Read Online The Octopus Effect by Michael Reisman - Free Book Online

hadn’t slept much. “You know the rules; we’re not supposed to show off our powers.”
    â€œYeah, right,” Alysha said with a chuckle. “Really? You do it all the time.”
    â€œI’m the only Keeper now,” Simon said. “And the Board might be watching.”
    Owen nodded. “Those creeps are probably going to show up as new teachers or something so they can keep an eye on you.”
    Simon looked around with a haunted expression on his face. Alysha glared at Owen, who shrugged and mouthed “ Sorry ” to her.
    â€œCome on,” Alysha said. “You don’t want to be late for homeroom. And we have that quiz today in math.” She grabbed Simon’s sleeve, and Owen grabbed the other; at their tugging, he followed them into the school.
    Though Owen was in a different homeroom than Simon and Alysha, he accompanied them to theirs to make sure Simon was okay. Owen and Alysha kept to either side of him through the halls, with Owen secretly using his formula to prevent the hordes of kids that swarmed past from jostling them. It was a trick Owen had perfected since getting his velocity control back; he was still the smallest kid in his grade (and now, in junior high, the smallest in the school), but subtle pushes here and there had given him the reputation of being tough.
    They saw hulking Barry Stern, the biggest kid in the school and a former bully in the sixth grade, hurrying to his own homeroom. Barry spotted the trio and quickly pressed against the row of lockers to give them room to pass. Simon and Alysha barely noticed him, but Owen smiled and nodded to the much larger boy.
    Barry’s face went pale; he was clearly terrified of Owen. He used to tell anyone who’d listen how devastating the smaller boy was at dodgeball. Barry didn’t have many people willing to chat with him, though. He’d lost most of his friends after the once-popular Marcus Van Ny, Barry’s best friend in sixth grade, had annoyed everyone with wild tales of Simon, Owen, and Alysha having magical powers. Marcus moved away when his father—secretly Order of Physics traitor Mermon Veenie—suffered partial amnesia and went to prison for a number of crimes. And Barry, now a social outcast, simply tried to keep his head down and make it through each day.
    In homeroom, Alysha kept a close eye on Simon as he stared off absently; she figured his imagination was wandering, as it often did. She saw the problem when their homeroom teacher tugged at her attendance book, which was somehow too heavy to lift.
    â€œSimon,” Alysha muttered, leaning over to him, “snap out of it!”
    Simon blinked and returned his attention to the class. The teacher almost fell over backward when the notebook, suddenly at normal weight, sprang up in her hands.
    Owen and Alysha were both in Simon’s first period class, history; a whispered warning from Alysha put Owen on alert, too. Sure enough, classmates murmured and pointed as several crumpled sheets of paper and the teacher ’s empty Styrofoam coffee cup mysteriously floated up out of the garbage pail in the front of the classroom.
    Owen used velocity to tip over the can. The clatter startled Simon; he realized what he was doing, and the drifting objects fell to the floor with the rest of the trash.
    In third period math, in the middle of their quiz, various students dropped their pencils; chaos ensued as they chased the unnaturally slippery pencils across the floor. Alysha groaned at this. When she saw the tissue box on the teacher’s desk start to slide, she rolled her eyes and took action. She briefly drained the electrical flow from the overhead lights, plunging the room into a full minute of darkness. This gave her time to rush over to Simon’s desk, swat him on the shoulder, and hiss, “Knock it off!” into his ear. He did, and things went back to normal.
    By lunchtime, most of the seventh grade was buzzing