Blue Noon

4

2:59 P.M.

MAJORETTE

"Don't worry, I'll take you over to Madeleine's at midnight."

"Yeah, sure," Jessica answered. "After you guys have already talked about all the important stuff this afternoon."

Both Dess and Jonathan sighed and looked away, apparently tired of her whining.

Jessica rubbed her ankle, which wasn't helping her mood. It had been getting gradually better all day, but it still twinged with pain. The three of them were sitting on the school's front steps. Around them students were spilling out of Bixby High, slowly sorting themselves among the line of idling school buses. The lawn was dotted with clusters of people saying goodbye or arranging rides home. The sound of a tuba warming up for band practice drifted across the football field.

Jessica, of course, was waiting for her father to pick her up for a final night of being grounded.

"You won't be missing anything, Jess," Dess said.

"Madeleine probably doesn't know any more about what happened this morning than we do. I doubt this is a mindcaster issue."

"But she's all old and stuff," Jessica said.

"Yeah, but if anything like this ever happened before, it wasn't fifty years ago. More like five thousand, if Rex doesn't know about it." Dess nodded slowly, rubbing her hands together. "My guess is, this is a job for a polymath."

"But doesn't she have all those memories in her head?" Jessica said. "All that stuff passed on from mindcasters in the olden days?"

Dess seemed to shiver a bit, and Jessica cursed herself for bringing up the subject of mindcasters and memories. Madeleine had also messed with Dess's brain, trying to keep her existence a secret from the darklings.

After an uncomfortable silence, Dess answered. "Anything this big would be in the lore. They wouldn't just use memory, would they?" She shrugged. "But maybe she did scoop some info from the darklings this morning. I can't wait to ask her if that blue time was shaped funny."

"Shaped funny?"

Dess's eyes lit up. "Yeah, like, did it go all the way to the edge of Bixby County? Or was it smaller than a normal midnight? Like... focused in some particular places."

"Why would it be?"

Dess shrugged. "That's just the way the blue time is: it has a shape."

Not for the first time, Jessica tried to wrap her head around that concept. These days Dess talked about the midnight hour more like it was a place than a time. She was always playing with maps, and even as they sat there, she was fiddling - as usual - with her electronic gadget that spat out coordinates.

To Jessica it seemed weird that the blue time only went so far, then just stopped, like the edge of the world the way people imagined it before they realized it was round.

"So, Dess," she said. "What would happen if you went all the way to the edge of Bixby at midnight and then went just a little farther?"

"You mean go past the midnight boundary? You wouldn't... or couldn't. Time's frozen out there. So from your perspective, midnight would end as you took that step. But if another midnighter was watching you, they'd see you freeze up for the rest of the hour, just out of reach."

Jessica's head spun with that image for a moment. "So midnight's, like, a bubble around us?"

"You mean a sphere? Well, it's lumpy and uneven, but yeah."

"But say you were right on the border when midnight fell. Would, like, half of you keep moving and half of you freeze up?"

"And then you'd slide into two pieces," Jonathan added. "Like those guys in samurai movies?"

"Um, I guess I don't know." Dess laughed. "Why don't you try it and tell me?"

"Here they come," Jonathan said.

Rex and Melissa were making their unhurried way through the throng, their fingertips touching lightly, their expressions tranquil. As usual these days, the crowd seemed to have no effect on Melissa. She ignored the stares of the few freshmen who were freaked out by her scarred face, gliding past them as serene as a movie star on a red carpet.

Dess sighed. "I can see why you're bummed, Jess. You don't get to spend the afternoon drinking skanky tea and putting up with two mindcasters." She rose to her feet, her long skirt rustling. "See you."

"Yeah, really," Jonathan said. "You're lucky to miss this." He gave Jessica's hand a squeeze and stood.

"Yeah, so lucky," Jessica said. "If only I could be grounded all the time."

She watched the four of them walk away, chewing her lip and cursing her parents' calendar logic. Didn't they know she had more important things to do than be grounded these days?

For the first time ever, her dad was late.

He had faithfully picked up Jessica every day of her grounding, on the theory that left to ride the school bus, she would fall back into her criminal ways. But Don Day's car wasn't anywhere to be seen among the crawling traffic of parents picking up their kids.

Maybe after all the debate about exactly how long her grounding should last, he had gotten confused about whether it ended today or not.

For this morning's argument Jessica herself had gone with the werewolf model: a month was twenty-eight days, which meant that she should have been ungrounded last night. But her parents had cruelly opted for the calendar month, and as her father liked to repeat: "Thirty days hath September (April, June, and November)."

Of course, it still wasn't fair that she was grounded tonight. Jessica had been detained and returned to parental custody (technically not arrested) on a Saturday night. So thirty days later should be a Monday night, to any sane person. But both her parents had raised the technical point that she'd been brought home Sunday morning, and so her grounding really hadn't begun until Sunday night, which meant that it was Tuesday before her sentence would be served.

Jessica had kept arguing until her dad had gotten angry and threatened to invoke the fact that most months were thirty-one days, which meant he could in good conscience extend her grounding until Wednesday. Even Mom had rolled her eyes at that one, but Jessica had finally realized she was beaten.

She looked at her watch, which she'd reset to regular Bixby time - it had gained twenty minutes during the eclipse. Her bus would be leaving soon. If she got on it and her father showed up looking for her later, he would go ballistic and ground her again. Of course, maybe this was all a trick to make her miss the bus, forcing her to walk home so then she could be re-grounded for showing up late.

