***
The next day, Mom and Dad don’t want me to walk to school, so they actually drive me. It’s ridiculous. They never drive me unless there’s a freaking blizzard, mostly because driving me makes them catastrophically late for work. They not only aren’t going to work, so they are even more helicopter-y, they’re on the hunt for Mitch too. I don’t have the heart to tell them what Mitch told me. Not until I know for sure. Not until I go back to the zoo.
Twin Day painted posters hang on the walls of the halls at school. I don’t have a twin. And normally that would be horrifying. I mean epic. Normally, if that happened to anyone at school you were instantly marked as banished from Peacockdom for the next year, until Twin Day came around again and you had a shot at proving that you had one actual friend. My problem is that my one-and-only friend abandoned me while I was busy being the Peacock Queen.
So I wait until the perfect time to ditch. No one will notice I’m missing. I mean nobody really notices me anyway. It’s not like I’ll be leaving a twin behind. No. One. Will. Notice. I’ll be fine. I keep telling myself this over and over while I’m at my locker.
“What are you doing?” Adrianne says. I close my locker door. Adrianne stares me down. Ally stands right behind her and she slides her hands on her hips. I throw Ally an I’m-so-mad-at-you stare. A stare I never ever threw at her before. The kind I used to save for peacocks. Adrianne and Ally just look so darling in their treacherous matching ponytails and turn-coat matching jeans and blue, baby-doll t-shirts. And what’s that I see? The same highlights in their hair, fake nails and, yep, makeup. I look like a kindergartener next to them. They definitely look like high school material, not me.
The first chance I get after lunch, I sneak down the long hallway to the deserted kindergarten playground. I eye the portable classroom and the playground to make double-sure no one sees me leave the building. And I run to the bushes. I sit in the middle of the bushes staring. At the parking lot. The playground. The portable classroom. The sidewalk that leads to Chatham Lane. And back at the parking lot.
The coast is clear. I run home. Down the sidewalk to Chatham Lane. I run all the way home and when I get there I pull Mitch’s keys out of my pocket. I click the unlock button. And his car beeps. I open the driver’s side door, throw my backpack onto the driver’s seat and sit on it checking to see if I’m high enough to see over the front of the car. And I hear a scurrying behind me.
I adjust the rearview. But only see feet pounding pavement. People running. I turn around to take a peek at who’s busted me. But they already opened one of the car doors. Adrianne slides into the front seat.
“What are you doing here?” I say.
Ally sits in back. Weird.
“Mitch is missing because of me,” Adrianne says.
“No Mitch is missing because of me.” Jeez, she’s irritating. “You know everything doesn’t revolve around you,” I say.
“Listen, just go!” Adrianne bounces her knee up and down and looks over her shoulder like she expects the cops to come arrest us or something.
I was older than them up until yesterday. I was even older than Brian. And I wonder what’s in store for all of us in the next four years. Will Brian and Ally actually date? Ewww. One crisis at a time.
“It’s happening. Because of me it’s happening. All of it.” Adrianne practically spits the words out and has to catch her breath after.
I look at Ally in the rearview. She shrugs her shoulders.
And I’m freaking out looking at the garage door hoping my helicopter parents won’t come out screaming for me to stop. To stop me from saving Mitch. And make me tell them what I know. I’ll die. And, I just can’t go there. Not yet. I can’t say what he told me out loud. I put the key in the ignition and give it a turn, the engine roars. This time I know that I need to set the thingy to R before I press the gas. It’s that simple. I look for grassy knolls. And I press the gas super-slow like a grassy knoll might sneak up on me out of nowhere. And I back out of our driveway and drive down Croydon Lane, at a crawl. Going the way Ally and I have walked to school our whole lives. Roads look so much different in cars. And even though it’s just the afternoon, the sky gets black.
I click the directional to turn left down Windsor Drive. The street me and my ex-best-friend Ally used to walk to go to school together, until my peacock obsession pulled us apart. And I think about how much trouble I’d be in if a cop pulls me over, but then I think about how Mitch isn’t here and how it’s all my fault. Not Adrianne’s, like she said. And I get to the entrance of Oak Woods, the name of the subdivision where I live. The traffic on York Road is super-busy. Sweat beads up on my forehead. A finger of lightening lights up the sky. The thunder makes me jump a little in my seat.
