Mark stepped forward again. “We don’t have to give up,” he began, speaking louder this time.
“Just a sec, Mark,” I quipped. “We found our stuff at Power Academy when crazy Clothes-too-tight Larriby stole them from us. We stopped an even crazier Mayor Masters from doing goodness-knows-what in experimental awfulness to those other cuspers. Now we are in the real world and have to find a simple address. Seriously? How hard can this be?”
I took a deep breath and stepped down from my metaphorical soapbox. And yippee for finally knowing what metaphorical meant!
Mark chimed in. “Guys, I—”
“Poppy’s right,” Ellie said, and Mark responded with a sigh.
“Now, everyone think really hard back to last night when we found the address,” I pretty much demanded. “What did you see on that sheet of paper?”
Logan’s eyes closed. Then Sam’s. And then Ellie’s. I closed mine too, squinting them hard in hopes it would jog my memory. Nothing.
“Poppy!” Mark whispered.
“Shh … just a minute.”
“Just go back to that moment,” I whispered, my eyes squeezed shut. And then I thought about how strange it probably looked to the passers-by. A bunch of middle school kids standing in the middle of a busy sidewalk, eyes closed. After living in a town like Nova, nothing seemed that strange to us. But to the average non-Novian, we probably stuck out just a little bit.
When I opened my eyes, I saw Logan, Ellie, Mark, and Sam staring at me. Then Sam started laughing. Ellie joined in, and then Logan and Mark.
“You sound all hippie-dippie,” Ellie said, through chortles. “You know? Those yoga mediation people my mom watches on television.”
“I think she means ‘meditation,’” Sam corrected her.
Ellie brushed him off.
I rolled my eyes. “Very funny, guys.” At least we could laugh in a moment like this.
“Anyway … did you think of anything?”
“Can I talk now?” Mark asked firmly, tapping his untied shoe on the sidewalk.
“Sorry, Mark,” I mumbled. “What’s up?”
“Thank you for finally letting me speak.” Then he pointed behind us. “Fifth. They live on Fifth Avenue,” he said with conviction.
We all stared at him in awe.
Mark smiled. “I might not have weekday powers, but I have an excellent memory,” he said, tapping at his right temple. “I don’t remember the exact house number, but I do know the street was Fifth Avenue.”
“Are you sure of it?” Logan asked.
“Yes!”
“Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” Ellie asked.
Mark smirked. “I tried.”
I realized then and there how much I liked Mark. Not like a Logan kind of like, but a friend-like.
I smiled at Logan. “Well, at least that gives us a place to start.”
Ice Cream and More was located on Second Street, so it didn’t take too long to figure out which direction we needed to go to get to Fifth Avenue. When we got to the street, though, we realized this would be more challenging than we thought.
“It looks like it goes on forever,” Ellie said. The street began at the top of a hill, so we could see the entire way to the end of it.
“There has to be at least fifty houses.” I yawned and then looked at my phone to see it was already ten at night. Super late, and only an hour away from most curfews.
“This is seriously like the craziest thing I’ve ever done,” Ellie said with excitement. I wished I could get on board with her enthusiasm.
“Let’s split up and take sides of the street,” Logan suggested. I could hear the wavering in his voice. If I were about to meet my parents for the first time in years, I’d probably be nervous too.
“Ellie and I will take that side, and you guys that one.” Sam gestured to the right side of Fifth Avenue.
We split up and started down the street.
“So what will you do if you actually come face to face with your parents?” Mark asked the question I’d been wanting to ask.
Logan sighed heavily and looked toward the sky. “I honestly don’t know,” he said, his lip turning up at one corner.
The first door was opened by an old man named Wilson and his adorable little wife. Logan asked them if they knew of a Margaret and Elliot Prince who lived on the street, and he answered with a sure, “No.”
“But I once flew planes with a Michael Prince.” The man looked over our heads, as if his memory transported him back in time. “I flew for thirty-five years, and he was my copilot for most of them.” Wilson smiled. “Nice young chap. I think he and his wife live a few towns away now.” He turned toward his wife and said, “We really should give them a visit some time.”
“Dear, you know how I hate the drive,” his white-haired wife said.
“Well, thanks anyway,” Logan said as the door shut. I could hear the couple bickering behind it.
“You know, if they were Tuesdays then they could just teleport to that Michael Prince’s house for a visit,” Mark said.
Logan smiled. “We all know that doesn’t work in the normal world.”
I wondered which world was actually the normal one. Nova—my normal? Or everywhere else? I pushed the thought from my head.
“One house down,” I said looking up the street.
Logan sighed. “And only fifty more to go.”
Chapter Twelve
Nothing from two through twenty, Ellie thought to me from across the street.
“Two to twenty are a no-go,” I relayed the information to Logan and Mark.
We now stood in front of house number twenty-seven. The ones we’d tried so far on our side of the road were no-go’s as well.
“Did you bring the picture with Larriby?” I asked, suddenly thinking of a way to make this so much easier.
Logan reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the original letter he found and the photograph of his parents with Headmistress Larriby she pretended to be ignorant of.
“Okay, so what if we show this to the people who answer doors?”
