Sophomore Freak (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 2) (6 page)

The light to my cell phone dropped out. Right when I positioned my index finger to restart it, a hand gently covered mine and squeezed.

“Don’t bother,” Rhapsody said. “I’m here.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

we make a plan

Without lights I couldn’t tell if Rhapsody was visible again or not. She hugged me and held on longer than usual, even for my best friend, but it wasn’t weird. I squeezed her back. The dust made me cough, which was a good excuse for both of us to let go.

“We’re not safe – especially not
here.”
Wiggling my fingers, I felt the grit in the air. It was like airborne sand. 

“Like we’re safe
anywhere
?”

She had a point. Now what?

“I’ve got a guy on the outside,” she said. “He’ll signal us if something’s up.”

A guy? My chest tightened. “Unless he’s like us, it’s not going to matter.”

She paused. He was like us? Selby?

Rhapsody stopped short of answering me. She shined her cell phone’s flashlight application onto her face. Without makeup, she looked tired around the eyes. “Somebody was mind-controlling him for a minute. He’s not sure who.”

Of course he’s not. “I don’t buy that crap. Why do you?”

“He looked out for me in elementary school. I needed help. Want me not to call other dudes for the job? Stop feeling up Girl Genius long enough to answer your phone. Quit blowing me off!”

“Fine!” I said, kicking at a loose piece of linoleum. “What’s the big emergency, anyway? What was in Welker’s safe?”

“Not yet.” She keyed a text message on her phone. “We came to Reject High so you could find us. Staying anywhere too long will make us targets.”

As soon as she pressed “send,” Selby
whooshed
into the lobby and sent a violent rush of air our way. I closed my eyes and mouth. Rhapsody ghosted and it passed through her. When the breeze faded away, I saw nothing but his silhouette. When I swung at it on instinct he easily dodged my punch.

“Good seeing you, too, Freak,” he said. “She told you about the. . .”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Mind control,
blah blah blah
. Tell it to my collapsed lung.”

“Meet you at the rendezvous point,” he said before zipping away.

Rendezvous point? Who talks like that?

“He’s way too into this,” I said out loud by mistake. “Where’s this ‘rendezvous point’?”

Rhapsody laughed a bit. “He’s extra. Dude, it’s just the old playground.”

I knew which one she meant – the one where Selby had pushed her to ghost for the first time and she’d almost lost her legs trying to do it.

No one was going to get maimed tonight, I hoped.

Once we got outside I held Rhapsody’s waist while we jumped to the playground. Its dull overhead orange lights allowed us to see each other. Selby, wearing one of his white practice jerseys and black shorts, relaxed on one of the benches. We joined him. It felt like an incomplete meeting without Sasha, but she had “Corky” to deal with.

Rhapsody pulled a small journal from the bottom zipper pocket of her black utility vest and handed it to me. “Read.”

As I flipped the yellowed pages they made a crackling sound like dry leaves. Each had a bunch of penned drawings and equations on them, written in English, I think, but with symbols I didn’t understand. “Carrington” was scribbled over and over again in black cursive.

Nearing the back of the journal, I saw the writings concluded with drawings of crystals and observations. Nothing was written next to “morganite,” which were the pink stones, “heliodor,” the gold, or “aquamarine,” the blue.

Had the owner of this journal never figured them out? Or he didn’t want anyone else to know what he did?

Selby must have seen confusion on my face. Sitting on the other side of Rhapsody, he leaned his head forward. “A scientific journal,” he said. “At least, that’s what we think.”

Rhapsody reached over and turned the pages back as it sat in my lap). Her fingers grazed my leg and my heart jumped. “I Google searched for details on Carrington,” she said. “It was a solar storm in 1859 – the biggest one in five hundred years.”

I connected the dots – the book was
really old
. “Bigger storm than next week?”

“Nope,” Selby jumped in. “Way smaller. Don’t you watch TV, or is it just movies for you? It’s been all over the news.”

