by Sophie Bell
That’s exactly what Iris Grace Tyler did. She did one thing more, too. She wasn’t sure why. Cheri was the one who usually wore makeup—just a little, sparkly lip glosses and eco-friendly nail polishes with nonsensical names like Lilac Attack. But the morning after her bad break with Sebastian, Iris was seized by an impulse. And after she’d combed through her signature purple strands until they were smooth and shiny and springing with curls, she picked up a black eye pencil her mom had left behind in the bathroom. And drew a curved line above the lashes of each lid.
Truth be told, what Iris really wanted to do with that eye pencil was color in a thick band across her entire face, up to her brows, over the bridge of her nose, back to both temples, so that her bloodshot blue eyes would be set in a ribbon of black. Just like a heavy metal singer’s getup, she thought. Or, yeah, a superhero’s mask.
Iris didn’t do that. It would have been messy, and it would have messed with the people at school. What was the point of wearing a mask when everyone already knew your secret? So she just drew the two black lines.
And that made her feel a bit better.
• • •
After school that Friday afternoon, the four girls walked together from Chronic Prep to the Highly Questionable Tower, aka HQT. Yup, you read right. Four girls. Count ’em! Early that morning, Iris had texted Opaline a cryptic message with a strange request. Then she’d caught up with her at school and, without explaining why, asked her to meet them outside the revolving doors after the last bell. Iris had seemed so matter-of-fact and fierce—even more than she’d been on Monday in the cafeteria—that Opal almost felt like, if she’d said anything but yes, Iris might have snapped and gone supernova on her right there in the hallway. Frankly, it was a bit frightening. Scarlet’s raised fist suddenly paled in comparison.
Now, as Opaline Ann Trudeau stood on the threshold of the Fascination Laboratory, aka FLab, she thought back to the last time she was there—four years ago when they’d all been splashed by DNA-altering goo. Maybe she should have been scared by the prospect of returning. Instead she was excited. Nervous, but excited. She’d passed the loyalty test—at least she hoped she had (Iris hadn’t said, exactly). She was among the Ultra Violets—even though Scarlet, between pirouettes, had thrown her shade the whole walk over. If Iris hadn’t seemed quite so remote, Opal would have reached out and held her hand right then, just like they used to do when they were in kindergarten.
She didn’t, though. Because, well, like we said.
• • •
“Hi, UVs!” Candace greeted them as they entered the laboratory. “Hi, Opaline!” The erstwhile babysitter welcomed Opal with more warmth than any of the three girls had, even going so far as to imitate Opal’s circle-and-two-snaps hand gesture. Opal wanted to die on the spot—how did Candace know about that?! And if she knew about that, didn’t she also know it was an “old Opal” gesture? A “bad Opal” gesture, Opal thought. Although maybe I could rehab it and use it again?
She smiled back shyly at Candace, hedging on whether she should apologize to her, too. The teenius was sitting on a stool at the stainless steel lab table, wearing a spotless white lab coat and protective plastic goggles over her thick black glasses. Tucked into the goggles’ elastic strap was what appeared to be a stainless steel swizzle spork?
“Tell us again why our moms aren’t here?” Scarlet demanded, skipping any pleasantries while spinning chaîné turns all the way up to the rock-crystal window. Opal wanted to join her there and enjoy the panoramic view of Sync City. But she didn’t have to be a scientist to know that Scarlet was keeping her distance—nettled, no doubt, by Opal’s lil’ fib about her love for Lil’ Freckles. So Opal hung back by the lab table instead, her eyes scanning the shelves for all the oddities: test tubes and petri dishes, a squeeze bottle labeled WHOSEEWHATSIT, mason jars with mystery meats afloat in their murky waters. Opal thought she recognized an ear. She shuddered and turned her attention back to the group.
“Your moms,” Candace was saying, “are participating in a panel on the global initiative to contain and convert methane gas as a way to combat atmospheric warming.”
“Methane gas?” Cheri repeated, fiddling with the dial on a Bunsen burner.
“Cow farts!” Scarlet hollered back from the window, where she was now interpretive dancing. Her modern choreography involved lots of melodramatic tumbles.
