A Perfect Storm Read online

  Chapter 1

  “It’s only week three of school and already I’m bored with all the guys at Stellamar Middle School,” my best friend, Lily, announced as she stirred the pool of butterscotch sauce at the bottom of her sundae glass.

  “I know, right?” agreed Avery. She grimaced, her mouth revealing this month’s band color, which was bright green. The bands she used for her braces tended to change color from one orthodontist appointment to the next. “That’s the problem with living in a small town.”

  “It’s true,” sighed Marlee. “All the guys do at lunchtime this year is sit around in big packs talking about sports. They don’t pay attention to any of us.”

  “Except Sara, here,” said Avery, pointing at me with her spoon. “They notice you, because you give off that ‘I’m not interested’ vibe, which of course makes them interested. Can you teach me how to pull that off?”

  “She pulls it off because she’s actually not interested in any of them,” Marlee joked, grinning at me. “Right, Sara? You’re not crushing on anyone at school so far this year, right?”

  “Earth to Sara,” said Miranda, waving a hand back and forth in front of my face.

  I jumped. Tried to focus on my friends. Tried to recover and act like I’d been paying attention, when really, I’d been staring out the window at the man standing on the sidewalk. He was dressed in strange clothing, unlike anything anyone else wore these days. Beneath his battered sailor hat I could see long, jet-black hair, loosely tied back in a ponytail. His pants were knee-length, his soiled blue coat fastened with big brass buttons, his thick-soled black shoes topped with large buckles.

  Oh, and he shimmered slightly around the edges.

  He was a spirit. A spirit I’d seen before, back at my house.

  The question was, what was he doing here, outside Scoops Ice Cream Parlor? Had he come here to look for me?

  Lily nudged me. “You okay?” she asked.

  I smiled weakly. “I’m fine,” I said. “I guess it’s been a long week.” But I wasn’t that fine. I was having that familiar, unpleasant reaction, the one I thought I’d conquered. The tingling feeling that had started in my left foot was moving up my leg. The air around me had grown thick. The lights had grown dimmer, though I know it didn’t seem that way to anyone except me.

  My eyes darted toward the window again. The spirit wasn’t paying any attention to me. I began to relax a little. Maybe he wasn’t here to talk to me. He seemed to be muttering to himself. Rather abruptly, he spun on his heel and marched away, his head down, his hands clasped behind his back. Before he’d gone more than a few paces, he grew transparent. He shimmered for a moment, like a barbecue grill on a hot summer day, and then vanished.

  Perhaps I should explain.

  You know how kids sometimes talk about how they feel different, that no one understands them, that they just don’t feel like they fit in sometimes?

  Well, trust me. I win the prize. Because I really am different.

  I can see spirits. Dead people.

  I’ve seen spirits since I was little. Up until recently, I hadn’t told anyone about it, not even my dad. But now he knew. And he’d moved us to this shore town in New Jersey the year before, so we could live in a big, ramshackle Victorian house with Lady Azura, my great-grandmother. She had powers too, and she’d been helping me with my own powers. Which was handy, because her house was filled with spirits.

  Only two other people know about my powers. One is a boy named Mason Meyer, the guy I have a crush on, though he doesn’t know that. Mason goes to a different school. I had barely seen him since the summer had ended, but we did text a lot.

  The other person who knows my secret is Lily. Lily Randazzo, my best friend.

  Now, back in the ice-cream shop, she saved me, by directing our friends’ attention away from my weird, distracted behavior.

  “You guys!” she hissed. “Turn around! Act natural! I just spotted Mason Meyer outside, and he’s heading in here and he has a friend with him. A totally gorgeous friend.”

  The rest of us settled down. We pretended we were engrossed in a deep conversation with one another as we heard the bell of the shop tinkle.

  Lily and Avery and Miranda had squished in on one side of the booth and were sitting with their backs to the door, Lily nearest the window. Marlee and I were facing the door, so we had a good view as the two guys came in.

