Prologue

  I should have known that as soon as Ezra got some kind of superpower he would use it for evil.

  Well, not evil really, but certainly not for good.

  Hayden and I weren't exactly thinking we should all put on blue tights and red capes and go around saving the world, but we also didn't think Ezra's approach was all that enlightened either.

  Because as soon as we got the morphing power - the power to change ourselves into any other person we wanted to - Ezra decided to change himself into Mr. Klonk, our principal at Messetup Middle School.

  He was going to wait until Klonk called in sick one day, then morph himself into a perfect copy of Klonk.

  Then he'd spend the day as Klonk, giving grief to all the teachers.

  I was tempted, too. I thought about using my morphing power to get revenge on the snotty cheerleaders who tormented me.

  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

  My name's Abby Moody, and Hayden and I and our friend Ezra are eighth graders at Messetup. I'd like to say we're all good-looking and popular and smart, but we're really just smart - and sometimes Hayden and I aren't too sure about Ezra.

  We got this power to morph into other human beings - to be Humanomorphs, as I called us - in an accident at this factory, involving chemicals and lightning.

  But there were problems, like the more we morphed the more we started getting these really weird nightmares.

  And the nightmares weren't even the worst of it. 'Cause the factory we had been snooping around at had caught us on surveillance cameras, and their guards came looking for us at school.

  And they found us.

  It turned out the factory was making a new kind of super-poisonous spray that they planned to use on the Amazon rain forest, to clear out thousands of acres. They were afraid we'd found out their secret, and they weren't too happy. They wanted to shut us up - permanently.

  We were just three kids (and one of us was Ezra, which counts even more against us). But we did have the power to morph.

  And maybe that power would give us the ability to save the rain forest.

  Chapter One

  It was another typical morning at Messetup Middle School. This was back before we got the power to morph, and we had no hint of what was to come.

  The cool girls were hanging around outside the entrance, checking out their perfect hair and their perfect makeup in their little makeup compact mirrors. The cool guys were trying to get the cool girls' attention by telling jokes in loud voices and punching each other in the arm.

  The brainiacs were already in their classes, already at their desks, re-checking the math homework they'd done the night before and discussing what they were going to do their Science Fair projects on.

  The bad kids were in the boys' bathroom, drawing on the walls of the bathroom stalls with magic markers.

  Messetup Middle School is in a pretty nice,

  safe suburb, but a handful of boys like to pretend they're inner-city gang members, wearing big baggy pants that hang down off their waists and backwards baseball caps. They always say "Yo!" to each other and draw graffiti on the walls.

  Hayden, Ezra and I turned off the sidewalk and walked up to the steps and the big double wooden doors. Suddenly, one of the cool guys called Hayden's name.

  Hayden jerked like he'd been shot by a sniper - Hayden, Ezra and I don't exactly hang out with the cool kids, or the brainiacs, or the homey-wannabes.

  We don't hang with anybody, except each other. Some of the other kids probably think we're misfits, but we just have our own little clique of three.

  Maybe it sounds strange, two boys and a girl just hanging out together in their own little group. But we've been neighbors and friends since third grade.

  Still, when Chip George, the star of the football team, stops flirting with Amanda Walker, the blonde cheerleader, and calls you to come over, well, you have to pay attention.

  So Hayden did.

  He walked over to Chip and a few other of the cool guys. I watched as Chip put his arm around Hayden's shoulder and led him away from the group, talking to him in a low voice.

  Strange. Very strange indeed.

  Maria, one of the cheerleaders in what Ezra called "the loathsome foursome," put away her compact and looked up and saw Ezra and me.

  "Look who's here, dudes," she said to her friends. That was the latest "cool" thing that the cool girls did, call each other "dude," like they were surfers in Southern California.

  "If it isn't Abby Moody," Maria called loudly.

  "How are you feeling today, Abby? Moody?"

  Her friends all exploded into laughter at her lame joke, one I'd heard in various forms for three or four years now.

  "I'd be moody too if I looked like that," said Kelly.

  Hey, I thought, I don't look that bad. So my hair isn't blonde and doesn't have that perfect little wave to it. It's brown and straight and short, but OK. In fact, that's me all over: OK brown eyes, OK medium height and weight, OK figure.

  Speaking of lame jokes, this is probably a good time to explain about the name of our school, Messetup Middle School. It's pronounced "Mess-ED-up," and it's an old Indian word meaning "great river." Actually, our school is named after the Messetup River that flows through town.

  Just about every kid who's ever attended Messetup, though, has pronounced it "Mess It Up," or

  "Messed Up." It's an old joke, one that the teachers have gotten used to over the years.

  But Ezra, being Ezra, had taken the joke name to new heights, or new lows, depending on how you saw it.

  At a football game a month ago, he had "borrowed" one of the megaphones that the cheerleaders use to lead the crowd, and stood up in the front row of the spectator stands. He turned around, facing the crowd.

  "Say it loud! Say it proud! This is one big messed up crowd!" he had yelled, imitating a cheer.

