by Paul Tobin
My impact was uncomfortable.
The hedge-dive left me covered in considerable scratches and even more considerable pain, with leaves stuffed into my mouth and ears. I had a momentary awareness of something white racing away from the hedges, and then Bosper was barking at me and all I wanted was to be far away from the painful hedges.
So of course the jetbelt decided I wanted to be about eighty feet in the air, and it tore me out of the hedges and soared me upward, bouncing me off the side of the house again and again in the manner of a fly repeatedly thumping against a window, although flies do not repeatedly yell “piffle,” at least to the best of my knowledge.
“Quit flying me everywhere!” I told my jetbelt, which faithfully decided to cut out completely, like a dog slinking away when it knows it’s in trouble. Speaking of dogs slinking away, Bosper was slinking across the yard, dashing beneath the oak tree and heading toward the hole in our fence, looking guiltily back at me as I plummeted from high above, thanks to a jetbelt that clearly didn’t understand me as a person.
“Bosper!” I yelled. But he kept running and I kept falling and it was irritating to once again fail to discover who Bosper was talking to, and I wanted to catch up to him and ask, so of course my jetbelt kicked back into life, overly eager in the manner of a dog that’s decided not only that she’s been forgiven, but that it must mean she’s never been in trouble in the first place.
My jetbelt insisted the shortest path to catching Bosper was through the branches of the oak tree (which felt like getting hit by a multitude of baseball bats) and then through the hole in our wooden fence, the diameter of which is approximately one-third that of a Delphine Cooper, or at least it was before I hit the hole at about two hundred miles per hour. The fence made a noise like “B-CRAKKK!” and I made a noise like “Seriously?” and then there were pieces of the wooden fence flying this way and that, pinwheeling through the air much in the same manner as I was doing, because I’d closed my eyes during impact and was literally flying blind.
“Up!” I thought, because I was bouncing off the street like a rock skipping across a lake, and I was worried about slamming into houses or trees or cars or a wide variety of other things that generally stick to the ground. If I went up, then all I had to worry about was clouds (not generally considered impact threats) and an occasional bird (all of which have learned to stay out of my way when I’m in the air), and that meant that flying upward was by far the safest—
Okay, so I almost ran into a helicopter.
It was a bright red helicopter with an image of a teacup painted on the side, and there were three men in suits inside, and one woman dangling from a cable almost fifty feet below the helicopter. She had some weird machine in her hands, something that resembled a crystal ball with a handle, pointing it in all directions while the helicopter went zooming over Polt, heading toward the storm clouds in the distance.
“Oops,” I said, accidentally flying into her.
“Ahhh!” she said, as if she was surprised that I would run into her, merely because she was flying a thousand feet over the streets of Polt, which proves that the Red Death Tea Society doesn’t really understand how talented I am at accidentally running into people.
“Bzzz?” Melville asked, having caught up to me.
“Sure,” I answered. “Sting her.”
Melville whooshed forward in an instant, because she never needs much encouragement to sting someone.
“Don’t you dare!” the woman told me, as if I could still stop my incoming bee. It was much too late for that, and also much too fun for that. Instead, I flew up to the open door of the helicopter and landed inside.
“Surprise!” I told the three men, who did indeed seem surprised. The nearest spat out the tea he’d been drinking.
“Delphine?” he said. “You’re Delphine Cooper!”
I nodded, because it is impolite to lie. Then I said, “Mind if I break this?”
With that, I grabbed a handy crowbar and smashed the instrument panel, which reacted in the wholly gratifying manner of sparking and fizzing, spraying electricity like a water fountain and shocking the copilot unconscious. Meanwhile, I could hear the shrieks and gasps of bee-sting agony from the woman who was dangling beneath the helicopter, doing whatever it was that she was doing.
“What’s that woman doing?” I asked one of the men as he tried to punch me. He had one of those strange glass guns, the disintegrator pistols, clipped to his waist, but he’d obviously decided against using it, which is an intelligent decision if you’re having a scuffle inside a helicopter that it would be inconvenient to disintegrate.
