Jackie's Jokes (7 page)

We were feeling so excited and so wanted to be good and behave ourselves properly for Pete that we stood on the platform and waited for the train patiently. Then, when the train arrived, we let the passengers that were on it debark before boarding ourselves in an orderly fashion.

When we walked anywhere, we usually walked in order of age and height, Annie through Zinnia. But on that day, Jackie lagged behind because she was busy pulling up her blue socks. Of all the Eights, Jackie was the one who always had the most trouble with her socks, although we all admit that socks
can
be a tricky thing.

And so it was that Jackie was the last in line to get on, and Jackie was still outside on the platform when a lady came up to her and asked her a question. We couldn't hear what was asked or answered, but of course we saw Jackie's mouth moving and we knew that she was answering, which of course she would, because that is the polite thing to do when someone asks you a question.

But all we could hear was the sound of our own voices shouting out the windows we'd forced open: "Jackie! Please! Hurry up! You'll miss the—"

She couldn't hear us and we couldn't hear her because just then the sliding doors closed, the whistle blew, and the train rolled down the tracks, leaving the station...

And Jackie wasn't with us.

CHAPTER SEVEN

We stood at the windows of the train, watching as Jackie in her blue dress grew smaller and smaller behind us. The conductor gently asked us to sit down.

"I don't see you telling the adults to hurry up and sit down," Rebecca objected.

"Yes," the conductor said kindly, "but I just don't want to see you kids get hurt."

"Yeah, right," Rebecca muttered as the conductor moved off to take someone else's ticket. "You're probably just worried about lawsuits."

"Do we even have a lawyer?" Zinnia wondered. "I think it would be nice to have a lawyer."

"We must have one," Annie said. "We have a CPA."

Then, as the train picked up more and more speed, a blue dot zipped by the windows.

"Did you see that?" Marcia asked.

"I've never seen anything like it," Pete said.

"Could it have been a shooting star?" Zinnia asked. "I've always wanted to see one of those."

"I don't think shooting stars fall in the daytime," Georgia said.

"And I'm fairly certain that whenever they do fall," Rebecca said, "they don't shoot sideways like that."

"Could whatever that was be dangerous?" Petal asked. "Do you think we're under attack? You know, our bus driver did say something the other day about aliens—"

"Now let's have no more of this attack talk," Pete said, getting us all settled down into our seats. "Let's just try to enjoy our nice train ride."

But much as we had looked forward to it, we couldn't relax. We were too worried about Jackie.

"I know you must be worried about Jackie," Pete said, reading our minds. "You Eights—or should I be calling you Sevens right now, since Jackie's not here?—have to relax. Jackie is a smart girl. She'll be fine."

Still, we worried. Yes, Jackie was smart. We knew that. But we also knew that she was back there all alone at the train station. She was miles from 888 Middle Way, with no money. How would she get home? Would she wait for us? It would be hours before we got back. We hoped she knew better than to accept a ride from strangers.

"She'll be fine," Pete said again.

Nonetheless, when we looked at him closely, we could tell that even
he
was a bit worried. He reached into the inside pocket of his Armani and pulled something out.

"Breath mint?" He offered the roll around.

So that's what we did for the next hour, we temporary Sevens: knocked back a few breath mints while the world whizzed by our windows, and tried not to worry about the CPA ahead of us and the Jackie behind us.

***

The train pulled into the station at the Big City and we all debarked, only to find...

Jackie waiting outside the door, leaning against a post in her pretty blue dress as she casually studied her fingernails.

"What took you all so long?" she asked with a bored yawn.

"
Jackie?
"Poor Pete. He looked like he was about to have a heart attack. "But what...? How did you...? That is to say..."

"I think," Annie said in the calm voice of one who knows about such things, "that Jackie just found her power."

"Yes," Jackie said, looking incredibly pleased with herself. "Apparently, my power is that I'm faster than a speeding train."

"That was
you
that zipped past our windows?" Pete asked.

Jackie nodded.

"I'd never have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes," Pete said. Then he shook his head. "In truth, I
didn't
see it. All I saw, all any of us saw, was a tiny blue dot whizzing by our windows." He thought some more about this, studied us. "Does it always happen like this, when one of you gets her power? One minute you're normal, and then—
boom! bang! lickety-split!—
there it is?"

Durinda shrugged. "Pretty much."

"It truly is amazing," he said, awed.

Eight heads bowed humbly.

Zinnia was the first to recover from our humble moment. "Oh, Jackie!" she said. "What an awesome power!"

"No one will ever beat you again on Field Day!" Petal said.

"I knew when she cut her hair that things were going to change," Rebecca said.

"Well." Pete clapped his hands. "We're all together again. Shall we go see your CPA now?"

***

Bright lights! Big City!

We liked to think that the place we lived was pretty special, but it was nothing like this.

