There was a slightly tricky moment when we got to his house. Max let himself in the front door so quickly I didn’t have time to follow him inside.
I stood outside in the yard for a few minutes, staring at the closed door and wondering what to do. Then I had a stroke of luck. The door opened again. Max was in the doorway, rattling a box of cat food. “Spider!” he called.
Spider? Who calls their cat Spider?
Luckily, I was quicker off the mark than the cat. I saw it leap down from a tree in the front yard and head for the door. I squeezed through just before the cat did and slipped into the hallway seconds before Max pulled the door closed. I was in.
Now what?
I followed Max into the kitchen and watched as he put some food down for the cat. My head was full of questions. Where had he put the crystals? What was he going to do with them? How would I get out of here without being noticed, if I needed to?
And then something broke into my thoughts.
Max. Speaking. To me.
“I can hear you, you know,” he said.
I looked around. There was no one else in the room. He had to be talking to me. But how could he hear me? I hadn’t made a sound.
“Not out loud,” he said. “Your thoughts. I can hear what you’re thinking.”
He could hear what I was thinking?
“Uh-huh. Every word. The closer you come, the more I hear.”
I took a step back. And tried to stop thinking.
“Now I can hear you trying not to think,” Max said. “And I know you’re invisible, too, so you might as well uninvisiblize yourself and let’s talk about this face-to-face.”
Uninvisiblize?
“Yeah, I know it’s not a real word. But, you know. Come on. Show yourself. I’ve told you I can read minds. You can turn invisible. So we’re even.”
Max was looking around the room as he talked, probably trying to figure out exactly where I was. I weighed my options. I could stand here and try not to think anything until he wondered if he’d imagined it and gave up — which didn’t feel too likely. I could make a run for it — which didn’t feel particularly clever since I’d come here to see what he was up to.
Or I could do what he said.
I focused on the empty part of my mind, filled it with thoughts and turned myself visible.
“You!” Max exclaimed, with what sounded like a mixture of disgust and annoyance.
“Oh, I’m so sorry I’m not someone more exciting,” I said, folding my arms and doing my best to sneer at him. “You’re not exactly my first choice to get caught up in a freaky situation with, either.”
Max’s mouth did something strange then. Well, it wouldn’t be strange on most people, but it was strange on him. Mainly because I’d never seen him do it before.
He smiled.
At least, I think that’s what it was. One side of his mouth didn’t move; the other half twisted upward in a crooked tilt. “Fair enough, kiddo,” he said. “You got me there.”
Kiddo? Who was he calling kiddo? He was in the same year as me!
“Sorry,” Max said. “It’s just that you are small.”
And he really was going to have to stop reading my mind.
“Sorry — again!” he said. “Look. Let’s start over.”
“OK.”
“I’ve seen you around. What’s your name anyway?”
I nodded. “Jessica Jenkins,” I told him.
“Well, hi, Jessica Jenkins.” He reached out a hand. “I’m Max,” he said. “Max Malone.”
I finally unfolded my arms and held my hand out to give his an awkward shake. “Hi, Max,” I said. Something was whirring in my head, though. His name — where had I heard it before?
And then I remembered. Nancy! She’d said that the doctor she’d been working with was named Dr. Malone. Was it a coincidence?
“Malone,” I repeated.
“You know my dad?” Max asked, reading my mind again.
“Do you have to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Hear my thoughts. Can’t you stop?”
Max frowned. “Sorry. Believe me, it’s worse for me than it is for you. Sometimes it’s fun to read people’s minds, but you don’t always get to hear the most pleasant thoughts about yourself.”
In his case, I could easily imagine that would be true.
“Thanks!”
Whoops. He’d done it again. I really was going to have to try to stop thinking so much. “I don’t actually know your dad,” I said, changing the subject. “But is he a doctor?”
Max pulled at his school tie to loosen it. “Yup,” he said. “Dr. James Malone.”
So I was right. Max was the doctor’s son. And he had a superpower, like me. What did this all mean? How did he get it? Did the doctor know? Had he given Max the serum?
Max reached into a cupboard and pulled out a couple of glasses and some juice. “Want a drink?” he asked, clearly deciding to ignore the questions he’d probably overheard me thinking.
“Yeah, thanks.”
He poured the drinks, and I followed him to the kitchen table.
Max took a long, noisy slurp of his juice. Then he wiped his arm across his mouth and looked at me. “OK,” he said. “How about we start talking? You tell me your story; I’ll tell you mine.”
“OK. You first.”
“Fair enough,” he said. And I couldn’t help a tiny dart of nerves shoot through me as he added, “If you’re ready to hear about a whole lot of weird, I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“First and foremost, I’m not a thief,” Max began.
“I never said you were.”
“You were there the other night, though, weren’t you? In the lab.”
I hesitated for a moment.
Max nodded. “Thought so. I didn’t notice anything until I was leaving.”
“Till I was near enough for you to hear my thoughts,” I mused.
“Yeah, probably. So if you were there, you’d have seen me looking at the crystals and stuff.”
You were doing a lot more than looking at them, buddy, I thought.
