Bubbles Read online

  But maybe I could fix things, somehow. Maybe that crazy bubble, whatever the heck it was, could help.

  After all, if Walter Washington Williams could live to be 117, I, Sophie Elizabeth Mulvaney, could fix what I had ruined: my mom’s life.

  4

  RISK

  It was almost impossible to concentrate at school the day after I’d seen Pratik’s bubble, which was too bad because we were studying the Boston Tea Party in social studies and it was super interesting. Maybe I could have concentrated better if it were the Boston Pancake Party instead. I guess it would depend on what toppings they used. I was very picky. Patrick Henry once said, “Give me liberty or give me death!” For me, it was more like “Give me banana chocolate pancakes or give me waffles!” Now there’s a line to put in a history book.

  Kaya glanced at me from her desk on my right and raised her eyebrows as if to say What gives? I’d been yawning all class and she knew that was unusual. Of my friends, I was the morning person, Kaya was the night owl, and Rafael was hyper no matter what time of day it was.

  I raised my eyebrows back in an I’ll-tell-you-later kind of way and stuck my nose into the article in front of me, pretending like I was following along with whatever Mr. Alvarado was reading. Really, though, my brain wouldn’t stop racing. I was dying to tell Mom about the bubble, but first I had to make certain it had actually happened.

  I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to do that.

  “Now.” Mr. Alvarado looked at all of us with a very-serious-teacher face. “Think about the historical figures and events we’ve been studying lately. Though they’re all different, they have something major in common. Ordinary people—men, women, children of all ages—took risks. They did things they didn’t know how to do and things they had never done before, and they did it without knowing how any of it would turn out. They were likely very scared, but they took the risks anyway to do what was right, to do what needed to be done in order to make their lives and the lives of those around them better.”

  I exchanged a look with Kaya. Sure, this was something different and interesting, but we both knew it was probably leading to a big, fat pile of homework.

  Viv Carlson was looking at Kaya, too, and at me, with a smile on her face as fake as her big square glasses. Those things practically screamed I am just here for decoration, not actual seeing. I bet if Mom told her everyone was getting imaginary locks for their doors, she’d have a hundred of them by the next day.

  “Your assignment,” said Mr. Alvarado, and everybody groaned, “is to think about a risk you’d like to take. It doesn’t necessarily have to correct an injustice, like the Boston Tea Party—though there are still plenty of injustices to choose from in our world—but it does need to be an act that you can do that scares you a little bit. You can work alone or with partners or in groups, with anyone from this class or the class I teach after lunch, as long as each person on your team agrees that your project would be risky for everyone involved. We’ll talk over more of the details next week, but for now, just start thinking. And this probably goes without saying, but let’s not do anything dangerous or illegal, comprende?”

  After class, Kaya and I met Rafael at our usual spot in the hallway. It was the exact middle point from all of our lockers, and we knew this for a fact because Kaya had actually calculated the number of feet between our lockers and done the math, determining that if we met in this spot and only this spot, we would each have the same amount of time to get to our respective lockers and then have enough time to catch up on everything that had happened since we’d seen each other last.

  “What gives?” She said it out loud this time as Rafael approached from the stairs. He skip-galloped toward us, his favorite of all the weird ways to move he made up when he was bored. We called this one the skallop, not to be confused with the scallop that’s a fish and tastes like slime.

  “I just couldn’t sleep,” I said, and at the same time Kaya turned to Rafael and said, “Sophie is yawning,” like such a crazy thing had never happened before in the whole history of the world. (In fact, I was sure lots of people yawned throughout history. I didn’t have the official names and places, but it was practically a guarantee.)

  “Whoa, it’s eight forty-five, what gives?” he said.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. And maybe it was nothing. Or maybe it was the biggest secret ever of all time. Either way, I decided, it wasn’t anyone’s business besides mine and Mom’s.

  “Ooookay,” Kaya said. “So what should we do for the risk project?” It was obvious that Kaya, Rafael, and I would work together. She twisted a strand of her long black hair around her finger. Just saying the word risk freaked her out, I knew. Kaya was afraid of a lot of things. Except math. She loved math. She’d keep math as a pet if she could.

  “Huh?” Rafael looked confused. He didn’t have social studies until after lunch.

  “Mr. Alvarado wants us to take a risk and do a special project about it,” I said in a big, dramatic voice. “Just like all those historical people. You know, like the ones who drank all the tea.”

  “Right,” said Rafael with a smile. “Yeah, those guys. Totally. Is it a group project? Can the three of us do it together?”

  I grinned. “You know it!”

  Kaya and I walked, and Rafael skalloped, in the same direction as the warning bell rang. I had English next. Rafael and Kaya had science together, and our rooms were across the hall from each other.

  A crowd was gathered around Shavonna’s locker (with Viv Carlson in the very front, of course), and a bunch of people were jumping up and down.

  “I don’t know what’s happening here, but I like it,” said Rafael, and he started jumping, too.

  “My bracelet is stuck on top of the lockers,” Shavonna told us, pointing. “Lora was throwing it to me and totally missed.”