Everywhere we looked, there were people walking and taxis speeding. Horns blared, and on every corner there was a little metal hot-dog cart.

"Do you think we have time to go see a musical?" Petal wondered. "I think a musical show might be just what I need to calm my nerves."

'"Fraid not," Annie said, not unkindly.

So instead of seeing dancing girls and listening to show tunes, we made our way to the offices of Alan Watts, CPA.

If his secretary was surprised to see nine of us show up for the appointment, she didn't let on.

Alan Watts, on the other hand, couldn't hide his surprise at the sight of Pete. He stood up from behind his desk and came over to us.

"And who might you be?" he demanded, as if Pete were some stranger who'd followed us in off the streets.

Alan Watts had a body like one long comma, and he had a horseshoe of black hair around an otherwise bald head. His eyes were big and green, the color of money, and they were behind incredibly thick, dark-rimmed glasses. Although he wore a suit, we will say this about Alan Watts: his suit had nothing on Pete's Armani.

"Pete Huit," Pete said, extending his hand for a shake. "Robert's brother. I didn't like the idea of the girls coming into the Big City on their own, so I decided to come along for the ride."

"I hope you had a nice trip in, at any rate," Alan Watts said.

"Oh yes," Pete said. "Why, when we were on that train, you could say that some pretty astonishing things flew by our window."

"Pete Huit," Alan Watts said. "What an interesting name. Did you ever wonder what your parents were thinking when they gave you that name?"

"I can't honestly say I've ever given it any thought." Pete shrugged.

"Are those real glasses?" Rebecca asked Alan Watts.

"Excuse me?" he asked, his eyes growing even more enormous behind the glasses in question.

"It's just that I've never seen glasses so thick before," Rebecca said. "I wondered if they could possibly be real or if this was some sort of practical joke. You know, like April Fools'. And I hear that you play golf. Are you actually able to keep your eye on the ball with those glasses?"

"Please ignore Rebecca," Annie directed Alan Watts. "She's like this with everybody. We do try to keep her under control. But, well, she
is
Rebecca."

Before Rebecca, or any of us, could say something else insulting to our CPA, Annie pulled out the file we'd brought and handed it over to Alan Watts.

He sat down behind his desk while his secretary hauled in seats for the rest of us, since he had only two other chairs. It occurred to us that the secretary worked awfully hard and we hoped she was well paid for it.

"Well, let's see what the damage is," Alan Watts said with a laugh as he opened the file.

We failed to see the humor because we were fairly certain that
damage
never meant anything good.

"I see here that Robert is still modeling and that Lucy is still with SOLSA," Alan Watts said.

SOLSA?

"What is SOLSA?" Annie asked for all of us as we moved to the edge of our seats.

"You don't even know where your own mother works?" The CPA didn't wait for an answer. "Why, SOLSA stands for the Secret of Life Scientific Agency."

"Then Mommy really is working on—" Rebecca started to say, but Durinda, in a rare act of violence, kicked her.

"And is that what they really work on at this agency," Annie asked coyly, "the secret of life?"

"Oh, I doubt that very much." Alan Watts laughed. "I've always assumed it was just a cover—you know, a ridiculous-sounding name so no one will ever take it seriously or look too closely into what they're doing over at the Agency."

"And what exactly
are
they doing over at ... the Agency?" Annie pressed.

"Well, I don't rightly know, do I?" Alan Watts said. "Your mother, Lucy Huit, has always been something of a mystery. Really, I am quite certain that even your father would agree with me on
that.
"

"First the pictures on the computer back home," Rebecca mused aloud, "and now this ... SOLSA thing—does anyone else feel like everything we come across is yet another clue? How are we supposed to ever figure out what really means something and what doesn't?"

Sometimes, you just can't get to Rebecca in time to kick her.

"Did you say something?" Alan Watts asked. Thankfully, he'd already turned his attention back to the tax file.

"I said that I really like those glasses," Rebecca said sweetly.

"My," the CPA said after a few moments, addressing Pete as if he were suddenly the only other person who mattered in the room. Some adults were like that, we knew: always thinking that children were or should be invisible. In our family, the only one who really could be invisible was Georgia. And Greatorex.

"Your brother and his wife did very well for themselves last year," Alan Watts said.

"Please address your comments to the Eights too," Pete directed him. "They are here, in case you haven't noticed."

God, we loved Pete.

"Yes." Alan Watts reddened. "As I was saying, er,
all of you,
Robert and Lucy did very well in 2007. In fact, you could say they're my wealthiest clients."

When we'd put the 2007 taxes information into the folder, we'd briefly looked at the sheets of paper. There were lots of numbers on those sheets, but that's all they'd been to us: lots of numbers. None of it meant anything.

But now what we were hearing
did
mean something. We felt that it must mean that our family was rich, even richer than we'd thought.