“OK, not just looking at them,” Max added, and I kicked myself and tried to remember to stop thinking.
“So if you weren’t stealing them, what were you doing?” I asked.
Max shook his head. “To be honest, I dunno. Checking them out. Trying to figure out what’s going on with me.” He pointed at his head. “With this stuff.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“It only started a few weeks ago. Dad had been really busy.” Max made a kind of sarcastic grunt. “Well, Dad’s always busy. He’s never been much of a hands-on kind of parent. I’ve always been clear about his priorities.”
“Which are?”
Max ticked them off on his fingers. “Patients, hospital, more patients, more hospital, and then, maybe, somewhere down the line, me.”
Despite myself, I felt a twinge of sympathy for him.
“Oh, don’t start that!” Max snapped.
“Start what?”
“Feeling sorry for me. Woe is me and all that. Look, don’t get me wrong. He’s a great dad. He’s always done his best, I know that. It’s just — well, he’s a doctor. It’s like his calling, you know?”
“All right, I get it. No sympathy. Go on.”
“OK. So, a couple of months ago, he started being gone even more. It was the anniversary of . . . well, it was kind of . . .” His voice trailed off. His cheekbones had flushed a tiny bit. Then he shook himself and carried on impatiently. “Anyway, something changed. Dad was still just as busy — in fact, more so — but his mood was different. He was kind of — I dunno — I want to say happier, but that’s not quite right. He’s never exactly happy. But he seemed to have more purpose, like something was driving him, exciting him in a way I couldn’t remember having seen before.”
“And this all started a couple of months ago?” I asked. In other words, around the same time the doctor had app
roached Nancy and suggested they get back to work on the research.
“Yup.”
“Did he say anything to you about it? Did you talk about it?”
Max laughed. It didn’t feel like a real laugh. It was more of a sarcastic one, if you can laugh sarcastically. And maybe a little sad, too. “Dad actually communicate with me about something that mattered?” he said. “No, we didn’t talk about it. We don’t.”
“You don’t what?”
“Talk. That’s just how it is. It’s not a problem.”
“So, what happened next?”
“I had to get in touch with him about a permission slip for a soccer tournament a couple of weeks ago. I assumed he was at work, so I called him at the hospital. I spoke to his secretary but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t at home, either. In fact, that was when I found out that he hadn’t done a double shift for weeks. It shouldn’t have bothered me. It was just another thing that I didn’t have a clue about.”
“But it did bother you.”
“Yeah, it bugged the heck out of me.”
“And I’m guessing you didn’t think of the obvious solution?”
“Huh?”
“The one that would have involved the two of you having a conversation?”
“Ha, ha,” Max said sarcastically. “No, I didn’t do that. The more I thought about it, the more I found myself getting annoyed, and the more I wanted to know what he was up to.”
I suddenly realized Max hadn’t mentioned his mom yet, and I wondered if he meant he suspected his dad was having an affair or something.
“So, one day, I skipped school and followed him,” Max went on in a rush, interrupting my thoughts. “I felt like I was in some kind of cheap spy thriller, hiding behind bushes and lampposts and dashing behind parked cars, wearing a pair of sunglasses to disguise myself from my own dad.”
Yup, been there, done that.
“And he ended up at the lab.”
“Had you been there before?” I asked.
“Nope. As far as I knew, he’d packed up his research years ago. But it turned out I was wrong. Seemed he was there every chance he got.”
“And obviously you couldn’t ask him why, due to the not-wanting-to-have-a-conversation thing.”
Max frowned. “I took the only realistic option I had.”
“You waited till he was at the hospital, then went over to the lab to find out for yourself exactly what was going on.”
Max sat back and stared at me, as though he’d just noticed me for the first time.
“What?” My ears felt hot under his gaze.
“Not bad, kiddo,” he said.
If he called me that again, I’d . . .
“Sorry, sorry!” He held up his hands in defense. “You’re just smaller than me, that’s all,” he said. “And younger.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m the oldest in the grade,” he said. “I’ll be fourteen at the beginning of September.”
Which was when it hit me. Max’s birthday wasn’t the same as mine. He wasn’t one of the two other babies born on the same day as me. We’d already established who they were. So how had he gotten this power?
I didn’t want to disturb his flow. I needed to hear his story. “Carry on,” I said.
“So, yeah, I wanted to go to the lab, but I couldn’t go during the day. I’d already had two detentions that week. One more and there’d be a letter home, and under the circumstances, I didn’t need that. So I set my alarm for ridiculous o’clock in the morning and sneaked out while Dad was asleep.”
“And what happened when you got to the lab? How did you get in?”
“I’d spotted the keypad when I saw him there the first time and I’d planned ahead — made a list of all the significant numbers I could think of.”
“And you got lucky.”
Max looked at me, an unreadable expression on his face. It was like when a black cloud moves in front of the sun. Then it disappeared. “Yeah, something like that,” he said. “I got into the lab, anyway.”
I decided not to ask about the strange look. It didn’t take the world’s most intelligent person to realize that Max was not someone you discussed feelings with. “Then what?” I asked instead.