Most of the movies I saw were because Debra couldn’t afford cable until we moved in with Aunt Dee. “King needs me to find the heliodor because I can lift it for him and move it fast.”

Selby passed me an old photograph. “Heely-o-what?”

“That’s what they call the gold crystal,” I explained, taking the picture from him.

“Oh, well, maybe King is one of those people.”

I stared at the picture of men in white lab coats and women in nineteenth-century formal dresses. The background was blurry, but it almost looked like a castle. “How would King still be alive if he was in
this picture
Selby?”

“Well, whatever,” Selby said, taking the picture back. “Rhapsody found it in Welker’s safe. I don’t know, Freshman. Couldn’t he be tracking down their relatives?”

She told Selby what she found before she told me? I rubbed the back of my neck and delivered the worst part of the news.

“He also said the provenance crystals are going to explode next week.”

Both of them cursed at me.

“What? Like we’re all gonna
die?”
Rhapsody asked.

“They’re not anywhere close to here,” I said. “At least not three of them.”

Selby held his hands out. “You know where they are! So, we’re good if we just stay in town?”

I might have been wrong for taking a second to think about it, but I did. Shaking myself I said, “I don’t know, Selby. These things are like nuclear bombs. We might be okay. We might not. But a whole lot of other people will die if we don’t do anything about it.”

“If Spivey’s telling the truth. Let me ask him. I’ll get the truth out of him.”

My shoulders tensed. Spivey was in no condition to be questioned, thanks to Sasha. “What good would that do? Are you going to run around him until he talks?”

Rhapsody rubbed my left hand, which helped calm me down. “Cap knows where the red, green, and white ones are. The other three could be in town, for all we know.”

We all stood. I admit that I don’t like anything about Selby, but running was a punk move, even for him. “You’d let innocent people die if you could stop it?” I asked him.

“You can’t even drive. What makes you think you or anyone else can keep them from blowing up? Bury them underneath a jail. Those people aren’t innocent.”

Thousands of people would die if we stayed out of it. I shook off the cold shiver traveling up my spine. “I’ll get the crystals together and hand them over. King, Welker, whoever – they could have a plan to stop them from exploding.”

“Jason, think for a second,” Rhapsody said. “Look at what we can do with three of them. You’d be giving them all six without knowing what they all do or what those people plan to do with them.”

I backed away from her. What else could we do? The crystals couldn’t be destroyed. When we’d tried smashing the green emerald it had blasted me unconscious.

“Move the red, green, and white,” Selby suggested. “I’ll help do whatever until Saturday. After that, I’m in the wind, and if you’re smart, you will be, too.”

He zoomed off, leaving a cloud of uprooted grass behind. The metal basketball net rattled in the distance.

I slumped down in the bench and dropped my face into my hands.

Rhapsody sat next to me and rubbed her hand across my back. “Do you really think they’d leave us alone? Or is that what you’re hoping would happen?”

“No idea.” My voice muffled in my hands. “I almost agree with Selby. We should just leave. Go north to Xobai County for a couple of days, live it up while we still can.”

The perk in Rhapsody’s voice dropped. I could, but she couldn’t.

“Ruby’s pulling the plug on Pápa. She told me to say goodbye. Our priest already gave him last rites.”

I straightened up. “What?
Why?
She doesn’t believe in that, does she?”

She licked her bare lips. “The insurance company believes in it. We’ve done it all – bike rides, beef and beers, highway donations. He’s been sick forever, Jason. This is it. He’s gonna die, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”

My heart broke for her. Losing a parent was the worst. I put my arm around her shoulders. We didn’t speak. She cried for a long time. I wondered if she’d ever stop. Every time she slowed down, she picked back up again.

“I’ll bring him green prisms every day until the storm.”

Sniffling, she looked at me with tears still streaking down her tanned face. “You mean it? You’d do that for me? What about the explosion?”

“Screw it,” I said. “We’ll figure something out.”

