The Secret Hour Read Free

textbook last year.”
    “A
mistake?” Dess looked up at her with a frown.
    “A couple, I guess.”
    Dess looked down at the book and shook her head. Somehow Jessica felt like she’d said something wrong. She wondered if this wasn’t Dess’s way of hassling the new girl. Or some weird way of showing off for her benefit.
    Jessica went back to her own book. Whoever had owned it last year had dropped the class or had just lost interest. The pages were pristine now. Maybe the whole class had only gotten halfway through the book. Jessica hoped so—just leafing through the final pages of dense formulas and graphs was starting to scare her.
    Dess was mumbling again. “A handsome rendering of the gorgeous Mr. Sanchez, page 214.” She was doodling on one corner of a page, marking up the book and then recording the damage.
    Jessica rolled her eyes.
    “You know, Jess,” Dess said, “Bixby water isn’t just tasty. It gives you funny dreams.”
    “What?”
    Dess repeated herself slowly and clearly, as if talking to some textbook-answer-checking moron. “The water in Bixby—it gives you funny dreams. Haven’t you noticed?”
    She looked at Jessica intensely, as if awaiting the answer to the most important question in the world.
    Jessica blinked, trying to think of something witty to say. She was tired of Dess’s games, though, and shook her head. “Not really. With moving and everything, I’ve been too tired to dream.”
    “Really?”
    “Really.”
    Dess shrugged and didn’t say another word to her the whole class.
    Jessica was grateful for the silence. She struggled to follow Mr. Sanchez as he zoomed through the first chapter like it was old news and assigned the first night’s homework from the second. Every year, by law, there was at least one class in her schedule designed to make sure that school didn’t accidentally become fun. Jess was pretty sure that beginning trigonometry was this year’s running nightmare.
    And to make things worse, she could feel Dess’s eyes on her the whole period. Jessica shivered when the last bell rang and headed into the crush of the loud and boisterous hallway with relief.
    Maybe not everybody in Oklahoma was that nice.

3
12:00 A.M.
THE SILENT STORM
    Jessica woke up because the sound of the rain just… stopped.
    It changed all at once. The sound didn’t fade away, trickling down into nothingness like rain was supposed to. One moment the whole world was chattering with the downpour, lulling her to sleep. The next, silence fell hard, as if someone had pushed mute on a TV remote control.
    Jessica’s eyes opened, the sudden quiet echoing around her like a door slam.
    She sat up, looking around the bedroom in confusion. She didn’t know what had woken her—it took a few seconds just to remember where she was. The dark room was a jumble of familiar and unfamiliar things. Her old writing desk was in the wrong corner, and someone had added a skylight to the ceiling. There were too many windows, and they were bigger than they should have been.
    But then the shapes of boxes piled everywhere, clothing and books spilling out of their half-open maws, brought it all back. Jessica Day and her belongings were strangers here, barely settled, like pioneers on a bare plain. This was her new room, her family’s new house. She lived in Bixby, Oklahoma, now.
    “Oh, yeah,” she said sadly.
    Jessica took a deep breath. It smelled like rain. That was right—it had been raining hard all night… but now it was suddenly quiet.
    Moonlight filled the room. Jessica lay awake, transfixed by how strange everything looked. It wasn’t just the unfamiliar house; the Oklahoma night itself felt somehow wrong. The windows and skylight glowed, but the light seemed to come from everywhere, blue and cold. There were no shadows, and the room looked flat, like an old and faded photograph.
    Jessica still wondered what had awakened her. Her heart beat quickly, as if something surprising had happened a moment