The Quirks, Welcome to Normal Read Free

until one day he just disappeared. Penelope had seen him crawling through the kitchen to grab a Cheerio
off the floor, and in the blink of an eye he was gone. She assumed he’d somehow zipped out of the room, until she accidentally kicked him.
    The strange thing was, Molly couldn’t understand what everyone was fussing about. She could still see Finn. Bright as ever, solid as ever, ugly as ever. But she was the
only
one
who had seen him—or the clothes that were or weren’t on his back—since.
    Which meant that no one else could see Finn plucking flowers from Mrs. DeVille’s perfect pansy bed while the family walked Molly and Penelope to the bus stop later that morning. Molly shot
Finn a look, silently begging him to behave. People would notice if flowers just started popping out of the ground. Especially Mrs. DeVille. (Penelope and Molly had already learned that their
neighbor on the left was cranky and allergic to kids. Also, she smelled like hamster cage shavings, but that was beside the point.) Molly was not moving to Texas because of something as silly and
childish as ruined flowers.
    But she knew this morning was harder for Finn than most other days. If things were different, Finn would have been starting kindergarten. Because of the way he looked (invisible, of course), he
wasn’t allowed to go to public school. Like Penelope, Finn had been working on controlling his Quirk, but he hadn’t yet gotten the hang of it. He was still as see-through as ever. Molly
was the only person on earth who could see his sproingy blond hair and his chocolate-colored eyes and his dirt-crusted little legs.
    “You girls should let your grandpa join you on the bus ride to school,” Bree Quirk suggested. “I need to get ready for work, but he can come along and help out if anything
happens.” Penelope and Molly’s mom worried about the first day of school almost as much as her girls did. She’d seen so many first days go badly for them.
    Molly knew it would make them look even stranger if their grandpa rode the bus with them. That wasn’t normal.
    And yet, Penelope agreed immediately. “Okay, Mom!”
    “No, Mom,” Molly insisted, shooting her sister a look—the kind of look that told her twin to zip it. “Gramps is not riding the bus with us. No offense.” Grandpa
Quill shrugged.

    “You
will
let your grandfather ride with you,” Bree said, staring at each of the girls in turn. Her frizzy brown hair curled around her face, puffing up in some places and
sticking against her scalp in others. That morning’s combination of wild hair, a chicken apron, and staring, watery blue eyes made her mother look a little crazy, Molly thought. She hoped her
mom would run a comb through her curls before her shift, since she looked so pretty when she took a few minutes for herself. Their mom was so scatterbrained that she often forgot about combs and
matching socks and other things that regular moms ought to remember.
    “Mom, you know your magic doesn’t work with me.” Molly sighed, reaching up to tuck one of her mother’s curls behind her ear. “You can stop wasting your energy on
us.”
    Bree Quirk’s magic was useful for a mother. If she put her mind to it, she could make people do what she told them to do, and could get them to believe whatever she wanted them to believe.
Bree could make just about anyone see things her way. Anyone, that is, except Molly.
    Just as Molly was the only person who could see her invisible younger brother, she was also the only one who couldn’t be mind-charmed by her mom. Molly was immune to her whole
family’s magic. Immunity was Molly’s Quirk, and she knew better than anyone just how lame that was.
    “Are you girls sure you’re ready for this?” Bree asked. She sounded sort of funny—like her voice was skipping. She was probably going to cry. That happened sometimes.
Especially when she’d been doing her mind-control stuff. That day, though, Bree’s tears were probably