Midnight on Strange Street, page 7
Weird, thought Bastian. The Gils always kept the hall light off.
He got out of bed and, thinking practically of intruders, grabbed a heavy brass paperweight from his desk. Holding it at the ready, he approached the door and listened. There was no sound of footsteps or whispers, just the faint, rustling sound that had woken him. Before he could lose his nerve, Bastian flung open the door, paperweight raised.
But there was no one there. He looked one way down the hall, then the other.
No robber, no stranger. Not even Nando, up to get a glass of water. No one.
Then a great whoosh passed over him, and Bastian saw crumpled papers hanging in midair, surrounding him on all sides. They were half-finished, abandoned sketches of glowboard designs—all papers from the trash can beneath his desk. A folded sheet of neon green breezed forward and nudged his elbow.
Come, said a voice in his mind, light and clear, like a rushing stream. Follow us.
Bastian followed his artwork down the stairs.
Dani was dreaming of racing. In sleep, she felt the glowboard beneath her feet, her muscles finely tuned to it, swerving and hugging tight corners. In her best dreams, she beat Mitchell and his Grackles once and for all, sliding across the finish line and exulting in their defeat.
Dani heard the gentle hum of the board and the electronic swoosh as she kicked on the glowstream, which trailed behind her in a glowing ribbon of neon orange. She saw the stream shoot out sparks, cutting across the night and then fading from view, turned to vapor.
Only…
She wasn’t dreaming the glowstream.
She was seeing it. She was suddenly awake, sitting up, and found that her glowboard was hovering above her bed, sputtering orange sparks into the dark. She yelped as more sparks blew out from the glow pipe. Then she lunged for the board.
But the glowboard did not want to be caught. It swooped out of reach, and Dani toppled off her bed, watching as the board flew to her bedroom door and hovered there.
Come. A voice clinked in her mind, like a butter knife tapping glass. Follow us.
Then the glowboard shot from Dani’s room, and she had no choice but to chase it down.
“Radar? What is it, boy?”
Avery had woken to Radar’s barking—shrill, nervous yips, as he danced close to her bed. She rubbed out the sleep from her eyes, and the shadowy forms in her room took shape.
Books. Books from her bookshelves were spinning around her bed in concentric circles. She ducked as the Merriam-Webster dictionary floated toward her face.
Radar kept barking, leaping to nip at the books nearest his jaws.
“It’s all right, boy,” Avery whispered, crawling from bed and patting him down.
But Avery wasn’t sure if it was all right.
This didn’t feel like a dream. The hardwood floor was cold and uneven beneath her feet. She could hear her breaths and feel the quick beat of her heart. Then a voice spoke inside her mind.
Come, it said, a woodwind melody. Follow us.
The books broke from their circles and swooshed in a flurry out the door.
With a whining Radar at her side, Avery followed.
The Sardines convened in the Gils’ backyard, stopping outside Cedar House. For one instant, the midnight world was chaotic—the convergence of paper birds, crumpled artwork, books, and a rogue glowboard.
Then, in a burst, the objects dispersed, shooting back toward the houses whence they’d come.
All that remained were four friends and a dog.
Crickets sang around them, and the moon poured down its beams. A gust of wind shot through the backyard, and the door to Cedar House flew open. All together, the Sardines walked inside, where, silently, they formed a circle.
Then Cedar House filled with light.
A bright blue column shot down its center, as Radar barked wildly, straining against Avery’s hold on his collar.
The column swelled, and so did the burning blue flames inside each of the Sardines. Then a voice spoke from the light:
Greetings.
We, the light beings, have taken note of your plight.
We planted the elixir here, in hopes that it would aid your civilization.
Instead, your own have turned against you because of your differences.
This world is not a hospitable place for gifted creatures like you.
So we have traveled from distant space to rescue the five of you.
We look…to meeting…the appointed date…when…
The voice was breaking up, garbled, like a broken transmission. The words turned indistinct, and then there were no words at all. The column gave a final swell, growing more and more unbearably bright until it forced Avery, Bastian, Dani, and Lola to shut their eyes.
