart ached, too.

  Gone was the joy she’d felt just minutes before. She looked down the park’s riverside path. Good-bye, yellow brick road, she thought sadly. And with a blink of her brimming eyes, she turned it orange again. Without another word, without a glance at Opaline, still on her knees, Iris walked out of the park.

  And then the sky went velvet dark, as if all the stars in the galaxy had burned out along with one bruised balloon.

  Just Thinkin’ About. . .

  BUT, JUST LIKE IT SAYS IN THE SONG, THE SUN DID come out tomorrow. The Ultra Violets didn’t even have to bet a thing: not bottom dollars or black pearl collars or superskunks. They just had to hang on till, “come what MAAAAAAY . . . !”

  “Oh!” Curled up on the marshmallow couch in Club Very UV, Cheri covered her ears. “Scar, you sound good, but should you maybe save your voice?”

  “OKAAAAAY!” Scarlet sang out. Then, abruptly bashful, she flopped down from the arabesque pose she’d been holding and buried her face in the silver beanbag. Breaking news: She got the part! She was one of Chronic Prep’s three rotating Annies, and rehearsals officially began . . . the day before tomorrow.

  While Scarlet burrowed into the beanbag and Cheri went back to her book report, Iris stared up at the sun from the massive flower window. The sun was Iris’s favorite star, and it did make her feel energized all over again, like anything was possible. Even rescuing Opaline from the darkness.

  “I cannot believe you got your hug on, right there in the park!” Cheri exclaimed, setting her book aside. Iris’s story, from her date with Sebastian to the motorcycle rat of Kitchen Sync to the major power outage with Opaline, was much more interesting.

  Iris smiled to herself, because she couldn’t quite believe it, either. “I guess it was Operation Get-O, version two-point-no,” she said, walking from the window back to the long marble table. “Plan ‘Share the Love.’”

  “With a megawatt psycho?” Scarlet remarked, her voice muffled by the beanbag.

  “Don’t call her that!” Cheri stifled her own laugh. “Opal is . . . I don’t know what she is.” She looked to Darth, but he just shrugged his little skunk shoulders. “Disturbed for sure.”

  “What was she even doing there?” Scarlet sat up, her face red from squishing it. “What if she’s following us? For real, Cher, she’s scary. She could have electrocuted Iris!”

  “But she didn’t at first,” Iris said, thinking back. “For a second or three, everything was . . . was pure violet! And I truly thought . . . I don’t know.” She could sense Cheri’s and Scarlet’s doubts. But Iris was such a starry-eyed optimist, she said it out loud anyway. “I thought we were going to make up.”

  Scarlet groaned. Cheri was silently skeptical. At the table, Iris traced her finger around the ruins of the blue balloon. She’d decided to add it to her scrapbook. Even though it was in tatters, there was still, she thought, something precious about it. Maybe just knowing the story behind it, her strange yesterday, was what made the balloon worth saving. Maybe that was why she still wanted to save Opal, too. On the outside, Opal seemed like a lost cause. But Iris could never forget Opal’s inside story.

  “I just felt so sad after, you know?” she said, her gaze drifting over to Skeletony, who was indeed wearing Opal’s black pearl collar. The girls had put it there, around the bony white vertebrae, as a joke. Now it looked a bit eerie.

  “Have you seen her bummed-out lunch table lately?” Scarlet said, scissor-kicking from her beanbag seat. “It’s like, who died? Opal has definitely got a way of killing the mood in the cafeteria.”

  “Maybe everyone who sits next to her loses their appetite,” Iris commented. “That perfume she keeps wearing is literally sickening. I thought I was going to barf in the park.”

  “Then there was that time she tried to get me to join O+2,” Cheri said with a sigh as she filed her pinkie finger. “That was superdepressing.”

  “When did that happen?” Iris asked, as Scarlet sprang to her feet again.

  Cheri ceased her filing. “Alas,” she realized, two petals of pink blooming on her cheeks. “I never did tell you, did I?”

