It wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t go to Boba Delights on Saturday, at 2:24. I was in a hurry because I had to go to Emmeline’s party at 2:45, and I needed to pick up Deetya from her house. The line only had two people in it, and I selected the Peach Mango Berry Mix with extra boba.
“Number 5 with extra boba, please,” I said, then ordered four other bobas for my friends. I rummaged through my bag for my wallet and 50 dollars. I held out the money, but the man at the counter didn’t take it.
“You sure?” he asked in an almost worried voice. “Because—”
I didn’t bother to hear the rest of his sentence. “Yes yes,” I said, waving him off. “I’m certain.” I wiggled the 50 bucks.
Slowly and not surely, the man took it and called the orders. For a split second, all the noise there was gone. I looked up, and saw the rest of the Boba Delights crew staring at me with their mouths slightly ajar.
“What?” I asked. The crew suddenly became very interested in their shoes. I frowned. Odd. Whatever. I was in a hurry.
Ten minutes later, I had biked to Deetya’s house and was panting so hard I thought my face was going to be submerged in sweat.
“What took you so long?” Deetya asked as we biked up the street to Emmeline’s house. I glanced at her enviously. Detya never seemed to sweat. And, as usual, she looked perfect. Her black skin matched with the lime green dress with polka dots she was wearing.
“Boba…Delight. They took…so….long,” I panted as I handed her the Lemon-and-Strawberry boba.
“Hmm… They took two seconds with my order last time I went there,” Deetya said, taking a sip. “I wonder if they’re missing crew members…like someone got kidnapped!” Deetya is always looking for a mystery.
I rolled my eyes and took a sip of my boba, then put it back in the bike basket. “No.”
“How do you know?” Deetya asked pointedly. “Do you work there?”
“No, but my sister does,” I reminded her, “and if a kidnapping happened, mom would’ve gotten her outta there so fast her head would spin. But she’s working the 6 to 8 shift today, so I didn’t see her.”
“Oh.” Deetya seemed sad that there wasn’t a kidnapping.
“We’re almost there,” I said. I took a neat right turn, my bike’s tires spinning evenly across the pavement, and biked up to Emmeline’s driveway. She had a babysitter.
Well, not really… The “babysitter” was a teenage girl and didn’t really like it when Emmeline had friends over. But she was really cautious in front of Emmeline because if she messed up, her mom might fire her.
We parked our bikes by the door and I slung my bag over my shoulder with my sleepover things. Deetya grabbed hers and bounded over to rang the doorbell. The door opened.
“Hello?” said Maria, the babysitter. Her golden hair was bouncing about her forehead as usual, her face full of makeup so thick it looked like it weighed ten pounds. Her jeans and shirt looked as if she just got them.
“We’re looking for Emmeline,” I told her.
Maria scrunched up her face. “I don’t know she was expecting visitors,” she said in her squeaky, high-pitched voice, her black eyes searching our faces.
“You also don’t know when the War of 1812 took place,” said a smooth voice behind her. Maria jumped as Emmeline, with her dark skin and black, straight, hair, brown pants and orange shirt with a white heart on it came up behind her.
“Emmeline! You should’ve told me if you’d have friends coming,” Maria said, smiling nervously. “I—uh—I would’ve invited them in for—er—some…um…drinks! Yes, drink!”
Emmeline rolled her eyes and pointed at the calendar on the wall. In the June 9th box, it said in bright red letters, EMMELINE’S SLEEPOVER TODAY!
Maria became very interested in her shirt.
“Come in!” Emmeline said in a much cheerful voice to us. “We’re just waiting for Jenna now.”
“I’m right here!” I turned around and saw Jenna. On some people, glasses, especially bright blue glasses, just wouldn’t look right. But Jenna pulled them off. She was wearing the green shirt I got for her birthday and brown shorts that reached down to her knees, which was reasonable, since today was 92 degrees.
“Hi, Jenna,” Deetya and I said. I handed Jenna her Apple Banana Berry mix and gave Emmeline her Grape-and-Blueberry mix boba.
“Thanks, Lavender,” Emmeline said, taking a sip. “Now come in!”
Up in her room, we sat on the ground as I told them about the weirdness at Boba Delights.
Emmeline scratched her head. “I didn’t know they took so long.”
