by Sophie Bell
I piteez da fool who try dat! Dart snickered from his hiding place in Cheri’s tote bag.
“Sync City is a grand metropolis,” Mayor Blumesberry continued, “with its glass and steel towers, its formerly modern monorail, its aeroscootering commuters. How can nature be expected to compete without some cosmetic help?”
“IT CAN’T!” The bellowing came again from off-camera. This time the mayor must have anticipated it, because she ducked down behind her podium before the blast could mess up her hair once more. The Sync City banner flapped out in 3-D over the bleachers.
When Mayor Blumesberry popped back up, her smile appeared slightly strained, and beneath the cakey layer of white powder her cheeks flushed russet with embarrassment. But she carried on with her announcement. “No, no, it can’t,” she responded to the camera, as if the citizens had asked her the question and not the other way around. “That’s what Projekt BeauTekification is all about: natural beauty—only better!”
“GRASS SKIRTS!”
Although not wearing one herself, Mayor Blumesberry swayed to this latest shout in an accidental hula dance. “And you’ll recognize the volunteers by their cheerful grass skirts!” she explained, regaining her composure.
A photo inset showed a beaming worker in a grass skirt the same acidic yellow as the Mall of No Returns’s neon sign. The same bilious chartreuse as its shopping bags—the ones Opal’s mom had used to pack the poisonous perfume at her daughter’s birthday disaster. Iris, being an artist, searched for the good in all colors. But something about that sharp sulfuric yellow made her eyes hurt.
“I saw some weird tourists wearing those at Synchro de Mayo!” Cheri gasped, just as the image vanished from the screen.
“So if you pass someone in a sassy grass skirt dabbing perfume behind a pigeon’s ears or brushing a beaver’s front teeth or, ahem-tee-hee-ha, powdering the harbor,” the mayor concluded in a rush, “stop and take a moment to say thank you. Thank you for making Sync City more pretty!”
The picture froze again, Mayor Blumesberry’s giant 3-D grin looming over the girls in the gymporium as if she would snap all their heads off in a single bite. Scarlet didn’t think she could slouch any lower on the bleachers, but she did. Sometimes being small had its advantages.
“That is the dumbest waste of money I ever heard of,” she said from her spot next to Iris’s feet.
Darth chittered something to Cheri.
“I know!” she exclaimed. “Chrysalis Park is perfect as it is. Putting makeup on squirrels is totally pointless. Plus, almost nobody can pull off blue eye shadow, alas.”
With a whir that echoed throughout the gymporium, the supersized monitor began its ascent back into its storage slot, the ceiling swallowing up the mayor’s fixed grimace. Girls began to make their way down the stands and toward the locker room. As Iris reached the exit doors, she turned to face Scarlet and Cheri.
“Obvi that was Develon shouting in the background,” she said. “This Projekt BeauTekification must be what she was talking to the mayor about.”
Over her friends’ shoulders, Iris could see Opaline, still in the middle of the gym. She was helping Ms. Skynyrd tidy up, slowly, though there really wasn’t much to be put away before the next period. Iris suspected she must have been stalling to avoid the crowd in the locker room. Again, she couldn’t stop from feeling a little sorry for her. And again, her Coolness?/Lameness! list ran through her mind.
Iris yanked anxiously on the stubborn knot in her hair as Scarlet and Cheri looked back at Opal, too. “I’m going to text Candace,” she said, continuing through the exit. “She’ll know how to break the tie.”
• • •
At the mayor’s office, as soon as the cameras had been shut off, Rosenmary Blumesberry undid the top button of her blouse and ran her jacket sleeve across her sweaty forehead. A smear of white powder soiled the dark fabric.
“How was that?” she said in the direction of the broadcast’s invisible bloviator.
Develon Louder, president of BeauTek, stepped out from behind the scenes. A bottle of bubbly in one hand, two long-stemmed glasses in the other, and her black Burkant handbag hanging from the crook of her arm, she approached the mayor with complete confidence—despite the fact that she was teetering on six-inch heels. Once she reached Mayor Blumesberry—who would have been a good deal shorter than her even if she hadn’t been wearing stilettos—she popped off the cork with an assured jerk of her thumb. It shot up to the rafters as frothy bubbles spewed out of the bottle’s mouth. Placing the flutes on the podium, she filled each one high enough for foam to spill over their thin lips, too. Then she put the bottle down, picked a glass up, and swung around her pocketbook until it was directly in front of her face.