Then there was silence.
Darkness.
The column was gone, and Radar began to bark once more.
Avery was the first to speak.
“Whoa,” she said.
There were stars in her eyes, specks of light left behind from the now-vanished column. Her knees felt more liquid than solid. She sank down into a beanbag, and soon so did all the Sardines. It was dark in Cedar House—too dark to see. Avery ran her hand against the wall until she found the clubhouse’s single shelf. From it, she grabbed the emergency flashlight and switched it on. The Sardines blinked, taking in each other’s stunned expressions.
Bastian was the first to actually speak.
He said, “Did…aliens just contact us?”
Avery laughed. She didn’t know why. She laughed and found she couldn’t stop. Dani and Bastian stared at her like she’d lost her mind.
“This is serious!” Bastian finally shouted over her giggles.
Avery wiped her wet eyes. “But it isn’t really,” she said. “It’s hilarious. Aliens talking to us.”
“We all heard the same thing, right?” asked Dani. “First things first. It’s important we’re on the same page.”
Leave it to Dani to organize this, thought Avery. But the truth was, she was grateful. If anyone could help to make sense of the blue column and its message, it was Dani Hirsch.
“You mean how, apparently, we’re in some sort of ‘plight’?” Bastian folded his arms. “And how these light beings planted an elixir and are coming from distant space to rescue us? That’s what I caught.”
“What does that mean?” Lola asked in a threadbare voice. “Do they want to abduct us?”
The smile vanished from Avery’s face. She didn’t feel like laughing anymore.
“Yeah,” she admitted. “That’s kind of what it sounded like.”
Lola sniffed, tugging at the lace of her nightgown collar.
“Sooo?” Dani drew out the word like an unanswerable question. “Who are these people? Why would they contact us? And rescue us from what?”
“Maybe,” said Avery, “it’s…a practical joke?”
She wasn’t convinced by her own suggestion.
Dani wasn’t, either. “A practical joke that woke up all of us with floating stuff and brought us out here and shot down blue light from the sky? Who could make a practical joke like that? Not even Mitchell’s rich enough to do something that fancy.”
Avery tried to swallow and found she couldn’t. “It’s too weird” was all she could say.
“Is it too weird?” asked Bastian. “Weren’t we all in this clubhouse last night, talking about the stuff we can do? Is this any weirder?”
“The voice said there are five of us, though,” said Avery. “In case you guys haven’t noticed, we’re only a four-person team.”
The clubhouse was quiet. Then Avery noticed Dani and Bastian both looking her way. Though not her way, exactly. They were looking at…Radar. Avery’s eyes got big. She turned to her dog.
“But…that’s not possible! If you were one of us, you’d be able to talk. You’d…” Avery trailed off as she stared into Radar’s eyes—one brown, one blue. She thought of all their games of Frisbee fetch, of dreaded baths and snuggle sessions over the past year.
“But he’s only two,” Avery said. “He’s not our age.”
“What’s two in dog years?” asked Dani.
Avery scowled.
“Well,” said Dani, “what other explanation is there? The voice said there are five of us, and there are technically five of us here.”
“But…a dog!” Avery protested.
“That’s the part you have trouble believing?” asked Bastian. “We’re talking about alien contact here. And telekinesis. And telepathy. And—”
“Stop it!” cried Lola, shaking her head. “Everyone, stop! We’re not focusing on what’s most important here. Whoever contacted us, we didn’t get their whole message. Don’t you remember?”
Avery wrinkled her nose. How had the message ended? Meeting…the appointed date…when…
“It stopped,” she whispered. “It cut out.”
“That’s right,” said Dani, frowning. “They were talking about an appointed time, about—about—”
Dani was suddenly on her knees, searching the ground in the middle of their circle, where the column of blue light had once been. Somehow, Avery knew Dani wouldn’t find any remnant of the message there. The light had simply been, and now it was gone.