  The kids had all laughed, but the grown-ups didn't think it was funny. Neither did the cheerleaders -

  Angela, Amanda, Maria and Kelly and the rest. They were used to being the center of attention.

  "Hey ho! What do you know! We're all messed up with no place to go!" Ezra had bellowed.

  At this point, Mr. Klonk, the principal, had made his way over to Ezra, and told him to put down the megaphone. Then he grasped Ezra firmly on the upper part of his arm and marched him out of the stands and back towards the concession area.

  That's when he told Ezra that he was giving him detention after school every day for a week, cleaning desks.

  When that week was finished, Ezra said he would never chew a piece of gum again for the rest of his life.

  There was nothing grosser in this world, he told us, then squatting down with a putty knife in one hand and scraping dried gum off the underside of desks.

  "No, I take that back," he told Hayden and me. "There is one thing grosser than scraping dried gum off the bottom of a desk."

  "What's that?" we asked. We should have known Ezra was setting us up.

  "The only thing grosser than scraping dried gum off the underside of a desk is scraping off gum that hasn't completely dried yet."

  "Eeeewwwww," I said, and made a face.

  "Aw, come on, Abby. Here, I saved you a piece," Ezra said, and reached his hand down into his pants pocket.

  I started to run away, but Ezra pulled his hand out empty.

  That was Ezra.

  Chapter Two

  I had turned away from Amanda and Angela and their little gang of stuck-up cheerleaders, and saw Hayden walking back over to us.

  "What was that all about?" I asked Hayden as he re-joined Ezra and me. "Since when is Chip your buddy?"

  "Better known as Chip Off the Old Blockhead," said Ezra.

  "I've got some good news and some bad news," said Hayden.

  "What's up?" I asked.

  "Well, the good news is that Chip invited me to join this club that some of the guys have. They call themselves the Cruisers, and they get together and just hang out. Chip's one of the leaders, and Brian and Kyle and Tony are all in it, too."

  "And they asked youT said Ezra.

  I understood his lack of understanding. Brian and Kyle and Tony were some of the guys that had been hanging around the cheerleaders when we'd walked up. Brian was president of the eighth grade class and was going steady with Maria; she even wore his ID bracelet.

  These guys were like the cream of the eighth grade. And Hayden, even though he was my best friend -

  well, Hayden was like the skim milk of the eighth grade.

  Why would the Cruisers ask Hayden to join, when they made fun of him and Ezra and me?

  "Yeah, he asked me," Hayden said. "But here's the bad news. I have to pass the initiation test."

  "How bad is this bad news?" I asked.

  "I don't know yet," said Hayden. "But I'll know tonight. They told me I have to sneak inside that deserted factory on the outskirts of town. I somehow have to get inside there and find something and bring it back to them."

  "What do you have to find?" I asked.

  "Anything, but it has to be something that could only have come from inside the factory. Like, I don't know, a sign or some paper about what the factory used to make or something."

  "The factory" was what we all called the enormous dark building that had sat, unattended, on a huge fenced-in lot for years.

  We never went

there, because there was nothing to do there and it wasn't on the way to anywhere else.

  About the only times we saw it, really, were when we were riding with our parents, driving out of town on the highway, just past the City Limits sign.

  The factory was two stories high and kind of ominous looking. It had no windows and you couldn't even see a door from the road. A building with no windows at all is pretty strange.

  It's as if it's trying to keep secrets.

  Plus there was the fence. This wasn't any regular fence like the kind people put around their backyards to keep their dogs from getting loose, the kind that any 14-year-old with even a dab of athletic ability could climb with no trouble.

  This was a fence abut ten feet high, and instead of being chain-link, like backyard fences, it was made of black metal poles, each about an inch thick, set very close together so you couldn't see in very well.

  Once, a couple of years ago, I had been riding with my dad past the factory and had asked him what the building was. He said he had no idea, that it had been closed down when we moved to town. That was more than ten years ago, when I was only four years old.

  "Are you gonna do it?" I asked Hayden. "Are you really going to go in the factory just to be able to join the Cruisers?"

  "I'll have to think about it," Hayden said.

  "Well, if you go, we'll go with you," I said boldly.

  "Say what?" squeaked Ezra. "Excuse me, Abby, but did you just volunteer me for a mission at night that

  could be potentially dangerous, and one I get nothing out of?"

  "If you don't want to go, Ezra, you don't have to," I told him. "But I thought it would be a nice supportive thing to do for Hayden, so he wouldn't have to go alone. He's our friend. And in case you haven't noticed, we're not exactly swarmed with so many friends that we lose count of them all."

  Ezra looked kind of ashamed. I felt proud of myself for volunteering and being such a good friend to Hayden.

  The morning bell rang and we walked up the steps and into school together, the three of us, ready to start another day at Messetup.

  But as the day wore on, my bravery started turning to a bad case of nerves.

  What in the heck had I signed us up for? Maybe Ezra was being chicken, but he had a point. Hayden was doing this to get into the Cruisers, but what were Ezra and I getting out of this nighttime mission into the old abandoned factory?

