I woke up the next morning to the sound of my brother Tom knocking on my bedroom door.
"Wake up," he said, "You've got company!"
Marco and Tobias were waiting for me in the living room. Tom went back outside, and we soon heard the thump of a basketball bouncing off the hoop over the garage.
"Hey, guys. What's up?"
"We've got good news and bad news," Marco said. "The good news is that the drive-in theater is running a double feature tonight. 'Demon With the Atomic Brain' and 'Guns of the Apocalypse'."
Those definitely sounded like the kind of dumb movies Marco liked, but even though he was my best friend, I wasn't about to let him talk me into wasting an entire night watching them. I can tolerate those movies on videotape at home, but not trapped inside a movie theater.
"Are you sure you don't have the good news and bad news mixed up?" I asked.
"No, that was definitely the good news. Now for the bad. You remember that haunted house we swore we were never going to talk about again?" Tobias said, with an awkward smile, "We need to talk about it."
Tobias was smiling. I definitely wasn't.
"Absolutely no idea what you're talking about," I said.
"We thought you might say that," Marco said. "We figured you'd need a bit of persuasion."
He put two fingers up to his temple, pointed another hand at a couch pillow, and dramatically waved his hand around. The pillow lifted itself up into the air and began dancing around. I jumped back.
"How are you doing that?"
"I think it might be that green goop that got splashed all over us," Marco said as he let the pillow drop to the floor. "That's the only logical explanation."
"How did you even figure out you can do that?"
"Well, at breakfast, I suddenly realized that I'd managed to pour myself a bowl of cereal without even touching the milk jug."
"So, what, is Tobias telekinetic now, too?"
"No," Tobias said, "That might just be Marco. Something else happened to me."
"Like what?"
Tobias just grinned at me. Something seemed weird about it. Like, his teeth were just a little too sharp and pointy. And his eyes were a lot greener than I remembered - wait, weren't his eyes supposed to be blue? Wasn't he supposed to be taller than this?
"Hey, what's happening?"
"Just watch," Marco said.
As Tobias kept getting smaller, his ears got bigger and crawled up the side of his head. Sleek black fur spread across his body, and a tail sprouted out of his back.
"Did... did he just turn into a cat?"
"A cat? Oh, I screwed up again. I was trying for a penguin this time."
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the voice was coming from the little black cat on the ground in front of me. I kneeled down to look it in the face.
"Tobias?"
"Yes, Jake, I turned into a cat. And earlier this morning, I also turned into a fox, an owl, a hedgehog, and a hawk. Oh, boy, is this cool or what?"
Tobias may have thought it was cool, but I was leaning towards 'or what'. I was too tired out from last night, and I hadn't even had breakfast yet. I was not in the right frame of mind to process my friends suddenly developing supernatural powers.
"You know what this means, right?" Tobias said. "If this happened to me and Marco, it probably happened to you, too. And Rachel and Cassie."
"Because of that green slime?"
"Probably," Marco said, "I mean, what else do you think might have done it?"
The Monster Blood. That had to be it. The only other culprit I could think of was the mystery meat they'd served for lunch at school the day before.
"So what do we do now?" I asked. "Do we try and find a cure, or something? I don't even know for sure yet if that goop actually did something to me."
"We could talk to my dad about it," Tobias suggested, as he started turning back into a human. "Maybe he could run some kind of test to see what it did to you."
I'd only met Tobias's dad once or twice. All I knew was that he was a scientist who worked over at the Valmy Institute.
"Isn't he a botanist?" Marco said, "You know, plants and stuff? 'Monster Blood' doesn't exactly sound like his area of expertise."
"Yeah," Tobias said, mostly human now, except for an oversized pair of cat ears, "But do you actually know any other scientists?"
"My dad's a robotics engineer," Marco said, "So... he'd probably understand this even less than your dad. But that's the other thing. I didn't exactly tell my parents that I was crawling around an abandoned house last night. And if we go to your dad, he's probably going to tell them. And everyone else's parents, too."
"Yeah, I'm not too keen on getting grounded over this," I said, "Right now, Mom just thinks we were goofing around by the bridge over Fish Creek. I don't need her to find out about us getting into a battle with some kind of weird secret society."
Tobias's cat ears finally disappeared.
"All right. Well, whatever we do, we should probably check in with Rachel and Cassie first."
Author's Note: 'Demon With the Atomic Brain' and 'Guns of the Apocalypse' are, in fact, real movies. I actually have posters for both of them, autographed by the director.
