The Secret Hour

“Several moronic answers corrected by nonmoron, page 326,” she muttered. “Who checks these things? I mean, if you’re going to be all new-mathy and put the answers in the back, they might as well be the right ones.”

Jessica swallowed. Dess was checking the answers for chapter eleven, and they hadn’t even started the book yet. “Uh, yeah, I guess. We found a mistake in my algebra textbook last year.”

“A mistake?” Dess looked up at her with a frown.

“A couple, I guess.”

Dess looked down at the book and shook her head. Somehow Jessica felt like she’d said something wrong. She wondered if this wasn’t Dess’s way of hassling the new girl. Or some weird way of showing off for her benefit.

Jessica went back to her own book. Whoever had owned it last year had dropped the class or had just lost interest. The pages were pristine now. Maybe the whole class had only gotten halfway through the book. Jessica hoped so—just leafing through the final pages of dense formulas and graphs was starting to scare her.

Dess was mumbling again. “A handsome rendering of the gorgeous Mr. Sanchez, page 214.” She was doodling on one corner of a page, marking up the book and then recording the damage.

Jessica rolled her eyes.

“You know, Jess,” Dess said, “Bixby water isn’t just tasty. It gives you fu

“What?”

Dess repeated herself slowly and clearly, as if talking to some textbook-answer-checking moron. “The water in Bixby—it gives you fu

She looked at Jessica intensely, as if awaiting the answer to the most important question in the world.

Jessica blinked, trying to think of something witty to say. She was tired of Dess’s games, though, and shook her head. “Not really. With moving and everything, I’ve been too tired to dream.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Dess shrugged and didn’t say another word to her the whole class.

Jessica was grateful for the silence. She struggled to follow Mr. Sanchez as he zoomed through the first chapter like it was old news and assigned the first night’s homework from the second. Every year, by law, there was at least one class in her schedule designed to make sure that school didn’t accidentally become fun. Jess was pretty sure that begi

And to make things worse, she could feel Dess’s eyes on her the whole period. Jessica shivered when the last bell rang and headed into the crush of the loud and boisterous hallway with relief.

Maybe not everybody in Oklahoma was that nice.

3

12:00 A.M.

THE SILENT STORM

Jessica woke up because the sound of the rain just… stopped.

It changed all at once. The sound didn’t fade away, trickling down into nothingness like rain was supposed to. One moment the whole world was chattering with the downpour, lulling her to sleep. The next, silence fell hard, as if someone had pushed mute on a TV remote control.

Jessica’s eyes opened, the sudden quiet echoing around her like a door slam.

She sat up, looking around the bedroom in confusion. She didn’t know what had woken her—it took a few seconds just to remember where she was. The dark room was a jumble of familiar and unfamiliar things. Her old writing desk was in the wrong corner, and someone had added a skylight to the ceiling. There were too many windows, and they were bigger than they should have been.

But then the shapes of boxes piled everywhere, clothing and books spilling out of their half-open maws, brought it all back. Jessica Day and her belongings were strangers here, barely settled, like pioneers on a bare plain. This was her new room, her family’s new house. She lived in Bixby, Oklahoma, now.

“Oh, yeah,” she said sadly.

Jessica took a deep breath. It smelled like rain. That was right—it had been raining hard all night… but now it was suddenly quiet.

Moonlight filled the room. Jessica lay awake, transfixed by how strange everything looked. It wasn’t just the unfamiliar house; the Oklahoma night itself felt somehow wrong. The windows and skylight glowed, but the light seemed to come from everywhere, blue and cold. There were no shadows, and the room looked flat, like an old and faded photograph.

Jessica still wondered what had awakened her. Her heart beat quickly, as if something surprising had happened a moment ago. But she couldn’t remember what.

She shook her head and lay back down, closing her eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. Her old bed seemed uncomfortable, somehow wrong, as if it didn’t like being here in Bixby.

“Great,” Jessica muttered. Just what she needed: a sleepless night to go with her exhausting days of unpacking, fighting with her little sister, Beth, and trying to find her way around the Bixby High maze. At least her first week at school was almost over. It would finally be Friday tomorrow.

She looked at the clock. It said 12:07, but it was set fast, to Jessica time. It was probably just about midnight. Friday at last.

A blue radiance filled the room, almost as bright as when the light was on. When had the moon come out? High, dark clouds had rolled over Bixby all day, obscuring the sun. Even under the roof of clouds the sky was huge here in Oklahoma, the whole state as flat as a piece of paper. That afternoon her dad had said that the lightning flashes on the horizon were striking all the way down in Texas. (Being unemployed in Bixby had started him watching the Weather Cha

The cold, blue moonlight seemed brighter every minute.

Jessica slid out of bed. The rough timbers of the floor felt warm under her feet. She stepped carefully over the clutter, the moonlight picking out every half-unpacked box clearly. The window glowed like a neon sign.

When she looked outside, Jessica’s fingers clenched and she uttered a soft cry.

The air outside sparkled, shimmering like a snow globe full of glitter.

Jessica blinked and rubbed her eyes, but the galaxy of hovering diamonds didn’t go away.

There were thousands of them, each suspended in the air as if by its own little invisible string. They seemed to glow, filling the street and her room with the blue light. Some were just inches from the window, perfect spheres no bigger than the smallest pearl, translucent as beads of glass.

Jessica took a few steps backward and sat down on her bed.

“Weird dream,” she said aloud, and then wished she hadn’t. It didn’t seem right saying that. Wondering if she were dreaming made her feel more… awake somehow.

And this was already too real: no unexplained panic, no watching herself from above, no feeling as if she were in a play and didn’t know her lines—just Jessica Day sitting on her bed and being confused.

And the air outside full of diamonds.

Jessica slipped under her covers and tried to go back to sleep. Unconscious sleep. But behind closed eyelids she felt even more awake. The feel of the sheets, the sound of her breathing, the slowly building body warmth inside the covers were all exactly right. The realness of everything gnawed at her.

And the diamonds were beautiful. She wanted to see them up close.

Jessica got up again.

She pulled on a sweatshirt and rummaged around for shoes, taking a minute to find a matching pair among the moving boxes. She crept out of her room and down the hall. The still unfamiliar house looked unca

The clock in the kitchen read exactly midnight.

Jessica paused at the front door, anxious for a moment. Then she pushed it open.

This had to be a dream: millions of diamonds filled the air, floating over the wet, shiny asphalt. Only a few inches apart, they stretched as far as Jessica could see, down the street and up into the sky. Little blue gems no bigger than tears.