I dodged his punch by the simple expedient of stepping entirely outside of the helicopter, using my jetbelt to keep me aloft. Then I whooshed back inside and punched him in the face with the full force of my jetbelt behind me.
He toppled.
“Ouchies,” I said, looking at my fist, because I’d skinned my knuckles.
“Oww, you guys,” I told the other two. “Why are your faces so hard?” It’s possible they had a perfectly reasonable explanation, such as force fields or just plain block-headedness, but the helicopter was starting to spin out of control and it was making me dizzy. Luckily, I had the option of leaving.
“We’ll talk about this later,” I told them, and then stepped out of the helicopter and dropped below, to where Melville was still chastising the dangling woman for being a member of an unpleasant assassin society.
“Bzzz?” Melville said.
I looked at the woman, who had bee stings all over her face and arms, and said, “Yes. I think that’s enough.” Melville stung her three more times just to be sure, and then landed on my hand, which was still holding the note I’d found in my yard. It’d become a bit battered during my adventures with the roof, with the chimney, the oak tree, the fence, and the helicopter that was now wobbling off, spitting sparks and the tiniest amount of black smoke.
“Bzzz?” Melville asked. I nodded. She was right. It was indeed time to read the note.
Hovering in midair, I read,
"Delphine. Hopefully my timing will work out. I calculated that it would only take you five minutes to master the thought-controlled jetbelt. They can be a little tricky, though. For instance, zoom to the left."
“Zoom to the left?” I said. Why had Nate written—
I zoomed to the left.
And frowned.
Then returned to the note.
It said,
"See? There's a 98.6 percent chance that merely looking at those words made you zoom to the left, simply because you were thinking about it. Oh, but now I'M the one who's being distracted; I meant to tell you that I do not expect to live through this day."
“What?” I said. My voice was thick. I could barely swallow. “Did I . . . did I just read that right?”
"Yes,"
the note said.
"You did indeed read that correctly. This is the reason why I went alone to the lake, telling you to stay behind to practice. It was almost a lie, but it came close enough to the truth . . . since you DID need to practice with the jetbelt. It's just that . . . I've been doing some calculations . . . and I think I've found a way to stop the Red Death Tea Society and save Chester, but I've calculated a 92.768 percent chance that I will not survive what needs to be done."
“What?” I gasped. Melville buzzed in dismay, picking up on my distress.
“Nate, you are being so stupid,” I said to the note. It didn’t answer back. I was already beginning to trigger my jetbelt, flying toward the distant lake.
And I was still reading.
"Anyway, Delphine, I just wanted you to know you're the best thing that's ever happened to me. I've always had fun making inventions, solving math problems, trying to understand how the world works, but . . . you're the one who made life fun, and I never truly understood how the world works, not until I met you. If you look at the back of this paper, you'll see a handprint, and it will tell you what to do. Oh, and pleas
e tell Bosper that I've solved the Erdős-Turán conjecture on additive bases. The solution is written on one of my socks. He'll be interested to know."
I was flying ever faster, heading toward the faraway lake and the storm.
I turned the paper over, and at first there wasn’t a handprint, and I was wondering what Nate was talking about. Then, the paper turned almost blindingly white, and a handprint began to form.
It was entirely black, centered on the white paper.
In the middle of the handprint it said, “Put your hand here.”
I did, but nothing happened. The handprint felt oddly warm, but that was all. My own hand was slightly smaller than the one on the paper, just like my hand is somewhat smaller than Nate’s. I moved my hand outside the handprint to see if the surrounding paper was as warm as the handprint, but it wasn’t, and, and . . .
“Oh no,” I said.
The words on the handprint had changed.
Now it just said, “Goodbye.”
I slammed my hand back into place, as if that would change anything, and I kept flying through the air, zooming far above the city of Polt, the city where I’d lived all my life, and where my life had truly begun on the day that I’d met Nathan Bannister, the smartest boy on earth.