“They don’t,” I told her. Emmeline always asked us to buy boba for her because Maria would never let her go.
“Well, I—” before Jenna could finish her sentence, we heard a light pop.
“Is it the boba?” I asked. I looked down at my boba and nearly screamed.
There was a ball inside, with boba eyes and a dot for a mouth.
“G-g-guys?” I stuttered, as they ball’s expression changed into this:
>.<
It began wiggling around, as if trying to free itself from the bottle. Emmeline did scream, and Jenna jumped up on her bed. Deetya crashed into a small bookshelf, which resulted in crashing into Emmeline’s bedside lamp and shattering it onto the ground. One of the pieces flew straight at me, and in my haste to get out of its way, I bumped into her desk, causing papers and Daiso Japanese pens to fly everywhere. A piece of paper flew into Jenna’s face, and she shrieked and fell off the bed, right onto Emmeline.
The two then crashed into Deetya and into the closet.
Just as suddenly, everything seemed to quiet now. Maybe even too quiet.
“Everything alright?” Maria called.
“Um…YES!” I called back down. If Maria saw this, she would probably scream and cause more destruction.
As Emmeline, Jenna, and Deetya untangled themselves from each other, I got up and surveyed the damage.
It was not that bad, except for the desk and lamp. Oh, and the chair had a broken leg, but that was the same leg that broke three times already as Emmeline told us, so not a big deal.
The ball was still trying to free itself.
“You guys okay?” I asked.
“Right now,” Emmeline said. Her face scrunched up. “But my room’s not.”
After a few discussions, we stuffed the boba in a drawer and locked it. I wore the key on a chain around my neck. We spent two hours cleaning Emmeline’s room, which looked better than new when we were finished. Emmeline had decided to throw away a lot of useless paper and we fixed her chair again. We swept out the remains of the lamp and buried it four feet under in the spacious backyard that Emmeline’s house had, full of native plants. Jenna and Emmeline went to get another lamp from the garage, and Deetya and I got us a snack. By the time we finished, it was six already.
“Okay, listen up, guys,” Jenna said in her I’m-the-boss voice. “We have a few days to figure out what to do with the ball, since this is a sleepover and our parents are going on a vacation together.”
“WHAT?!” Deetya and I sat up.
“You guys don’t know?” Emmeline asked in surprise.
We shook our heads.
“Well, they’re going on a vacation together,” Jenna said.
“For three days?” I asked. “Wasn’t the sleepover only three days?”
Emmeline winced as Jenna bit her lip. “I guess they didn’t tell you that it
a week…”
“A week?” Deetya cried. I sighed.
“That’s why my mom packed my stuff for me,” I said. “Why did they tell you but not us?”
“I actually overheard it,” Jenna confessed. “I guess they were planning to let us find out ourselves. Then I met Emmeline at the science fair and I told her about it.”
“Well, fine,” I said firmly. “If they’re not going to tell us about their secret, we won’t tell them about our secret.”
Emmeline stared at me, her mouth opened in shock. “You don’t mean…”
“I do,” I said. “We’re not going to tell them about the ball.”
That night, Jenna, Deetya, and me all squished into Emmeline’s bed. We were comfortable because Emmeline’s room was bigger than my kitchen and her bed was a king-sized one. Maria slept in the guest room.
“Okay guys,” I whispered. “I think that Maria is asleep.”
We tiptoed out of bed in a line, but Jonna’s long hair slapped my face as she looked out the window and I lost my balance and fell onto the bookshelf, letting out a little yelp.
Emmeline, Jonna, and Deetya glared at me. I pointed to Jonna. “Her fault.”
“Why are we even doing this at night anyway?” Deetya grumbled.
“To make it more mission-like,” we replied in unison.
“This is the only adventure we might have all summer with each other!” I said. “We’re going to be too busy over the summer to have another week-long sleepover.”
Deetya continued her pouting.
We arrived at the drawer, and I did a somersault like a ninja on the ground. And crashed into the closet. It was a soft crash.
I got up and dusted myself off. “Not my fault,” I said, “that the closet’s there.”
Slowly but surely, I twisted the key and opened it.
