by Jen Malone
Paige plops back down and snuggles into her sleeping bag again, but from the way she’s huffing and puffing and sighing all annoyedlike, I’m guessing she isn’t going to be able to get back to sleep. And knowing Paige, her philosophy will be: If she’s up, then the whole world should be too.
Might as well beat her to it.
I unzip my bag and use my legs to push the cover the rest of the way off. Then I stand. My eyes are still adjusting and the sun isn’t bright enough through the windows yet, so all I can make out are dark shapes. I know the basement pretty well, but we pushed a lot of furniture around last night. Plus there are people sleeping in places we usually walk. Nothing seems familiar, and I don’t trust myself not to trip on something or someone, so I drop to my knees and crawl toward the wall, feeling pretty ridiculous.
Halfway there something brushes against my face, and I very nearly scream. My hand swipes at my cheek, and I catch something wispy in my fingers. Please don’t be a spider web, please don’t be a spider web. If you have to be a spider web, please, please don’t be a spider web with an actual spider attached to you.
Whatever’s in my hand is thin, like spaghetti, slightly sticky, and almost a little spongy-feeling. I bring it close to my face and squint.
Silly String? My brain catalogues the texture between my fingers and confirms the match. Weird. I don’t remember any Silly String battles last night. My crawl gets ten times more awkward as I attempt to make forward progress on my hands and knees while also keeping one arm up to sweep the air in front of me for any other unwelcome surprises. When I finally reach the wall, I slide along its length until I’m on my feet at the edge of the room. I stretch my hand along the wall and feel the edge of the flat-screen. That means if I go in the opposite direction I should hit the bank of light switches right about . . . here.
I fumble with the switch in the dark and then flip it on, saying a silent sorry to Veronica, who is still snoring.
My jaw drops to the floor right alongside my stomach.
Um, this is all seriously . . . like, whoa. To put it mildly. For starters, there is Silly String ev-ery-where. Wound around the base of the potted plant, looped along the Irish pub signs, threaded through the holes in the net of the Ping-Pong table, and crisscrossing Veronica’s body on her cot.
The second the light goes on, and Paige settles the sweatshirt I’d lobbed at her over her face.“Whyisthelighton?” she groans.
“Um, Paige. I think you need to see this.”
“Umph,” comes through the sweatshirt.
“Seriously, Paige. I really think you need to see this.” I tiptoe my way through hundreds of Doritos crumbs and popcorn kernels covering the carpet in the corner by the stairs and bend to examine a wrapper covered in sticky melted ice-cream sandwich remnants. I place it gently in the center of the coffee table, next to a towering pyramid built out of Mountain Dew cans, and wipe my sticky hands on my pajama pants.
Wow. Just . . . wow.
I reach Paige and jostle her shoulder. She still has the sweatshirt over her eyes and an arm draped across that, holding it in place. “C’mon, Paige. Wake. Up. Now!”
She swats at me from under the covers, but I catch her wrist and tug, dragging her out of the sleeping bag. The sweatshirt falls aside, and I stare into her face.
Paige looks back, opens her mouth . . . and screams.
Which wakes Veronica. And makes me scream.
“Eeeeeeeeeep!” we all shriek.
“What’s happening?” My voice is high-pitched, like I’ve inhaled helium. I turn to Veronica—wait, is she wearing footie pajamas? No time to think about that right this second—who blinks at me once before her mouth drops open. Oh God. I get a bad taste in my mouth that doesn’t have anything to do with morning breath. Why are they looking at me like I grew a second nose overnight? My hands fly to my face, and I dart frantic looks back and forth between the two of them. Why aren’t they saying anything?
“What? What is it? Do I have a giant zit, because that happens sometimes and I can’t—”
“It’s not that.” Paige’s forehead goes all crinkly. “It’s . . . Oh man, I don’t know how to . . .”
“You’re missing an eyebrow,” Veronica blurts.
Say what?
My fingertips move from my cheeks to my eyes, and I begin feeling above them. I brush distinctive fuzz, and there’s a reassuring, soft scritching sound as I explore the ridge above my right eye. But then I move my fingers to the same spot above my left eye and . . . it’s disturbingly smooth, like the skin of an apple.
