Midnight on Strange Street, page 4
“Maybe I should climb down,” whispered Lola, “and pretend to find you last.”
“Don’t you dare,” said Bastian. “Dani has to learn not to be so competitive.”
Avery suspected that Bastian was talking about more than just a game of sardines.
“There!” whispered Lola, pointing through the leaves. Dani stood on the Hirsches’ back porch, arms crossed, surveying the yard.
Come on, thought Avery. Please, come on and find us.
It was almost as though Dani had heard Avery’s request, because at that moment, she looked to the tree, and sudden realization spread over her face.
“Hey!” she called, jumping off the porch and hurrying toward the oak.
“Get ready,” muttered Bastian, and seconds later, Dani was under their feet, shouting up through the leaves.
“You guys are the worst! If I’m not first, I’m always, always last.”
“Twin advantage,” Bastian shouted down. “We can’t help it!”
“Twin advantage isn’t a thing!”
“Sure seems like it is!”
Dani glared.
“Whatever,” Bastian said. “We’re coming down.”
“No!” barked Dani. “The rules state that the last seeker has to sardine.”
Avery looked over the branch where she and the twins sat. “I don’t know, Dani. It’s kind of a tough climb.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t think I can make it?”
“No,” Avery called back. “All I’m saying is that it doesn’t make sense for you to climb up, only to climb back down.”
But Dani wasn’t listening anymore; she’d already jumped and grabbed hold of the lowest branch. She jammed her sneakers against the bark, hastily walking them up.
“Be careful!” called Lola.
“I know. What. I’m doing,” Dani puffed back.
She did know what she was doing, but she was moving so fast.
“Hey!” called Avery. “Slow down, okay?”
Dani didn’t slow down. She wrapped her legs around the branch, hoisting herself and, without pause, throwing her hands out to catch the next branch up.
One of her hands did not catch.
It slipped free, upsetting Dani’s balance and sending her hurtling downward.
What happened next happened very quickly. Lola raised her hands to her mouth. Bastian shouted at Dani’s descent. And Avery thought, No, she can’t hit the ground.
The way Dani had thrown out her arms, the way she had twisted her back—Avery couldn’t bear to watch the impact. Stubbornly she kept thinking it: Dani can’t hit the ground, she can’t, she can’t, she won’t.
That’s when something inside Avery began to burn. It was a sensation she’d first felt at her old school in LA. It was the heat between her stomach and her heart that burned every time she skated downhill on a curve. She felt the blue light’s energy, and suddenly she saw it, pulsing out of her. It washed around Avery, poured over the branches like water, rushed under Dani’s back, and cradled her in its arms.
Then, in a snap, everything was fast and loud again.
“DANI!” Bastian screamed.
Dani lay motionless in the grass below.
“No,” whispered Avery. “No, no.”
She scrambled after Bastian and Lola, who were already halfway down the tree.
“Dani?” said Bastian, reaching her first. “Can you hear me?”
Dani blinked. Then she sat up.
“Uh,” she said, touching her cheek. “I—I—”
“Where does it hurt?” asked Lola breathlessly.
“It doesn’t. It…doesn’t.” A strange look crossed Dani’s features. “It’s like, I don’t know.…It’s like I landed on—on—”
Dani didn’t finish the sentence, but Avery could: You landed on light. Light that I made.
Avery’s hands shook as she and Bastian pulled Dani to her feet. There wasn’t a scratch on Dani’s body—no bumps or bruises that Avery could make out.
“Something caught me,” Dani said, finally able to speak. She looked at the others, her brown eyes wide. “You saw it, too, didn’t you? It was invisible, but it was there.”
Now Avery’s whole body was shaking. They knew. And everything was going to be different. No more glowboarding, no more friends. It was going to be exactly the way it had been in LA, with Katelyn Sumner, that awful principal, and her own dad.
But before Avery could run away, before she could watch her worst nightmare come true…something unexpected happened.
Dani said, “I thought I was the only one.”
“We gotta talk about it.”
Dani’s words broke the quiet.