“EEEK!” I screamed as the ball jumped on my face. It was light brown and felt as sticky as the slime that Emmeline made me last year.“GET IT OFF ME! GET IT OFF ME!”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Deetya clicking on the light.
“Don’t ruin my room again!” Emmeline warned as she grabbed the boba ball with both hands and pulled, Jonna helped. It came off with a pop and Deetya trapped it by putting a see-through container on it.
“What is it?” I asked, looking at it.
“A boba ball,” Emmeline said. She raised her head. “We’re going to boba delights. Now.”
“Open up!” I knocked on the locked door, but the teenager inside was listening to some kind of music and he couldn’t hear me.
We managed to sneak past Maria, but she was snoring so loudly, I doubt she wouldn’t have heard an atomic bomb go off.
“Here. Let me do it,” Emmeline said. She pressed a 100 dollar bill to the glass door. The teenager immediately saw us.
When he opened the door, I said, “Who was the guy at the counter working the 2:00 to 6:00 shift?”
“Gerald?” he asked, eyeing the bill.
“Yes. You know where he lives?” I asked. The guy nodded.
“Bring us to his house, please,” Deetya said.
“Sorry, but I can’t—”
Emmeline took out another 50 dollar bill, and he said, “Get in the car.”
15 minutes later, we were in Gerald’s house. The boba ball was in the container on the table, and it was still trying to get out.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A boba ball,” Gerald replied.
“We know that,“ Jonna said.
“It’s been in my family for generations,” he explained. “There is magic in this world, you know. We used to call it the Boba of Doom. It caused destruction wherever it went. Until my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- grandmother Lila created a type of magic that made it good.”
“Wow.” Deetya’s eyes were twice the size of her normal eyes.
“Well, why hasn’t it done anything good?” I demanded.
“It doesn’t have any magic in it yet,” Gerald said. “Now, you can hand the Boba of Doom to me, and I’ll deal with it. You’d better get home before people start getting worried.”
“Okay,” Emmeline said, yawning. “Sounds like a plan.”
We got into the teenager’s car, and he drove us back to Boba Delights. As we biked home in the silent night, Jonna said, “Well, that adventure’s over.”
“Not quite,” I said, grinning.
“What do you mean?” Deetya asked.
“He said magic.”
“Oh no,” Emmeline groaned, but we were all smiling.
Time for another adventure!
“Number 5 with extra boba, please,” I said, then ordered four other bobas for my friends. I rummaged through my bag for my wallet and 50 dollars. I held out the money, but the man at the counter didn’t take it.
“You sure?” he asked in an almost worried voice. “Because—”
I didn’t bother to hear the rest of his sentence. “Yes yes,” I said, waving him off. “I’m certain.” I wiggled the 50 bucks.
Slowly and not surely, the man took it and called the orders. For a split second, all the noise there was gone. I looked up, and saw the rest of the Boba Delights crew staring at me with their mouths slightly ajar.
“What?” I asked. The crew suddenly became very interested in their shoes. I frowned. Odd. Whatever. I was in a hurry.
Ten minutes later, I had biked to Deetya’s house and was panting so hard I thought my face was going to be submerged in sweat.
“What took you so long?” Deetya asked as we biked up the street to Emmeline’s house. I glanced at her enviously. Detya never seemed to sweat. And, as usual, she looked perfect. Her black skin matched with the lime green dress with polka dots she was wearing.
“Boba…Delight. They took…so….long,” I panted as I handed her the Lemon-and-Strawberry boba.
“Hmm… They took two seconds with my order last time I went there,” Deetya said, taking a sip. “I wonder if they’re missing crew members…like someone got kidnapped!” Deetya is always looking for a mystery.
I rolled my eyes and took a sip of my boba, then put it back in the bike basket. “No.”
“How do you know?” Deetya asked pointedly. “Do you work there?”
“No, but my sister does,” I reminded her, “and if a kidnapping happened, mom would’ve gotten her outta there so fast her head would spin. But she’s working the 6 to 8 shift today, so I didn’t see her.”
“Oh.” Deetya seemed sad that there wasn’t a kidnapping.
“We’re almost there,” I said. I took a neat right turn, my bike’s tires spinning evenly across the pavement, and biked up to Emmeline’s driveway. She had a babysitter.