  I forgot all about the spirit. My mouth went dry and my palms got wet—but this was what usually happened when I first saw Mason.

  He noticed us right away and jerked his chin up in a quick hello gesture, grinning sideways a little. I saw him say something to his friend, and the two ambled toward our booth. I wasn’t going to pretend I hadn’t seen him. I looked up. Smiled. Felt that familiar sensation I’d been feeling whenever I was in Mason’s presence, like electricity crackling through my body. I could feel myself flushing. No doubt my fair skin was turning an embarrassing shade of pink, right up to the roots of my blond hair.

  I could feel his green eyes gazing at me. I had to look away quickly. He had that effect on me. Like all my bones had turned to rubber. Instead I looked at Lily.

  Lily was blushing. Lily, the world’s most extroverted, outgoing, never-at-a-loss-for-words person on earth, appeared to have lost the power to speak.

  Still avoiding Mason’s gaze, I checked out his friend.

  Oh. No wonder.

  “This is Calvin,” Mason said to us, gesturing to his friend.

  “Hey,” said Calvin with a shy grin. His voice was deep and smooth.

  “Hey,” we all murmured back.

  Calvin was tall—even a little taller than Mason, who was already taller than most boys our age. His dark-brown hair was short on the sides and a little longer on top, and his eyes were a light shade of hazel. I knew that Lily had a weakness for guys with dark hair and light eyes. Especially ones this cute.

  I watched Lily pick up her glass of water and take a big, gasping gulp. I suppressed a smile. She’d already fallen for him.

  I’d met Mason during the summer, through a series of weird coincidences. Lily and her family now owned Buddy, a sweet little dog who used to belong to Mason and his family. I sometimes wondered if Mason and I had been meant to meet each other, and if Buddy had brought us together.

  Mason went to a school two towns over, in Harbor Isle. I had no idea what he and Calvin were doing at Scoops right now, since Harbor Isle had plenty of fun places to hang out. Maybe, just maybe, he’d come because he knew this was a place I liked to hang out with my friends? I dared to hope that was why. I also dared to hope he had half as big a crush on me as I did on him.

  Avery glanced from me to Mason to Lily to Calvin. She giggled again. “So what brings you guys here?” she asked the boys.

  “Just passing by.”

  “No reason.”

  Calvin and Mason had answered at the same time.

  A movement out the window caught my eye. There was that spirit again. What was he doing here? I never saw our “house spirits” anywhere except in our house. This was one of the spirits I rarely saw, and I’d kept my distance from him because he didn’t seem very friendly. I had assumed, based on his hat, that he was an old sea captain or sailor or something. The late afternoon light cast his face in shadow, as the sun was setting behind him, so I couldn’t see his expression very well. But why would he be outside Scoops?

  Once again, he didn’t try to get my attention. He didn’t even look up at me as he passed by the window. I felt relieved all over again that he wasn’t here looking for me, but also really puzzled about what he was doing.

  Yeah, the whole thing was weird. Weirder than the usual weird, I mean.

  Even though I had b
een focusing on the spirit, I became aware that an awkward silence was descending on our group. I tore my gaze away from the window. Lily was still clearly unable to speak coherently. Luckily, Miranda stepped up.

  “So I heard about your award,” she said to Mason.

  “What award?” asked Avery.

  “People were talking about it in dance class the other day,” she explained to us. “Harbor Isle Middle School had a big ‘silly award’ competition in honor of their homecoming. Evidently Mason got the Best-Dressed Jock Award, and it was published in the Harbor Isle school newspaper. It just came out today.”

  “How did you hear about it before the paper came out?” asked Marlee.

  “Jody Jenner’s in our dance class, and she’s on the school paper,” said Miranda.

  “Did you hear about it too, Lil?” Avery asked, giving her a not-very-subtle Say something! look. Lily and Miranda were in the same dance class, so it would make sense if Lily knew about it too.

  Lily blinked at her. “What? Oh. Um. What?”

  I almost laughed but caught myself at the last minute. She really liked Calvin!