The Sardines were gathered in a circle inside Cedar House, the clubhouse that Mrs. Gil, a contractor, had built for the twins in the third grade. There was a charge in the air—so strong, Dani could almost see it sparking in the dim light of the clubhouse. Something had happened in her backyard. Something big. If the others weren’t going to speak first, then Dani would.
All eyes turned to Dani as she continued. “Well, don’t we? We’ve been hiding stuff from each other. Keeping secrets. I think it’s about time we talked about what’s going on.”
The Sardines didn’t look at each other. The only sound was the angry buzz of cicadas outside.
“C’mon,” Dani pressed, getting annoyed. “We all saw what happened back there. I should be knocked out cold, but I’m not. So, which one of you did it?”
Still, no one spoke.
Dani wanted to shout in frustration, to get to her feet and storm out of Cedar House. She was about to do all of those things when Avery blurted, “It was me.”
For a moment, Dani couldn’t breathe.
Avery kept talking. “It was me,” she repeated, softer than before. “I’m the one who broke your fall. It was like I was catching you, but not with my hands—with my mind’s hands. Like a fire came out from inside of me.”
“A blue fire.” Bastian spoke lowly, his face obscured in shadows.
Outside, there was a growl of thunder, and the clubhouse’s twinkle lights swayed overhead.
Avery blinked. “Y-yeah. I mean, I’ve never seen it outside of myself. But, somehow…I’ve always known it’s blue.”
Dani coughed. It was all she could do with so little air in her lungs.
Blue fire. Wasn’t that how she pictured the power inside of her? The power she’d discovered on her birthday, in September. The power she used to close doors and windows when she felt like it.
“Whatever it is,” said Dani, “this flame—it’s the reason we can move things without touching them. Right? That’s what it is: We can move stuff with our minds.”
“It’s more than that,” said Bastian, cautiously glancing at Dani, then Avery. “Can you all…speak with your mind, too?”
Dani blinked. “What?”
Bastian swallowed extra loud. “The race. Last night. I heard you in my head, Dani. All of a sudden, your voice was in my mind, telling me to whip Avery forward. It freaked me out, and…I choked.”
“You heard me in your mind?” Dani’s eyes were as big as full moons.
“I thought it was something only Lola and I could do,” Bastian said.
“Excuse me?” Dani’s eyes got even bigger. She looked between Bastian and Lola, mouth agape. “You two can read each other’s minds, and you never told us?”
Lola wrapped her arms around her knees. She looked uncomfortable, almost like she wanted to cry, when she said, “It’s not that big a deal.”
“Anyway,” said Bastian, “if we had told you, you wouldn’t have believed us.”
Dani shook her head. “I don’t get it,” she said. “How could I have talked to your brain and not known I was doing it?”
“Who knows?” said Bastian. “Maybe you were thinking so hard at me, it just…happened. Have you ever done it before?”
“What, brain talking?” Dani scoffed. “No way.”
Bastian pointed to Avery. “Well, what about you?”
Avery licked her lips, looking nervous. “Not that I know of.”
But I haven’t ever tried before.
Dani gasped, pressing a hand to her forehead. Avery hadn’t moved her lips; Dani was sure of that, she was looking straight at her. Even so, Avery’s words had reached her mind.
“Wh-what’s happening?” Dani demanded, looking wildly about. “How is this possible?”
“Twin telepathy,” said Bastian. “That’s normal for me and Lola. We’ve been connected since forever ago. But moving things, mind-talking with you…that’s new. And I didn’t start mind-moving until last year.”
Softly, Lola said, “Me neither.”
“When?” said Dani. She was formulating a theory now, as exciting as it was terrifying. “Can you remember exactly?”
Bastian and Lola looked to each other, as though having a silent conversation. Dani had seen that look countless times before. Only now, for the first time, she realized that the twins really were conversing.
“Maybe last February?” Bastian said when he and Lola were through. “Lola remembers her winter coat zipping itself up, right when she was thinking how cold it was outside. And I was making valentines. I remember: I almost knocked a jar of silver glitter off my desk. I caught it…but not with my hands.”
