The Secret Hour

No moon was visible. Thick clouds still hung over Bixby, but now they looked as hard and unmoving as stone. The light seemed to come from the diamonds, as if an invasion of blue fireflies had been frozen in midair.

Jessica’s eyes widened. It was so beautiful, so still and wondrous, that her anxiety was instantly gone.

She raised a hand to touch one of the blue gems. The little diamond wobbled, then ran onto her finger, cold and wet. It disappeared, leaving nothing but a bit of water.

Then Jessica realized what the diamond had been. A raindrop! The floating diamonds were the rain, somehow hanging motionless in the air. Nothing moved on the street or in the sky. Time was frozen around her.

In a daze, she stepped out into the suspended rain. The drops kissed her face coolly, turning into water as she collided with them. They melted instantly, dotting her sweatshirt as she walked, wetting her hands with water no colder than September rain. She could smell the fresh scent of rain, feel the electricity of recent lightning, the trapped vitality of the storm all around her. Her hairs tingled, laughter bubbling up inside her.

But her feet were cold, she realized, her shoes soaking. Jessica knelt down to look at the walk. Motionless splashes of water dotted the concrete, where raindrops had been frozen just as they’d hit the ground. The whole street shimmered with the shapes of splashes, like a garden of ice flowers.

A raindrop hovered right in front of her nose. Jessica leaned nearer, closing one eye and peering into the little sphere of motionless water. The houses on the street, the arrested sky, the whole world was there inside, upside down and warped into a circle, like looking through a crystal ball. Then she must have gotten too close—the raindrop shivered and jumped into motion, falling onto her cheek and ru

“Oh,” she murmured. Everything was frozen until she touched it, like breaking a spell.

Jessica smiled as she stood, looking around for more wonders.

All the houses on the street seemed to be glowing, their windows filled with blue light. She looked back at her own house. The roof was aglitter with splashes, and a motionless spout of water gushed from the meeting of two gutters at one corner. The windows glowed dully, but there hadn’t been any lights on inside. Maybe it wasn’t just the raindrops. The houses, the still clouds above, everything seemed to be incandescent with blue light.

Where did that cold light come from? she wondered. There was more to this dream than frozen time.

Then Jessica saw that she had left a trail, a tu

She laughed and broke into a run, reaching out to grab handfuls of raindrops from the air, all alone in a world of diamonds.

The next morning Jessica Day woke up smiling.

The dream had been so beautiful, as perfect as the raindrops hovering in the air. Maybe it meant that Bixby wasn’t such a creepy place after all.

The sun shone brightly into her room, accompanied by the sound of water dripping from the trees onto the roof. Even piled with boxes, it felt like her room, finally. Jessica lay in bed, luxuriating in a feeling of relief. After months of getting used to the idea of moving, the weeks of saying good-bye, the days of packing and unpacking, she finally felt as if the whirlwind were winding down.

Jessica’s dreams weren’t usually very profound. When she was nervous about a test, she had test-hell nightmares. When her little sister was driving Jessica crazy, the Beth of her dreams was a twenty-story monster who chased her. But Jessica knew that this dream had a deeper meaning. Time had stopped back in Chicago, her life frozen while she waited to leave all her friends and everything she knew, but now that was over. The world could start again, once she let it.

Maybe she and her family would be happy here after all.

And it was Friday.

The alarm rang. She pulled herself from under the covers and swung herself out of bed.

The moment her feet touched the floor, a chill ran up her spine. She was standing on her sweatshirt, which lay next to her bed in a crumpled pile.

It was soaking wet.

4

8:02 A.M.

MELISSA

As Melissa got closer, the taste of school began to foul her mouth.

This far away it was acidic and cold, like coffee held under the tongue for a solid minute. She could taste first-week anxiety and inescapable boredom mixed together into a dull blur, along with the sour bile of wasted time that seeped out of the walls of the place. But Melissa knew the taste would change as school grew nearer. In another mile she would be able to distinguish the individual flavors of resentments, petty victories, rejections, and angry little skirmishes for dominance. A couple of miles after that and Bixby High would become almost unbearable, a buzz saw in her mind.

But for now she just grimaced and turned her music up.

Rex was standing in front of his father’s house, tall and ski

Served the old guy right.

Melissa pulled her car up to the curb. Between the brown grass of the yard and Rex’s long coat, she half expected cold winter air to rush into the car when he opened the door. But the hideous sun had already burned away the brief chill of last night’s storm.

It was still early fall, still the begi

He jumped in and shut the door, careful not to get too close. When Rex scowled at the music’s volume, Melissa sighed and turned it back down a notch. Human beings had no right to complain about music of any kind. The pandemonium that went on in their heads every waking hour was a hundred times noisier than any thrash-metal band, more chaotic than a bunch of sugar-rushing ten-year-olds with trumpets. If only they could hear themselves.

But Rex wasn’t that bad. He was different, on a separate cha

Melissa could feel his excitement clearly, his hunger to know. She could taste his impatience, sharp and insistent over his usual calm.

She decided to keep him waiting. “Nice storm last night.”

“Yeah. I went looking for lightning for a while.”

“Me too, kind of. Just got soggy, though.”

“Some night we’ll get one, Cowgirl.”

She snorted at the childhood nickname but muttered, “Sure. Some night.”

Back when they were little kids, when it was just the two of them, they had always tried to find a streak of lightning. A bolt that had struck at exactly the right moment and gone to ground close enough to reach before time ran out. Once, years ago, they’d spent the whole hour biking toward a bright, jagged spur on the horizon. But they hadn’t made it all the way, not even close. It’d been a lot farther away than it had looked. Riding back in the falling rain took much longer, of course, and by the time they’d made it home they were soaking.

Melissa had never been quite sure what they were supposed to do with a streak once they found one. Rex never said much about that. She could sense he wasn’t totally sure about it himself. But he’d read something somewhere on one of his trips.

School grew nearer, the early morning collision of struggle and apprehension building from taste to clamor, the bitterness on her tongue expanding to a cacophony that assaulted her entire mind. Melissa knew she’d have to put her headphones on soon just to make it until classes started. She slowed the old Ford. It was always hard to drive this close, especially at the begi