Through a thin transparent panel that ran around its top, she peered down at the mayor.
“LEGENDARY, BLUMESBERRY!” she barked, just as she’d been barking all throughout the broadcast. “Projekt BeauToxification is underway!” From behind her black Burkant, she took a celebratory sip, then pointed to the second flute with a sharply filed fingernail.
“Thanks,” the mayor said, raising her glass in a toast. “Don’t mind if I do.”
Second Helpings
YOU WOULD THINK THAT, AFTER PARTY-CRASHING Opal’s birthday and basically blowing up the back room in a single awesome solar event, the Ultra Violets would never want to set foot inside Tom’s Diner again. Too many bad memories. Too mucho bad mojo. But that would be crazy talk! The Ultra Violets don’t get all superstitious about stuff like that! (Well, maybe Candace does, a little bit, sometimes. Which is utterly baffling considering she’s just a few college credits short of becoming an official scientist and thus should be the most rational of the bunch.) It wasn’t the diner’s fault that it had been the site of a bombastic superhero showdown. And Tom’s Diner had the best berry parfaits and butterbeer and curly fries in Sync City. AND the girls had grown quite fond of their sassy unflappable beehived waitress—a woman who had seen it all but didn’t seem to care about any of it.
The sassy waitress was so unflappable, in fact, that when the three Ultra Violets cruised down on their robotic hummingbird wings and entered the diner after school on Tuesday, she barely blinked at their now public superhero status. She just called, “Yo, Philippe!” across the dining room, then slapped her hip with her notepad.
And just like that, the girls’ favorite table opened up.
“Is that a velvet rope?” Cheri cooed as the busboy unlatched it in front of the booth. He gave the red vinyl bench a final towel-buffing before stepping aside and gallantly bowing while she slipped in and sat down. He was a rather crush-worthy busboy, Cheri couldn’t help but notice, with neatly parted ash-blond hair and a prominent curve to the cupid’s bow of his lips.
“Merci, Philippe,” she said with her sparkliest smile.
“C’est mon plaisir, mademoiselle,” he answered in perfect French, his gray-gold eyes twinkling right back at her.
“Did you hear that?” Cheri gushed to the other two girls as he headed off to clean another table. “He said it was his pleasure!”
“Oh brother!” Scarlet gave Cher an eye roll. She may not have been superstitious like Candace, but Scarlet definitely was suspicious of flowery sweet talk, especially in a foreign language. Jack would never say something all stupid and gooey like that, she found herself thinking. Instantly annoyed that she’d stopped being mad at the Black Swan even for a minute, Scarlet gave her head an aggressive shake. As if she could knock the lil’ agent out of it. As if!
“Are you all right?” Iris asked, sliding into the booth beside her.
“I just don’t have time for boys, okay?” Scarlet said vehemently. “We have more important things to worry about!”
“I’m sorry!” Iris exclaimed, her face breaking out in purple paisleys. “I’ve tried not to obsess any more about Sebastian, at least not out lou
d, I—”
“No, no, no!” Scarlet shook her head again, loosening her ponytail elastic until her licorice-black hair tumbled out of it. “I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean you. I . . . Oh, never mind. Hey, check this out!” she said, spotting a welcome distraction. A small brass plaque had been added beneath the window. Scarlet read the engraved words:
“Our own VIP booth!” Cheri beamed. “Awesome!”
“What does ‘connoisseurs’ mean?” Scarlet asked.
“Like, experts,” Iris said, smiling. “We’re milkshake experts!”
“That’s a French word, too,” Cheri added, a dreamy look in her emerald-green eyes. “Maybe Philippe wrote it. Maybe this VIP booth was his idea . . .”
“Oh. Brother!” Scarlet objected again, twisting her hair back up into its ponytail.
Just then, Candace pushed through the diner’s doors. Seeing the girls in their usual booth, she gave a wave and headed over to join them.
