Has Anyone Seen Jessica Jenkins? (16 page)

“So you stole it.”

“So I
borrowed
it,” Max said.

“And then what?”

“Then the mind-reading thing started happening. It was weird. At first it only happened when I was feeling tired. The first time was over breakfast. I was sitting there, half awake, eating my cereal. Dad was sitting across the table from me reading a medical journal, and then I heard it.”

“What did you hear?”

“I heard my dad say, ‘What a load of nonsense! I could have written this article ten times better.’ Actually, he didn’t say ‘nonsense,’ but you get the idea.”

“I do.”

“So I looked up from my cereal and asked him what he was talking about. He said he hadn’t said anything. I said he had. He told me I was late for school and he was late for work. Then he folded up his paper and told me he was leaving in five minutes if I wanted a ride, and not to forget to brush my teeth.”

“Gosh! I see what you mean about the level of conversation with your dad.”

“I told you. Anyway, gradually, I realized that if my mind was kind of slow — you know,
empty
— the mind-reading thing would happen.”

“And then you taught yourself how to deliberately empty a part of your mind but carry on as normal with the rest of it.”

“I guess you’ve been there, huh?”

“Been there, got the T-shirt, the handbag, and the matching shoes and scarf,” I said.

“Once I got my head around what was going on, and traced it back to the skull, I couldn’t help wondering what the rest of it was about — what exactly my dad was up to in that lab.”

“So you went back to the lab, ‘borrowed’ a few more crystals, and tried to put the rest of them to the test?”

“That’s pretty much it, yeah.”

“And I’m guessing what you found was that none of the other crystals had any effect on you?”

“You’ve tried it, too, huh?”

“Not exactly,” I said carefully. I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to tell him at this point, or if I should let him know about the experiments Nancy had shown us in the park. “What I do know is that it seems you only get one power — the one from the first crystal you use. After that, you can’t swap or change it or add to it with another one.”

“Yeah, that’s the conclusion I’d come to as well. Hey, if I’d known that, I might have gone for one that gave me superhuman strength or something. Like I said, this mind-reading thing doesn’t always tell you what you want to hear.”

I was on the verge of thinking that he probably heard lots of people think unpleasant thoughts about him. But I stopped myself, for two reasons. For one thing, he’d know I’d thought it. And for another, sitting here talking with him like this, he didn’t seem quite as bad as I’d thought. He was kind of OK, really.

Max gave me a scowl.

“You heard all that, didn’t you?” I said as I realized it.

He nodded.

“Sorry.”

Max shrugged. “It’s OK. I’m used to it. So, anyway, that’s my side of things. What’s yours?”

I hesitated for a moment — and then I decided to tell him everything. What did I have to lose? Max was the only other person in the world like me — that I knew of. I had to trust him, and to be honest, it felt like a relief. I mean, I’d talked to Izzy about it all, and Nancy, and now we’d gotten Tom involved, and Heather, too. But at this point, Max was the only person who I
knew
had actually experienced having a superpower and would totally understand what I was going through.

He listened while I told him all about getting the necklace for my birthday and turning invisible in geography.

“That’ll teach Cooper to be so boring!” he said with a laugh.

I told him about spying on his dad, and about meeting up with Nancy and seeing what the other crystals did.

“So that’s how it works,” he said when I told him about the bowl with the serum in it. “But why does it work on us? I’ve never drunk any of that stuff, as far as I know.”

“I’ve no idea why it works on you,” I said. I explained what Nancy had told me about getting the serum on me when I was a newborn. “Babies’ cells are replaced much faster than adults’ cells,” I told Max. “Nancy thinks the serum must have affected me because of my cells multiplying so fast. But she says it stayed dormant in my body until now because apparently the brain has another growth spurt at our age, or something.”

“That’s good to know,” Max said lightly. “Maybe mine’ll develop enough that I’ll stop failing chemistry one of these days.”

I laughed. It felt nice. Nice to talk to Max and to share all this with someone who completely understood — which was probably why I decided to go a step further and tell him about the others.

“So there could be more of us out there,” Max mused. “Any ideas who they might be?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “We think one is Tom.”

“Tom? Tom who?”

“Tom Johnson. He’s in my class. He’s really — ”

I didn’t get any further as Max burst out laughing. “Little geeky math genius?
That
Tom? With a superpower? That’s funny!”

My cheeks reddened as I felt a surge of loyalty toward Tom — and annoyance toward Max. Why did he have to be such an idiot at times?

Max stopped laughing. “You’re right. I’m an idiot,” he said. “Sorry. OK, who’s the other?”

“Heather Berry.”

Max tried to look uninterested but his eyebrows went up a little, as did the color in his cheeks. Typical. He probably had a crush on her, just like every other boy in our class.

Max glanced at me and folded his arms. “Anyway, moving on,” he said quickly. “So you think they might have powers, too, but you don’t know for sure?”

“Not yet. Izzy and I are hoping to meet them at lunchtime tomorrow. Hey, why don’t you come, too?”

Max burst out laughing. “Yeah, right,” he sneered.

“Oh. Sorry. Of course. You wouldn’t be caught dead spending your lunch break in an art room with a bunch of losers when you could be out playing soccer with your friends.”

Then he probably realized that Heather might be there as he unfolded his arms and shrugged. “I might show up,” he said. “I’ll see.”

Which I took as an “OK, then,” in Max-speak.

“Anyway,” he went on, changing the subject. “It’s even more of a mystery now. I wasn’t born on the same day as you guys. As far as I know, I didn’t get that serum stuff on me — unless my dad secretly gave me some and never told me about it! So why me?”

