When I woke up, the bedside alarm clock said 6:13.
"Uuuuuulf," I groaned. I hated waking up just a couple minutes before the alarm went off. I ended up groggy and cranky for the rest of the morning, and most of the afternoon too.
I sat up in bed, feeling light. That was unusual. Most of the time I had to drag myself heavily out of bed, torn between getting up and pulling the covers back over my head.
When I jumped to the floor, the first thing I noticed was the distance. It wasn't quite right. Did I usually fall this far to the floor? Of course, I was still half-asleep. For all I knew, my exhausted brain was making things up, taking them from the remnants of some dream.
Then, when I went over to the door, I couldn't reach the doorknob. For the first time, I was a bit alarmed. I turned to Maddie and Tiger, who were still asleep in their beds, completely obscured by blankets. At the same instant the alarm went off. And then things started getting really weird.
A groan of "Meeeeeees" came from Maddie's bed, and she sat up.
Only...it wasn't Maddie. It was Mesprit.
I screamed. She screamed back.
"Maddie, you're Mesprit!" I said. Only it came out like "Azelf zelf azelf!" That was weird. Even stranger, Maddie appeared to understand.
"Meeesprit me sprit!" she said. In my head, I translated: "And you're Azelf!"
Figured. At least that explained the distance to the floor and the fact that I couldn't reach the doorknob.
That left Tiger to be Uxie. Sure enough, she sat up in bed, and her yellow eyes were closed; yet somehow she appeared to be looking right at us. And you'll never guess what happened next— she screamed!
"Yuuuuuuuuxieeeeee!"
I didn't need to mentally translate that to know it was pretty much the Uxie equivalent of "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaugh!"
Just as it seemed things couldn't get any worse, there was a knock at the bedroom door.
"Wait a minute," I thought. "No one knocks at our house."
"Are you people killing each other in there or what?" said the person who knocked. "Okay, I'm coming in!"
"Oh, great," I muttered. It was my cousin, Caitlyn (not the same Caitlyn as Tiger), who sometimes rode the bus with us to school because her mom had to go to work real early, like mine. Probably she would take one look at us and have a heart attack.
"Back in bed!" I hissed. "Pull the covers over your heads. Now!"
Maddie seemed about to protest, but did as I said. Tiger was already buried under her comforter.
There would be no climbing up on the bed for me. I was only like a foot tall, and the bed was more than two. My stubby legs just wouldn't cut it. So I hurled myself under the bed just as the door opened.
"You people are lazy," said Caitlyn. "The bus gets here at 7:15 and you're still in bed at 6:25."
"That still gives us fifty minutes, moron," I thought. Caitlyn wasn't that great at math. Then again, she wasn't exactly a genius by most people's standards.
"We just—" I started to say, then clamped my mouth shut. Idiot! If I started talking, all Caitlyn would hear was variations on the word "Azelf." Okay, so maybe she had no idea what an Azelf was, but I wasn't taking any chances.
"Mmmmmm," groaned Maddie. Luckily, she seemed to have picked up on the no-talking idea. She sounded like nothing more than a grumpy kid who'd just woken up.
"Weirdos. Let 'em be late," muttered Caitlyn. She turned and left, closing the door behind her.
"Man, that was close," said Tiger. She floated out of bed and hovered in the air.
Why didn't I think of that? Of course I could fly. I was Azelf, after all. "C'mon, fly," I told myself. But my butt remained planted on the floor. I looked over at Maddie, who wasn't having much success either.
"You're both concentrating too hard," said Tiger. "If you think too much about floating, you won't be able to. You have to just let it happen."
I tried her advice, but nothing happened. " 'Being of Knowledge,' indeed," I thought, but then I felt myself rising and knew she was right. Struggling got you nowhere when it came to being lighter than air.
"Okay, school," I said, once I'd stopped rising. "Something tells me we're not riding the bus today, so how do you propose we get there?"
"Um... fly?" Maddie suggested.
"With this buttload of papers? I don't think so," I said.
"But we're Psychic-type," said Tiger. "Can't we like... you know... lift stuff with our minds and stuff like that?"
That struck me. "Like telekinesis! Good idea," I said. "Okay, so we'll use our psychic powers to carry our homework with us. And... how do we do that?"
Tiger turned thoughtfully to the neat stacks of paper on the floor.
"C'mon, Uxie," I said to her. "Let's see some more of that 'Being of Knowledge' stuff in action."
"Working on it," Tiger replied. "Let's try this." And she opened her eyes.
I was unprepared for the flash of light that came from her. Her eyes glowed brightly enough to illuminate the entire house. I squinted against sharp pinpricks of pain.
"Don't look at her eyes," I said to Maddie. One look at Uxie's eyes was supposed to be enough to wipe out your memory.
Tiger closed her eyes again and seemed to shift light to the stacks of biology homework. The light faded until only the papers glowed. Then they shifted a little and began to float upward.
"Well, that's one problem solved," I said with some relief. "But we can't just show up in class looking like we do. I can just see the headlines—'Mrs. Hawkins's Ninth-Grade Biology Class Drops Dead of Heart Attacks!' "
"What is it with you and heart attacks?" grunted Maddie.
"Hey, you'd think about heart attacks too if two of your favorite teachers in the world had died of them," I snapped. "Now, I have an idea. I'll write a note to school, like Mom does when one of us is sick. I'll 'explain' how all three of us are sick with the flu—that should give us some time to change back before the school district starts getting suspicious. And I'll add that we need our project delivered to Mrs. Hawkins's room by the end of last period."
"That's easier said than done," said Maddie. "How are we supposed to deliver this stuff to the office in the first place?"
"That," I said, "you can leave to me."