Zoe Versus the Sparkles

Blink.

Zoey had read a lot of books from her father’s library. She’d read fantasy and science-fiction and mystery and fiction and strange not-like-any-of-the-others. In some of them, she’d read how the world spun under the main character’s feet, or how everything went sideways or how the ground dropped away.

When she touched a sparkle, none of those things happened. It was just a blink, a single instant in which everything changed, and she was in a new place. The tree she’d been leaning against was gone from behind her. The children who had been running and laughing were nowhere to be seen. Even the school was gone.

Oh no.

She climbed to her feet and looked around more carefully. 

Where am I now? And only fifteen minutes to get to class!

Things in Boulder had been difficult when she touched a sparkle and found herself somewhere new, but at least she’d lived there her whole life. The first few times they’d got her in Bethel, she’d had no idea where she wound up. It had taken weeks of bike riding all around the community to learn the major landmarks and roads and buildings and where the forests were. The bike paths were at least as important because they let her get a better view of things from outside the regularly traveled routes. At least when she was on a bike, she was safer since the sparkles needed a surface to rest upon.

This time, luckily, they’d only sent her a short distance. She recognized some houses and, after turning a few times to get her bearings, set off at a brisk jog along Maple Street.

Stupid sparkles! She ranted to herself for far from the first time. Why they picked her to mess with was anybody’s guess, but nobody else she’d met even seemed to know they existed. Zoey had stopped asking people about them many years ago since everyone she spoke to couldn’t see them and believed they were made up. Even when she pointed right at one, a gigantic one, no one could see it.

What little she’d been able to figure out about the sparkles was from personal experience. Her touching of them was always by accident. Who would want to be zapped to a different place, especially when you didn't know where that place would be? Way back when she was still trying to figure them out rather than just avoiding them, she’d studied some of the bigger sparkles she’d found. But her investigations hadn’t lasted long since people looked at her funny when she spent long periods of time staring at an area of empty sidewalk or grass. Her mother had found her doing just that on more than one occasion and then not believed that there really were sparkles there.

The colors changed in beautiful ways, but Zoey couldn’t find a pattern to the shifting. Maybe there was a pattern, but maybe it was unique to each individual one of them. Or maybe they were trying to communicate with her, and she couldn’t figure it out. Or maybe they were communicating with each other and plotting ways to trap her and transport her. Even though she didn’t really believe it, Zoey liked that idea the best. She liked to think of them as her nemesis, conspiring and creeping around as they planned her downfall.

A very large patch of sparkles covered nearly the entire sidewalk ahead, so she ducked onto the grass to get around it, slowing down a little to make sure none of the little ones were trying to trick her by hiding among the stems. Once past, she took a moment to look back at the big sparkles just in time to see a little wave of blue drift across the silvery surface, followed by an even smaller swell of red.

They came in all shapes and sizes and colors, Zoey knew. They sat on the ground or attached to ceilings or walls. Some clung to tree trunks, the big ones wrapping all the way round. Chairs and tables, cars and busses, benches and sidewalks and roads and counters. Nothing seemed immune to the sparkles. She’d had to throw away a lot of stuff when they became contaminated by little sparkles because you couldn’t get them off. Zoey had spent a lot of time trying to remove them from some of her favorite belonging by washing, scrubbing and scraping, but been unable to save anything. Once the sparkles took hold, the only way to get rid of them was to touch them and let them send her somewhere.

That had been one of the first things Zoey had figured out about them. Once she touched a sparkle, it was gone. Whether they just disappeared or lost their power or moved somewhere else was still unknown, but they were never in the same place when she went back. Maybe they teleported when they touched her the same way she was teleported when she touched them, but there was no way to figure that out. First, she didn’t know how the teleporting worked, so wouldn’t know where to look. Second, she’d never be able to recognize the exact sparkle she’d touched. Yes, they all looked different from each other, but they were also always changing with different colors appearing and disappearing, some moving in a slow and gentle wave while others darted across in a line.

Maybe someday someone important would learn about them and do some real sciency experimenting to find out how they worked and what they wanted. Until that day, Zoey would just do her best to avoid them and the chaos they brought into her life.

It took only five minutes to get back to the school from Maple street, thankfully, meaning she had time to stop at the washroom. There’d been more than a few times when she’d barely managed to get through the classroom door before the bell sounded and she’d had to suffer through the whole lesson before being able to get away.