“What about you, Avery?” Dani asked.
A funny expression crossed Avery’s face. She looked down at the chipped nail polish on her right thumb. “Before I moved to Callaway. Right before summer.”
Dani furrowed her brow as she put the pieces of her puzzle together. “And me,” she said. “I shut a door without touching it on September third. I remember, because it was my birthday.”
“Your birthday,” Avery echoed. Now she also saw the puzzle, all its pieces aligning.
Dani pointed to the twins. “Last February.” Then, to Avery. “Last May.” Then, to herself. “September. Don’t you see? When we turned twelve. We all started to move stuff when we turned twelve.”
“Telekinesis,” Avery said. “That’s the word for it. Moving things with your mind.”
Dani and the twins stared at her.
“What?” Avery asked. “Didn’t you guys look it up?”
Dani had. She’d searched the words “move stuff without trying” on the internet, back in the fall. But she hadn’t heard a real-life person say the word “telekinesis” out loud.
Not until now.
Outside, the sky groaned irritably with more thunder.
“Telekinesis,” Bastian repeated. “And telepathy—talking without speaking. That’s what we have.”
Dani made a face. “What we have? You make it sound like we’re infected.”
“How else should I say it?” Bastian asked. “If we can move stuff with our minds…if, maybe, we can all speak in each other’s heads…that’s not normal. Normal kids don’t have tele-anything. So that makes us freaks, doesn’t it?”
Dani flinched. Freaks. That was Mitchell Jensen’s favorite word for the Sardines. Maybe the Sardines had powers—blue flame powers—but that didn’t make them freaks.
“We shouldn’t be labeling any of this,” said Dani, “when we don’t even know what this is. So let’s get it straight: We can move things and say things with our minds. All of us?”
She looked around at the Sardines. No one was nodding, but no one was disagreeing, either.
“And what else?” Dani went on. “We’ve been doing this stuff since we turned twelve. Except the twin telepathy.” She waved her hand at Lola and Bastian. “That’s gone on longer.”
In reply, Lola gave a timid nod.
Dani pressed her hands to her cheeks. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, okay. We gotta come up with a game plan.”
“What kind of plan?” Bastian asked, incredulous. “What can we do, tell our parents? Go to the doctor?”
“NO!” the three girls shouted together.
As though joining their protest, another bout of thunder rumbled outside.
“I don’t want anyone to know,” Lola said. “Why do they have to? It isn’t like we’re hurting anybody.”
“Anyway,” said Avery, “any grown-up is gonna think we’re crazy. Wouldn’t you? If you asked me right here and now if I believed in tele-whatevers, I think I’d still say no.”
“So there’s nothing we can do.” Bastian turned to Dani. “Don’t you think the rest of us have already thought this through? Haven’t you thought about it?”
Dani slumped her shoulders, feeling defeated. “I guess I’ve been trying to ignore it, more than anything else.”
“But what happened tonight…” Avery said quietly. “That’s…harder to ignore. And hearing each other’s thoughts is new, too. Like maybe the tele-stuff is getting stronger.”
“We don’t know that,” said Bastian.
“But we do know that Avery saved me from falling out of a tree,” Dani said, raising her voice. “She caught my whole body with her mind. That’s not nothing. And it’s not nothing that we all started noticing this stuff when we turned twelve. No one else gets a birthday present like that.”
“We don’t know that, either,” said Bastian. “Maybe plenty of other kids have what we do.”
“Oh, come on, Bastian,” said Dani. “If everyone else was like us, don’t you think you’d hear people talking about it? Don’t you think you’d hear other voices in your head, or see stuff moving all on its own? You said it yourself: We’re not normal.”
“But why us?” Avery asked. “There’s gotta be some sort of explanation.”
“DANIELLE!”
Dani froze, hands clutched into the squishy sides of her beanbag.
