“But we should get going,” Rex said. “You’ll be okay here, Jessica. And it’ll all make more sense in the morning.” He pedaled down the walk and into the street. “See you at noon.”
Dess’s bike rattled across the lawn. “See you in 43,200 seconds, Jess,” she called as she passed. “And wear shoes next time!” She laughed and pedaled to catch up with Rex. Jessica looked down at her bare feet and had to smile.
Melissa stayed a moment longer, her eyes narrowing.
“You don’t belong,” she said softly, her voice almost a whisper. “That’s why the darkling wanted to kill you.”
Jessica opened her mouth, then shrugged.
“I didn’t ask to be a midnighter,” she said.
“Maybe you’re not,” Melissa said. “Not a real one, anyway. Something about you is so… 11:59. You don’t belong.”
She turned and rode away without waiting for an answer.
Jessica shuddered. “Great, the biggest weirdo in the weirdo club says I don’t belong.”
She turned and went into the house. Even in the strange light of the dark moon it seemed welcoming as it never had before. Just like home.
But Jessica sighed as she walked down the hall toward her room. Melissa’s words were still with her. The darkling hadn’t seemed like a wild animal to her—more like something that hated her with all its heart. The slither had led her into a trap because it wanted her dead.
“Maybe Melissa’s right.”
This blue time didn’t feel like a place she was meant to be. The alien light pulsed from every corner of the house, haunting and wrong. Her eyes stung from an hour of it, as if she were about to cry.
“Maybe I don’t belong here.”
Jessica paused at Beth’s door. Her white shape was still there, unmoving, sprawled on the bed in its anxious pose.
She went in and sat next to her sister, forcing herself to look, to wait for the end of midnight. She had to know that Beth wasn’t dead. If Rex had been telling the truth, she was only stuck for a moment in time.
Jessica pulled the sheet up around her sister’s neck and reached out to touch the motionless cheek, shuddering as her fingers met its cool surface.
The moment ended.
The boxes and corners faded back into darkness, no longer lit by their own light. Dim streetlights slanted in through the windows, making zigzag shadows on the cluttered floor. The world felt right again.
Beth’s cheek grew warm, and a muscle in it flicked under Jessica’s hand.
Her eyes opened gummily.
“Jessica? What are you doing in here?”
Jessica pulled her hand away, suddenly remembering that an awake Beth could be just as scary as a frozen one.
“Hey, I, um, wanted to say something.”
“What? I’m asleep, Jessica.”
“I just had to say that I’m sorry for avoiding you. I mean, I know it’s tough here,” Jessica said. “But… I’m on your side, okay?”
“Oh, Jessica,” Beth said, twisting away and winding herself further into the tangle of sheets. Then she turned her head to stare accusingly. “Did Mom tell you to do this? That is so lame.”
“No. Of course not. I just wanted—”
“To be Miss Mature. To show how you’ve got time for me even though you’re Miss Popular here. Whatever. Thanks for the pep talk, Jess. Maybe some sleep now?”
Jessica started to reply but stopped herself and then had to stifle a smile instead. Beth was back to normal. She had defrosted from the blue time without any visible damage.
“Sleep tight,” Jessica said, crossing to the door.
“Yeah, no bedbugs and all that.” Beth rolled over grumpily, pulling the sheet over her head.
Jessica closed the door. As she stood all alone in the hall, her sister’s last words rattled around in her head. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she whispered.
She went to her own room and closed the door tightly, suddenly feeling as if the blue time hadn’t really ended. The light was back to normal, and the sound of the constant Oklahoma wind had returned, but everything looked different to her now. The world Jessica had known—the world of night and day, of certainty and reason—had been completely erased.
In another twenty-four hours the blue time would come again. If Rex had been telling the truth, it would come every night.
Jessica Day lay down in her bed and pulled the covers up all the way to her nose. She tried to go to sleep, but with her eyes shut, Jess felt as if something else were in the room. She sat up and peered into every corner, making sure again and again that no unfamiliar shapes lurked there.
It was like being little again, when night was a time of peril, when things lived under the bed, things that wanted to eat her.
There were worse things than bedbugs, and they did bite.
11
9:28 A.M.
MARKS OF MIDNIGHT
Beth was in fine form the next morning at breakfast.
“Mom, Jessica was sleepstalking last night.”
“Sleepwalking?” Mom asked.
“No. Sleepstalking. She was creeping around my bedroom, stalking me while I was asleep.”
Jessica’s parents looked at her, raising their eyebrows.
“I was not stalking you,” Jessica said. She dug her fork into the huevos rancheros—cheese and eggs—that Dad had made, wishing this topic of conversation would just go away. She should have known that Beth wouldn’t keep quiet about her visit last night.
When Jessica looked up, everyone was still staring at her. She shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep, so I went in to see if Beth was awake.”
“And to give a little speech,” Beth said.
Jessica felt her face flush. Her little sister always instinctively found the route to maximum embarrassment. She wanted every uncomfortable fact out in the open. Every awkward moment desperately needed her commentary.
“A speech?” Dad asked. He sat across the table in one of his sleeping T-shirts. The shirt was emblazoned with the logo of some software company he used to work for, the once bright colors faded. His hair was scruffy, and he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days.
Mom was eating standing up, already dressed for work in a two-piece suit, the collar of her blouse blindingly white in the sunlit kitchen. She’d never dressed up this much for work in Chicago, but Jessica guessed she was trying to impress her new bosses. Mom had never worked on Saturday before, either. “Why couldn’t you sleep?”
Jessica realized that there was no way to tell the truth on that one. Before she’d showered this morning, the soles of her feet had been almost black, a lot like the feet of someone who had walked a mile on asphalt barefoot. Her hands still had faint red marks on the palms, and she had a bruise on the hand the slither had bitten.
Of course, there was still the barest chance that it had all been a dream, complete with sleepwalking and sleep-fence-climbing. She would be checking that possibility in a couple of hours.
“Jessica?”
“Oh, sorry. I guess I’m kind of tired today. I’ve been having these weird dreams since we moved. They wake me up.”
“Me too,” Dad said.
“Yeah, Dad,” Beth said, “but you don’t come into my room and make little speeches.”
All three of them looked at Jessica expectantly, Beth smiling cruelly.
Normally Jessica would have made a joke or left the room, anything to escape embarrassment. But she had already fibbed about why she couldn’t sleep. She decided to make amends in the truth department.
“I just thought that I’d tell Beth,” she said haltingly, “that I knew moving was tough on her. And that I was here for her.”
“That is so lame,” Beth said. “Mom, tell Jessica not to be so lame.”