Today she’d be able to concentrate, which was good because they were continuing with learning about fables and they’re just stories that were a lot easier to figure out than Shakespeare. They’d done the one about the tortoise and the hare first and while she’d heard the story before, it was still interesting to talk about the lessons it taught.

When Mrs. Perez asked what the moral of the fable was, Julia had her hand up immediately and said it was that slow and steady wins the race. Mrs. Perez then asked the class if they agreed and almost everyone nodded, Zoey included, as that’s what she’d been told it meant. Their teacher then asked how someone moving slowly could beat someone moving quickly, and every student had struggled to wrap their brains around the concept.

“Let’s think about it this way,” Mrs. Perez said when nobody had an answer for the question. “The tortoise was upset at constantly being teased for being slow and challenged the fast hare to a race. Knowing that the tortoise really is a lot slower than the hare, does anyone think this was a smart thing to do?”

“Then the hare was overconfident,” she continued as heads shook all around the classroom. “And decided to have a nap to rub it in even more rather than just finishing the race and winning. Again, not a smart thing to do.”

“Looking at the tortoise’s decision to challenge the much faster hare to a race, what lesson can we learn?” Mrs. Perez asked next.

“Not to make bad decisions because you’re angry,” a student had replied

“Exactly.” The teacher nodded. “And what lesson can we learn from the hare taking a nap and losing the race he’d been bragging he was going to win?”

“Not to be overconfident,” Julia said.

“To always try hard,” someone else put in.

“Very good,” Mrs. Perez said with a smile. “Slow and steady is a great way to be careful and thorough, but the only way it’s going to win a race is if the one running fastest beats themselves with bad decisions.”

Zoey had to be slow and steady for exactly that reason. She had to avoid the sparkles when she wanted to be fast and have more fun. Two years ago, back in Boulder, she’d been on the soccer team and one of the fastest on the field. Then one day, near the end of a game they were winning, she’d been at the back of the pack after the girl in goal sent the ball sailing towards the other net and everyone raced the other way. Then she’d stepped on a sparkle.

It took over fifteen minutes to get back to the field and by the time she arrived, the game was over. Her parents were frantic with worry and her coach was grumpy that she’d wandered off during the game. Knowing that it could happen again any time, she’d quit the team the next day, then volleyball, then every other activity she’d been involved in. Going slow and steady took a lot of fun out of her life.

Detention, after watching nearly all the other students flee the school, was nearly empty. Only two other kids were there, and neither bothered to look over when she walked in and sat down.

“I assume you know your assignment,” Mrs. Pearson said from the front of the room. “I expect your papers at the end of the hour.”

Another paper on being late, Zoey thought. What am I going to write about this time? She started with her name and grade at the top of the page, then tapped the tip of her pen against the desk a few times. Mrs. Pearson cleared her throat loudly and Zoey began writing.

"I was late for school today, the fourth time this month. The reason I was late is that I tried to walk to school in a different way and got lost. Staying to the sidewalks gets kind of boring after a while since I always see the same trees, the same houses, the same everything so I decided to go through the woods.

We’ve been talking about the fable of the tortoise and the hare in class. I read that story a long time ago and was told that the moral we’re supposed to learn is that slow and steady wins the race. Mrs. Perez says this isn’t the lesson we should learn though. She says we should learn that the tortoise made a bad decision to challenge the hare to a race, and the hare made a bad decision when he was overconfident and didn’t try his hardest.

Maybe I made a bad decision to go through the trees instead of sticking to the path I knew. Or maybe I made a bad decision not to go faster even though I could have gotten hurt and that could have slowed me down and made me even later.

We’ve been working on distance, rate, time word problems in math. They make a lot of sense to me. That’s one of the reasons I went through the trees today. Mr. Berger taught us to draw the problem out so we can understand it better. Every time we do, there are some points, then there are straight lines connecting them. If we’re trying to figure out how long a train is going to take to get somewhere, we don’t worry about the track going around mountains or up and down hills. We just pretend that everything is a direct path and we know that the shortest way between two places is a straight line. Since I’ve already been late three times this month, I thought taking a straighter route to school might save me some time. It didn’t work."

Zoey read her work over, then sat and counted the words one by one. At finding herself just short of what she needed and started writing again.

