Dess sighed. “I can see why you’re bummed, Jess. You don’t get to spend the afternoon drinking skanky tea and putting up with two mindcasters.” She rose to her feet, her long skirt rustling. “See you.”

“Yeah, really,” Jonathan said. “You’re lucky to miss this.” He gave Jessica’s hand a squeeze and stood.

“Yeah, so lucky,” Jessica said. “If only I could be grounded all the time.”

She watched the four of them walk away, chewing her lip and cursing her parents’ calendar logic. Didn’t they know she had more important things to do than be grounded these days?

For the first time ever, her dad was late.

He had faithfully picked up Jessica every day of her grounding, on the theory that left to ride the school bus, she would fall back into her criminal ways. But Don Day’s car wasn’t anywhere to be seen among the crawling traffic of parents picking up their kids.

Maybe after all the debate about exactly how long her grounding should last, he had gotten confused about whether it ended today or not.

For this morning’s argument Jessica herself had gone with the werewolf model: a month was twenty-eight days, which meant that she should have been ungrounded last night. But her parents had cruelly opted for the calendar month, and as her father liked to repeat: “Thirty days hath September (April, June, and November).”

Of course, it still wasn’t fair that she was grounded tonight. Jessica had been detained and returned to parental custody (technically not arrested) on a Saturday night. So thirty days later should be a Monday night, to any sane person. But both her parents had raised the technical point that she’d been brought home Sunday morning, and so her grounding really hadn’t begun until Sunday night, which meant that it was Tuesday before her sentence would be served.

Jessica had kept arguing until her dad had gotten angry and threatened to invoke the fact that most months were thirty-one days, which meant he could in good conscience extend her grounding until Wednesday. Even Mom had rolled her eyes at that one, but Jessica had finally realized she was beaten.

She looked at her watch, which she’d reset to regular Bixby time—it had gained twenty minutes during the eclipse. Her bus would be leaving soon. If she got on it and her father showed up looking for her later, he would go ballistic and ground her again. Of course, maybe this was all a trick to make her miss the bus, forcing her to walk home so then she could be re-grounded for showing up late.

Unless she’d forgotten something. Jessica searched her memory for any change in plans. Since the weird events of this morning, her mind had been a little vague. All day she’d kept expecting time to freeze again and blue amber to capture everyone around her. Every lull in the noise of lunchtime had made her jump as she’d wondered if the world of motion and sunlight and other human beings was fading out for good.