“What are we supposed to do now?” asked Bastian when Dani slumped back from her unsuccessful search. “All we know is that probably aliens contacted us, and that, for some weird reason, they want to rescue us. The five of us. But why? And where? And when? We’re kind of missing all the important details.”
“Maybe they’ll send us another message,” Lola said.
“But maybe they won’t,” said Dani. “Maybe they’ll show up in the middle of the night, like they just did, and abduct us on the spot.”
A chill prickled up and down Avery’s arms. Beside her, Radar whined.
“Don’t…say things like that,” whispered Lola.
Tiny tears were trickling down her face, and Avery’s heart beat hard at the sight. Avery concentrated on the blue flame inside, and then she thought right at Lola, pushing words out to her: It’s okay, we’ll figure it out. Together.
Lola inhaled, sitting up straight and meeting Avery’s gaze. Then Lola’s thoughts came in, bright and somehow lavender-hued, the same way Lola’s hair was so wonderfully lavender-scented: Thank you.
Avery inched a hand over to Lola’s, took hold, and squeezed once—another way to say, I’m here. Lola smiled a little, even though fear was still in her eyes, and a flutter filled Avery’s stomach—the kind of flutter she normally only got before a big glowboarding race.
Out loud, Avery said, “Maybe everything will make more sense in the morning.”
Or maybe in the morning, this will turn out to be a dream, Avery thought, only to herself.
“Avery’s got a point,” said Dani. “It’s after midnight, and we’re tired. We’ll be talking in circles if we stick around here. Let’s get some sleep, and we’ll discuss this tomorrow, at glowboard practice.”
“Practice?” Bastian gawked at Dani. “You’re thinking about practice?”
“Yes, I am,” Dani said matter-of-factly. “Glow in the Park is still happening, isn’t it? Nothing’s going to stop us from winning that prize. Not the Grackles, and not even some weird alien message from outer space.”
“Seriously, Dani, do you hear yourself right now?”
“Yeah, Bastian, I do,” Dani said, raising her voice. “You just don’t get it because your parents buy you new boards every Christmas.”
Cedar House fell silent, and Avery looked down, picking sand from her eyes. They really did need sleep.
The Sardines left Cedar House, trudging through the damp night, back to their homes. Radar trotted by Avery’s side, glancing up at her every so often. When they reached Avery’s room, he licked her hand and rested his chin on her lap, blinking his worried eyes up at her.
“Radar,” Avery whispered, “are you one of us? Do you have tele-whatevers? Is that why the aliens want to rescue you, too?”
Radar kept looking at her. Avery tried again. “Can you understand what I’m saying?”
Radar stared up with his big, glistening eyes.
Avery decided to try something else.
Can you understand me? She thought the words and then pushed them from her mind toward Radar’s furry head and floppy black ears.
Radar whined, pressing a paw into Avery’s knee.
She gasped.
Did that mean yes?
Did that mean anything at all?
Avery looked around the room. All her books were back in their proper places, not a single one overturned or left open.
Maybe, Avery thought, she had simply imagined it all.
She would find out the truth soon enough when morning came.
It was the first breakfast of summer break, and Dani was stuck slurping a power smoothie.
She had tried many times before to convince her parents that smoothies were the worst form of breakfast. They tasted like chalk mixed up with shoots and leaves, and Dani may or may not have secretly dumped out more than one smoothie in her bathroom sink.
Dani had made the mistake of actually complaining once, whining that Avery got to eat Eggos and Lucky Charms for breakfast and that the Gil twins regularly ate Spanish omelets with fancy Iberian ham. Dr. and Mr. Hirsch had curtly replied that Avery’s mother was never around to monitor her breakfast, and the Gils were perfectly nice folks but incorporated far too much meat into their diets. As long as Dani was a Hirsch, said her parents, she would follow the Hirsch Code—and that code wasn’t limited to food choices.