  “Is that true, bro?” said Calvin, turning on Mason. “I haven’t seen the paper yet. That’s pretty funny.”

  “Yeah, hilarious,” said Mason through gritted teeth.

  I knew how much Mason hated being talked about. He tugged at the neck of his sweatshirt, like it had suddenly grown too tight, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  “So how’d the soccer game go yesterday?” I blurted out, desperate to change the subject for his sake.

  “Oh, ah, good,” said Mason. “Awesome, actually.” He shot me a grateful look.

  “So you guys won?” I asked.

  “I didn’t know you played a fall sport,” said Marlee.

  “He’s the goalkeeper,” said Calvin. “But I’m the real reason we win games. I play sweeper, so I save his neck ten times a game.”

  Lily finally came back to earth long enough to laugh at Calvin’s joke. He looked pleased to have gotten a reaction from her.

  I thought we’d safely deflected the conversation away from his award. But Miranda refused to let it go. “Yeah, Jody told me all about the article in the school paper,” she said. “Jody won an award too—I think she won Coolest Family. Her dad’s a famous director. Hey, Mason, maybe that means you and Jody were made for each other!”

  I couldn’t get mad at Miranda for her comment, because she didn’t know about my crush on Mason. But I did sneak a peek at Mason to see how he was responding. He definitely seemed to be blushing. He looked at me, and I quickly looked away.

  CRASH!

  We all whirled around to look toward the counter. Lily’s cousin Dawn Marie, who worked there as an ice-cream scooper, was leaning over the counter and staring at the floor, a shocked look on her face.

  A metal container full of spoons had crashed to the floor. Spoons had skittered to all corners of the black-and-white-tiled room.

  “That was weird,” said Dawn Marie to us. “I was nowhere near those. It’s like they just jumped off the counter.”

  We all hopped up to help collect the spoons.

  I was stooping down, trying to collect them with the handles all going the same way, when I felt Mason’s arm brush mine. A jolt rippled through my whole body.

  “Nice attempt at changing the subject,” he murmured out of the side of his mouth as he scooped up a scattered group of spoons.

  “Yeah, well, I tried,” I murmured back. My hair was falling down across my face, so I hoped the others wouldn’t notice our private discussion. Or how much I was now blushing from being so close to Mason.

  But a few feet away, I could see that Lily was giving me a Look. A whole bunch of emotions chased one another across her face—interest in the nature of my relationship with Mason, excitement about the fact that Mason had a crush-worthy friend, curious about how the canister of spoons just happened to have done a swan dive off the counter.

  There’s something else you need to know about Mason. He can move objects with his mind.

  Chapter 2

  Telekinesis, Lady Azura calls it.

  I was the only other kid-aged person who knew about his powers, and I had promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone.

  Over the summer, he and I had been locked in a closet together by Henry, the ghost of a mischievous little boy who lives in my house and loves to cause problems. Mason has asthma and needed his inhaler really badly, so I had started talking to Henry to try and convince him to let us out. When that didn’t work, Mason used his powers to open the door. It was the first time I had ever told someone who wasn’t an adult about my powers, and the first time Mason had ever told anyone about his. It’s not like we would have told each other if we hadn’t been in that emergency situation together, but I was kind of glad it happened. Glad he knew. We were friends now. I just wasn’t sure if he thought of me as more than a friend.

  We’d just finished collecting all the spoons, and Lily was pushing the container across the counter to Dawn Marie, when the bell on the door tinkled again.

  Three girls walked in, girls I’d never seen before.

  The tall one in the middle really stood out. She was really pretty. She was dressed like a model—well, that is to say, those pictures in fashion magazines showing models snapped without makeup, their hair casually caught up in a perfectly sloppy bun. I don’t know much about fashion—that’s Lily’s area of expertise—but even I could tell that her outfit was amazing.

  “Oh! Hey, Jody!” called Lily.

  The tall girl flashed a million-dollar smile, as my dad would describe it. I guessed this was the Jody from dance class that Miranda had mentioned.

