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  Jordan looked at the thermometer on the wall outside Mrs. Lermon’s science room: 86 degrees Fahrenheit, 30 degrees Celsius, 303.15 kelvin. And the relative humidity was 79 percent.

  “Hey, watch it!”

  “You watch it, idiot!”

  Jordan turned around just in time to see Will Fennig slam Reed Addison against the lockers.

  Mr. Sanderling rushed across the hall from his doorway and stepped between them, both hands up like a traffic cop.

  “Both of you, knock it off! Get to your classes, and not one more word to each other, or you’ll both be in the principal’s office, got it?”

  Each boy nodded sullenly, and traffic in the hallway began moving again. Slowly.

  Reed was at least a head taller than Will, and Jordan was surprised the smaller guy had been able to push the big one so forcefully, and that he had wanted to. They were practically best friends.

  It had to be the heat.

  It was business as usual in social studies. Three seconds after the bell rang, Mrs. Sharn said, “Take fifteen minutes and review pages 378 to 395 in your textbooks. Then we’ll have a discussion about the main historical events during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, beginning in AD 14. There will be a quiz on this material tomorrow or Monday. So take careful notes, particularly about the emperor’s relationship with the Roman senate. Please open your books and begin. Now.”

  Jordan heaved a big sigh as she dug around for her book. Mrs. Sharn wasn’t giving in. Not frazzled, frayed, distracted, or distressed—she didn’t even look warm. She hadn’t given up on her lesson plans, hadn’t yielded an inch to either the heat or the end-of-the-year madness.

  Well, I guess it’s good that someone’s trying to hold things together. . . .

  But it did feel sort of pointless. Tiberius and the Roman senate in AD 14? How was knowing about that ever going to help her—unless she wanted to win at Jeopardy! on TV. Those people seemed to know everything. . . .

  As she opened her book, a folded piece of paper sailed over her left shoulder and landed in her lap. It was a note.

  She didn’t react. Jordan didn’t have to look to know who had tossed it. Social studies was a class that wasn’t tracked—no high or low groups. And Marlea was back there, two seats behind on the left.

  Once she felt certain Mrs. Sharn’s attention was elsewhere, Jordan reached down and unfolded the paper, then smoothed it onto the right hand side of her book so she could read it.

  I’m working on an article for the school newspaper next year: “What It’s Like to Be a Total Loser.” Can I set up a time to interview you?

  Jordan felt the tips of her ears begin to glow.

  No! She was not going to let herself feel insulted. Or angry. Or like she wanted to step back there, jam the paper into Marlea’s mouth, and then make her chew it up and swallow it. No. No.

  This was just another niceness test.

  It was time to stay cool. Time to take a deep breath.

  But what can I say or do that would seem nice?

  If she replied with something like, “An interview? Sure, anytime,” that might seem sarcastic—or stupid. Being nice didn’t mean she had to pretend to be stupid.

  Because I’m not. I’m not!

  And in a flash, she had it. She knew what to write.

  Jordan turned the note over.

  Dear Marlea,

  I’m sorry you think I’m a loser, because I know I’m not. But if you actually want to interview me, we could meet tomorrow after lunch. I’m sure it’d be interesting if we talked.

  Sincerely,

  Jordan

  Quickly reading over her reply, Jordan almost tore it up. Who would believe someone who’d just been insulted could be that nice? It sounded fake.

  She took a moment and read it again slowly, and this time she saw something different.

  It was simple, really. Everything she’d written back to Marlea was true. She wasn’t letting herself get mad or calling her an idiot, wasn’t trying to win a point or get an advantage. She was just being honest and not letting hurt feelings get in the way. It was the kind of niceness that took some guts.

  She refolded the note and tucked it into the palm of her left hand. She picked up her pencil, got up, and walked back to use the pencil sharpener near the door. When she was done, she retraced her steps and slipped the note onto the corner of Marlea’s desk as she went past.

  After that, Jordan put the whole thing out of her mind. She actually enjoyed reading about the conspiracies and power struggles in ancient Rome. It felt like a vacation.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WINNING

  Jordan noticed that the fan in Mr. Sanderling’s room was making that overheated-electric-motor smell. But the smoke alarm wasn’t beeping, and the fan was still pushing the air around, still making its little click at the end of each turn.

  Unlike Mrs. Sharn, Mr. Sanderling had pretty much given up on his lesson plans. Tests and quizzes and homework had been tossed out the window, and Jordan was happy about that. But the man was still keeping them busy. He’d served up a menu of little forty-three-minute projects all week. Today, his cheerful intensity was way too much.

  “Okay, everyone, today we’re going to write about something we all know very well, a common circumstance we each experience in our own unique way: this awful heat and humidity. Exciting, huh?”

  The class answered with assorted groans and grumbles.

  “And we are going to pour our thoughts on this topic into a very familiar, very compact little container: the haiku.”

  More groans.

  “I know you all remember this small gem of poetic form: just three lines long, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. So simple, but so full of expressive possibilities. Any questions so far?”