The Hirsch Code meant the hardest courses in school. The Hirsch Code meant no junk food, and absolutely no candy in the house. The Hirsch Code meant no pets, due to Mr. Hirsch’s severe allergies. And the Hirsch Code meant an ongoing dedication to a legitimate sport. The trouble was that, in Dr. and Mr. Hirsch’s estimation, glowboarding was not legitimate. Glowboarding was a fad that had arisen in the last couple decades and would fade away just as quickly. There were no college glowboarding scholarships, and there had been no glowboarding legacy passed down in the Hirsch family. Unlike…competitive swimming.
The fiercest fight of Dani’s life had been convincing her parents to let her drop swim team that summer in favor of glowboarding. Dani could go to honors classes and even choke down nasty power smoothies, but she would never give up glowboarding. That spring, she’d spent many nights attempting to eavesdrop as her parents argued in loud whispers behind their bedroom door. In the end, they’d allowed Dani her glowboarding, but that didn’t mean anything else changed. They didn’t buy her equipment, like they had for swimming; it had cost Dani many years’ worth of gift money just to get a mediocre board. The Hirsches hadn’t attended a single one of her races, as they had her swim meets. There was always an excuse—a business trip or convention, a dinner date that simply couldn’t be missed. Dani knew that the real reason was because her parents didn’t approve. But she would take small victories as they came, and in the meantime, she’d drink her power smoothies without complaint.
This morning, all three Hirsches sat around the kitchen table. Dr. Hirsch’s glasses sat perched on her nose as she read over the newspaper.
“Terrible,” she said, tapping the headline that read EXPLOSION AT TAFT MIDDLE CAUSED BY PRANKING TEENS. “Glad they got to the bottom of it so quickly, though. Imagine, those eighth-graders rigging firecrackers in a public place. I’d like to know who their parents are. We’ve enough on our hands with this war without a scare like that.”
Dani wanted to say, If you’d thought it was so terrible, then you would’ve stuck around and not left me home alone.
“How did they figure out who did it?” Dani asked instead.
“They say the kids confessed,” Mr. Hirsch said between sips of goopy green liquid. “They’re keeping their names private because they’re underage.”
Or because those eighth-grade kids don’t actually exist, Dani thought. She was sure that the men in business suits she’d seen the day before had something to do with the fake story. Only the Sardines knew the truth. Only they knew it was Lola.
And we’ll keep it that way, Dani thought resolutely. Today, at practice, we’ll figure out everything: the cafeteria, our tele-whatevers, and what happened last night in Cedar House.
“I’m glad you’re out of that school for the summer,” Dr. Hirsch said. “They’d better put stricter safety regulations in place by August. Imagine if it had been a sympathizer.”
Dani mashed her straw into a clump of unblended kale. Of course her parents believed the bogus story. Why wouldn’t they? Her parents were always on the side of rational explanations.
These days, no one spoke about the incident, when a mysterious blue fire had burned in the middle of Cedar Lane. That day had been over thirteen years ago, before Dani’s parents had bought their house for an excellent price. Before the Curse of Strange Street became legend.
There was no curse, Dr. and Mr. Hirsch maintained. The blue fire had been an anomaly, but the fact that there was no current scientific explanation for the phenomenon did not mean it was something to be afraid of. The trouble, said Dr. Hirsch, was that people were largely guided by superstition and emotion. Not every homeowner could be as perceptive as she, a licensed psychiatrist, was trained to be.
A slightly scary story—that’s all the incident had been to Dani before. But now her mind was feverishly turning over a possibility. She’d never considered before that the blue light she felt inside had anything to do with the incident. Her blue flame had been personal, set apart. Now, though, she’d seen a bright blue column with her own eyes, right in the middle of Cedar House. Now she wondered if the incident that had earned Cedar Lane the name Strange Street had anything to do with her. And that wasn’t something she wanted her parents to ever find out.
Dani slurped up more of her smoothie, and as she did, thick green bubbles appeared in the blended avocado and leafy greens. Dani stopped slurping.
But the bubbles kept appearing.