No. No, no, no, no, no, no!
This cannot be happening.
I kick aside a pillow and step over Paige in a race to the bathroom, not even stopping to get grossed out over something gooey I step in. I grab the door handle and push down, but it doesn’t budge. I jiggle it a few times and am just lifting my fist to pound when it opens inward, throwing me off-balance.
Max, in plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a matching top, blinks at me; then, after a beat or two, grins. “Classic,” he says, laughing as he slides past me.
Ugh! I feel like screaming again, but I bite it back and slam the door shut behind me. Then I creep to the sink, prop my hands on the sides, and lean in close to the mirror.
Oh. Heavenly. Heckweasels!
I have one eyebrow. ONE! I stare and stare, but no amount of blinking shows me anything different than a one-eyebrowed freak. This cannot be happening. Can. Not. My life is ruined. It takes a few moments of gaping into the mirror for my brain to start moving again and, when it does, it’s completely full of questions I have zip—zero—answers for.
At the top of the list: how long does it take for eyebrows to grow, anyway? Surely, longer than a few hours, which is all I have before my mom comes to pick me up and take me to handbell practice at church. Could a hat hide it? Makeup? I mean, obviously I’m not allowed to wear makeup, but maybe Paige can work some magic so my parents won’t notice.
Oh God, but then there’s school! There is no way I can go to school on Monday with one eyebrow—and it’s not like I’ll have Paige at my house in the morning to help even if she could find a way to hide it with makeup. Plus our school has a no-hats-indoors policy, so that won’t work.
“Megs?” Paige taps gently on the other side of the door. “Are you okay? Can I do anything?”
“I’m fine. I just need to . . . process.”
I go back to thinking as hard as I can.
A headband? I’ve seen some high school girls wearing a thin ribbon around their foreheads in some hippie-bohemian kind of look. Would anyone buy it if I suddenly went boho?
No. Of course they wouldn’t.
Could I get a fake eyebrow? Some kind of stick-on one like the mustache I wore last Halloween when I went to the party at school dressed as Luigi from Super Mario Bros.? Or maybe like the toupee our mailman wears, which I always try so hard not to stare at whenever he hands me the stack of catalogs and bills for my parents?
Let’s face it. My life is over. O-v-e-r.
I don’t even want to think of the nickname I’ll probably end up with after this. What if it follows me to college? What if I want to run for president one day, and all the people I knew in middle school resurface to tell the whole world about the time I had a unibrow, and not from lack of tweezing above my nose? Or what if I still have it? What if it NEVER grows back?
For a long time all I can do is stare into the mirror, not really seeing the reflection but working through and shooting down forty-seven million more harebrained schemes to possibly save me from my mother’s screeching and, more important, from the bottom rungs of the social ladder at school. But then a small movement in the mirror, just behind my reflected shoulder, catches my eye.
What on earth . . . ?
I spin to face the bathtub and am greeted by a slew of tiny, fluffy balls on legs. I slump back against the sink and begin counting. One. Two, Three. Four. Five, Six . . . There are sixteen baby chicks happily parading ar
ound the empty bathtub! But why are there sixteen baby chicks parading around the bathtub? Why am I missing an eyebrow? What did I step in on the way to the bathroom, and why are there Silly String loops connecting the faucet to the shower nozzle? What is even happening right now?
I pause. There’s something else that isn’t quite adding up. Well, obviously, there is way, way more about this morning that isn’t adding up, but there’s something big I’m missing. It’s pushing its way into my brain except I can’t quite grasp it.
And then I do.
I yank open the bathroom door.
I ignore Paige and Veronica, who are staring at me in pity, and march straight to Paige’s sleeping bag where I reach in and grab the sweatshirt that had been right next to me when I woke up this morning. The one I’d thrown at Paige when she aimed the flashlight app at my face. I hold it up and gulp. The air in the basement chokes me, and there’s a slight tilt to the room.
“Whoa,” says Paige in an awestruck voice. “Is that . . . ?”