  I glanced up. Our lockers were stacked in columns of three and the tippy top one went up extra high. The people who had those usually ended up sharing with a friend instead of using them because they were so hard to reach.

  Rafael stopped jumping for a second. He glanced up at the bracelet. And then he looked at me.

  “Sophie, do you want to try to get it?” he asked, in the same kind of voice that moms use (or in my case, used to use) when they want you to do something you don’t really want to do.

  “Um,” I said. I could feel the tops of my ears turning red. Sure, when I was an Adventurous Girl I used to do stuff like this all the time and would’ve come up with ten different ways to get that bracelet before Rafael had started jumping. But now, all I really wanted to do was go far, far away.

  “I could give you a boost,” he said.

  “Or we could go to class,” I said.

  “Or I could give you a boost.” He grinned, and I couldn’t stop myself from smiling a little, too.

  He could give me a boost … I didn’t really have to do anything except let him lift me up so I could reach for the thing.

  “Fine.”

  Before I could change my mind, he dropped his stuff on the ground and stretched out his arms dramatically. We turned so we were facing the lockers, and he grabbed my waist like we had done this a million times before. It actually did work pretty well. Since he was tall and skinny—like a breadstick, only human—and I was basically a twelve-year-old trapped in an eight-year-old’s short little body, he lifted me up really easily.

  It had been a while since I’d done anything like this. It wasn’t fun anymore. I wanted to get down.

  Except before I could ask Rafael to lower me, he made a funny grunting noise and lifted me even higher.

  I looked down and realized how far off the ground I was, and my heart started to thump like crazy in my chest. What if Rafael drops me?

  “Come on, Soph,” he said. “You’re almost there! Show that bracelet who’s boss.”

  I looked straight ahead then. It really was right there. All I had to do was reach just a little bit, then a little more—and—“Got it!
”

  The group cheered as Rafael lowered me to the ground and I placed the bracelet in Shavonna’s open hands.

  “Wow, you’re good,” she said. “Thanks!”

  “No problem.”

  I didn’t tell her that even though I was on the ground now, away from heights and bracelets and adventures, my heart kept thumping like crazy, and when I told it to relax, it didn’t listen at all.

  I had been in lots of high places before, places way higher than the tops of the lockers. I’d been on the tops of trees. Rooftops. Roller coasters. That sky-tower place downtown where you sit on the glass floor about a zillion feet above the ground.

  And I had been fine. Everything had been fine.

  But that was before.

  Now, things were different. Except for the getting-out-of-bed thing last night—also a really bad idea—I didn’t do stuff like this anymore. It didn’t feel right to have adventures when adventures only seemed to cause problems.

  I glared at Rafael. Part of me wanted to take back the bracelet and throw it at his face for making me do something that I hadn’t wanted to do. The other part of me sorta wanted to thank him for making me do it and give him a super big hug and not let go for a long, long time.

  Only that was weird. Obviously not doing adventurous things for a while and then doing two in a row had messed with my brain, big-time. Why would I want to hug Rafael for a super long time? That was something you wanted to do when you liked somebody. And I didn’t have a crush on anyone right now, especially not one of my best friends, whose movements reminded me of slimy fish. Even if, up close, he smelled in a strangely interesting way like a garden that hadn’t been watered in a while.

  Kaya elbowed me in the side. “Look at you,” she said. “You’re still an Adventurous Girl.”

  She knew all about the way Mom and I used to be. She was our official photographer that time we climbed to the top of the unbelievably tall outdoor rock wall in Lincoln Park, and that time we took an improv class at Second City, and when we went in a real race car at the Chicagoland Speedway.

  “I’m not an Adventurous Girl,” I said. Just because I’d gotten a bracelet down from a high place—and done the sneaking-out thing last night that no one needed to know about—it didn’t mean anything had changed.

  “Oookay,” said Kaya.

  I gasped. Something was coming out of her head.

  No. It wasn’t. It couldn’t be.

  Yes. It was. It definitely was.

  “What?” Kaya asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  I miss the way she was, said her bubble.

  Too bad, I almost said back, even though Kaya hadn’t actually said anything. I was different now, and everybody was just going to have to be okay with that.

  Then it hit me. The fact that I wanted to talk back to a bubble. The fact that there was another bubble, period. It wasn’t just a one-time thing, and it definitely wasn’t my imagination.

  I breathed in sharply. The bubbles were real.

  5

  RAINBOW INSIDES

  So it was settled: I wasn’t imagining it. I couldn’t be. You couldn’t imagine something that crazy twice in a really short amount of time, unless you were living in 1692 in Salem and you had a really active imagination and everyone thought you were a witch because of it. Just like Pratik’s, Kaya’s bubble had three poofy white dots going from her head to the bigger bubble, and the words inside were small but readable and appeared one by one. And Kaya seemed to have no idea that they were there.

  “Hey, Sophie, that was awesome how you got that bracelet,” Viv Carlson said as she walked by.

  “Uh-huh. Thanks.” I couldn’t concentrate on anything right now, especially not Viv Carlson, and especially not the bubble over her shiny Viv Carlson head that said: My project is going to be amazing. Everything I do is amazing! I have the most perfect life!

