Edgewood Series: Books 1 - 3 (6 page)

He swiveled in his chair to answer. “The sky, the stars, the moon.” He chortled more than was warranted, and Mallory laughed too. I got the impression it was a standard joke between them.

The owner, Rosie, who was also the waitress, motioned us over to what she said was their usual booth. I slid in first and was glad when Mallory sat next to me.

“You added a new person to your group,” Rosie said, bringing menus. “You’re not a trio anymore.”

“He’s on probation,” Mallory said, giving my arm a poke. “We’re still testing him out.”

Rosie laughed. “If he’s a good tipper, I say you keep him.”

Oh, shoot, the mention of tipping reminded me that I had no money with me at all. Mallory’s group knew their order without even looking at the menu. Without exception, they all ordered breakfast by giving her a number.

“Okay, so I’ve got two number fours, and a number six for the tall gentleman by the window,” Rosie said, jotting the order down on a pad. She looked up. “The usual drinks?” They nodded.

She turned her attention to me. I handed her the menu and said, “I’m not really hungry. I’ll just have a glass of water, thanks.”

Mallory spoke up. “He’ll have a number four like me. And an orange juice. My treat.”

“Hey,” I said, “you don’t have to do that.” Was my face red? It felt red.

She shrugged. “It’s the least I can do since you made the trip out here.” The waitress jotted down my order and walked away before I could cancel it. I guess I was having the number four, whatever that was.

“You don’t have to pay for my food,” I said.

Mallory said, “Call it payback.”

“For what?”

“For saving Nelly Smith’s life,” Nadia piped up, her head aimed at the table.

I turned to Mallory. “You told them?”

“I didn’t have to. They were with me that night. They saw you running away.” She took a sip of her ice water. “But I would have told them, if they didn’t already know. We don’t have any secrets in this group.”

“What exactly is this group?” I asked. Jameson was busy stacking the jelly packets so they were perfectly symmetrical, and Nadia still had her hood up. Mallory was the only one who seemed to have it together as far as I could tell.

Jameson gave me a steely-eyed look over his glasses. “We’re geniuses with superpowers.”

I couldn’t help myself—I laughed. He’d said it with a completely straight face, but I couldn’t imagine he was serious. I looked from Nadia to Jameson to Mallory. They didn’t look like geniuses with superpowers.

Jameson looked disgusted. He said to Mallory, “I told you this was a bad idea. I can tell already that he’s not going to work out.”

Rosie came with our drinks. It was orange juice all around, except for Jameson, who had coffee. Nadia pulled the wrapper off her straw and twisted it around her finger. After the waitress walked away, I said, “I’m sorry for laughing, but come on. You’re joking right?”

“It’s no joke,” Mallory said, lowering her voice.

“You’re all geniuses?”

Nadia’s head bobbed up and down under her hood. Jameson glared at me.

“That’s how we met,” Mallory said. “At a group for accelerated homeschoolers doing college-level work.”

Now I was confused. “But you’re not homeschooled.”

“Not this year,” Mallory said. “But I was before. The only reason I’m going to school now is that I wanted to see what I was missing. Going to dances, having a locker, doing labs in science class. The usual high school stuff. I wanted to play field hockey and complain about the cafeteria food. Plus, my folks thought it would be good for me socially.”

“And has it been good for you?” I asked, and then added, “Socially, I mean.”

Before she had a chance to answer, Jameson spoke up. “Mallory won’t tell you this herself, but she’s brilliant. A day at your high school for her would be like you spending time with kindergartners.” His tone wasn’t hostile, exactly, but it wasn’t friendly either. I could tell he wanted me to know the pecking order. A guy thing.

“Okay, I get it, you’re all smarter than me,” I said. “You can feel superior if you want.”

“It’s not that we’re smarter exactly,” Mallory said. “It’s just with academics—”

“No, he’s right,” Jameson said, interrupting. “We’re smarter. You don’t have to apologize for it, Mallory. It’s okay to say it. Russ here probably has other things he’s good at.”

“I know I’m pretty average. I don’t have a problem with that,” I said. “I get good grades, but I spend a lot of time studying.” Jameson nodded like he agreed with me. What a jerk. I changed the subject. “So what kind of superpowers are we talking about?”