“Eww!” Cheri squealed, scrunching her features into an ick-face while Candace cautioned Scarlet to “take it easy up there!”
Scarlet came to a tippy-toed stop. “What?” she said, playing innocent. “That’s what methane gas is: cow farts!”
Cheri and Opal looked to Candace for confirmation. Iris, who had half perched on the stool opposite the teenius at the lab table, looked past Scarlet out the rock-crystal window.
“Methane gas does come from decomposing organic matter,” Candace admitted with a roll of her eyes. “Such as, yes, bovine flatulence.”
“Barf! For serious?” Cheri squealed again while Scarlet snickered in victory. “Scarlet, how do you even know this stuff?”
Opal guessed it might have something do with Scarlet having three older brothers, but she didn’t think it was her place to bring it up.
“Let’s get down to business, guys,” Iris said, completely nonplussed by the subject of cow farts. She withdrew the folded lollipop wrapper from the pocket of her messenger bag. “Let’s analyze this gunk. Opal, did you bring what I asked for?”
All eyes turned to Opaline. After getting Iris’s text that morning, it’s not that she didn’t know this moment must have been coming. But she blushed all the way down to her Peter Pan collar anyway. Reaching into the pocket of her dress, she withdrew what looked like a small glass ball with a squishy pouf on top. Inside, greenish liquid sloshed, black flecks of bracken swirling in the mix.
“Is that—?” Scarlet began, as Cheri backed away.
“Yes, it’s L’Eau d’Opes,” Iris answered. “It’s Opal’s mind-control perfume.”
“You still have some of that stuff?” Cheri said, dumbstruck—since obviously Opal did. “You kept it, even after everything that happened?”
Opal stared down at her scuffed Mary Janes. “Not to use on anyone,” she mumbled. “Just as a kind of, um, memento.”
Scarlet glared, her gunmetal eyes shooting back and forth between Opal’s hanging head and the bottle of poison perfume in her hands. Cheri made a nervous joke of sorts. “I guess I could understand that,” she said. “I guess it’s not every day a girl gets a perfume named after her?”
“Hmm, okay.” Candace snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves, strapped on a face mask to cover her mouth, took the sample from Iris, the perfume from Opal, and produced a second spork from the pocket of her lab coat. With precise movements, she used its sharp tines to scrape the pasty grellowish sludge onto a microscope slide. “Don’t worry, it’s sterilized!” she assured the girls, even though none of them had even thought to ask. Then, on a separate slide, she spritzed a few droplets of the perfume.
The FLab grew quiet, Opal standing self-consciously at the far end of the table, Iris slouched in stony silence, Scarlet aggressively voguing over at the window, and Cheri watching by Candace’s side. As the teenius worked, she tried to make more small talk. Her words were slightly muffled by her mask.
“Iris, are you wearing eyeliner?” she asked.
“Yes,” Iris replied with just the slightest edge to her voice.
“I think it looks good!” Cheri piped in with a smile: Some of her favorite experiments involved makeup.
“I think it looks good, too,” Candace said, focusing as she sandwiched the fungus on the slide by centering a cover slip on top of it. “A bit tough, though?”
“Somebody’s gotta be,” Iris tossed off.
“Amen to that, sister!” Scarlet shouted, grooving back over to the table in a funky cros
s-step that involved a shuffle, a dip, and a rotating shoulder shake. It looked really cool. Opal hoped the day would come when Scarlet might show her how to do it.
Lifting the first slide with the tips of her fingers, Candace transferred it to the stage of the microscope. “I saw you talking to Sebastian on the grassy knoll yesterday . . .” she ventured.
“Oh, Candace, seriously?” Iris exclaimed with exasperation. “On the MAUVe cam? It would be nice to have some privacy once in a while!” Like when a boy is dumping me, Iris thought. But she didn’t say it out loud because she had resolved to be strong. And it’s not as if she hadn’t already told the whole story, down to the last detail, to Scarlet and Cheri, if not Opaline.