  Paul Ennis raised his hand, and Mr. S. nodded at him.

  “Do we have to do this?”

  “Yes, but I’m going to make it interesting.”

  More groans.

  “This is a timed event—ten minutes. After ten minutes, anyone who wishes to compete for a prize may hand me one haiku. I will read each one aloud and assign it a number. After all entries have been read, I will read each one again, and each of you will vote for every poem, assigning a point value ranging from one to seventeen—one meaning not so great, and seventeen meaning terrific. Then we’ll tally up the points, and the writers of the three top-scoring poems will win the prize.”

  A chorus of voices: “What’s the prize?” “What do we win?” “What do we get?”

  Mr. Sanderling nodded wisely. “Here is a haiku answer:

  “Excellent writers,

  cooler than autumn breezes,

  move to front of class.”

  He pointed to his left.

  “In plain English, the three top-point earners get to pull their desks up here and sit directly in front of the fan for the last fifteen minutes of the class. Cool prize, huh?”

  More groans—a dumb pun.

  Mr. Sanderling began passing out index cards. “Write your draft poems on your own paper, and when I call time, copy one fantastic haiku onto the card and put your initials at the bottom. And remember, you have to write about this weather.”

  Jordan’s first thought was a lazy one.

  So, really, I don’t have to do anything. . . .

  Which was true. Entering the competition was optional, and nothing was going to be graded. . . .

  The room went silent. Some kids simply leaned forward and put their heads down on folded arms, and Jordan was tempted to take a little desk nap herself. She yawned, but a word jumped into her mind, and she wrote it down.

  puddle

  Which is what she felt like—a puddle of sweat.

  She wrote that whole phrase down.

  a puddle of sweat

  It was five syllables, the first line of a haiku . . . or the last line.

  She kept writing, sort of free-associating, using the fingers of h
er left hand to tick off the syllables.

  my mind is melting

  my mind has melted

  I am melted cheese

  the school dissolves around me

  the salty world dissolving

  dissolving in salty drops

  dissolving in saltiness—

  I am dissolving

  Heat melts my slow brain

  Hot day melts my empty mind

  This day melting empty mind

  I am dissolving

  dissolves and slips down

  dissolves in slow drips

  She started assembling different pieces, changing word forms to get the exact syllable count, trying to make seventeen syllables that felt right.

  A sweaty puddle,

  the heat melts the tired mind.

  I am dissolving.

  She liked that last line—and noticed she’d written it several times. But the other stuff felt wrong. And she was liking the words “sweat” and “puddle” less and less. What would work?

  Then she saw it and heard it and felt it all at the same moment, and she scribbled the words down just as Mr. Sanderling called time. The ten minutes had flown by.

  “Okay,” he said. “Copy one haiku onto your index card.”

  Jordan counted as he walked around and collected them. Only fourteen of the twenty-four kids in the class turned in a card.

  Striding quickly to his desk, Mr. Sanderling pulled out his chair and stepped up onto the seat.

  “And now,” he announced with a booming voice, “let the great haiku competition begin!”

  Even the snoozers sat up and listened as Mr. S. began. He was great at reading out loud.

  Jordan thought several of the early contenders didn’t even sound like poems—more like dull little newspaper reports.

  Hot and humid air

  makes it harder to breathe right.

  Hot days are the worst.

  As Mr. S. kept going, Jordan was glad she had dropped the word “sweat.” It appeared in five or six of the haiku, including the one that got the biggest laugh:

  Heat has got me beat.

  My underwear is clammy.

  Sweat is not my friend.

  When hers was read aloud, Jordan really enjoyed the way it sounded. And she didn’t care if anyone else liked it or not.

  Drip by drop by droop,

  steam heat melts my empty mind.

  I am dissolving.

  It turned out the other kids did like it. When the points were tallied, Reed Addison’s clammy underwear haiku won first place, and Jordan’s poem came in third, only a few points behind a really sweet one, the haiku she had liked best of all:

  No war, no famine,

  just a bit too warm today.

  This isn’t so bad.

  Some of the kids clapped as Mr. Sanderling tapped out a fake drum roll on his desk, and she and Reed and Lindley Byrnes pulled their seats up to within a few feet of the fan. Jordan was impressed that Lindley had written such a thoughtful poem.

  The cooler air felt great, but the respectful nod she got from Lindley was even better. She only wished Marlea had been there to see all this. And Kylie too. Of course, they’d hear about it at the next gathering of the Cuteness Club. . . .

  Do I care if they hear about this? Or if anyone hears?

  Jordan knew she did care.

  Yes, it was just a little haiku, chosen from a tiny group of others that had all been slapped together in ten minutes.

  Still, she was one of the winners. And she couldn’t wait to tell Nikki.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IN THEIR BONES

  The WCZF studios were located on County Road Seven, about three miles west of the Salton town center. The building was small, a thirty-foot square built of concrete blocks with a flat tar roof. The crisscrossed steel antenna tower rose up a hundred and ten feet into the air from its fenced area behind the parking lot. Six cables anchored it to the earth.

