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.”
Jessica felt her mom’s fingers lightly on the back of her head. “I think that was really sweet, Jessica.”
Beth made an ugh noise and fled from the kitchen with her breakfast. The sound of cartoons came on in the living room.
“That was very mature of you, Jess,” Dad said.
“I didn’t do it to be mature.”
“I know, Jessica,” Mom said. “But you’re right—Beth needs our support right now. Keep trying.”
Jessica shrugged, still a little embarrassed. “Sure.”
“Anyway, I’ve got to go,” Mom said. “I get to try out the wind tunnel this afternoon.”
“Good luck, Mom.”
“Bye, sweethearts.”
“Bye,” Jessica and her father said together. The moment the front door had closed, they took their breakfasts in front of the TV. Beth scooted aside on the couch for Jessica but didn’t say a word.
At the first break between cartoons, however, Beth picked up her empty plate to take it away, hesitated, and looked down at Jessica’s dish.
“You done?”
Jessica looked up. “Yeah…”
Beth bent down and stacked up Jess’s plate on her own, then carried them both back, rattling in her hands, to the kitchen.
Jessica and her father exchanged surprised glances.
He smiled. “Being lame does work sometimes, I guess.”
An hour later Dad decided to be Mr. Responsible. He stood up and stretched, then muted the TV. “So, you guys are going to finish unpacking today, right?”
“Yeah, sure,” Beth said. “Got all day.”
“We really should get some work done before your mother gets home,” Dad said.
“Actually,” Jessica said, “I have to go to this museum downtown. The Clovis Museum or something. For homework.”
“Homework already?” Dad asked. “Back in my day you didn’t get any homework the first week. You were just supposed to hang out for a while, then they’d slowly reintroduce the concept of work.”