And I don’t know if it was because we shared something completely crazy or because he was the kind of person I’d rather have as a friend than an enemy, or because I saw something in him that I guessed most people never got to see — a kind of vulnerability. Anyway, whatever it was, before I knew it, my mouth was doing that thing where it lets words come out without asking permission from my brain.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But from now on, we’re in this together, and I’m going to help you find out.”

“Before we do anything else, we need a plan,” I began. “And part one of the plan is that we need to take the crystals back to the lab.”

“You’re not turning me in!” Max said, shaking his head vigorously and folding his arms. “I’ll deny everything. You can’t prove it. I’ll say you’re making it up. I don’t want people to know about this. They’ll just call me a freak. My life’ll be over.”

I held my hands up in self-defense. “Max. Chill. I won’t say anything. Like I said, we’re in this together. We’ve got to trust each other. OK?”

Max gave me a sulky nod. “OK. Whatever.”

“But we do need to put the crystals back. That way, Nancy will stop getting suspicious, and no one needs to know about you. You still have them, don’t you?”

Max nodded.

“Can I see them?”

He paused for a moment, then got up from the table. “Hang on. I’ll go get them.”

A couple of minutes later, he was back with a small bag that he emptied onto the table. A rainbow of colors sparkled and winked as the sunlight hit them from the kitchen window.

I counted nine crystals. Three that looked like shiny pebbles, two that were like jagged pieces of rock — one bright red, the other deep green — two rings, a bracelet, and a pendant on a gold chain.

“I was never planning to keep them,” Max said.

“I didn’t say you were.”

Then I remembered the other thing I’d seen. The bottle that he’d had in his pocket. “Is there anything else?” I asked.

Max looked as if he were about to deny it. Then he frowned. “You saw me, didn’t you?” With a sigh, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the tiny bottle. He put it on the table with the crystals. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s everything.”

I picked up the bottle. “What
is
this?” I asked.

“I really don’t know, but do you want to know something weird?”

“I’m
living
in the world of weird, so, yeah, hit me.”

Max picked up the bottle. “OK, so I’d found this at the lab and it intrigued me. The other day, I was sitting at the table here, looking at it, and I opened it up and sniffed it to see what it smelled like. Just as I did that, Spider jumped onto my lap and bumped into the bottle.”

“Your cat? Did it spill?”

“Yeah, about half of it went on the table.”

“So what happened?”

“Before I even realized what was going on, Spider licked it up. Lapped it all up.”

“Yikes.”

Max frowned. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Or words to that effect, anyway.”

“So then what happened?”

“Nothing at first. I watched him like a hawk. I was worried out of my mind in case anything bad happened to him. But he was fine. I didn’t see any change — not till the next day, anyway.”

“What happened the next day?”

“Spider was in a fight with another cat. I heard screeching and yowling and went to the back door to see what was going on. He ran in, fur sticking out like he’d been electrocuted, tail upright and as thick as a tree trunk. It took me a while to calm him down. He’s only two and can be a bit of a bully, but he can be a real baby at times, too. Eventually he calmed down and I checked him over. He had a scratch on his paw, and it was bleeding all over the place.”

“Poor thing.”

“Yeah. Anyway, I took him into the kitchen to look for something to stop the bleeding. I grabbed a wad of paper towels, and I was going to wrap it around his paw.” Max hesitated.

“So did it work?” I asked. “Did you manage to stop it?”

“That’s just it. It wasn’t bleeding anymore.”

“Oh! Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

“Mmm, I guess.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

Max leaned in and lowered his voice. “The cut, right? It was big and pumping out blood like a tap. But when I went to wrap it in the paper towels, it was gone. Disappeared, like it had never been there. And I mean
at all
. There was no cut and no sign that there had ever been one. The only way I knew I hadn’t imagined the whole thing was that there were still spots of blood on the floor from where Spider had run into the house.”

I tried to think. “Are you saying you think the serum had something to do with this?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. See, I’ve been thinking about it, a lot,” Max went on. “And I think I’ve got it figured out.”

“Go on.”

“OK, so the second time I went to the lab, I saw some sheets with names of crystals and notes on them. Most of them were full of question marks in the ‘properties’ column. But then I had a thought. I looked for a sheet that had any information on rubies.”

“Why rubies?”

Max pointed at the cat. “Spider’s got this ridiculously bling collar. He used to belong to my grandmother, who was a bit eccentric, extremely rich, and loved cats, especially Spider. The collar has an actual ruby on it. Just a tiny one, but it’s real.”

“So you thought that the ruby on the collar could have interacted with the serum?”

“Exactly.”

“And? Did you find anything about rubies at the lab?”

“Yup.”

“What did it say?”

Max looked me straight in the eye. “Heals wounds.”

I stared at him as the breath whistled out of me.

“Wow!” I said quietly. “I mean, a cat . . .”

“I know. Hard to get your head around, isn’t it?” Max said. “Thing is, Spider gets into scrapes with the cats in this neighborhood fairly often. He comes home with scratches and bites on him at least once or twice a month, and the first time any of them have ever healed this quickly was the day after he’d drunk the serum. It
has
to have something to do with it.”

My head was spinning. I barely knew what to think. “Max. Please, come tomorrow at lunchtime. If Tom and Heather are like us, that’s two more people to help us figure all of this out. And even if they don’t come, Izzy will be there, and she always comes up with good suggestions.”

Max nodded. “OK,” he agreed. Then he gestured at the crystals. “What about these?”

“We’ll take them back together, OK? How about tomorrow night? Mom and Dad both go out on Wednesday evenings. I’ll tell my neighbor I have to go out for a bit. She won’t mind.”

Max stifled a laugh. “You’ll tell your
neighbor
?

I made a face. “I know. She checks in on me when my parents are out. Anyway, all she ever does is watch TV. She’ll hardly notice I’m gone. So we take the crystals back tomorrow night, yes?”