Totally Toxic (9 page)

“Hey, Em!” I cried, jumping up from the bed and pulling her into the room. I'd been missing her even more than I realized. “I'm so glad you came by.”

“Me too.” Emily was toting four huge shopping bags. “Caitlin's nice and all, but we have very different shopping
styles, and, well, she wouldn't split a hot fudge sundae with me at the food court. She wanted to go to the juice bar instead, where they only use organic fruits and they don't add any sugar. It was like drinking fresh-squeezed lawn clippings!” She gave me a puppy-dog look. “I kept wishing you were there.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She noticed the flyer in my hands. “What's that?”

My cheeks turned pink. “A note,” I said. “From Josh.”

Emily opened her mouth. She closed it. Her eyes danced. “Shut
up”

I grinned. “It is.”

Emily snatched the note and belly flopped onto my comforter, facing away from me. Her feet dangled over the side of the bed as she devoured the words. “Gosh, could he be any cuter?” she sighed.

I seriously doubted it.

Emily got right down to business. “Okay, well, I think you definitely should buy hot lunch tomorrow. It's a lot more sophisticated than brown-bagging it.” She bit her lower lip thoughtfully. “Unless they're serving meat loaf surprise. Oh, and try to snag the picnic table farthest away from the basketball hoops. That one has the most romantic ambiance.”

“Okay,” I said. I wasn't sure what ambiance was, but I trusted Emily completely.

She bounded off the bed and went straight for my closet. “Now comes the tough part,” she warned. “We need to decide what you're going to wear!”

About twenty-seven outfits later, Emily approved an A-line denim miniskirt with a flouncy embroidered tee she'd just bought herself at the Templeton Heights mall. I tried it on while Emily dove (literally) into the task of finding the right shoes, which left her on her hands and knees crawling around the closet floor.

“I'm thinking flats—the navy ones with the rhinestone buckle… or maybe boots….” There was a pause. “Hey, where'd you get this?” she asked. “It's awesome.”

I was so distracted with adjusting my skirt that it took me a minute to realize that she'd scooted out of the closet; she was sitting back on her haunches, holding up the superbackpack.

My first thought was
Please don't let it self-destruct.

“It was a present from my grandparents.”

“Oh.” Emily put it down beside my tennis shoes. “Love the color. It goes great with your…”

Emily stopped talking. In fact, she stopped moving.

“This can't be good,” I muttered, stepping toward her. “Emily?” I bent down and snapped my fingers in front of her face a few times, but she didn't respond.

She was frozen! But why? How?

My eyes shot to the backpack; I dropped to my knees, grabbed it, and shook it. But all that did was make the key chains jingle.

Frantically, I poked into the pockets and compartments but came up empty. Then I noticed the zipper pull tab. It had looked like ordinary metal before, but now it was blinking like a tiny blue Christmas tree light. I squinted at the tab and saw two words engraved into the metal:
Emergency Pause.

Great. The backpack had somehow zapped Emily, and it had put her on pause, as if she were a CD player. I guess Grandpa
forgot to mention that handy little feature, so I had no idea how to use the zipper to take Emily off pause.

As it turned out, though, I didn't have to do anything. The next second, the zipper stopped blinking blue and began flickering fuchsia. I took that to mean “Time's up,” and dropped the backpack where Emily had left it. Then I scrambled back to my feet just as the zipper pull went dark.

“… eyes,” Emily said. Clearly, she had no clue that she'd been frozen for the last few minutes. “Maybe I'll borrow it sometime,” she said.

It took me a minute to catch up. “Huh?”

“The backpack,” she explained patiently. “It goes with your eyes. And maybe I'll borrow it.”

“Oh, uh…”

Luckily, Emily didn't wait for an answer. She crept back into the closet and resumed her search for the perfect shoes as I let out a long sigh of relief, making a mental note to ask Grandpa about the zipper zapper.