  “Tell us what?” Scarlet demanded, dancing worrisome little soubresaut jumps. Iris began anxiously twisting a tendril of her hair.

  Darth snuggled into Cheri’s lap to give her moral support while she explained. “Scarlet, you were so nervous about your audition,” she began. “And Iris, you were so hung up on Sebastian . . .”

  “And?!” Iris and Scarlet said together.

  “And I didn’t want to upset you more!” Cheri cried. “I said no, obvi! But Opal said . . . she said she wanted my brain.”

  “Gah!” Scarlet covered her head with her hands as she leaped in place. Darth covered his with his paws, chittering.

  “Not in the Frankenstein transplant way,” Cheri said, stroking the skunk to soothe him. She wasn’t quite sure why she was defending Opal, considering the girl had just shocked the hair straight on Iris. Maybe it was because Cheri still remembered Opal’s inside story, too. “More like . . .” Cheri trailed off, and all three girls concentrated for a moment.

  “More like in the Feinstein mathlete way!” Iris gasped, snapping her fingers.

  “Well,” Cheri huffed, buffing her nails against Darth’s fur, “I actually think I’m smarter than Albert, but—”

  “But she couldn’t control you, Cher!” Scarlet said, smacking her forehead a little harder than necessary.

  “And she could control Albert.” Iris snapped her fingers again. “And K-Liz.” She swung her arm up high and snapped there. “And BellaBritney.” Another snap down low.

  “Is that what she’s doing?” Cheri wondered. “Blowing the fuses in everyone’s minds? But how?”

  “I’m not sure, but have you seen the way Albert’s been following her around, all stumbly and blank-faced?” Iris asked.

  Cheri frowned. She had seen it, and it had bugged her, but she’d told herself she was just being vain. After all, there was a time when Albert followed her around like a puppy dog, too. There was The Kiss That Changed Everything! And while Cheri never did think of Albert as boyfriend material, she did still have a special place in her heart for her first successful stealth makeover project.

  “We’ve got to save Albert,” she stated.

  “And we’ve got to stop Opal from short-circuiting anyone else!” Scarlet shouted, springing so high that her ponytail almost got tangled in the holiday lights they’d strung all across the ceiling. “At least she’s only zapped Albert so far,” she said as she landed in demi-pointe. “K-Liz and BellaBrit are mutants.”

  Wheels spinning, Iris reeled around in the fuzzy orange egg chair. “True. But she threatened to take over the entire class. And remember how Martin Gibbs clawed at Cheri in the hallway after your audition?”

  “Ruh-roh,” Scarlet muttered, thinking back on it.

  “Opal got an entire crew of mutants to obey her every command at the Vi-Shush . . .” Iris let the sentence hang.

  Cheri’s mind was in overdrive, too, so much so that her hair started to glow
magenta right there in CVUV. “If Opal got the whole class together, like at an assembly . . .”

  “Or at the school play!” Scarlet realized, horrified.

  “Or,” Iris said, arching an eyebrow as she looked from one Ultra Violet to the other, “at a birthday party . . .”

  “OMV!” Cheri and Scarlet cried out together.

  That had to be it: Opaline was planning a mass reprogramming at her own party!

  For once Cheri was thrilled to be uninvited. Even if she had already planned some awesome party-crasher outfits.

  Are You There, Candace?

  ALL OF A SUDDEN, RIGHT THERE IN CVUV, IRIS, SCARLET, and Cheri had an overwhelming urge to write down their phone numbers and wash some cars? All three could hear the notes of a pop-music synth violin in their heads. They lined up in the middle of the clubhouse and broke into song:

  Hey, we had a breakthrough!

  That plan is cray-z!

  We must stop Opal!

  Call Candace, maybe?

  Then, as if this bizarre musical interlude had never gotten hold of them, the three girls each grabbed a seat at the long marble table and video-buzzed Candace at the FLab. They leaned in close together so that she could see all three of their faces on the laptop screen.