  What was happening? I felt my forehead, expecting it to be as hot as the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, but it was a totally normal temperature.

  “You guys don’t happen to see anything up there, do you?” I asked Kaya and Rafael.

  “Uh … like the ceiling?” asked Rafael. “I do see that. It looks very ceiling-y today.”

  Kaya laughed. “The ceiling-est,” she agreed.

  “So you don’t see anything else?”

  Rafael gave me a strange look. “Do you see something else? Also, we really need to hurry. Come on.”

  So I was the only one who saw the bubbles. Part of me wanted to tell my friends, but we were already going to be late for our classes. And I should tell Mom first, anyway. She’d want to know something major like this before anyone else, and it was the least I could do after everything else I’d done.

  The rest of the day went by in a blur. I didn’t see any more bubbles, which was kinda weird, but I looked for them everywhere. At least the Shavonna bracelet thing was a good excuse when people asked me why I was looking up so much. Just looking for more jewelry to save, I said. Obviously.

  When I got home, I was careful to take the elevator and to quietly slip into our place. Most condos in Chicago didn’t have an elevator, but our condo did because it was so tall and was pretty new. Mom liked to remind me that we got really lucky—we never had to take the stairs, where we’d probably run into a certain person.

  Her idea of luck was way different than mine. If we were actually lucky, I wouldn’t have caused Pratik to ditch us in the first place. We’d be able to use the stairs or the elevator whenever we wanted and even have races where one of us took one thing and the other person took the other.

  When I got inside, Mom was lying on the couch, a giant stack of magazines beside her. Her BFF Britta wrote articles for every magazine in the world, it seemed like, and she was always dropping off extra copies so Mom would have them handy for when her brain needed a break from work. She had started working at home as a website designer person. Well, I was about to give her the ultimate brain break. I hoped. I never really knew how Mom’s brain would react anymore.

  “So, Mom,” I said, in the most casual voice I could, “something weird’s been happening since last ni—since yesterday.”

  “Oh?” She set down whatever she was reading.

  My heart thumped a lot all of a sudden, so I looked at all the different parts of Mom’s face instead of her eyes to make the nerves go away. I looked at her long brownish-blondish bangs that went from her head to the tippy tops of her eyebrows. I looked at the shiny silver stud in her nose, her dangly beaded earrings, and the freckles dotted across her cheeks. Then, finally, when I could breathe normally again, I looked at her eyes and started to talk.

  “I’m kinda seeing these bubble things. You know, like the thought bubbles in cartoons? Those. Only above actual people’s heads.”

  Mom raised her eyebrows and sat up a little straighter. “You’re … What?”

  “Bubbles,” I repeated.

  “Bubbles?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like, above whose heads, exactly?”

  That was her first question?

  I couldn’t say Pratik. After I was done being in trouble for getting out of bed, she’d want to know every little detail about what he looked like and seemed like and blah blah blah. It was so weird, how she could hate somebody’s guts but also want to know every little thing about those guts at the same time. We’d be here all night having this talk, and I really didn’t want to have it at all. I just wanted things to be better.

  Mom gave me a get-on-with-it kind of look, so I got on with it.

  “Like Ms. Wolfson,” I blurted. “And Kaya and Viv Carlson.”

  “When did you see Ms. Wolfson?”

  Crud.

  “In the morning, on my way out.”

  Lying made me feel bad, but telling the truth would be way worse.

  “And were there words in the bubble?”

  Crud again.

  “Yeah. They just said some stuff about some stuff.”

 
Great, Sophie. Awesome answer.

  “Well…” Mom scratched her chin and tucked a ringlet of hair behind her ear. “That’s pretty weird, Soph. Are you bored? Stressed? Have you been eating anything different?” She glanced over toward the kitchen, like that would tell her the answer.

  “No,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think so.”

  The only thing different about food was the fact that I wasn’t eating Pratik’s cooking. I sighed. Mom was good at pancakes, but if you wanted anything else, well, you were kinda out of luck.

  “I don’t know, Soph,” Mom said. “I’ve never heard of anything like this. Maybe we should go to the doctor.”

  My whole body tensed up. What if something was really wrong with me?

  Mom put her arm around me and squeezed, and I took a long breath. “Okay,” I said.

  “It’s going to be fine. I’ll call her now to see if she can work you in.” Mom gave me a tiny smile. I could tell she didn’t really know if it would be fine, but it almost didn’t matter. She was smiling. And even with all the bad stuff going on, that little fact made my insides feel like a rainbow.

  6

  FALSE ALARM

  The first doctors on record were the ancient Egyptians. They believed that evil spirits got inside your body and that’s what made you sick. To help you get healthy again, they’d make you eat something that smelled really nasty, hoping the evil spirit would get grossed out and leave.

  Medicine has come a long way since then, but I’d almost rather have eaten something that smelled gross than have to sit there any longer.

  “The good news,” Dr. Peterson said that afternoon, “is that everything looks fine, physically. Now, I could put in an order for a CT scan or a PET scan, but I think the results would probably come back negative, and I don’t want you to have to do that unnecessarily.”