Marty was my partner. She limped to the lab table, picked up our box and shook it. Those skating lessons were still with her.
“Hey,” I said. “That could be a fragile mystery object!”
“We have to figure out what it is. No one said it couldn’t be broken.”
Point to Marty. I glimpsed over my shoulder at the girls attending Coral. One was carrying her observtainer, another her lab book, and yet another her pencil.
Figuring out what was up with Coral was a lot like figuring out the observtainer. There were things I could do that would help me address the likelihood of her supernaturalness. I was going to do this right and get some conclusive data.
I wandered to the table in the front of the room where Mrs. Lester had placed a variety of kid-friendly science apparati and scored some liquid crystal sheeting.
“That’s not going to help us with our observtainer,” said Marty.
“It is cool, though,” I said. Liquid crystal sheeting measures the temperature of whatever it touches. That means that an undead would be the temperature of their surroundings, like a cold-blooded creature, and the crystal sheeting would remain black. It would be a conversation piece at lunch.
School lunch was gross. School lunch is always gross, but today’s entree was extra gross. I hated the school’s chili. I had Dad’s genetic English-ness. At home, exciting spices were black pepper. Chili used exotic red things like cayenne and paprika. I’d face down monsters, but I wasn’t going there. The cooks also thought it was a good idea to pair chili with pigs in a blanket. Now that was a food throwback. I don’t think you should waste a perfectly good crescent roll on a hot dog.
When Dad and Mom had gone to Japan a couple of years ago, they brought me back another quality Hello Kitty product—a Japanese lunch box, two levels of cute from Sanrio. Dad thought if I had a Japanese lunch box, he should know how to make me Japanese lunch. In my lunch today were two rice balls. On the top layer? You guessed it. Designer sausages and some cut strawberries. Separated by a divider wall, of course.
In the cafeteria, I found Marty sitting with Jo and Bev. Jo glanced up, honey blond hair falling away from across her right eye. “Where have you been, Abby? Marty told us you skipped and had detention last week.”
“Yup.” I sat down on the slick plastic bench. “However, I have paid my debt to society, so my checkered past can remain there.” Marty hmphed. Jo gave me a thumbs up. She is a pastor’s kid. If anyone approved of skipping, it would be a pastor’s kid.
“Honor code?” said Bev. Bev took detention very seriously, more so because I was one of her defensive hockey players and as the goalie, she relied on me. “Do you know how far behind we are in practice?”
“First offense against the code,” I said. “I am so sorry about missing practice.”
Bev stopped with fork midair. “You aren’t becoming a delinquent, are you?”
“Not so far as I know. I’ll get back to you if any-thing changes.”
Across the table from Bev and me, Marty and Jo were undergoing delicate lunch negotiations. “You aren’t going to eat your pudding pop?”
“All yours, Martido.” Jo took the blanketed pig in trade. Marty can’t eat pork, so Jo was doing her bit for keeping Marty from starving.
Bev made it through about a spoonful of chili. Jo ate half a bowl. Marty polished hers off. Marty is weird in all kinds of unnatural ways. I flaunted my sausages to the envy of my crew, except for Marty who stuck out her tongue. My eyes scanned the dining room. Lots of girls in blue uniforms in various forms of neatness or slouchiness. The problem with our school uniforms is they’re uniform, so it’s hard to get a line on someone. Then I saw Coral in the center of a group of girls. She was like a lantern in the center of a bunch of wannabe moths. I placed my bento on the table and rummaged in my backpack for the liquid crystal sheet and my lab book.
“What’s that?” Bev asked.
“Liquid crystal sheeting. Touch it.”
Bev rested her finger on it. “Leave it,” I said. I opened my milk. Bev was my baseline. The color she left on the sheet was that lovely bright blue of a living mortal.
“That’s interesting.” Bev bent the flexible plastic.
“It measures body temperature,” I said. I scribbled down her name and the color in my lab book. “Be right back.” I snatched the sheet away from her and scrambled toward Coral. Bev’s blue fingerprint faded, and where I pinched the sheeting, it turned a rainbow of colors.
Coral sipped from a thermos. Soup? Pudding? Blood? Not chili, anyway. Someone else had some taste buds.
“Hey, Coral,” I said.
“Hi,” said Coral. “Sorry about the limbo thing. Again.”
“Rematch next week,” I said. It was getting personal.
“Are you coming to the slumber party?”
“Yup. William wants me to watch movies with him.” I was playing with the liquid crystal sheeting. I too was a lovely shade of living blue. I put my name down and the color. “Do you want to try?”
“What is that?”
“It’s a temperature measure. I’m doing some extra credit for Mrs. Lester.”
“Okay,” she said. She grabbed the sheet.
Three girls sat down while we waited for the results. The sheet didn’t change color. It remained black, which meant her temperature was somewhere in the sixty-five to eighty degrees Fahrenheit zone, or twenty degrees Celsius, just to make things more scientific. Not the temperature of a human being.
“Hmmm,” I said. “It looks like you’re not