“So how did you know to help Nelly Smith?” Mallory asked, ignoring my question. “Why were you out at night to begin with?” She squeezed my arm in a way that made me want to cooperate. We could get back to the superpower question later.

“I have trouble sleeping,” I said, “The only thing that seems to help is walking at night.”

Nadia looked at me with surprise. Mallory had a triumphant look on her face, and I saw her catch Jameson’s eye, but his expression didn’t change.

“Why do you have trouble sleeping?” Mallory asked.

“I don’t know why. I just can’t.”

“What made you think to go for a walk? It’s kind of a weird thing to do.”

I thought for a moment and then shrugged. “I don’t know. I just sort of felt compelled to go outside. The house seemed confining. I had to get out. And then, after it helped, I kept doing it.”

Rosie came with a tray then and set the food in front of us with crisp efficiency. Man, the cook here was fast. “Be careful, the plates are hot,” she said, and pulled a bottle of Tabasco sauce out of her pocket, which she set in front of Nadia. “Do you need anything else?”

“No, we’re good,” Jameson said, speaking for the group. “Thanks.”

Everyone turned their attention to the food. The salt shaker was passed around, and Nadia coated her fried eggs with enough Tabasco to burn the stomach lining of a cow. Everyone picked up their forks and began eating. I followed their lead and dug into my hash browns. I was hungrier than I’d thought.

“So Russ,” Mallory said. “You have trouble sleeping and then you go walking. That’s it, basically?” She took a sip of orange juice while she waited for me to answer.

“I guess. It’s the only thing that helps.”

“Does anyone else know you go out at night?” Jameson asked.

“No. I go out and I’m back before my folks even know the difference.”

“And you always follow the same route.” This from Mallory. She said it as a statement, not a question.

“You’ve been watching me?”

“Not on purpose,” Jameson said. “But we can’t seem to avoid you. Everywhere we went, there you were.” He smirked at Nadia, who grinned in response.

“There aren’t too many people out at night,” Mallory said. “So when we started to see you lurking in the shadows it got our attention. We only followed you to make sure you weren’t doing anything wrong.”

“You were following me?” Creepy. How could I not have known that?

“Only at first,” Jameson said. “We figured out pretty quickly that you were harmless.” He emptied a sugar packet into his coffee and swirled it around, his spoon clinking loudly. I guess they never covered stirring without hitting the side of the coffee cup in genius school.

“So,” Mallory said cheerily, “want to join our group?”

“Um, no,” I said. “Why would I?”

Nadia turned to Mallory. “You forgot to tell him what we’re all about.”

“It got lost in the interrogation,” I said, taking a sip of orange juice.

“Okay, short answer,” Mallory said. “There’s some kind of weird astronomical phenomenon happening. Those exposed to it seem to become affected in some way.”

A light bulb went on in my head as I realized what she was talking about. The lights in the sky. So I wasn’t the only one who’d experienced it. “You saw it too, then, the other night? The lights that came down out of the sky and landed in a spiral?”

The three of them exchanged a look that I couldn’t quite decipher. Mallory sucked in a deep breath. “No, not this time.”

“It’s happened before?” I asked.

Mallory nodded. “We saw it about a year ago. It came in streaks and then landed in a perfect Fibonacci spiral on the ground. We studied it until it burned out, but none of us could figure out what it was. Later on, we all started to experience different things.
Unusual
things.”

Nadia said, “It put some kind of spell on us. It was intoxicating.”

“How did you know I saw the same thing?” Now they had my complete attention.

“Because you sketched it in Specter’s class,” Mallory said. “You drew it exactly the way we saw it. And then Specter started asking about it. I put two and two together.”

“Tell him about what happened afterward,” Jameson said in a forced voice. “After we saw it.”

“This was last year. A few days after we saw the ‘lights’ as you call them, we went back to the site to collect evidence. We’d been so mesmerized by what we saw that it didn’t occur to us to pick up some of the pieces, so we went back.” Mallory spoke in hushed tones. “And this is when it gets really weird. It was all gone.”

“Gone?”

“Not there anymore,” Jameson said, his voice tinged with sarcasm.

“I know what
gone
means,” I said. “I just don’t understand. How could all the pieces be gone? There were like thousands of them. Maybe they blended in with the rest of the dirt?”

