The Last Day of the Holiday, Chapter Three

It seemed to take her a long time to get ready, but finally Mini-Flash Juniper exited the girls’ changing room and swished briskly onto the squash court where Calvin was waiting. She was holding her racquet, and had put on a simple short-sleeved sports shirt and skirt to play in.

Calvin’s eyes couldn’t but dart to her free hand. This she slipped up and under her bumping pleats in front, and he heard the snap of elastic as she plucked forth two little round squash balls.

“It felt ever so funny with those in there,” remarked Mini-Flash Juniper.

“It can do,” Calvin agreed.

She was making him rather self-conscious though, and the feeling didn’t go away when Juniper clenched the squash balls before him with such a formidable grip that they bulged.

“Look at how squishy they’ve already gone, Calvin!” Mini-Flash Juniper enthused.

This Calvin acknowledged, without speaking and a little fearfully.

“That’s why you have to keep them somewhere warm,” Juniper explained. “Heat-agitation. It’s also why they get springier and bouncier the more you knock them about.”

That sounded to Calvin like what they’d just been doing. Mini-Flash Juniper then sang out lightly that he was only little so he’d better serve first, at which Calvin obediently made ready with his racquet, in a state of some uncertainty as to whether he felt like frowning. She hadn’t seemed quite such a know-it-all earlier, and as much as Calvin liked her desperately, he wasn’t yet sure he did when she was being like this.

Together they turned to the wall against which you had to aim each shot. Mini-Flash Juniper handed Calvin one of the warm little balls and put the other back where it had been.

He drew a deep breath, then threw the ball over his head and gave it his best serve.

Fwumph.

The racquet sailed through space but its strings made no contact.

If there was one thing Calvin didn’t want just then, it was for Mini-Flash Juniper to start giggling. That really would have been just like a girl! He scampered at once for where the ball had fallen and scrambled to pick it up, hotter in the face than he had been when he fell off the wall of death.

Juniper, to her credit, didn’t giggle. In fact she wasn’t really doing anything, except standing there suggestive of mini-cheddars. Calvin on reflection wasn’t at all sure he liked that either.

He attempted a second serve.

Fwumph.

“It’s like it’s passing straight through the racquet!” blew from Calvin in a near-fervour to defray the dreaded titters.

Mini-Flash Juniper actually had no intention of laughing at him, though she had to struggle to keep down a smile.

For the ball really was passing straight through the racquet.

It and Calvin had become as intangible as she’d quietly rendered herself.

A scientific theory was borne out, and now that Mini-Flash Juniper knew there was no danger of anyone being injured, she wanted to show him what else he could do.

“Maybe I should serve,” she proposed at length in a smooth voice. “Seeing as you’ve got until Wednesday, but I haven’t.”

Calvin by now was less undecided about that frown.

Mini-Flash Juniper picked from her panties the second squash ball, and letting it go gave it several experimental thwacks on the floor with her racquet. Calvin winced.

“Bouncy enough,” was her verdict.

More than, thought Calvin. Too much so. He shifted restlessly from foot to foot.

“Now be ready,” Juniper went on. “Because I’ve told you why you have to hit it hard, so just in case it ends up going somewhere you won’t like.”

“Does that happen very often?” cried Calvin, pale.

“No,” replied Mini-Flash Juniper absent-mindedly. “Only when I play boys.”

Her serve was blisteringly fast. Calvin might have expected to see flames trailing from the small rubber sphere, and for it to leave a black scorch-mark when it rebounded from the wall, but the stretch of time this took was so terrifyingly infinitesimal that ruminations were supplanted by sheer panic. For what Mini-Flash Juniper had whacked at him was indeed sizzling straight for where he most feared, and Calvin couldn’t believe he’d thought he liked someone who did things like that, yet he had nowhere near the reflexes to parry with his racquet so all that was left was to brace himself for the worst hurt he’d known in his –

Yellow light and the sweet waxy smell of oilseed sprang up around him like a shield. The suddenness bowled Calvin to his hands and knees on the court, but the ball never touched him.

Where it whipped away to, neither he nor Juniper saw.

They were too busy gazing at each other, breathless.

“Just wondering if Calvin would still be as taken with you if you’d been wrong,” Flashsatsumas commented.

“I was reasonably sure I wasn’t,” Mini-Flash Juniper replied.

They were heading along the main plaza with Miss Ugly, bound for the very top end of the camp where the funfair and chairlift were. Grey summer’s day was fading, and the arcades and shops looked cosy lit up. Clouds overhead were still heavy but moving, as though they’d finally made up their minds about what they were going to do.

“He has some sort of ability to mimic the powers of others,” Juniper went on. “That’s why the creatures are after him, and why I want him under my protection until he leaves.”

Miss Ugly saw the sense of this. “And I’ll protect him from you,” she added. “The way you play battledore, it sounds like someone ought to.”

“I can see neither of you are going to let me forget that,” Mini-Flash Juniper said.

If there was ever a time Miss Ugly lived up to her name, it wasn’t now. “I didn’t want you to go anyway,” she confessed. “I’ve not had many friends. And I’m not even sure what would have happened to me when you did.”

“I’m no expert either, Miss Ugly,” Juniper told her truthfully. “Both of you need to be clear on that, even though I know you’ve said you’ll stand by me. I’ve been lost here before, and according to Joe, it all began when he made what seemed a tiny choice to stay a little longer. That doesn’t sound altogether dissimilar to what we’ve decided to do. What worries me most is there’s a reason people say what they do about Joe’s powers, and if this place can get the better of him, then…”

“Then we’re lucky,” Flashsatsumas finished for her. “You’re not Joe.”

Mini-Flash Juniper wondered if Flashsatsumas knew how much his faith in her meant, or how it made her doubly determined to somehow prove it justified.

There was Calvin, beaming and waving by the chairlift’s ticket-booth. Flashsatsumas and Miss Ugly took their seats first, and once skirts were sorted out and safety-belts securely fastened they set off creaking and swaying for the sky. A second carriage awaited and Calvin turned to Mini-Flash Juniper, seeming if anything more aglow than he’d been on the squash court.

“So glad I had the chance to do this with you,” he breathed.

“Always assuming no-one bars me,” Mini-Flash Juniper replied very seriously, “we can do it every day until you go home.”

It took a moment of thinking he’d misheard her before Calvin was struck dumb.

A question he’d asked at the BMX track couldn’t but come back to him now!

What was more, Mini-Flash Juniper in true Special Program fashion already knew what it was, and proceeded at last to answer.

“I never stop teasing,” she told him with a grin. “I was only making it up about tomorrow. I’ll likely be here longer than you.”

END OF THE FIRST WEEK