“Sorry I’m late, guys,” she explained, sitting down next to Cheri. “The cumulus were pretty thick coming from the FLab, and it took me a while to remotely park the cloudship.” She flashed the screen of her smartphone, but all the girls could see was a field of fluffy white. Their prism-covered aircraft was impossible to detect within it.
The sassy waitress sashayed over to the table, notepad at the ready. She must have been running low on hairspray, because her black-and-white-striped updo was collapsing in the middle, making it look more like a big bird’s nest than a beehive. Philippe had also circled back around and was now clearing plates off the table directly behind theirs.
“The usual, ladies?” the waitress asked with a crack of her chewing gum, not bothering with any effusive “OMV you three are superheroes” small talk.
“We’re going to try something different today!” Iris responded, while Cheri and Scarlet nodded along. With their newfound appreciation of pie, humbly, mumbly, tart, or sweet, they’d decided to taste every type on the menu at least once. Also, ordering pie greatly decreased the chances of Candace accidentally pilfering another swizzle spork, since those mostly came with parfaits. “A piece of blueberry cobbler for me,” Iris said.
“Straight up coconut cream,” Scarlet ordered.
“And I’d like—” Cheri began.
Azk her, pleez! From his hiding spot in her bag, Darth nudged Cheri’s leg with his nose.
Cheri pursed her lips, but she found it impossible to deny Darth anything, even when she already knew the answer—and when a cute busboy was eavesdropping on their order. Clearing her throat, she said, “You wouldn’t happen to have a slice of grub-earthworm pie, would you?” She was too embarrassed to meet the sassy waitress’s skeptical eyes.
“Sorry, hon, all sold out,” the waitress replied without missing a beat. “That was yesterday’s special.”
Darn! Darth thought.
I’m sure she’s being sarcastic! Cheri thought back as she smiled sheepishly at the waitress. “Then just cherry for me.”
“How ’bout you, Moms?”
By now Candace was certain the waitress had to know that no way was she the girls’ mom. But she’d given up trying to correct her. “Key lime, please,” was all she said.
As the waitress strutted away, Candace leaned in to the center of the table and looked out over her geek-chic glasses. “Okay, first things first. What’s the gut check on Projekt BeauTekification?”
All four of them placed great value on the gut check. The gut check was not to be confused with superstition. The gut check was all about knowing how to trust your intuition—the undefinable, pit-of-your-stomach feeling that something was either right or wrong.
“You saw the broadcast today, too?” Cheri asked.
“It was impossible to miss,” Candace answered. “Mayor Blumesberry overrode all the networks in Sync City. It came up on the main screen in the FLab. She must have a pretty powerful computer server to do that. Of course, I operate all of our tech—our cell phones and tablets, the robo-wings, the MAUVe, the cloudship, and all the equipment in Club Very UV—off my own private satellite, so we didn’t get hacked. It’s one thing for the Ultra Violets to publicly serve Sync City, but I’m not down with the mayor having access to everyone’s TVs and computers. Especially not ours. Not if she’s in cahoots with BeauTek!”
“Something’s totally unkosher about it,” Scarlet agreed, just as the waitress arrived with their order.
“Purple sings the blues,” she announced, serving Iris her cobbler. “Cherry for Red, hold the worms,” she joked to Cheri. “Lime time for Moms. And for the peanut, coconut cream!” With a flourish, she placed the last plate in front of Scarlet.
Scarlet forced a smile. “Thanks,” she mumbled through her first mouthful of pie. The waitress seemed to take a special delight in teasing her, and there wasn’t much Scarlet could do besides grin and deal.
At the tartness of the lime, Candace puckered up. “We need to get to the bottom of the Projekt,” she said through pinched lips as the waitress shuffled away on her orthopedic sneakers. “Find out what it’s really about. Maybe I can counter-hack the mayor’s systems. And figure out the best way to infiltrate BeauTek.” She went to drum her fingers on the tabletop thoughtfully, but ran them into her pie mousse instead.
“That brings us to the second thing second,” Iris said, plucking a few napkins from the tabletop dispenser and passing them to Candace.