Candace looked up from the microscope at the purple-curled Ultra Violet. Even through her two layers of glasses, Iris could see the compassion in her former babysitter’s eyes. She turned away and bit the inside of her cheek to keep from crying again.
“It’s not that I mean to spy on you, sweets,” Candace said, changing slides. “It’s just that I worry about the three of you—the four of you,” she revised her sentence, “out there, with all that’s going on.”
Opal appreciated being included in the group. She was just trying to remember what the MAUVe cam was.
“Anyhoo . . .” Candace racked her impressive brain for what to say next. She always found it a tad challenging to be a cheerleader for the girls while still staying “empirically accurate.” As an almost-scientist, she considered it an ethical obligation to always be straightforward with them—not to fill their heads with any false hopes or hocus pocus or mushy metaphysical gobbledygook. She’d never forget the time Opal had asked her about the existence of fairy godmothers! Candace didn’t believe in fairy tales; she believed in facts and evidence (and also aliens and astrology, because they were equally valid). So she didn’t like to say anything she couldn’t back up with research. Even though she sensed that was exactly what Iris needed to hear right now.
Candace ran a rubber-gloved hand through her baby bangs and tried again. “Iris, you know better than anyone how things can change,” she said. That was certainly true! “And Saturn is at a hard angle to the sun right now, which is causing all kinds of cosmic havoc.” That was true, too—astronomical charts could prove it. “So even though it might feel like an end”—this part she was going a bit out on a limb with—“it might really be an . . . evolution.”
“We don’t have to talk about it,” Iris said softly, shaking her head.
“Okay.” Candace grappled for a more positive way to close the conversation. “But that boy would be crazy to blow you off.” Thinking it over, Candace knew this statement was the most empirically accurate of all.
Then she sneezed right into her face mask.
“You too?” Cheri said, passing Candace a tissue from the FLab’s sanitized dispenser. “Everyone’s been a bit sneezy lately.”
“Maybe Snow White cloned her dwarf,” Candace deadpanned, giving Opal a wink.
“No, we think it has something to do with this stuff!” Cheri pressed.
Candace propped the protective goggles on top of her head. They left behind a pink outline on her skin, imprinted in half circles under her eyes. “Interesting theory, Cher,” she said, tugging down her mask. “I want to run some tests on a smaller sample to analyze its chemical properties—toxicity, flammability, combustion point—”
“You mean to check if it’s poisonous, or will catch fire, or explode,” Iris said, trying to keep up with Candace’s science-speak.
“Exactly.” Candace nodded. “But just from observing the slides, I can see the similarities. The spores in the river gunk are, I hypothesize, a condensed version of the same nerve-altering ingredients in the perfume. Airborne, they would definitely be an irritant.”
“Spores?” Opal asked, inching a little closer.
“I’d say they’re at least partially artificially generated.” Candace leaned back so that Opal could take a peek through the microscope at the squashed mold in extreme close-up. “Though I also detect some organic materials in the composition. A cruciferous vegetable, like broccoli, or cauliflower, or—”
“Or brussels sprouts!” Opal and Scarlet said together. Opal was chagrined, Scarlet angry.
“OMV, Opal, it is your perfume again, isn’t it?” Cheri cried. “The Projekt BeauTekification mutants are dumping a powdered version in the harbor? But why?” She had left Darth back in Club Very because she thought he might be upset by the presence of Opal. Now she wished he were there. She could have hugged him for comfort.
Opal grimaced. She’d wanted to just walk away from BeauTek, but her bad deeds seemed to be following her. “It’s possible that,” she said to the four expectant faces looking to her for an explanation, “after the trial batch of perfume was, um, vaporized at my birthday party”—Opal met Iris’s pale blue, black-rimmed eyes, but they seemed as faraway as the horizon—“BeauTek could have tweaked the formula.”
“Concentrated it into a talc.” Candace reached across the lab table to her tablet computer and opened up one of her e-textbooks, though the latex glove was making it hard for her to scroll through the pages on the screen.
“Like baby powder?” Cheri whispered.
