Ashley Miller was the first person to be picked up on the bus route to Mount Valley High School. Everyone else came later.
Normally, it was an opportunity to get a moment of quiet (even if the ride itself was bumpy) or a chance to catch up on homework or study for exams.
This morning, however, it was something totally different. Not only had last night’s game in Lake Point caused her to snap, sparking a game-ending bench-clearing brawl that could earn her a suspension, it also had left Ashley Ash, transformed her entire team, and culminated in what once seemed to be impossible.
Whatever had been in the water in Lake Point all those years was spreading down the road, and the signs of that weren’t just on her body, they were painted on the gymnasium walls.
Mount Valley Vixens? She had to admit that the alliteration was nice, but she was completely and utterly not used to it. It was as foreign as saying Earth had two moons, or the sky was green, or one plus one made three.
Ash Miller had, unknowingly, not seen the signs of a wider shift at home that morning because her parents had left for work early, and she was already something of a tomboy. A T-shirt and jeans were fine for her, then and now.
The bus put on the brakes as it approached its second pickup point. She saw a girl and two boys at this stop every day. The boys were brothers. One of them hunted (or something like that). The girl was one of Mount Valley’s cheerleaders, and she wore a bow in her hair every single day. They looked normal when they were outside.
And then they stepped onto the bus. Suddenly, there were two boys clutching purses and giggling to each other, and a girl wearing a camouflage shirt and baggy olive-colored pants.
What in the world did I just see? It happened again at the next stop: a girl she knew from her science class and who had managed to use her cleavage to make herself popular over the years suddenly went from C-cups to no cups. One stop later, a boy with thick-rimmed glasses had become a dark-skinned beauty who could have been a model.
She pulled out her phone to text Shan Jackson and ask what was going on, but instead she got another notification.
It was a text from a number she didn’t recognize.
“Hey Ash...you there?”
The fact that the text said Ash, not Ashley, jolted her further awake. This was not some bizarre dream sequence.
Feeling her heart pulsing, she frantically wrote back.
“Who’s this?”
The “sparkle” notification sound caught Jade Duncan by surprise. After all, he would never have chosen it himself. He rushed to grab his phone.
“Oh my gosh it’s Ash! ...Wait, I didn’t say who I am?” The other cheerleaders giggled. “Silly Jade…”
He frantically texted back.
“It’s Jade. From Lake Point!”
A moment later, after she saw another short girl suddenly gain ten inches of height just by getting on the school bus and a tall boy who ran track and field get shorter by about the same amount, Ash’s phone dinged with Jade’s message.
Ash couldn’t believe it. She had given her number to a cheerleader — a boy cheerleader from Lake Point, no less — and she got a reply? Crazy stuff, she chuckled. She thought about what to say back to him, but another message got in the way.
It came from Erin Lindell.
“Is it me or is this town just Lake Point all over again now? I’m a freak now! They call people like us girls???? Everyone I meet seems to change, sometimes right before me!”
After Ash read Erin's message, it hit her like a ton of bricks. It wasn't just her on a bus that was changing people.
The entire Mount Valley basketball team was Patient Zero.
She waited for the next person to get on and watched the point at which they changed — about ten feet from her. She stopped the changed boy as he passed. "Excuse me...do you see anything different around here today?"
The boy shrugged. "Like what?"
"Umm...never mind." Ash realized that she was going to have something to say to Erin.
"It's not just you," she texted. "Anyone who's been getting on my bus and getting within ten feet of me changes."
She turned her attention to Jade's message and replied to that, too. "We should go out some time!"
Yet she couldn't turn all her attention to a boy yet. She'd known Erin for as long as she'd been on the team. Hearing her friend's panicked thoughts made her worried.