  “Sorry we’re late,” said Jody, looking directly at Mason. “Hope you haven’t been too bored waiting for us.”

  Mason glanced quickly at me, then shrugged. “Nah, it’s cool,” he said.

  Before I could decide how jealous I should be feeling, Jody took Mason by the sleeve of his sweatshirt and Calvin by the sleeve of his sweatshirt, and pulled the two of them toward a booth in a far corner, away from ours. Her two friends followed in their wake.

  “Good to see you again, Lila,” she said over her shoulder as the five of them smushed into a too-small-for-five-people booth.

  “It’s Lily,” Lily called back. Then she shrugged. “I should be getting home.”

  “Me too,” we all agreed. We returned to our booth to collect our stuff.

  We were barely out the door when Lily blurted out what she’d obviously been dying to know.

  “So is Jody going out with Calvin?” she asked Miranda.

  I was all ears. I wanted to know what the deal was between Jody and Mason.

  As usual, Miranda seemed to be a fountain of information.

  “Nope, she’s not going out with either of those guys,” she said. “I heard from Ellie Kramer, who also goes to Harbor Isle, that Jody’s dating a high school freshman.”

  We all digested this information. Still. Mason and Calvin had obviously planned to meet Jody and her friends. It wasn’t an accidental encounter.

  “And also I heard that her dad is a famous, like, really famous, television director. And her mom used to be a model. But nowadays she’s a photographer, a famous one, and her photos have been in galleries and stuff.”

  I thought about how cool it would be to have a mother who was a famous photographer. My own mother had been a really good photographer, and I had inherited her love for it too. But she’d died having me, so I never knew her. I wondered, if she’d lived, whether she’d be famous like Jody’s mom. Her pictures were amazing. I bet she would have been.

  When I got home, my dad was still at work, and Lady Azura was in a session with a client. She’d been written about in the newspaper earlier this year, and the news services had picked up the story, so her business had really taken off. I was happy for her. I knew that all the extra money was a good thing, but more importantly, it made her feel
good to have a lot of clients. To be helping so many people. But it meant that our afternoons together were less and less regular. She’d been helping me with my powers, teaching me how to deal with different situations and passing on all the wisdom she had from eighty some odd years of dealing with being able to see spirits. I missed getting to spend a lot of time together.

  My dad came home soon after I did. As a special treat, he brought home takeout from Thai Taste, my favorite Thai restaurant, and we had a delicious dinner together. I had to do a ton of homework, so I didn’t get to bed until after eleven.

  I fell asleep quickly and then had the strangest dream.

  In my dream, I rose from bed, wearing the actual nightshirt I’d worn to bed in real life—an old T-shirt of my dad’s. I walked out of my room, down the hall, and into a room I rarely went into during the daytime. It was the hexagonal-shaped room with pale blue walls. The room that was usually occupied by the spirit of the man in the sailor hat, the one I had seen outside Scoops.

  In my dream, it was dark and shadowy, but still daytime, the way it might be in the late afternoon on a drizzly fall day. An old-fashioned clock under a glass dome sat on the mantelpiece, ticking loudly. At first I thought I was alone in the room. And then I saw that there was someone sitting at the writing desk over near the window. A girl. A girl with long blond hair. She was bent over, writing. Not on a computer, though. She was writing with a pen, in a small book that looked like a journal. She didn’t look up. I moved closer to her. She was writing so intently a strand of hair had fallen across one eye. Maybe she hadn’t seen me.

  I cleared my throat. Did it again.

  She looked up, startled. As her hair fell away from her face, I saw that it was me. Me, except with longer hair. But I only looked at myself for a split second, because then I woke up with a start.

  It was the middle of the night, and the room was freezing. That, too, was weird, because when I’d gone to bed it had been nice and warm in my room. Now, though, it felt icy cold.

  I turned on the light next to my bed. The clock said 3:38. I’d kicked the coverlet off the bed entirely. It lay in a heap on the floor. I pulled it back up and around myself, turned out the light, and went back to sleep.