Well, not really… The “babysitter” was a teenage girl and didn’t really like it when Emmeline had friends over. But she was really cautious in front of Emmeline because if she messed up, her mom might fire her.
We parked our bikes by the door and I slung my bag over my shoulder with my sleepover things. Deetya grabbed hers and bounded over to rang the doorbell. The door opened.
“Hello?” said Maria, the babysitter. Her golden hair was bouncing about her forehead as usual, her face full of makeup so thick it looked like it weighed ten pounds. Her jeans and shirt looked as if she just got them.
“We’re looking for Emmeline,” I told her.
Maria scrunched up her face. “I don’t know she was expecting visitors,” she said in her squeaky, high-pitched voice, her black eyes searching our faces.
“You also don’t know when the War of 1812 took place,” said a smooth voice behind her. Maria jumped as Emmeline, with her dark skin and black, straight, hair, brown pants and orange shirt with a white heart on it came up behind her.
“Emmeline! You should’ve told me if you’d have friends coming,” Maria said, smiling nervously. “I—uh—I would’ve invited them in for—er—some…um…drinks! Yes, drink!”
Emmeline rolled her eyes and pointed at the calendar on the wall. In the June 9th box, it said in bright red letters, EMMELINE’S SLEEPOVER TODAY!
Maria became very interested in her shirt.
“Come in!” Emmeline said in a much cheerful voice to us. “We’re just waiting for Jenna now.”
“I’m right here!” I turned around and saw Jenna. On some people, glasses, especially bright blue glasses, just wouldn’t look right. But Jenna pulled them off. She was wearing the green shirt I got for her birthday and brown shorts that reached down to her knees, which was reasonable, since today was 92 degrees.
“Hi, Jenna,” Deetya and I said. I handed Jenna her Apple Banana Berry mix and gave Emmeline her Grape-and-Blueberry mix boba.
“Thanks, Lavender,” Emmeline said, taking a sip. “Now come in!”
Up in her room, we sat on the ground as I told them about the weirdness at Boba Delights.
Emmeline scratched her head. “I didn’t know they took so long.”
“They don’t,” I told her. Emmeline always asked us to buy boba for her because Maria would never let her go.
“Well, I—” before Jenna could finish her sentence, we heard a light pop.
“Is it the boba?” I asked. I looked down at my boba and nearly screamed.
There was a ball inside, with boba eyes and a dot for a mouth.
“G-g-guys?” I stuttered, as they ball’s expression changed into this:
>.<
It began wiggling around, as if trying to free itself from the bottle. Emmeline did scream, and Jenna jumped up on her bed. Deetya crashed into a small bookshelf, which resulted in crashing into Emmeline’s bedside lamp and shattering it onto the ground. One of the pieces flew straight at me, and in my haste to get out of its way, I bumped into her desk, causing papers and Daiso Japanese pens to fly everywhere. A piece of paper flew into Jenna’s face, and she shrieked and fell off the bed, right onto Emmeline.
The two then crashed into Deetya and into the closet.
Just as suddenly, everything seemed to quiet now. Maybe even too quiet.
“Everything alright?” Maria called.
“Um…YES!” I called back down. If Maria saw this, she would probably scream and cause more destruction.
As Emmeline, Jenna, and Deetya untangled themselves from each other, I got up and surveyed the damage.
It was not that bad, except for the desk and lamp. Oh, and the chair had a broken leg, but that was the same leg that broke three times already as Emmeline told us, so not a big deal.
The ball was still trying to free itself.
“You guys okay?” I asked.
“Right now,” Emmeline said. Her face scrunched up. “But my room’s not.”
After a few discussions, we stuffed the boba in a drawer and locked it. I wore the key on a chain around my neck. We spent two hours cleaning Emmeline’s room, which looked better than new when we were finished. Emmeline had decided to throw away a lot of useless paper and we fixed her chair again. We swept out the remains of the lamp and buried it four feet under in the spacious backyard that Emmeline’s house had, full of native plants. Jenna and Emmeline went to get another lamp from the garage, and Deetya and I got us a snack. By the time we finished, it was six already.
“Okay, listen up, guys,” Jenna said in her I’m-the-boss voice. “We have a few days to figure out what to do with the ball, since this is a sleepover and our parents are going on a vacation together.”
“WHAT?!” Deetya and I sat up.