  “You took your time with the call!” Candace said. She must have just gotten her hair cut, because her bangs were so baby they were practically newborn. Weirdly, tucked behind her ears, she had not one but TWO sporks. The pointy ends stuck out like stainless steel cyber tulip clips. No, they did.

  “Candace!” Iris said, surprised. “Did you accidentally pick up another spork from Tom’s Diner?”

  Candace hardly seemed to care that she was attracting sporks the way a refrigerator does magnets. “What happened with the Black Swans?” she asked. “Did they rock the pier or what?”

  “Very funny, Candace,” Iris said. “And thanks for your text. We totally busted those spy boys.”

  “Yeah!” Scarlet pushed her face in front of the laptop’s camera. “At a poker game in the boys’ room!” She furrowed her freckles, recalling the pugnacious agent with the salt-and-pepper hair. “But the lil’ one climbed out the window.”

  “The big one is kind of a bully,” Cheri stated with a roll of her eyes.

  “They’re working for BeauTek, just like we suspected! But that’s not why we’re calling, maybe!” Iris wedged her chin on top of Cheri’s head, a few of her purple ringlets tickling Cher’s nose.

  “The Black Swans we can handle!” Scarlet said.

  “Boys come and go,” Cheri added, cheek-to-cheek with Scar.

  “But—” Iris began, Scarlet shouting, “SPOILER ALERT!” so loud that it made the speaker crackle on Candace’s side of the call.

  “But,” Iris continued, rubbing her ear, while beneath her Cheri and Scarlet bickered in low tones about whether it really was a spoiler, “we figured out that Opal is planning to shock our entire class!”

  “INTO HER ELECTRIC ZOMBIE SLAVES!” Scarlet said, shouting again.

  “At her birthday party!” Iris piped in.

  “That we weren’t invited to,” Cheri couldn’t help saying.

  Then the Ultra Violets fell silent. Their stares were holding. Their breathseses (= plural) were holding, too. Waiting for Candace’s reply. Waiting for Candace’s advice. Waiting for Candace’s instructions.

  Instead, she gave them nothing at all. Stood up. And went offscreen altogether.

  “Hey!” Scarlet cried out. “Where d’you think you’re going, lady?” . . .

  dot dot dot

  DOT DOT DOT!

  “Candace?” Iris spoke at last to the empty screen. “Are you there?”

  “It’s us,” Cheri whispered.

  “The Ultra Violets?” Scarlet said snarkastically.

  They could hear a voice somewhere in the FLab proclaiming, “That ectoplasm isn’t going to mop itself up, you know!” Then, as suddenly as she’d left, Candace returned to the screen. She bent her head in close, her supershort bangs like a dirty-blond picture frame across her forehead.

  “Okay, UVs,” she said quickly, glancing behind both shoulders so often that the two silver sporks flashed in front of the screen so fast that the only thing missing was a tossed salad between them. “This is the deal: To keep Opaline from reprogramming your entire grade, you have to find an antidote to her electrocute-ability.”

  “Which is really not very cute at all,” Cheri muttered.

  “But what is it?” Iris asked. “Where do we find it? How do we use it?”

  “Be careful!” Candace said, answering none of those questions. “And remember, if you need any help, you’ve got my number. So call me, maybe. Coddington out!”

  Before the girls could add any more questions to the unanswered list, Candace lowered her screen, and theirs went blank.

  Mama Drama

  ’TWAS A CLASSIC RUSE. A WILY SUBTERFUGE. A TRIED-and-true trick.

  Iris told her mother, Dr. Tyler, that she was sleeping over at Cheri’s house that night.

  Cheri told her mother, Dr. Henderson, that she was sleeping over at Scarlet’s.

  Scarlet told her mother, Dr. Jones, that she was sleeping over at Iris’s.