Five blocks later, with me flying along via my jetbelt, a thousand pigeons and a multitude of other birds suddenly took to the air from below, flapping desperately.
“Why did they—” I started to think, but then the ground began to shake and the buildings began to quiver. A few windows broke, then the trembling quit, and the birds went back to their perches.
A few blocks later, a much stronger tremor cracked a big line across the middle of Rathbun Street. A broken water main sent water bursting into the air. More windows were shattering. A wall collapsed. The neon sign for the Laurelhurst Theater wrenched free of its moorings and toppled toward a group of people standing in line. I put on a burst of speed and swooped lower, grabbing people as fast as I could, moving them aside, a blur in the air as the huge sign cracked free of the building, ripping free from the bricks and the mortar, with people screaming and panicking, but everyone was moving so slowly, frozen in place by confusion, which is why I train all the time, because you have to be ready when the unexpected happens, when the buildings are shaking, when you have to save people like I was doing, straining my muscles to take two or even three people at a time as the huge sign came crashing down, with me dropping them safely away and hurtling back for more, yelling for everyone to run, with Melville stinging them so they’d move faster, so they’d snap out of the daze of horror they were in, with me moving so fast that I was an unrecognizable blur in the air, rushing people out of the path of the oncoming sign until it was barely above the sidewalk and there was only one person left and I could feel the broken steel of the plummeting sign grazing my back as I grabbed up the last person and then there was a tug on my legs as the sign slammed into the sidewalk, nipping at my feet, but I pulled him away just in time, although we went into a spin as the two of us flew onward, the panicked move unbalancing me so that I lost control and we clipped the top of a parked car and went tumbling to the sidewalk.
But we made it.
We were safe.
“Delphine?” I heard.
“Huh?” I looked to the last person I’d saved, the one I was still holding, the both of us tangled in our crash positions, with his legs up against a car and one of my hands having slid through a sewer grating to encounter an assortment of Things I Very Much Wished I Was Not Touching.
“Delphine?” the boy said again. And it was a boy who I was still holding. It was . . .
“Tommy?” I said. It was Tommy Brilp, my classmate and the leader (and current sole member) of Captain Underworld’s Circus of Breakfast Hellfire, a band that even on its best days sounds like a robotic cow in extreme distress.
Tommy has a huge crush on me.
And now I’d saved his life.
Again.
“I thought that sign was going to crush me!” he said. He was still holding me, but I was no longer holding him, having pushed him away only moments after pulling my other hand out of the sewer grating and wiping some unthinkable green stuff on Tommy’s shirt, which I do think was a fair exchange for saving his life, though with the way that goo smelled we were probably even now.
“Oh, I could just kiss you!” Tommy said.
“No you couldn’t!” I said, and then flew up and away, just as the streets began to shake yet again.
Two blocks of flight later, my phone rang.
It was Liz.
“Is it earthquaking?” she asked.
“Yes! So be careful. Any luck with the science vials?”
“Absolutely! We found a ‘Gravity Dispersal’ vial, and Stine drank it.”
“She did what?” My voice was possibly a shriek.
“Ouch,” Liz said. “You trigger many earthquakes with that yell of yours? Oh, hold on, here’s Stine.”
“Delphine?” It was Stine’s voice. “I had to drink the ‘Gravity Dispersal’ vial. You don’t understand. Liz has been floating.”
“Liz has been floating?” I was nearing the edge of the city. A few more miles and I’d be at the lake, where there was a tremendous storm over the waters. There was lightning everywhere. And rain. And hailstones so large and so pounding that I could hear the roar of their impact even from miles away.
“Delphine?” It was Wendy’s voice. “You’ve been hiding lots of secrets from us. What else don’t we know about?”
“I—”
“Ventura, here,” I heard on the phone. “Liz and Stine are both floating, bouncing on the roof of the car, like balloons, or bubbles, or frogs. You should see them. Oh, and, wow! This car is neat. Her name is Betsy.”