A hopeful look spread across Logan’s face. “Maybe they would recognize them? It’s worth a shot.”
The woman who answered the door at 29 Fifth Avenue wore a robe, fuzzy slippers, and pink curlers twirled around locks of gray hair. Her toes were painted a magenta shade of pink. The woman looked hard at the picture Logan passed to her. She squinted and held the photograph so close to her face it looked like she was about to eat it as a bedtime snack. “They might look familiar, but I’m just not sure,” she said, frowning. “Isn’t it a bit late for you kids to be out?” The woman stepped closer to us. She pushed her pink plastic-framed glasses up her nose and squinted—at us, this time.
“Thank you very much,” Logan said, snatching the photograph out of her hands.
The lady placed her hands on her hips. “Get home to your parents!” she shouted as we turned away.
We walked down the brick stairs leading from the old woman’s front porch and tried the next few houses. No such luck.
We met Ellie and Sam across the street.
“So what’s the plan if we don’t actually find them tonight?” Sam asked.
I looked at Logan, who stared at Sam, who glanced at Ellie, whose eyes shot to Mark, who looked at Logan. Logan had no idea. “I didn’t really think that through,” he said with a scrunched nose. We need to find them, I heard him think.
“Well, we’re not done yet,” I chirped. “We still have a few houses to try,” I said with a hopeful tone. We had to find the right house. We just had to. Then, I thought not about what would happen if we didn’t find them, but what would happen if we did find them. How would Logan react?
I’m thinking the same exact thing, Ellie thought to me.
As we checked the last few homes, the woman who answered 37 Fifth Avenue reacted to the photograph. “They don’t come out too often, but I think that’
s the couple on the end.” The woman pointed to the very top of the hill—the last house on the street.
Logan’s eyes grew wide. He went to speak, but nothing came out.
“Thank you,” I said for him.
Mark put a hand on Logan’s shoulder. “You got this, man,” he said.
“This might be it,” Logan finally said.
We walked slowly to the last house on the bottom of the hill. 49 Fifth Avenue.
“Yeah,” Mark said. “Forty-nine sounds familiar.”
From the looks of the home, I felt hesitant about even ringing the doorbell.
“Are you sure this is the one?” Ellie asked, taking a step backward.
The house sat back farther from the road than the others on the street. Although the other homes appeared to be at least a hundred years old, this one looked a little more aged than they did. It was entirely built of red brick, and rows of ivy crawled up the side chimney. A rounded turret structure wrapped around the corner of the home, and an equally grand porch wrapped around the other corner. More ivy was woven around the five white columns holding the upper porch in place.
“What was that?” Ellie said, grabbing on the back of my hoodie.
“You’re choking me, Ellie!” I cried as I looked at a wisteria bush moving.
“It’s just the wind funneling down the street. But man! It looks like this home came straight out of a horror movie,” Sam said, staring at the monster of a house in front of us.
“Well … ” Logan started, “the lady down the street said she thinks she’s seen them here.”
We walked up the brick-paved sidewalk leading to the porch. Roots from nearby trees had pushed some of the bricks, so if you weren’t paying attention, you’d be sure to trip. And that’s what Ellie did.
“Ouch,” she squealed, her body tumbling toward the ground. Before I could do anything about it, Logan had teleported from where he stood and then reappeared right next to Ellie. He grabbed her arm just before she crashed onto the pavement. She turned to her side and cradled her right ankle in her hands. “It hurts so bad, you guys,” she whined.
“Sam, give us some light,” Logan stated.
I grabbed Sam’s wrist. “No,” I demanded, pushing his arm down toward his side. “It’s enough that you teleported, Logan. We don’t need any more suspicion from people seeing light magically blast from your hand.”
Sam’s eyes darted around the darkness. “I don’t think anyone’s going to see, Poppy,” he said. Even in the dark, I could feel his eye-roll at me.
Ellie let out a whimper. “I hope it’s not broken!” she whined, her voice sounded three pitches higher than usual. “Tsss,” she sucked in air in pain as I reached down to pull up her pant leg. “I need to see it.”
The same uneasy feeling I had on the train of someone watching us washed over me. I shook the feeling off and chalked it up to nerves. “Go ahead then,” I whispered.
Sam crouched down next to Ellie, and a blast of light emanated from his pointer finger. Ellie pulled up the bottom of her yoga pants the rest of the way until her ankle was just showing.
I cringed and sucked in air between my teeth. “Owwww. That looks terrible.” The side of her ankle was swollen and red, and a bluish-green bruise was starting to form around the edges.
“That makes me feel sooo much better,” Ellie shot back at me.
Sam reached his other hand down to help her up.
“Don’t!” Ellie yelled.
“Shhhh.”
“I twisted it really bad,” Ellie said. There was just enough light from the streetlamp to see tears glistening in the corners of her eyes.
“Now how are we going to explain this when we get back to Nova?” Sam asked. “If we can even get back.”
If Ellie hurt her ankle too bad, then there was no way we’d be able to get her back to Nova. Then there would be questions.