“Like crazy powder,” Candace said with concern. “Right now, it seems like it’s just a minor irritant. It smells foul, and it makes people sneeze. But”—her rubber-tipped finger paused on a paragraph about time-released toxins—“it may be weakening their immune systems. And if the mind-control chemicals have been condensed in this crazy powder, then BeauTek must have some plan to reactivate them at some point again.”
This time Iris did lock onto Opal’s stricken look. “Midnight Sunday, max!” Both girls quoted back what Agent Jack Baxter had said.
“What, Opal, the entire sixth grade wasn’t enough?” Scarlet snapped. “Now BeauTek is trying to poison all of Sync City?”
Good-bye, Gazebra
WHERE IS THE LOVE? CHERI HAD TO ASK HERSELF THAT Saturday afternoon, roller-skating through Chrysalis Park on her way to meet Scarlet.
The luv, the luv . . . Riding shotgun in her shoulder bag, Darth echoed the sentiment, as if they were thinking a duet.
Reminder: Cheri believed in love. She believed that love conquers all. That love is (almost) all you need (nail polish remover being a necessity, too). That love—along with the sun’s gravitational pull—makes the world go ’round. If those were clichés, that was just because the power of love had made them universally true. But believe as Cheri did in the L word, Cupid was not exactly cooperating with her designs . . .
Whooz Kewpid? Darth asked, interrupting her thoughts.
A flying baby who shoots an arrow through your heart to make you crush on someone, Cheri explained as she skated.
Darth squeaked with alarm. Iz another mutant?! He wondered what stink he should use against a winged baby packing a crossbow.
Cheri didn’t respond. She was too wrapped up in her analysis, mentally reviewing the status of all the boy-girl combos she could think of. Kind of like a reality TV results show in her brain. First, I tried to set up Albert with Opal, she mused. And he fell for me instead—major fail, alas. Though those two finally seem to be friendly? She smiled, but her satisfaction only lasted a second. Now, because Iris is all bummed out over one borderline Black Swan, I’m sneaking around to help Scarlet, who is smitten with another: a spy who wants to bring down the Ultra Violets!
The romantic intrigue was so complicated she needed a color-coded flow chart to keep track of it all. Her hair took on a magenta tint as she set one up in her mind. She filed it away when she spotted Scarlet up ahead.
Cheri slid to a halt on her platform skates as she reached her.
“Read the invite again?” It was the first thing Scarlet said. Brimming with energy, she triple-backflipped right there on the grass.
“Hel
lo to you, too,” Cheri quipped as Scarlet landed upright beside her.
The petite-est Ultra Violet raised her eyebrows beneath her long bangs and gave her friend an imploring look.
“By now I can recite it by heart.” Cheri clutched her hands to her chest and stared up at the sky as she said, “Dearest Scarlet, it has recently been brought to my attention that you are ‘hopelessly in love’ with me.”
“Shut. Up!” Scarlet bounced three feet off the ground, and Cheri had to swerve in a speedy half circle to avoid a superpowered shove that would have sent her bang, zoom! all the way to the river. “It does not say that!” Scarlet huffed, planting her feet back on the sidewalk in a defiant second-position stance.
“Temper, temper, Scar!” Cheri chided, pulling out her smartphone by the fuzzy green rabbit ears of its knitted case. She opened up the controversial text message with the tap of one lilac-lacquered fingernail. “Furi,” she directed, “read invite.”
For fun, just before the digital assistant could begin, Cheri activated another app.
“R-r-reading,” Furi reported back, her robotic voice filtered through autotune so that she sounded like an overproduced pop singer:
no more b-b-black-and-white rrrred.
gazebra @ 4:00 p.m. sa-sa-saturday.
“Oh, you’re ha-ha-hilarious today!” To Cheri’s giggles, Scarlet imitated the autotune, even though the techno message had made her sway in place. “No more black-and-white,” she repeated for the umpteenth time. “Do you think he was talking about his hair? You know, the way it’s salt-and-peppery?” Scarlet tugged on the end of her dark, shiny ponytail. It once would have been unthinkable for her to voice such a boy-centric question. Even now it made her cheeks hot. But she felt like she could risk being embarrassed in front of Cheri. Scarlet knew the girl pretty much lived for this kind of gooey stuff.