“No, they were gone. Someone had come and scraped the field clean,” Jameson said, and then regretfully added, “I should have picked up samples when we first saw them. I missed my chance.”

Nadia patted his arm, but he didn’t seem to appreciate her attempt to console him.

“No one is blaming you, Jameson,” Mallory said. “It’s not that big of a deal. It’s just,” she said, leaning toward me, “that we wanted to analyze the pieces. Their properties don’t correlate with what we know about energy and matter. They retain light and low-level heat, but they aren’t hot per se. Sometimes the light intensifies after it’s gone out, like those trick birthday candles that relight. It seems to permanently affect those who come into contact with it, but not consistently. Each of us had a different side effect, for lack of a different word.”

“I’d give my right arm to be able to study a chunk of that stuff,” Jameson said.

“Whatever it is, the properties of energy don’t seem to apply,” Nadia said, shrugging. “And the effects on human beings seem randomly generated.”

“Just one little piece, that’s all I’d need,” Jameson said.

My food sat on my plate. I set down my fork. I was done. “So now you all have superpowers?”

“I like to call them
enhanced abilities
,” Mallory said, her fingers making quotes around the last two words.

Jameson smirked. “I just called them superpowers for your benefit, Russell.”

“You don’t need to dumb down your vocabulary on my account,” I said. “Even if you use big words, trust me, I’ll be able to follow along.”

Rosie came back with a pot of coffee and topped up Jameson’s cup. While she was there, the group was silent.

“So what are these enhanced abilities?” I asked, once the waitress walked away. I gave each of them the once-over, trying to figure it out for myself, but came up short. Mallory looked like a typical pretty high school girl. Jameson, with his pasty white skin and lanky build, resembled an albino giraffe with glasses. And Nadia, well, since she lurked behind her hood the whole time, I wasn’t sure what to make of her. From her spiky bangs and big dark eyes, she could have been an anime character. None of them would ever be mistaken for a superhero. There was a long pause, and when no one answered I said, “Am I supposed to guess?”

I saw Nadia look at Jameson, and even though they didn’t speak, there was something going on there. Their eyes flickered slightly and their facial expressions gave them away. I looked at Mallory to see if she’d fill me in, but she was looking intently at the other two. It was so quiet that when Nadia spoke, it was almost startling.

“Show him, Jameson,” she said.

Jameson grinned like he’d been waiting for this moment. He rubbed his hands together. “So, Russ, how well do you know your science?”

I shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I’m getting an A in the class.”

“Good for you!” Jameson said, in a clearly condescending way.

“Of course I’m in the dummy class, something called Science Samplers,” I said. “Hey wait a minute.” I pointed to Mallory. “If you’re a genius, what are you doing in my class?”

She looked sheepish. “I tested out of all the math classes the school offered. I’m taking Specter’s class as an elective.”

“Oh.”

“And what was the deal with your faked seizure?”

“I had to do something. You were just about to tell Mr. Specter about the lights.”

“Eyes over here, Russ,” Jameson said, waving a hand and snapping his fingers. “Let’s get back on track.”

Nadia said, “Just show him what you can do.” Her dark eyes shone bright and she fidgeted slightly with anticipation. “It’s very impressive,” she said to me.

“I want to explain a little something first,” Jameson said. “This might be a little advanced for you, Russ, but try to keep up. It has to do with energy. For the sake of simplification, let’s say there are two basic types of energy: kinetic and potential. Potential energy is stored energy. If I lift up a jelly packet I exert energy that will become kinetic energy when the packet is dropped.” He held one up at eye level and released it so that it fell to the table.

“Oh for God’s sake, just demonstrate what you can do,” Mallory said.

Jameson held up a hand. “Patience, Mallory, he’s getting this, I can tell.” He turned to me. “Kinetic energy, on the other hand, is the energy of motion. The faster the body moves, the more kinetic energy is produced. If I put this same jelly packet on a slide at a playground and it hurtles its way down to the bottom, the potential energy is converted into kinetic energy. Still with me, Russ?”

I nodded.

“Thus, the greater the mass and speed of an object the more kinetic energy there will be.”

“I hope there’s a point to all of this,” I said, glancing up at the clock on the opposite wall. I was out much later than usual, and it was making me nervous.