“Which way to the zoo?” I say.
“Why are we going there?” Ally says all white-knuckled.
“Wait for the arrow and go left,” Adrianne says totally calm, like she knows where I’m headed. She knows way more than any of us.
I put my iPod in the dock and select technodancefantasyparty mix. Life is so much better with music and so irritating with a nervous best friend who thinks you’re about to kill her. It’s getting darker. A storm comes up on us fast.
“You should turn on your lights,” Adrianne says. I glare at her, she’s gnawing at her perfect fingernails.
“Ok, Mom,” I look down but I can’t find the button to turn the lights on. I look again. Nothing.
Adrianne reaches down by the radio and clicks on the headlights. “What would you do without me?”
“So, Adrianne, what’s going on?” Ally says.
I say nothing. Because, if I start yelling at Adrianne, I’ll never stop. Because I’ll yell at her on behalf of all peacocks, because it’s everything about them that makes me freaking sick. And it’s everything about myself that makes me sick too. Because I freaking fell for it. All of it. All the peacock stuff. That being popular is the be-all-end-all, that one single thing will make a puma like me happy. The fact that there is something lacking in non-peacocks because we are so pathetically ourselves. But the Adrianne I met on Planet Popular was cool. So there must be that girl down deep inside of Adrianne. Maybe she’s like me. Trying to figure it all out. Maybe Adrianne isn’t really a peacock either. Maybe she isn’t all loopy-hearty.
“I didn’t just want to be popular, I wanted to be epically popular. Famous. Celebrity famous. So, when my time came I took as many friends with me as I could. I even forced Lola to come. I used them,” Adrianne says.
Finally we drive down Forest Drive and come up to the big sign made out of bricks that reads BROOKFIELD ZOO. Rain pours over the windshield. I find the windshield wipers and click them on.
“And while I was busy using them, getting deeper and deeper into trouble on Planet Popular a freaking shadow tricked me. Instead of bringing my sister back, I brought back her shadow,” Adrianne says with tears in her eyes.
I almost miss the turn off to the parking lot.
“That violated rule number two. Shadows will do anything to escape, and you mustn’t give in to them. I gave in to Lola’s shadow.”
There’s no one in the parking lot. No one. I park anyway, by the trees, out of the way. On the edge of the lot so no one will spot Mitch’s car super easy. Damn doppelgangers. Now it all makes sense. Why Lola and Adrianne were fighting in the attic on my birthday. Why Lola is going out with Mitch. Because she isn’t Lola at all. She’s just a shadow.
“So because of my epic lameness, we all––all twelve of us, one by one, will lose our popularity. My dad and mom lost their jobs. Hayden’s voice freaks out and he can’t speak without sounding like a frog. Romulus’s face looks like a full on plague.”
I turn off the ignition, take a deep breath and open my door then slam it shut.
Adrianne opens her door and steps out of the car. “But it’s worse than that,” she says.
Nothing can be worse than my brother dying. I take off running.<
br />
Your brother fell in love with a shadow!”
“Where are you going?” Ally yells.
“Roxie!” Adrianne says. A warning I don’t slow down for.
I hear her steps coming up quick from behind, now she’s running.
I run right up to the gate and climb the tree that will help me jump the fence. The whole time Adrianne talks to me like I’m some kind of lunatic.
“See instead of Lola’s shadow taking over her animal spirit in the in-between, she trapped the real Lola and my sister’s animal spirit on Planet Popular. Lola’s shadow came back with us instead. Lola’s shadow tricked us all.”
I kept climbing.
“She said if you AP’d all by yourself there would be nobody to help you spot the light that would take you back. No one ever APs by themselves. It’s the rule. You know why, Roxie? Because most people have actual friends.”
She is such a jerk. I was dangling from a pretty high branch when she said that and I let go hitting my feet as hard as I wanted to slap her for saying what she did. She isn’t a climber. Peacocks don’t climb. She doesn’t have the powers of the puma, the powers I do. Ally is a puma too, I know that. But she just stays by Adrianne’s side. Because she’s trying to be a peacock too. She’s trying to be what she isn’t.
I keep walking.
“You need me. I know something that will help you,” Adrianne says.
I turn around and decide whether to believe her.
