The Secret Hour

“But Melissa and Jonathan never got along,” Dess added. “She’s never even flown with him.”

“Really?”

“She couldn’t stand it. She has this thing about… holding hands.”

Jessica blinked. She’d been jealous of Dess a moment ago, but now she couldn’t help feeling sorry for Melissa. Flying with Jonathan was the best part of midnight.

“So Melissa gets left out of all these trips to the badlands, Jonathan gets tired of being Rex’s personal flying chauffeur, and all hell breaks loose.”

Jessica swallowed. “I guess I can see where there might be a personality conflict or two there.”

“Everything’s been messed up since then, really.” Dess looked down at the floor. “Well, maybe it’s always been messed up.”

“So, Dess, why didn’t you tell me about Jonathan if Rex wasn’t going to?”

“I didn’t want to say anything in front of Rex. The mere thought of Jonathan makes him all snitty.”

“You could have called me.”

Dess shrugged, smiled. “I wanted it to be a surprise, maybe.”

Jessica peered through the dark glasses and into Dess’s eyes and realized she was telling the truth. However weird she might seem, Dess had always been honest with her. She’d tried to make it clear from the begi

Jessica smiled. Even though Saturday night had wound up horribly, she was glad that Dess had told Jonathan about her.

“I guess it was pretty surprising. And yeah, excellent.” Jessica sighed. “Until a load of darklings showed up, courtesy of me. And five minutes after we gave them the slip, the police were there. He probably thinks I’m a walking disaster.”

“Don’t worry too much about Jonathan, Jess. We’ve all been in the back of Clancy St. Claire’s car. It goes with the territory.”

“Oh, that makes me feel much better. My parents are already pretty upset. If I get brought home by the cops again, I’m toast. Blackened, charred, lever-got-stuck-down toast.”

“We’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Dess said.

“So I’m afraid to ask, but do you guys have a plan yet? To get me out to the snake pit?”

“Just can’t wait, can you?” Dess said, smiling. “We’re still working on that. It’s too bad you can’t go to that party at Rustle’s Bottom.”

Jessica frowned. As much as she liked Constanza, it hadn’t sounded like her kind of party. “Why?”

“The snake pit is the name for the deepest part of the Bottom. You’d be five minutes’ walk away. And I have a feeling this party’s going at least until midnight. Are you sure there’s no way to talk your parents into making an exception to this grounding thing?”

“Very sure.”

“Too bad.” Dess leaned back into her chair. “Well, on to more pleasant subjects.”

“Like what, root canal surgery?”

“No, like trigonometry.”

After school Jessica waited for her father in front. Dad was picking her up until further notice, his theory being that she might end up lost and/or arrested on the way home. As the unemployed member of the family, he had nothing better to do than worry and overreact. Of course, he was going to be late from having to stop off at Bixby Junior High halfway across town. Beth wasn’t about to ride the bus if her crime-lord sister was getting chauffeured.

Crowds of students spilled out of the high school, all of them taking one last look. Jessica was thrilled that everyone was getting another chance to gawk at the new bad girl in town. It might be a while before they could stare at her again. Like tomorrow morning.

She glared back at a couple of freshman boys, and they flinched and ran to their waiting bus. One day into her grounding and public humiliation, Jessica Day had had enough.

She hadn’t asked to be a midnighter, hadn’t tried to get into trouble. As far as she could tell, her big mistake had been not stopping to explain to the darklings that Bixby had a curfew.

For the thousandth time that day she replayed in her mind the fantasy where the darklings had caught her and her shredded body was presented to her parents with a final note:

Mom and Dad,

Couldn’t run for life because of curfew.

Dead but ungrounded.

— Jess

She was composing an alternate, much more ironic note when a voice came from behind her.

“Jess?”

She turned around. It was Jonathan.

“You’re… out?” She felt a huge grin growing on her face.

He laughed. “Yeah. Good behavior.”

“I’m sorry. I mean, it’s good to see you.” She took a step forward.

“You too.”

The school sounds around them seemed to vanish for a moment, as if the blue time had somehow arrived in the middle of the day. For once Jessica knew she wasn’t dreaming.

She looked at Jonathan, trying to gauge what he was thinking. He seemed tired but relaxed, relieved to see her. His hair was a little damp, as if he’d just taken a shower. Jessica realized that he must have come out to school just to see her, and her smile broadened.

“What happened?”

“St. Claire, the sheriff here in Bixby, just wanted to make a point,” Jonathan said. “It’s no big deal. He talked my dad into this thing where they could lock me up all weekend until Dad picked me up this morning. But it was all a joke. I wasn’t even arrested, not for real. Just detained in custody.”

Jessica shivered. She had imagined him being “detained” all day. None of the images in her mind had been comforting.

“How was it?”

Jonathan shivered. “Completely skyless. And not enough to eat. Spent the secret hour bouncing off the ceiling. But the rest of the time it was mostly… smelly. I’ve been taking showers all day and listening to my dad apologize.”

“But you’re okay?”

“Sure. How are you?”

Jessica opened her mouth, wanting to tell Jonathan about Rex’s plan, to ask him more about jail, about midnight gravity, about how they’d escaped the darklings. Then she saw her dad’s car crawling through the buses and shouting kids and decided to summarize.

“Well, I’m wanting to go flying again.” She gri

“Great. How’s tonight?”

19

11:49 P.M.

MINDCASTER

“Whizzway’stown?”

Melissa took one hand off the wheel and pointed to her right, toward the great mass of sleeping humanity. The center of town tasted bloated and sweet, pulsing with slow and vapid dream rhythms, laced with a few sharp nightmares like undissolved chunks of salt. One good thing about Bixby was that people went to bed early. On a Wednesday night the mind noise started to fade about ten, and by eleven-thirty the few waking thoughts were merely a

Rex grunted, spreading out the map with both hands and clenching a small flashlight between his teeth. It had been his idea to take the car tonight.

“I know how to get there,” Melissa complained. “Let’s just get onto Division. We’ve only got ten minutes.”

“Donwa

Melissa sighed.

At sixteen in Oklahoma, she was stuck with a hardship license valid only for going to and from school. (And work, in the unlikely event that she ever found a job that wouldn’t drive her insane.) It was also after eleven o’clock, so Rex was being ultracautious and guiding her through the back roads. He didn’t want to meet any police, in case Sheriff St. Claire had decided to launch some sort of curfew crackdown.

Jonathan’s trip to jail had spooked Rex. In a way, Clancy St. Claire scared him more than anything in the midnight hour. When it came to fat, nasty sheriffs, there was no lore to turn to.