She knew that sound. It was her mom, and it was her mom’s angry voice. Panicked, Dani looked at her digiwatch. It was 9:43 p.m.—thirteen whole minutes past her curfew. Definitely not in accordance with the Hirsch Code.
“Crap,” she said, leaping to her feet. “Crap, crap.” Frantically, she looked at the others and said, “We’re not done here. We’ll talk about this tomorrow. After school, okay?”
Dani didn’t wait for a response. She ran out of Cedar House, into the beginnings of a late-spring thunderstorm. The rumblings overhead were louder than ever, and rain tip-tapped on her head as she dashed across the Gils’ lawn. A lightning bolt tore across the sky, illuminating the world in a ghastly hue.
In that moment, Dani got a strange feeling.
Even though she knew it didn’t make sense, and it couldn’t possibly be true, Dani felt sure that she was being watched by unseen eyes, hidden behind those storm clouds in the big Texan sky.
It was the last day of school, and it smelled like summer. The thunderstorm from the night before had cleared away, replaced by blue skies and a beaming sun, and the Gils’ kitchen windows were open. A breeze blew in the scent of watered lawns and sunbaked roads.
Bastian didn’t like for his parents to see his artwork, but Lola had no trouble sharing hers. Atop the refrigerator was a line of folded creations she’d made for her parents, composed of flowers and birds, all formed from pastel folding paper. The breeze blew the creations around, and Lola watched them shift and turn, a finch and a tulip dancing a waltz. She was so distracted by the dance that she didn’t notice her mother until Mrs. Gil was standing directly over her and announcing, “Time for Last Day Magic!”
Last Day Magic was brown and white sugar, mixed together with rainbow sprinkles, and it made Lola’s breakfast oatmeal taste like hot ice cream. Since Lola’s kindergarten graduation, her mother had shaken out Last Day Magic at the breakfast of every last day of school.
Today, Mrs. Gil shook the sprinkle jar with gusto, first over Lola’s bowl, then Bastian’s, who sat beside her at the table. Then she placed a kiss on both their heads and said, “Congratulations! Seventh grade is almost over.”
Lola tried as best she could to smile. Normally, Lola gobbled up Last Day Magic, scraping her bowl clean of every bite. Today, though, the stuff tasted much too sweet. She could only manage a few swallows.
The kitchen television was on, playing a commercial for a used car lot. As the announcer shouted about bargain prices, another breeze blew into the house, this time picking up a yellow paper bird from the fridge. The canary swooped through the air, gliding out from the kitchen and onto the breakfast room table, landing a half inch from Lola’s orange juice.
On a normal day, Lola would smile at this marvelous happenstance. On a normal day, she would be in a state of utter bliss, what with the nice weather and good food and the last day of seventh grade. Today wasn’t normal, though.
Dani had said that the Sardines would talk more about the tele-whatevers after school, but Lola wasn’t looking forward to that. She wanted things to go back to the way they were—before Dani fell from that tree, when no one was talking about “powers.” She didn’t want to talk about her and Bastian’s twin telepathy, or admit that some days she folded her paper animals with her mind. It didn’t seem right to talk about those things. It didn’t seem safe.
Lola had felt the blue flame inside her growing stronger, flickering more insistently, day after day. It was as though there was too much flame for her body to contain, as though it were desperate to get out of her in any way it possibly could. Lola didn’t like that feeling. There was a reason why Bastian was their twin spokesperson. There was a reason why Lola was content to be the one Sardine with no big job in the draft train competition. She liked to be quiet, and never so important that she’d stand out. And these tele-whatevers…they were the opposite of that.
On TV, the car lot commercial ended and the seven o’clock news came on. The newscaster spoke calmly, but all his words were ugly: “bomb” and “conflict” and “casualties.” Mrs. Gil reached a sudsy hand from the sink, hitting the power button on the remote and turning off the TV in one succinct snap.
Lola didn’t like to think about the Global War—not if she could help it. Especially not with Nando far away, in such a dangerous place. A “target city,” the reporters called it. If the standoff ended, they said, and there was an “escalation,” then DC would almost certainly be the first city attacked.