“Well, at least my parents probably wouldn’t pay attention enough to even notice. They’d believe some gym class mishap excuse anyway,” she said, reading my mind. There was hurt on her face.
“Sam and Mark, you guys wait with Ellie, and Poppy and I will check out this house.” Logan sighed and then stepped forward. This was it. And if his parents weren’t behind the large wooden door with two gargoyles standing guard on each side, then this whole thing wasn’t meant to be. But the feeling I had in my stomach—a mix of excitement and nausea—gave me hope for some reason.
I caught up to Logan before he mounted the front steps and grabbed his hand.
Nice, I heard Ellie think behind me.
We got to the top of the stairs and could see the ground below us was a worn shade of orange. After closer inspection, I noticed the ivy framing the windows also began to grow across the door knocker.
“It looks like nobody even lives here,” Logan said. Although I couldn’t see his face very well, I could hear the frown in his voice.
Using my Monday power (because nobody was around, I was sure of it), I brushed the ivy from the door-knocker and willed it to lift and knock three times.
All I could hear was mine and Logan’s breathing.
Anything? Ellie thought to me.
I shook my head.
“Let’s try just once more,” I said, expecting the same result—silence.
But as Logan lifted his hand to push the knocker, a rustling noise came from inside. In the middle of the door was the face of a lion, and one of the lion’s eyes suddenly opened.
“What the heck?” Logan asked, stepping backward.
I was startled by the sudden creepy lion’s eye opening too, but realized it was a way for whoever was inside to see whoever was outside.
And then the black eye snapped shut.
That’s weird, Logan thought.
We turned to walk away, but just as we spun around, a creaking sound bellowed from the door.
A couple who appeared to be about the age of my parents stood in the opening. The woman had the same sandy blond hair as Logan, but strands of gray framed her face. There was no mistaking that the man standing next to her was the man we’d seen in the picture Logan grasped tightly in his hands.
“Mom?” Logan asked though a quavering voice. He took a step forward and reached out his hand. “Dad?”
The woman ran to Logan and embraced him in the biggest bear hug I’d ever seen. Logan’s dad came behind them and squeezed his arms around them both.
Ellie, Sam, Mark, and I watched in awe. This was actually happening.
As we entered (and hobbled) into the mansion of a home, Logan’s mom spoke for the first time. She glanced at Logan’s father, and then her eyes focused on her son when she said, “We knew you’d get our note.”
Chapter Thirteen
The appearance from the outside of the Princes’ house was different from the reality of the inside. Like so much I’d learned about Nova, nobody and nothing are what they seem.
From the outside, the home looked straight-out haunted, and I expected a ghost or two to pop out of the giant grandfather clock that towered to the ceiling of the entryway. But the inside boasted newly polished hardwood floors and an immaculately clean living room to the right with a marble fire place and grand piano. The wooden curvatures around the windows and doors reminded me that we were in a house that was probably 200 years old, but they were well-kept and added a certain amount of character to an otherwise dated home.
“Please make yourselves at home,” Logan’s father said to Ellie, Sam, and me. “Ice is in the refrigerator for your foot, dear,” he added, gesturing toward the hobbling Ellie. Then his attention focused on Logan. “I think it’s best we have a chat in the sunroom,” he said, directing Logan through the grand foyer of the home and into a small room off to the left.
Logan held on to his mom’s arm as they disappeared around the corner. Well, not literally disappeared. As they walked around the corner.
Ellie, Sam, and I just stared at one another.
None of us could comprehend what just happened.
“So they really are alive?” Sam finally said. He pulled the hat from his red poof of hair and scratched the back of his head.
Unbelievable. This was just unbelievable.
“Totally unbelievable,” Ellie said while staring ahead.
I couldn’t even imagine what Logan was thinking right now. Reuniting with his parents after years of thinking they were no longer living? Craziness. But there had to be so much more to the story.
We walked across the ginormous foyer. “So it was Logan’s parents who left that note after all?” Sam asked.
“Definitely not someone playing a trick,” Mark confirmed.
We entered the kitchen to see white cabinets with marble countertops.
“Wow.” Sam rubbed his hand against the smooth, cool surface of the marble. “This is so nice!”
“But why are they hiding way out here?” Ellie asked the question we’d all been wondering.
“I don’t know, but remember the note said something about it being ‘safe’ in Nova?” I commented. “I’m sure Logan’s telling them about Mayor Masters right now, so I bet they’ll come home now that they know Nova is safe.”
“What weekdays are Logan’s parents?” Sam asked me.
I looked up and tightened my lips, trying to remember if he’d ever told me. But I don’t think the powers of both of his parents ever came up in our conversations. “No idea,” I eventually answered. “But with Logan’s cusp power, one of them is obviously a Tuesday.”
“Well, I’m sure we’ll find out the other one eventually.” Sam shrugged and opened up the door to the pantry.
“Hey,” Ellie called to Sam. “What are you doing?” She used her Monday power to slam the door shut. “Who said you can do that?”
“What?” Sam asked. “They said to make ourselves at home. And if I were home right now feeling this hungry, then I’d make myself a sandwich.”
Poppy Mayberry, a New Day Page 6