Rhapsody gave me a kiss on the cheek. I smiled. She smiled back. She gave me another peck, slower this time and closer to the corner of my lips. The scent of her perfume overpowered everything else around. I swore it was the same kind my mom used to wear.

I know where this was going. Shouldn’t I stop it? She needs this. But. . .

The next time she kissed me, it was full and on the mouth. I hesitated at first, but then I kissed her back. She shed her vest and tossed it over the back of the bench. I wrapped my arms around her sides. We continued kissing. Her mouth tasted like cigarettes.

What’s happening?
We’d done this before, but not like this. I didn’t feel the small chill in the air anymore, and I started sweating under my arms.

Suddenly, Rhapsody pulled away. “Sorry, Cap,” she sniffled, putting her hand to her mouth. “I’m emotional, stressed out, whatever. Text it.” 

She triggered her powers and vanished before I could say anything. Thinking about returning to Sasha’s to check on her, I wiped off my mouth, in case Rhapsody was wearing lip gloss. I took a self-photo on my cell phone to double-check.

After making sure no one was lurking around I left for Sasha’s house. I touched down on one of the less steep parts of the roof near her room. The entire house was dark, except for her nightlight. I lightly tapped my fingers on her window. A minute later she dragged herself to the sill and waved – not that I should come in, but that it was too late for me to sleepover and I should go home.

I leaped to Aunt Dee’s and used my key sensor to turn off the alarm from the backyard. The intruder light flashed on when I got to the gray cement steps at the rear door. Beyond that was an annoying door alarm hanging on the inside doorknob. When I went out Debra always deactivated that one for me. Otherwise, I’d wake up everyone.

Aunt Dee had a shotgun and she was trigger happy.

When I got into the kitchen I saw Debra leaning over an empty pot of coffee on the counter. She’d been waiting for a while.

Everything else but the sink was covered in plastic tarp. Aunt Dee had insisted we renovate the kitchen this summer, and since she’d taken us in and didn’t have the money to hire anyone, she and Debra forced me to help.

“Morning, Cap,” she said, scratching her black headscarf. “Breakfast?”

I checked the time on my phone. 4:45 a.m. “Yeah. Thanks.”

Debra cracked eggs forever and laid an entire slab of turkey bacon into the pan. I watched her until my eyes drifted closed. After however long she took, I jerked awake with a full plate in front of me – scrambled eggs and cheese, turkey bacon, toast, grits, cereal and milk, with a mug of coffee. It smelled like a restaurant in the kitchen. I ate it all with no problem and scraped my plate clean.

My stepmom took my plate and washed it in the sink. “Busy night?”

“You could say that,” I said, sipping my drink.

“After Dee got Zachary and you left the police station, Ray called me. He went on and on about floating knives, you flying, and Julia. . .”

I quickly swallowed the coffee in my mouth before I choked on it. “She’s alive?”

“Yes,” she said. “She’s in North Hospital. You saved her life.”

The next sip of coffee was a little sweeter than the last one. “You don’t say!”

She lowered her voice at the sound of Aunt Dee walking across the floorboards upstairs. “A woman from Homeland Security came here looking for you.”

My eyes widened. Homeland Security? “What’s her name?”

“I don’t remember,” she whispered. Both of us heard my aunt approaching. “She left her card – I hid it upstairs. She said that. . .”

“Shh,” I said. Aunt Dee was close.

“Just be careful,” she warned.

Aunt Dee padded into the kitchen. Her hair was in rollers and she was wearing a purple nightgown with no bra on. I quickly chose something else to look at.

“Morning,” she said. “What are ya’ll doing up at 5 a.m.?”

I tapped my fingers against the table. “Couldn’t sleep,” I said. It was the truth.

“Deidra Lee, where is your bathrobe?” Debra asked her. “I just washed it.”

Aunt Dee folded her arms across her chest. “That’s why I can’t find it, Debra Brown. Look at me, Boy. You miss your curfew? What time did you get in?”