“Jake Ribano’s sweatshirt,” I say breathlessly, with a combination of wonder and fear. This is big. This is, quite possibly, bigger than a trashed basement. Bigger than a flock of chicks in the bathtub. Maybe, maybe, even bigger than a missing eyebrow.
Jake Ribano is never, ever, ever seen without his trademark black sweatshirt with the giant white skull and crossbones across the front. It lets all the kids know Jake Ribano is Trouble with a capital T.
And now I’m holding it? The sweatshirt!
I have to figure all this out. I watched a movie once where everyone woke up in an alternate universe and had to find their way back. Maybe that’s it! If I could just quiet the buzzing in my brain . . . You’re smart. You can make sense out of this, Meghan.
“Wow. Who do you guys think this belongs to?” Paige is holding up this weird, superfuzzy, supertall hat that looks like someone wrapped it in a carpet remnant. It has a maroon ribbon along the bottom and a hideous tassel on the top part. Paige plops it onto her head, and it wobbles there until she slides the chin strap on. “Is this the best, or what? Next year’s Halloween costume, ya think?”
“Where did that come from?” I ask.
Paige shrugs. “Dunno. It was right at the end of my sleeping bag.”
“Um, guys?” Veronica’s voice is nasally and grating and cuts through the quiet I’m trying to find. I so badly want to be nice for my best friend’s sake, but I seriously wonder how anyone could expect me to process what is happening and deal with Veronica politely.
Paige is clearly not concerned with being sweet. “Not now, Veronica.”
Veronica sniffles once and then says in a tiny voice, “But, um, this is kinda important.”
I stare numbly at the sweatshirt I have clenched in my fist and try to tune out their exchange. Think, Meghan, think.
“What?” Paige snaps.
Veronica makes a harrumph sound and turns her back on us. She bends over her cot and begins letting the air out of her mattress. “Forget it then! I just thought you might also be noticing, or I guess the word would be more like wondering. . . . I mean—”
“Spit it out!” Paige orders, and I cringe. Veronica falls onto the half-filled mattress, which hisses air angrily.
“Well, it’s just . . . ,” she says, her arms spreading wide to take in the whole room. “Where is Anna Marie?”
CHAPTER SIX
Ninja Nancy Drews
I let my eyes rest on the empty sleeping bag I could have sworn had been filled with my best friend’s warm body at bedtime last night. Or this morning. I can’t actually remember what time we finally went to bed, but it had most definitely, positively been in the a.m. hours. Come to think of it, though, I can’t be totally sure, because I can’t remember much of last night.
I’ve been trying so hard to clear my head so I can figure this all out, but why hadn’t I started with the basics? Like what really happened last night? I remember Madame Mesmer telling me to lie down on the floor, and each of us staking out a space on the rug to follow her directions. I remember breathing deeply and trying not to laugh when she told us to relax our bums, but after that . . . ? Nothing. I can almost believe I’d just fallen asleep for the night then and there, but if so—how can we explain any of this?
I look around the room again. Everywhere my eyes rest, I see disaster. The tower of Mountain Dew cans on the coffee table reaches far above my head like a giant game of Jenga. The ceiling fan spins a long, slow trail of Silly String around and around, around and around. The floor is covered in Doritos crumbs, popped popcorn kernels, and the spilled contents of an entire bowl of M&M’s, just waiting to be ground into the thick carpet.
There is no way I could have slept through all this mess being made. No. Possible. Way. And yet I don’t remember even one second of the night in which this kind of disaster zone could have been created. I take a tentative step onto my sleeping bag to avoid the booby-trapped carpet of stains-waiting-to-happen.
“Take me to New York. I’d like to see LA. I really want to . . .”
I drop to the ground, frantically tossing my sleeping bag until I uncover the remote. I jam my finger on the off button again and again.
Quiet.
I crouch and take a deep breath. Veronica and Paige are frozen in place, clearly having the exact same thoughts, and the three of us stare at one another before I finally whisper, “What’s happening, you guys?”
Almost as if my words snap her out of a trance, Veronica flings a leg over the back of the sofa and kind of half climbs, half rolls onto the cushions and down to the floor, landing between me and Paige. She brushes her hands off, shrugs at us, and then crawls over to Anna Marie’s sleeping bag and puts her hand inside, patting around.