  Inside there was a small reception area, a central workroom with four desks, and the two soundproof broadcasting cubicles: one for country music programming and the other for the news, weather, and talk-radio programming.

  Joe had spent most of the day studying the wide computer monitor on his desk in the workroom. On weekdays he spent two or three minutes on the air every half hour, from five a.m. to six thirty p.m.

  This wasn’t Joe’s only job. He also taught an online meteorology course through the University of Illinois at Springfield, and he served every fourth weekend on a ground-support team with the 182nd Airlift Wing of the Illinois Air National Guard in Peoria.

  But being the local weather guy in McLean County was the work he loved. He didn’t tell the station manager, but he’d have done the job for free. It was endlessly interesting to him.

  Some days it was also frustrating. Like today.

  Warren hadn’t called him back yet from the National Weather Service office. He really wanted some confirmation about the changes he was tracking in the local conditions. Or maybe he wanted an argument—or at least a discussion.

  It was one thirty-four, so he had plenty of time before his next on-air report. Joe grabbed his water bottle and headed for the door. As he always told his students, a real meteorologist needs to get outside at least once every twelve hours. You had to walk around in the air mass and look up at the sky.

  Passing through the double doors, he stepped onto the asphalt parking lot. It had been sixty-eight degrees inside, and out here it was up near ninety-five. By the time he had crossed the lot and walked fifty yards into the field behind the antenna, his shirt was wet. He felt like he was trying to breathe underwater.

  Standing in the low grass, Joe turned a slow circle. The land here had been scraped flat by advancing and receding glaciers. The most recent ones had helped form a thick layer of some of the richest soil on the planet—soil soaked by recent rains. And today the Illinois prairie was exhaling. Water vapor caused a blurry haze that reached up ten degrees above the horizon in every direction. There was almost no breeze, but the dense air felt unsettled.

  Or is that just my own mind, laying its views onto the conditions?

  Weather forecasting was a tricky business.

  But he knew weather like this. Growing up on his dad’s farm, he had lived and worked through hundreds of days just like this one. And when the air was this warm and this saturated, and the sun was this bright, and the clouds were blooming, it was hard to miss the message. There was more to it than a bunch of numbers and some images on a computer screen.

  Joe made a decision. It didn’t matter if Warren called him back or not. When he went on the air at 2:03 p.m., he was going to tell his local listeners to keep a real sharp eye on the sky.

  But heck, they already knew that. Anybody working the land today could tell there was trouble coming. And they didn’t need some supercomputer to figure it out.

  They could feel it in their bones, same as he did.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ON THE BRAIN

  Mrs. Lermon was glad to see that whatever had gotten Jordan so upset during homeroom this morning, it wasn’t an issue anymore. She was practically glowing now—and not from the heat. The girl seemed happy.

  Such a dear child!

  It was good that Mrs. Lermon couldn’t read minds, or she might have changed that opinion. One reason Jordan looked so happy? She’d just figured out that after today, there would be only two more science classes this year. Tuesday’s all-school assembly would kill one, Field Day would kill another, and the last day of school was morning only.

  Science makes me nuts. . . .

  Jordan thought a second, tapping her fingers on the table. . . . Yup, five syllables.

  Thanks to Mr. Sanderling, she now had a bad case of haiku-itis.

  Also called haiku fever . . . which was seven syllables.

  She enjoyed knowing some of the stuff they studied in science, especially the earth sciences and outer space stuff. But all the lab work? It remi
nded her of chess—lots of rules, tons of little steps, and everything had to be planned out in advance.

  My brain is rotting away. . . .

  Seven syllables . . . aargh!

  But Nikki loved science, every bit of it. And if Nikki hadn’t been her lab partner, Jordan knew she would have probably gotten Ds all year instead of Cs.

  Of course, she’d have to deal with science again and again, all during junior high and high school. . . . Maybe it would seem easier later on. Jordan frowned.

  That seems unlikely. . . .

  Which was five syllables.

  Anyway, two more classes, and science would vanish for three months.

  Mrs. Lermon stepped to the chalkboard and wrote four words:

  barometer

  hygrometer

  thermometer

  anemometer

  “Eyes front, everyone . . . thank you. Today we’re reviewing a unit we studied back in February. What earth science do these four words relate to? Show of hands . . . ”

  Seven or eight hands went up, and Mrs. Lermon called on Leonard Sasken.

  “Weather.”

  Mrs. Lermon nodded. “And the science of weather is called . . . ”

  “Meteorology.”

  “Good. Now,” she went on, “each of these words ends with a two-syllable suffix that means what?”

  She scanned the hands and pointed. “Annie?”

  “To measure.”

  “Right. Think of a meter stick. And who can recall which weather elements these different devices measure?”

  Jordan lost interest. She knew the answers: barometric pressure, humidity, temperature, and wind speed. She’d done okay on that unit. Her garden wasn’t huge, but she cared about it, so she paid attention to the weather. She had to.