"I’m going to work hard to be on time for school from now on. First, I’m going back to the sidewalks, even if they are a little boring, so I don’t get lost in the trees again. Second, I’m going to be confident in myself, not overconfident, and walk at a better speed but not stop for a nap like the hare did."

There, she thought, done with ten minutes to spare.

Zoey spent the remaining time doodling on the paper cover on one of her textbooks, adding yet another penciled sparkle to the collection. Some students put stickers on theirs, others drew pictures or wrote the name of the book or subject, a few left them blank, but Zoey had always decorated hers with sparkles. Usually just in pencil, though a few were coloured in with red, green and blue ink to be more realistic,

“Papers please.” Mrs. Pearson called, and Zoey hastily tucked her books away, handed in her essay and rushed out.

Dinner was promptly at 6:30 and Zoey had plenty of time to get home, assuming the sparkles left her alone. But she wanted to get her homework done before then so she could have the rest of the evening free to read her book or watch TV.

Knowing that her mother would give her the “I’m disappointed” talk when she got home, it would be easy to take her time and arrive just in time for dinner, but that would spoil the rest of the day. Like pulling off a band-aid, best to get it over with quickly.

What bothered her, Zoey thought as she walked along the sidewalk, was having to tell her parents these stories every time the sparkles got her. She could tell that they didn’t really believe her, particularly when she came up with something really far-fetched. But they’d never believed her about the sparkles and thought she was making them up too. They’d been pleased when she left them behind in her explaining, taking it as a sign that Zoey was growing up. She couldn’t tell the truth because nobody believed her, so she had to make up believable stories.

She’d learned an important lesson about the sparkles because of their disbelief. The second or third time she’d tried to explain what happened, and they’d thought she was lying, she’d stepped right on a little sparkle in the living room … and nothing happened. It had taken a couple of other experiments to confirm, but the sparkles didn’t zap her when someone was watching her. But they had to be really watching her. If the person was just in the same place and not paying a lot of attention, the sparkles still got her. Since figuring this out, Zoey had wished that she were super rich so she could hire someone just to watch her all the time, but thought that might get a little creepy when she was trying to go to sleep. As far as she could figure out, that was the only thing that stopped the sparkles. She’d tried heavy boots, triple layers of mittens and double socks, but they’d got her every time.

“Hi mom,” Zoey called out as she kicked her boots off in the front hallway.

“Zoey, come into the kitchen, please.”

Best to get it over with quickly, Zoey thought as she shrugged her jacket off and hung it up.

Both her parents were sitting at the table when she entered the room. Not a good sign.

“We’re disappointed and concerned,” her father began as she sank into her chair. 

“Disappointed because we’ve had this conversation several times already. Concerned because your education is extremely important, and you don’t seem to focus enough attention on it.”

“I know, dad,” Zoey answered. “But I am focusing. I do all my homework every day. I work hard in class. My marks in math are really good.”

“And in reading comprehension,” her mother put in. “Don’t think we’re not pleased with the results, but you must understand that being at school and taking the work seriously are just as important as your grades.”

“I know, mom.” Zoey sighed and let her head sag.

“Not to mention that going off through the forest when nobody knows you’re doing so can be dangerous. What if you’d fallen and broken your leg?”

“I went slow and steady, mom. Just like the tortoise. It won’t win any races, but it’s the best way to be careful.”

“That sounds like something Mrs. Perez would say.” Zoey’s father smiled through the words.

“It was,” Zoey answered as she looked up again. “We were doing fables and talking about the tortoise and the hare and how everyone gets the wrong moral out of it because slow and steady only wins the race if the fast one beats themselves.”

“I’m glad you were careful, Zoey, but you need to stop being late. You leave on time every day, so the only reason you don’t arrive on time is that you do something other than walk to school.”

“We know you’re interested in a lot of things and very inquisitive,” Zoey’s father added. “And we don’t want to punish you to make sure you understand. You’re not a little girl anymore and you have to be responsible.”

“I will, dad.” Zoey was already as responsible as she thought she could be. She did everything she could to avoid the sparkles, but they still got her sometimes. “I’ll start leaving a little earlier, just to be safe.”

“I think that’s an excellent decision.” Her mother nodded. “But you still have to avoid distractions and going off to do other things.”

“Now go get to your homework,” Mr. Solis said as he rose. “And we’ll see to dinner.”

“Okay.” Zoey rose also and, taking up her book bag, headed for her room.

Chapter the Third