“She’s obviously not hiding in there, Veronica. She’s small, but she’s not that small,” Paige says, clearly biting back a sigh.
“Clue number one! It’s cold!” Veronica proclaims.
“Huh?” I ask.
“This sleeping bag is cold. No one’s been inside here for a long time. Maybe even hours.” Veronica sounds pretty sure of herself, even under the weight of Paige’s squinty stare.
“She probably got uncomfortable on the floor and remembered she has a comfy, cozy bed right upstairs. So let’s go find her!” Paige, who is always confident, sounds even more sure of herself than normal, and right away I realize, of course, that has to be exactly what happened. It’s beyond logical. A swarm of insects with wings had taken up residence in my belly the second Veronica made the comment about Anna Marie being missing, but now they die out, as though an exterminator showed up inside my stomach. Anna Marie is fine. One problem solved. Maybe the mystery of the basement mess will be just as obvious once we’re all back together again and can piece together what happened after Madame Mesmer left last night.
Paige stands and holds out a hand to help me up. Once on my feet, I take a step toward Paige, then stop, reach back down, and grab Jake’s sweatshirt. I slip it on and zip it over my hot pink KEEP CALM AND BAKE CUPCAKES T-shirt. It’s just . . . I have the thing now, so I might as well wear it while I—oh wow—it smells like boy too. The good kind of soap-and-mint boy smell, not the sweaty-socks-and-soccer-practice kind of boy smell.
“Wha-at?” I ask, all fake innocence, when I notice Paige’s raised eyebrows. Then I moan because I can’t do raised eyebrowsssss anymore. Just raised eyebrow. Singular. I slap a hand above my eye and rub at the ridge of smooth skin again. Somehow with all the bigger mysteries of the last few minutes, I’d managed to forget, but now all I can picture is my image in the bathroom mirror. My mother is going to have a complete and total conniption. She won’t even let me try bangs because she feels strongly that long layers suit my face shape better. She’ll never, ever let me spend the night out of the house again. And I was just getting good at it. Sort of. I didn’t freak out and demand to go home at bedtime, but I’m not sure it counts if I can’t actually remember lights-out.
If I want any prayer
at all of ever being allowed to leave the house again, we need to move fast. Step one: wake up Anna Marie pronto and get her down here. Step two: find a way to get this place cleaned up before Anna Marie’s mom sees it, because if she does . . . disaster. I mean, she’s usually pretty chill and it is a sleepover, so I’m mostly sure she expected some regular party mess. But this? A piece of Silly String detaches from the fan and lands on my arm. This goes way beyond. And if Mrs. Guerrero mentions anything about any of it to my mom, I’m doubly dead. As in, my mom will kill me and then find a way to bring me back from the dead just so she can kill me again.
Paige tugs on my sleeve, and we tiptoe carefully through the minefield of spilled food. Operation Wake Up Anna Marie is on. We’re almost to the stairs when Veronica races up behind us, huffing like she’s just run a race, despite the fact that the distance between the sleeping bags and the stairs is about ten steps, fifteen at most. She grabs my sweatshirt at the elbow, bunching the fabric between her hand. “Wait!”
We pause. I’m getting used to Veronica’s weird behavior now, and so I wait patiently, not even bothering to exchange secret smirking glances with Paige. Veronica puts her free hand up in a crossing guard’s stop motion. “We definitely can’t let her mom see us,” she says.
“Why not?” I ask. As long as the encounter isn’t taking place down here, what’s the harm?
“Be-caaaaaause. If Anna Marie isn’t up there, then her mom is going to have all kinds of questions for us. And she’s probably going to ask them after she’s stormed down to this basement to make sure Anna Marie’s not here. Do we really want Mrs. Guerrero to see all this?” She releases my sweatshirt to gesture around the room. First I have to stretch Jake’s sweatshirt carefully back into place, smoothing down the wrinkles Veronica’s fist caused. But then my eyes fall on a pizza box I hadn’t noticed before. A fly is crawling on one of the half-eaten pieces. And wait, is that a giant blob of Cool Ranch dip on the corner of the couch? Ugh.