Max shrugged. “I wandered around, trying to figure out what was going on that had gotten my dad so excited. None of it made much sense to me. There were lots of sheets of paper with crazy formulas on them, crystals and jewelry all over the place, bottles and test tubes, machines that looked as if they’d come straight off the set of a sci-fi movie. But then something caught my eye.”
“One of the crystals?”
“Yeah. Promise you won’t tell?”
Could I promise that? Wasn’t the whole point of this that I was finding out what was going on so I could tell Nancy?
“If it gets out, everyone’ll think I’m a complete loon who needs to be locked up. Plus, my dad will kill me.”
I knew how he felt. And even if he might not be the most pleasant person in the world, we were linked, and I felt a kind of loyalty to him already. “I promise,” I said.
Max reached under his collar and pulled out something on a thin piece of black leather. A shiny, shimmering, silvery-black skull with a wide spooky smile, hollow holes for eyes, and two triangular slots for nostrils.
I leaned forward to examine it. “What on earth is that?”
“Well, it’s called hematite, apparently. I’ve looked it up since. I didn’t have a clue at the time, though. It was sitting in a pile of about fifty crystals — some on brooches and bracelets, others like little stones.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen them.”
“This little guy was sitting there, looking right up at me. Seemed to be smiling at me. I told myself Dad wouldn’t miss one out of so many. Anyway, I planned to give it back at some point.”
“So you stole it.”
“So I borrowed it,” Max said.
“And then what?”
“Then the mind-reading thing started happening. It was weird. At first it only happened when I was feeling tired. The first time was over breakfast. I was sitting there, half awake, eating my cereal. Dad was sitting across the table from me reading a medical journal, and then I heard it.”
“What did you hear?”
“I heard my dad say, ‘What a load of nonsense! I could have written this article ten times better.’ Actually, he didn’t say ‘nonsense,’ but you get the idea.”
“I do.”
“So I looked up from my cereal and asked him what he was talking about. He said he hadn’t said anything. I said he had. He told me I was late for school and he was late for work. Then he folded up his paper and told me he was leaving in five minutes if I wanted a ride, and not to forget to brush my teeth.”
“Gosh! I see what you mean about the level of conversation with your dad.”
“I told you. Anyway, gradually, I realized that if my mind was kind of slow — you know, empty — the mind-reading thing would happen.”
“And then you taught yourself how to deliberately empty a part of your mind but carry on as normal with the rest of it.”
“I guess you’ve been there, huh?”
“Been there, got the T-shirt, the handbag, and the matching shoes and scarf,” I said.
“Once I got my head around what was going on, and traced it back to the skull, I couldn’t help wondering what the rest of it was about — what exactly my dad was up to in that lab.”
“So you went back to the lab, ‘borrowed’ a few more crystals, and tried to put the rest of them to the test?”
“That’s pretty much it, yeah.”
“And I’m guessing what you found was that none of the other crystals had any effect on you?”
“You’ve tried it, too, huh?”
“Not exactly,” I said carefully. I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to tell him at this point, or if I should let him know about the experiments Nancy had shown us in the park. “What I do know is that it seems you
only get one power — the one from the first crystal you use. After that, you can’t swap or change it or add to it with another one.”
“Yeah, that’s the conclusion I’d come to as well. Hey, if I’d known that, I might have gone for one that gave me superhuman strength or something. Like I said, this mind-reading thing doesn’t always tell you what you want to hear.”
I was on the verge of thinking that he probably heard lots of people think unpleasant thoughts about him. But I stopped myself, for two reasons. For one thing, he’d know I’d thought it. And for another, sitting here talking with him like this, he didn’t seem quite as bad as I’d thought. He was kind of OK, really.
Max gave me a scowl.
“You heard all that, didn’t you?” I said as I realized it.
He nodded.
“Sorry.”
Max shrugged. “It’s OK. I’m used to it. So, anyway, that’s my side of things. What’s yours?”
I hesitated for a moment — and then I decided to tell him everything. What did I have to lose? Max was the only other person in the world like me — that I knew of. I had to trust him, and to be honest, it felt like a relief. I mean, I’d talked to Izzy about it all, and Nancy, and now we’d gotten Tom involved, and Heather, too. But at this point, Max was the only person who I knew had actually experienced having a superpower and would totally understand what I was going through.
He listened while I told him all about getting the necklace for my birthday and turning invisible in geography.
“That’ll teach Cooper to be so boring!” he said with a laugh.
I told him about spying on his dad, and about meeting up with Nancy and seeing what the other crystals did.
“So that’s how it works,” he said when I told him about the bowl with the serum in it. “But why does it work on us? I’ve never drunk any of that stuff, as far as I know.”
“I’ve no idea why it works on you,” I said. I explained what Nancy had told me about getting the serum on me when I was a newborn. “Babies’ cells are replaced much faster than adults’ cells,” I told Max. “Nancy thinks the serum must have affected me because of my cells multiplying so fast. But she says it stayed dormant in my body until now because apparently the brain has another growth spurt at our age, or something.”