“Mitch has a tattoo,” she says.
I tilt my head and stare at her trying to decide if what she’s saying is a lie or not.
“He got it. Just in case.”
I freeze.
“Look. He fell in love with a shadow. The tattoo is a heart with Lola’s name inside. The real Lola, my sister is what I left behind, in the shadow world of Planet Popular,” Adrianne says.
I swallow hard.
“It’s on his shoulder,” Adrianne points to her upper arm and I shudder. “And you’ll need this,” she holds out a piece of broken glass. “It’s from your birthday present, the bottle,” she says with a sort of smile. And the cool part of Adrianne shines through. Past all her peacock-ishness. I take the piece of glass out of her hand and have a million questions I can’t ask because I have to save my brother. So I only ask her one thing.
“Why me?”
“Because the circle always gets bigger and you were next.”
“Who said I was next?”
“Where do you think you got the idea for the birthday party from? It was your turn. Everybody gets a chance.”
“A chance at what?”
“For a dream to come true. Go on, Roxie. Mitch needs you. Now. The glass should release him from the in-between. That’s what Lola’s shadow told me. But, I’m not sure what will come back. The real Mitch is in love with Lola’s shadow.”
“What do you mean Mitch needs Roxie to save him?” Ally asks Adrianne.
I run.
Mitch knew. He knew what Hayden warned me about. That I might never come back. And that he might not come back either. He fell in love with a shadow. A doppelganger. And maybe he was OK if he didn’t come back. I can’t help but feel my brother is missing, or worse, because of me. At least I know why he cares all of a sudden when he never did before.
My head throbs with little pin pains again with the beat of my heart. I’m tired and confused and angry all at the same time.
I run and slither through the locked turn style at the Big Cat exhibit and make my way to the puma cage. Mitch lays right at the front, inside of the cage. He lets me pet him and turns on his side. I part his fur. And there, on his shoulder is the tattoo.
“Hey you,” a guard calls out.
“It’s that girl,” the other one says, pointing his flashlight at me. They wind their way up the sidewalks that lead up to the puma cage.
I reach into my pocket for the piece of broken glass Adrianne gave me and hold it out in front of me. And it burns with the same white light that bounced me between worlds. My breath catches in my throat.
The guards freeze. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re afraid––like paralyzed by fear––or if they really are frozen but I don’t care. I have to figure out how to turn my brother back into a human. I grab the keys off of the belt of one of the paralyzed guards and give each key a turn until I find the one that opens Mitch’s cage.
When I push the heavy iron door just a crack, Mitch jumps out and he scratches me. But I know he doesn’t mean it. And I feel a sort of burning inside of my stomach. I look down at my hands, my arms. My paws. Black, furry paws. And the burning spreads over my body. It creeps down my spine and as it does I can’t stand up straight anymore. I’m on all fours. Looking into Mitch’s puma eyes. I see me, a real puma, reflected there.
We’re both pumas. On the run. And we race through the trees and hear each others’ thoughts.
How did you know I was in-between? it says.
Which Mitch are you? I ask.
It doesn’t answer.
Are you the real Mitch? I ask again.
It doesn’t answer again.
Are you the shadow?
Thanks for saving me from the in-between, it says.
What is the in-between?
I didn’t have enough energy to turn myself back. I could have been stuck there forever, it says.
Because you’re just a shadow, aren’t you? I say.
I’ll miss my real brother, even though he mostly sucked while I knew him. I don’t want to live with a shadow.
And we, me and the shadow of the brother I once barely knew now hidden inside the skin of a puma, run through the cover of the forest all the way back home, and we get hung up at the traffic on York Road. We time our crossing between some cars and cause a massive pile up on the country road. Slinking up Windsor Drive, we duck in bushes then run all-out for home, in a way that feels desperate but also like play. If we were in the Puma Olympics, I would have won the gold. And we crawl up the tree outside our house and into the attic, through the always-open window. We circle together and sit, staring into each other’s golden eyes in the same spot where all the peacocks and I sat when we first AP’d. A small slice of moonlight finds the attic floor and when it passes over our fur, a warmth returns to my paws. And the warmth spreads and cools a bit like a million butterflies flapping their wings over my body on a hot summer day. And I feel my jaw stop clenching and my arms go limp.