Unless she'd forgotten something. Jessica searched her memory for any change in plans. Since the weird events of this morning, her mind had been a little vague. All day she'd kept expecting time to freeze again and blue amber to capture everyone around her. Every lull in the noise of lunchtime had made her jump as she'd wondered if the world of motion and sunlight and other human beings was fading out for good.

Finally Jessica spotted the familiar car, Beth's head visible in the front seat next to her father's, and suddenly she remembered why he was late. Beth had demanded to be picked up at the junior high school on the other side of town so she wouldn't have to walk home in her humiliating new marching band uniform.

"Oh, right," Jess said, smiling. Her little sister was a majorette again.

She ran through the horde of cars, opened the door, and slid herself into the backseat.

Beth whirled around. "Not one word."

Jessica smiled at her. "I was just going to say that you look ravishing in purple and gold."

"Dad! She's making fun of me!" She turned to him. "You said she wasn't supposed to make fun of me!"

"Jess..."

"I just said ravishing. Ravishing is not a bad thing. Dad, explain to Beth how poor kids in Bangladesh would love to wear such a ravishing costume."

"Stop talking about it, Jess!" Beth cried.

"Girls..." Don Day's tone was still only vaguely threatening as he concentrated on guiding the car out of the traffic jam.

"Could you just ground her again and get it over with!" Beth shouted.

"Beth! That is so not cool!"

"Will both of you please be quiet!" their father pleaded. In an attempt to be scary he fixed Jessica with a stern look as he backed the car up into the clear, then put it into forward gear, and stared at Beth for a meaningful second before accelerating out onto the road.

Jessica settled back into her seat, unbeaten. "Anyway, I'm not even really grounded right now."

"Yes, you are," Beth said.

"Okay, I am." Jessica waited for a moment, then played her final trump card. "So, Dad, you know my one night a week off from my grounding? Could I have it, say... tonight?" She sat back and smiled. Her parents had granted her this limited reprieve a few days after she'd been brought home by the police. One day a week - a solemn promise. It had been a little suspicious, Mom agreeing to change a punishment once it had been meted out, especially now that Jessica knew what Rex and Melissa could get up to with people's minds.

But at the moment Jessica was willing to use the exception for all it was worth.

"That is so lame," Beth said. "Dad, tell her that's lame."

"That is pretty lame, Jess."

"But you said one day a week."

"And you've taken four free days. And you were grounded a month, which is four weeks."

Jessica's jaw dropped open at this unjust change of definition. "But you said, and I quote, 'Thirty days hath - ' "

"That's enough, Jessica." His voice had suddenly moved to fully threatening mode. "Or September will have sixty days this year."

Jessica swallowed. For once, he sounded like he really meant it.

Beth turned from the front seat and gave Jessica a worried look, hostilities briefly suspended by their father's outburst. Since coming to Bixby, Don Day had been jobless, a condition that had gradually turned into shiftless, then shirtless, and finally spineless. It had been a while since he'd gotten up the energy to raise his voice.

In fact, Jessica realized, it had been exactly thirty days - he'd yelled a lot when the police had brought her home for breaking Bixby's curfew with Jonathan. Maybe the end of the grounding was freaking him out and the concept of her being free to wander the streets of Bixby between the hours of three and 10 P.M.. was too much for him. He wasn't like Mom, too tired out from having to impress her new bosses to obsess over anything but work.

Maybe it was time to change the subject.

"So, Beth, how was band practice?" she asked.

"It was lame."

"You used to like it."

Beth turned toward the front of the car again and didn't answer.

Jessica frowned, wishing she hadn't made fun of Beth's uniform. It was an old habit, from the days when Beth could take being teased without exploding.

Two years ago, back in Chicago, Beth had been a champion majorette. She could stick a three-turn every time and do a hundred thumb flips per minute, and she came home from camp every summer with tons of ribbons. But halfway through being eleven years old, she'd declared majorettes totally lame and exchanged marching band for being Ms. Social. Since the move down to Bixby, she hadn't even unpacked her baton-twirling trophies. Jessica had found herself missing the little silvery majorettes lined up on their marble pedestals, just like she missed the younger, happier Beth of the old days.

But having made zero friends in Bixby had apparently changed Beth's mind about majorettes. Maybe being in the marching band was a big deal at Bixby Junior High. Or maybe at this point she simply didn't know what else to do.

Seeing Beth in a gaudy costume after two years was so strange, as if time had broken down completely this morning and was heading backward now.

"Listen, you want to practice together later?" Jessica said. "I mean, I think I'm allowed to go in the backyard."

"Sure," her father piped up.

"Yes, Jess, that would be great." Beth turned around to face her again. "Because it's so important to have an assistant while baton twirling."

"All right. Fine. Just trying to be helpful."

"And mature. Don't forget mature."

"I said fine."

Beth kept looking at her, the gold piping around her collar flashing in the sun.

"What's your problem?" Jessica finally asked.

"Why do you think I had Dad pick me up today?"

Jessica sighed. "Because you look so ravishing?"

"No, retard. I could have changed at school." She dropped her voice. "It was because of you."

Jessica shot a puzzled look toward the back of her father's head. Was Beth talking about Jonathan? Since Jess had introduced the two of them, she'd figured Beth was on her side on the secret boyfriend front. At least Beth hadn't told Mom and Dad about his late-night visits or how Jessica skipped out at night sometimes.

"What do you mean, Beth?"

"Just to make sure you know."

"Know what?"

"That even though you're not grounded anymore, I've still got my eye on you."

Jessica sighed again. "Beth, quit being weird. Dad, tell Beth to quit being weird."

Don Day was silent for a moment. Finally he said, "Well, Jessica, I kind of know what she means. After all, I've got my eye on you too."