“You mean Opaline?” Candace replied, sucking cool green cream off her thumb.
“How did you know?” Iris sat up straight with surprise. “She said she wants to join the Ultra Violets!”
“Wow, really?” Candace’s eyebrows rose to meet the ends of her baby bangs. “That is a newsflash!” She began poking around in her bag for her bottle of all-purpose decontaminant. Teenius scientists packed decontaminant at all times.
“Yup,” Scarlet said, licking her spoon clean. “Girlfriend ate the mumble pie.”
Cheri frowned. “That’s just what I called it by accident,” she explained to Candace, embarrassed again. After the humiliation of attempting to order an earthworm delicacy for their clandestine skunk mascot, she really did not want to relive another one of her verbal blunders. “What Scarlet means is, Opal said she was sorry. To Iris.”
“Wait, Candace, so if you didn’t know about that, then what did you think we meant?” Iris wondered.
“That her mom left BeauTek,” Candace stated bluntly, “and she’s back at the FLab.”
“What?!” all three girls cried out together, their voices overlapping as they said things like, “How is that even possible?” and “Doing what?” and “Who hired her?” and “Don’t our moms know about BeauTek?”
While the girls got all their questions out in the open, Candace pushed down on the pump of the decontaminant container. A squirt of gelatinous liquid shot right up onto her eyeglasses. “I don’t know all the details yet,” she said, taking them off before the gel dripped onto her dessert. “But I believe she went through an intensive interview process, and then she had to be deprogrammed, and she’s employed on a temporary basis only. Like a trial run.”
“But without Dr. Trudeau, we don’t have an inside track to BeauTek!” Iris despaired, slumping back against the padded vinyl booth. “That’s how I thought we might infiltrate it. Through Opaline and her mother!”
Hands and glasses sanitized and spotless once more, Candace put away the decontaminant and picked up her plain old, completely boring, non-swizzly spoon. Savoring another taste of her key lime pie, she eyed Scarlet, who by then was balancing her own spoon on the tip of her nose. “Don’t you girls—you in particular, Scar—have another connection to BeauTek?” Candace floated the question.
Scarlet twitched her nose, and the spoon clanged onto the table. “Meaning what?” she demanded.
“The Black Swans!” Cheri’s eyes fluttered wide. “I
daresay Agent Jack is sweet on you, Miss Scarlet Jones,” she teased. “Maybe you could infiltrate his heart!”
“I daresay shut up!” Scarlet retorted, kicking the table. Iris and Cheri burst into giggles.
“Girls, calm down!” Candace implored, wishing she had a spork to brandish. “Seriously, the Black Swans could be the way to go. A way to kill two birds—”
Seeing Cheri’s suddenly stricken expression, Candace quickly changed hers. “A way to do two things at once,” she substituted. “Find out about Projekt BeauTekification and test Opaline.”
“You mean get Opaline to investigate the Black Swans as a way for her to prove her loyalty?” Scarlet asked, secretly relieved that it wouldn’t force her into another confrontation with Agent Jack.
“As long as it doesn’t involve killing birds!” Cheri said as she fed Darth a jam-coated cherry. He squeezed his eyes shut at the sweetness. Tell me that isn’t better than some gross grub! Cheri chided.
Iz an akqwired tayst, Darth shrugged, holding out his paws for more fruity goodness.
“We’re all just so afraid to trust Opal again,” Iris summed up for the three of them.
“I’d be worried, too,” Candace said. “But this could be what we’ve hoped for from the beginning, guys. The four original Ultra Violets, together at last!”
Iris, Scarlet, and Cheri each glanced around the booth, remembering the time they’d been there with Opal after the ballet. Before everything went wrong.
“Everyone deserves a second chance, right?” Candace prompted. “Especially old friends.”
Iris twirled one of her violet ringlets thoughtfully. “That was the last point on my Coolness? list,” she said. “Giving Opal a second chance.”
“Did somebody say ‘seconds’?” The sassy waitress must have had pretty sharp hearing. She approached the table again and clicked her pen. “You cuckoo for more coconut, Short Stuff?” she asked Scarlet. “Who here gets a second helping?”