  If anything, we'd be the losers. Because if the Cruisers really did let Hayden join once he completed the mission, we'd probably see less of him.

  He'd have new friends. Cooler friends. Ezra and I would start looking like yesterday's lunch.

  Swell. What had I gotten myself into?

  Chapter Three

  As we walked home from school, Hayden told Ezra and me what we had already known was coming: He was going to go for the initiation into the Cruisers.

  "If you guys don't want to come, I understand," he said. "But this is my big chance. If I get into the Cruisers, it opens all kinds of doors. Including the door that leads to Angela, maybe."

  I was hurt, but I stayed quiet.

  I knew Hayden had a crush on Angela, and that she viewed him on about the same level as she viewed the dead frog she had been forced to dissect in biology class last semester.

  And it wasn't like I was jealous, was it? Well, was it? Hayden was a friend, just a friend.

  But at fourteen, things sometimes feel a bit confused. I'd been noticing how tall he'd gotten in the last year, and the way his brown hair hung down along the right side of his forehead almost to his right eye, and how that was a good look on him.

  Snap out of it, Abby, I told myself.

  "So when are you going?" Ezra asked.

  "As soon as it gets dark," Hayden answered. "I'll say I'm going over to Abby's house to study. Ezra, you say that you are, too. Abby, you say you're coming to my house to study. We'll meet at the school, and it's probably about a fifteen-minute walk from there to the factory. We get in, we get out, we go home.

  End of story."

  "End of story," I repeated.

  Of course, it was actually going to be the beginning of the story, not the end, but none of us knew that then.

  So we went home, ate dinner with our families, gathered our book bags, and met at school.

  We had to take our book bags so our parents would think we were studying. But we didn't want to take them to the factory because who knew what might happen there and we wanted to be able to travel fast if we needed to.

  So we went behind the school to the football stadium (the scene of Ezra's famous cheers), and stashed our book bags under the bleachers in a dark spot where no one would find them.

  Hayden had estimated the walk to the factory correctly - about fifteen minutes.

  Hayden and I were quiet as we walked. I felt a little nervous.

  Ezra, being Ezra, kept up a non-stop barrage of chatter. He told us this story about some teenage couple that parks at a lover's lane, and there's this maniac with a hook instead of a hand, and he kills the boy somehow and the girl drives away and when she gets to the police station the guy's hook is caught in her door handle.

  Or something like that.

  "Ezra, will you please shut up?" Hayden said. We were anxious enough about going into this abandoned factory at night, even without Ezra rattling on about a maniac who kills teenagers.

  Thanks, Ezra. Way to be.

  It didn't help that a thunderstorm appeared to be gathering force. Off in the distance we could see flashes of lightning, followed a few seconds later by a very low rumble.

  The air smelled like rain.

  The fence appeared on our right. Through it, we could see the hulking shell of the abandoned building.

  A full moon shone, giving us light to see by, but the main thing we could see was that the building was very dark. The grounds surrounding it were every bit as dark.

  "OK, first thing. How do we get in?" I asked Hayden. "Are we going to climb this ten-foot fence?"

  "I was hoping there would be an opening or a break somewhere," he said. "Let's start following it around towards the back and look for a way in."

  The lot was several acres big. We walked away from the street, and without the sound of cars, we seemed to be all alone in the world.

  We peered at the fence as we walked, looking for a hole or something.

  Ezra saw it first. Not a hole, not a break. A gate. A gate in the back.

  It was chained and locked, but there was a gap where the gate met the fence. It was too narrow for most adults to squeeze through, but three 14-year-old kids could make it.

  So in we went, one by one, squishing our bodies through the narrow passage.

  Chapter Four

  Once we were on the grounds, the factory loomed ahead of us. We still had no idea how we would get inside, or what Hayden could take for his initiation.

  "Isn't this, like, stealing?" I asked.

  "Yeah, I thought of that before and it started to bother me," Hayden said. "I don't want to steal. So I came up with a better plan. All Chip said I had to do was prove I was in the factory. So I brought this."

  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small camera with a pop-up flash.

  "You guys take a couple of pics of me and, boom, we're out of here," Hayden said.

  "Cool," said Ezra. "Can I get my picture taken too?"

  "Sure, Ez, if we have time," said Hayden.

  The thunderstorm we had noticed earlier was moving closer.

  The lightning was no longer an occasional, blurry glow on the horizon, but sharp streaks of light zigzagging across the dark sky. The thunder followed the lightning more closely now, meaning the storm was moving towards us.

  By now we were up to the factory itself. The moon had gone behind a cloud, and it was darker than dark.

  "Anybody see a door?" I whispered.

  "I can't see my own hand in front of my face," Ezra said.

  "Come on, guys, let's hurry this up or we're going to get wet," I said. "There's a storm coming."

  We came to what appeared to be a loading dock in back of the factory. There were lots of big green barrels stacked up on their ends, piled about three barrels high. There must have been fifty of them.

  Suddenly, the moon came back out and illuminated the scene.

  "You know, guys, those barrels don't look ten years old," I said.

 

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