“Hello, friend Delphine,” I heard Betsy say. “Your friends are nice. They don’t know Nate very well and are not trying to steal him from me.”
“I don’t know why I said ‘frogs,’ ” Ventura said. “I was thinking of something else.”
“Me again,” Liz said. “I had to let Stine drink the ‘Gravity Dispersal’ vial because she was jealous of my floating. Oh, I’m floating again. This won’t last forever, right?”
“Umm, I don’t think so.” Nate was the only one who would know, but I was trying not to think about Nate, because whenever I did then I started to sweat, and my throat would choke up, and there was a growing pit of nothing that felt like it was hollowing me out from the inside. I was flying over the Grabachs’ farm, the one with the ostriches. The birds were staring up at me, their heads swaying like grass in the winds.
“Hey, Delphine! This is Wendy. What does ‘Crayon Summoning’ do? We found it just where Nate said it would be, tucked into an old pair of shoes hanging from a telephone wire. Liz floated right on up there to get it, and then Betsy brought her down with a grappling hook. Anyway . . . this ‘Crayon Summoning’ potion-thingy? Should I drink it?”
“No!”
“Hey, Delphine! It’s Ventura. Wendy just drank that ‘Crayon Summoning’ vial. Should she have done that? Was your brother really a zebra?”
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean, Wendy shouldn’t have drunk that potion, and, yes, Steve was a zebra, but he’s better now.”
“Delphine!” It was Liz’s voice. “I totally understand your adventure training course now! All the obstacles! We should all train together. We could do it every Saturday right after our Cake vs. Pie meetings.”
“No way!” This time it was Ventura. “If we train after the meetings then we’ll be too sluggish from all the cake we’ll be eating.”
“You’ll be eating cake, not me!” I heard Wendy say. “Because pie is better. Anyway, Delphine, are you still there? Because I have a question for you. Are these Red Death Tea Society people nice?”
“I would say . . . no,” I told Wendy. “Not considering how these earthquakes are their fault, and that ‘death’ thing in their name is real.”
“Okay, then,” Wendy
said. “I’m officially building my own obstacle course. I need to train. Also, pie has a lot of calories and I could use the exercise.”
“What are all these crayons doing?” I heard Liz ask. “Delphine, there’s seriously, like, a hundred crayons on the car. Make that a thousand. They’re just coming from nowhere, landing on our car like bugs.”
“Like frogs!” Ventura yelled out.
“Frogs?” I said.
“Not frogs,” Ventura said. “Sorry, got messed up again. And, oh, we keep forgetting to ask . . . is there any way we can help with the earthsqueaks?”
“The whats?”
“Earthsqueaks. You know, like earthquakes, but smaller.”
“Oh,” I said. “No.”
“No? That’s it?” It was Liz again. “Is something wrong? You’re not talking very much. Did Nate make a ‘Delphine Doesn’t Talk Very Much’ potion? Why would he do that? Oh, we just found the ‘Speed Reading’ potion. At the Hergé Café. Right in the display cabinet. Stuck inside a blueberry muffin. Does anybody have three dollars? We have to buy it. Delphine, you’re not answering. Is everything okay?”
By then I was entering the edges of the storm, flying faster with every moment, desperate to find Nate. The rains were slashing down on me, soaking me, hitting my arms, my head, my back, and my legs, everywhere, including on the note I was clutching against my chest, holding it with my right hand pressed against the black handprint, where the ink was starting to run, with the rains washing it away.
The rain felt so cold.
“Yes,” I lied to Liz. “Everything’s fine.”
“Go home,” I told Melville. It was too dangerous for her with all the rain, with the hailstones that could smash into her, and the winds that would blow her around like no more than a leaf struggling in the storm, or . . . quite frankly . . . as no more than a Delphine Cooper in the wind, because I felt like I was in an aerial ocean, being tossed about by the waves and swept away by the currents.