“You guys don’t know?” Emmeline asked in surprise.
We shook our heads.
“Well, they’re going on a vacation together,” Jenna said.
“For three days?” I asked. “Wasn’t the sleepover only three days?”
Emmeline winced as Jenna bit her lip. “I guess they didn’t tell you that it
a week…”
“A week?” Deetya cried. I sighed.
“That’s why my mom packed my stuff for me,” I said. “Why did they tell you but not us?”
“I actually overheard it,” Jenna confessed. “I guess they were planning to let us find out ourselves. Then I met Emmeline at the science fair and I told her about it.”
“Well, fine,” I said firmly. “If they’re not going to tell us about their secret, we won’t tell them about our secret.”
Emmeline stared at me, her mouth opened in shock. “You don’t mean…”
“I do,” I said. “We’re not going to tell them about the ball.”
That night, Jenna, Deetya, and me all squished into Emmeline’s bed. We were comfortable because Emmeline’s room was bigger than my kitchen and her bed was a king-sized one. Maria slept in the guest room.
“Okay guys,” I whispered. “I think that Maria is asleep.”
We tiptoed out of bed in a line, but Jonna’s long hair slapped my face as she looked out the window and I lost my balance and fell onto the bookshelf, letting out a little yelp.
Emmeline, Jonna, and Deetya glared at me. I pointed to Jonna. “Her fault.”
“Why are we even doing this at night anyway?” Deetya grumbled.
“To make it more mission-like,” we replied in unison.
“This is the only adventure we might have all summer with each other!” I said. “We’re going to be too busy over the summer to have another week-long sleepover.”
Deetya continued her pouting.
We arrived at the drawer, and I did a somersault like a ninja on the ground. And crashed into the closet. It was a soft crash.
I got up and dusted myself off. “Not my fault,” I said, “that the closet’s there.”
Slowly but surely, I twisted the key and opened it.
“EEEK!” I screamed as the ball jumped on my face. It was light brown and felt as sticky as the slime that Emmeline made me last year.“GET IT OFF ME! GET IT OFF ME!”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Deetya clicking on the light.
“Don’t ruin my room again!” Emmeline warned as she grabbed the boba ball with both hands and pulled, Jonna helped. It came off with a pop and Deetya trapped it by putting a see-through container on it.
“What is it?” I asked, looking at it.
“A boba ball,” Emmeline said. She raised her head. “We’re going to boba delights. Now.”
“Open up!” I knocked on the locked door, but the teenager inside was listening to some kind of music and he couldn’t hear me.
We managed to sneak past Maria, but she was snoring so loudly, I doubt she wouldn’t have heard an atomic bomb go off.
“Here. Let me do it,” Emmeline said. She pressed a 100 dollar bill to the glass door. The teenager immediately saw us.
When he opened the door, I said, “Who was the guy at the counter working the 2:00 to 6:00 shift?”
“Gerald?” he asked, eyeing the bill.
“Yes. You know where he lives?” I asked. The guy nodded.
“Bring us to his house, please,” Deetya said.
“Sorry, but I can’t—”
Emmeline took out another 50 dollar bill, and he said, “Get in the car.”
15 minutes later, we were in Gerald’s house. The boba ball was in the container on the table, and it was still trying to get out.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A boba ball,” Gerald replied.
“We know that,“ Jonna said.
“It’s been in my family for generations,” he explained. “There is magic in this world, you know. We used to call it the Boba of Doom. It caused destruction wherever it went. Until my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- grandmother Lila created a type of magic that made it good.”
“Wow.” Deetya’s eyes were twice the size of her normal eyes.
“Well, why hasn’t it done anything good?” I demanded.
“It doesn’t have any magic in it yet,” Gerald said. “Now, you can hand the Boba of Doom to me, and I’ll deal with it. You’d better get home before people start getting worried.”
“Okay,” Emmeline said, yawning. “Sounds like a plan.”
We got into the teenager’s car, and he drove us back to Boba Delights. As we biked home in the silent night, Jonna said, “Well, that adventure’s over.”
“Not quite,” I said, grinning.
“What do you mean?” Deetya asked.
“He said magic.”
“Oh no,” Emmeline groaned, but we were all smiling.
Time for another adventure!