  And instead all three girls (plus one skunk) had laid low at Club Very UV until after dark. Then they changed into their catsuits—which were really just black leotards and tights, but catsuits sounds cooler. Iris wove her hair into two long braids and pinned them into purple cinnamon buns over her ears, Princess Leia–style. Cheri discovered her leotard had a cat tail sewn to the bottom, leftover from some past Halloween costume, and she decided to work it. With a black eye pencil she drew thick lines over and out from her lids. She pushed back her hair with a kitten-eared headband. And for a touch of sparkle, she slipped on the Hello Kitty bling ring she’d won in the poker game. Scarlet laced up a brand-new pair of red satin ballet slippers—which she found terribly pretty—to go with her red tutu.

  The three girls checked one another’s outfits and agreed they were purrrfectly dressed.

  To break into the FLab.

  To sneak out, Scarlet wanted to climb up to the clubhouse roof and then bungee down the side like Spider-Man, the same way the spy boys had the first time the girls caught them. But that plan had problems. First, they didn’t have bungee cords. Second, Iris was sure the wind would ruin her hair. Third, Cheri said Darth had a slight fear of heights.

  Instead, the girls simply slipped back down the spiral iron staircase, from the clubhouse into Iris’s bedroom, and then out her apartment door. As they left her room, Iris quickly disguised the three of them as junk mail, patterning their leotards with home decor catalogs and supermarket flyers. Her mom always ignored the snail mail, letting it pile up until Iris recycled it. But no worries: After a long day at the FLab, Dr. Tyler was already sound asleep on the couch. From the TV, an old episode of The Twilight Zone cast blue-gray shadows on her face.

  Downstairs in the lobby of the building, the doorman smiled when he saw them.

  “Off to a party, girls?” he asked.

  “Off to stop one, actually,” Scarlet said, shim-sham-shimmying out onto the street, while Iris just waved good night.

  * * *

  “Remind me again why we couldn’t ask Candace to get this stuff?” Scarlet hissed. She didn’t know why she was whispering. No one else was in the Highly Questionable Tower that late at night. Whispering just felt like the clandestine thing to do. Under the circumstances.

  The girls had broken into the Fascination Laboratory exactly how you’d expect them to: Iris camouflaging the three of them as they glid (we spell it like that!) past the security guards and shot up forty-two flights in the clear crystal elevator; Cheri using her computer brain to crack all the digital passcodes; and Scarlet giving the steel security doors a hefty rond de jambe en l’air roun
dhouse kick when they still wouldn’t budge.

  Now they were creeping around in the dark in their catsuits.

  “She didn’t offer to on video-chat,” Iris hissed back. “Doesn’t Candace seem extra spacey lately?”

  “Maybe she’s dating an astronaut!” Cheri whispered. She meant it seriously, but once she heard it out loud, she started giggling at how silly it sounded. Iris and Scarlet broke into giggles, too, the beams from their flashlights bouncing off jars and beakers as the girls shook with laughter.

  The last time the girls were in the FLab was right after Opal went evil. While their moms were out at some snoozy afternoon symposium, Iris, Scarlet, and Cheri had met with Candace. That was when they’d vowed to do everything in their powers (both super- and non-) to turn Opal good again. Because the second-to-last time they were in the FLab, four years before, was when Candace had been careless and Cheri had sneezed and Iris had drop-kicked the vat of Heliotropium goo that had then splattered all over them. Fourever altering the four best friends blah blah blah!

  Somehow, the strange purple goo that had made Iris, Scarlet, and Cheri supergirls was also the same strange purple goo that had made Opal such an electroshockingly mean one. To concoct an antidote, like Candace had mentioned, Iris had done some research. Cheri had done up a little FLaboratory shopping list. And Scarlet had done a tango.

  “Being here in the dark really reminds me of that night!” Cheri said softly after the giggle fit had passed. Hiding in her tote bag, Darth squeaked—he remembered it, too.

  Iris unwrapped a lollipop, the waxed paper crackling in the quiet as if she were in a movie theater and not a top-secret science lab. “It’s v beautiful, isn’t it?” She stopped for a moment to look out the FLab’s rock-crystal windows at the skyline of Sync City, searching for the pulsing purple light atop their clubhouse.