“One thing I don't understand,” she said, her voice muffled inside the closet again. “If you and Josh were together at the meeting, why the note?”

“Why didn't he just
ask
you to have lunch?” she asked, tossing a patent leather chunky-heeled Mary Jane out of the closet. “You were both at the meeting, so he could have just
asked
you, face to face, up close and personal. Right?”

“Actually …” I swallowed hard. “Actually, I kind of had to leave before the meeting started.”

It got very quiet inside the closet.

“Em?”

She didn't poke her head out this time. “I thought you said you had to hang around at the meeting to help.” There was a note of accusation in her voice.

“I was going to, but then …” I fiddled with the embroidery on my shirt.”… something came up.”

“Like what?”

“Like … something.”

Silence.

My forehead was perspiring; I felt like I did when I stood on the high dive at the Sweetbriar pool, deciding whether to jump (not that that would ever be an issue again, after my training session the day before). The point was, I felt like I was on the verge of making a huge decision.

She's my best friend. I should tell her.

But the rules say I have to keep the secret.

But she's hurt. She thinks I'm keeping things from her.

I am keeping things from her.

Man, I hate this!

“I had to go out to get something,” I said. “For the meeting. We were running low on supplies.”

Emily came out of the closet holding my navy blue shoes, which she placed at the foot of my bed.

“You bailed on Josh? You went away and left him here just because you ran out of snacks?”

“Activists love their snacks,” I said lamely.

Emily considered the situation. “Personally, I wouldn't have left this house for anything less than chocolate torte.” She gave me a sympathetic look. “So you didn't get to hang with Josh at
the meeting, but hey, you've got lunch plans, so it's not a bad trade-off.”

“True.”

“Zoe,” my mom called from downstairs,”Emily's father is here to drive her home.”

“Okay,” I called back.

Emily looked me up and down. “One final adjustment,” she said with a grin. She walked back to my closet and pulled out a pair of brown suede boots that came up to my knees. “Try these.” I quickly pulled on the boots, then turned back to the mirror to check the effect. Perfect! “Looks great!” Emily declared. She started out the door, then turned back with a grin. “Oh, and if the school cafeteria runs out of coffee cake tomorrow, do me a favor and choose something else. No abandoning Josh for the sake of dessert!”

I laughed. “Don't worry, I won't. See you tomorrow.”

I looked at myself in the full-length mirror and smiled. Something told me if the Federation ever got a good look at my best friend, they'd recruit her in a hot second.

I wasn't sure she'd be any better at saving the universe than I would, but I knew one thing for certain: if Emily had superpowers, the world would definitely be a more fashionable place!

that evening—after I'd called Grandpa and he'd explained that the Fast Freeze Feature was the backpack's way of keeping intruders from getting at the contents (it was a recent update he'd forgotten to mention earlier)—I settled down to quiz myself on the superhero training manual.

Seeing how great I looked all decked out in the supersuit had really motivated me, and I was slammin' through the questions like some kind of genius.

Well,
duh! All
of the above. The bystander thing and the location of the nearest jail were no-brainers. The weather-conditions consideration was a little trickier, but I was prepared for it. Because I'd studied the manual thoroughly and had reviewed the footnotes in chapter four—and because of a particularly exciting Lightning Girl comic strip I'd read the month before—I knew that some villains had the ability to influence atmospheric conditions. If the prevailing weather was right, they could manipulate wind speed, barometric pressure, and air temperature to their advantage, increasing their chances of escape. Not to mention the fact that several of the nastier villains had the power to spit fire, in which case a superhero would be very fortunate if there was a sudden rainstorm about to blow through.

I tallied up my answers and scored the practice test: 99 percent. Good job, me!

It was weird how Electra Allbright, creator of the totally fab Lightning Girl comic-book series, was so good at coming up with story lines that seemed so uncannily realistic. Since I was sure an Ordinary cartoon illustrator would never have seen the superhero manual, I chalked it up to her having a terrific imagination.