We are human again. I sit across from my brother’s slumped over self. It’s hard to move my arms and my legs. But when I finally get to my feet, I run and hide behind mom’s old clothes. I’m totally naked.
“Why did you do it?” I ask, not sure if I’m talking to a shadow. I grab the first dress I see.
“Do what?” he says shaking his head.
“Mitch, I remember. You said I wouldn’t but I do.” I throw a towel at him over the clothes rack.
He catches the towel and says, “Remember what?” Unslumping himself, moving slow. “What are we doing up here?” He rubs his jaw like he’s just bitten down on something hard and it hurts.
“I saved you.”
He’s the one that doesn’t remember. Anything. Only, I want to tell Mitch that I remember everything. But, how do you tell your brother that he told you he was going to die? I saved him. It’s over. But I get this weird feeling that it’s not.
I learn a lot about peacocks in my thirteenth year, besides the fact that I don’t want to be one. I learn that for over four thousand years peacocks graced Indian temples, because of their snake-eating ability.
And Ally and Adrianne and Hayden and I all survive middle school with all its crazy peer pressure and weird rules and uptight teachers. We enter high school the next year as friends, the real kind. The kind that don’t ignore or reject you so they can offer you up in order to climb the peacock ladder.
As it turns out, none of us are peacocks. Not in high school. We all sort of blend into the high school zoo. Ad
rianne becomes even more of a hamster, she loves making new friends and spends freshman year scurrying from one club and Save The World event to the other. I revise the meaning of hamsters to include busily pursuing things that accomplish a lot. Ally ends up a mustang, so fast she becomes an All-Illinois Cross Country Record Holder. Hayden becomes an owl. Hayden is super-wise but also really, really hot and our Class President. I revise my meaning of owls to include super-hot class presidents.
It doesn’t take four years for Hayden to ask me out. Which makes me really happy. On our first date, Hayden brings some ice cream over to my house and a scary movie called Cat People, which combines my two favorite things––Bowie and Pumas––and I love the movie even though it’s creepy since it hits a little close to home.
And I have these weird dreams about Mitch and I. Mitch doesn’t turn back into a human like I do. And in the dream I feel the fur on my skin and my 410 muscles tense and relax as I run through the forests of Oakdale on my way home. And I get a sinking feeling in my stomach when I imagine pumas living behind bars with all those muscles made for movement.
Here’s the sad part. Lola and Mitch never go out again. Lola trades up right afterward for some Ivy League guy. And life seems so unfair that summer between middle school and high school. By the time high school starts, Mitch has gone away to college and I barely know him. He turns into a stranger in lots of ways. I’m just happy Mitch is alive, even if I’m not totally sure if he’s a shadow.
I learned I’m not a peacock on Planet Popular. I’m not a dodo either. I’ll always be a puma. Even in high school. Fierce, fast and on the lookout. Always on the lookout. Because I have just one more thing I have to do. There’s something else pumas are good at, keeping secrets. And it’s my secret. I was never any good at secrets, but I get good at them my freshman year. We all have more secrets to keep for each other as we grow up.
I’ll tell you one of mine. The message in the bottle, the treasure map with the weird coded words, came back with me the night I saved Mitch. It was next to me on the floor in the attic when I became human again. I took it as a sign. I hid the map with the weird words in the top drawer of my nightstand. And I wait. I wait for when the time is right. And on my fourteenth birthday, when the moon is full, I have my second birthday party ever. Me and thirteen of my best friends sit in a circle in the attic and swear we will never tell another soul what happens next.
Shadow Slayer, Book 2 The Shadow Series
Shadows will do anything to become human.
You see their influence everyday. You say things you don’t mean or do things that aren’t like you, things you can’t explain. You look different. Friends you’ve known forever suddenly never call.
Planet Popular was just a part of The Shadow World, where all our altar egos live. Shadows want nothing more than to become human with the power of free will. There’s a war brewing between the world of shadows and the world of humans. When shadows invade Roxie’s high school, she discovers she is The Shadow Slayer, the one human who can save the world from the shadow onslaught. Roxie not only fights for her life but the lives of her family and friends. Oh yeah, there’s an evil English teacher, an enchanted play, a sword of Sandonian steel, a Homecoming of Horrors, and seven magic words too.
You thought zombies were bad.