Free The 6th Power by Justin David Walker Page B

and saw a bizarre hybrid clone of Barney the Dinosaur and Mr. Bubble. I rinsed my mouth out and tried to scoop the foam off of my face, but whatever the bubbles were made of, they were resilient. Nothing was making them pop.
    “Robert! Nathaniel! Breakfast!”
    And that was the two minute warning. I grabbed a towel and frantically tried to wipe the foam off of me. My super memory was still working, and my pre-sleepy-time thoughts came back to me: grape bubble bath, foam beard, Mom drying me off, singing that jingle.
    Frenzied, half crazed with desperation to clean this mess up, I opened my mouth and sang. “Use Bubble-Bubble and the dirt goes down the drain.”
    With a crackling, hissing noise, the foam vanished.
    I was de-bubbled! I was me again! Well, that wasn’t quite true. As I looked in the mirror, checking myself for any permanent damage, I saw that the bubbles had left me clean. Really clean. Like, action figure just out of the packaging kind of clean. My pajamas looked like they were fresh off the rack. Even the fruit punch stain on the collar, which had been there for over a year and had withstood countless trips through the washing machine, had disappeared. There was no dirt under my fingernails, no sleep goop in the corners of my eyes, no morning grease in my hair. My teeth looked like they had gone through that extensive chemical whitening thing that my dentist was always recommending to my mom at my checkups.
    I pointed at the mirror and clucked my tongue. Lookin’ good! A stream of purple foam shot out of the tip of my finger, covering the glass.
    Oh. Okay. I guess the bubbles did come from me. Huh. I sang the jingle again. The foam disappeared, leaving the mirror free of streaks and grime. Cause and effect. I squirted some more bubbles into the bathtub, and with a jingle, I was practically blinded by the shine.
    Cool! I could make bubbles that clean stuff!
    I thought about that for a moment, and the smile fell off of my face. I took the pill the night before so that I could have a superpower in case Robert tried to attack me and the best that my memory could come up with was the scrubbing-bubble power? Lame! How was I going to defend myself with purple foam?
    I sighed and left the bathroom, creeping back to my room. I was just about to open my door when the door across the hall was thrown open. I turned, shrieked in a completely non-manly way, and squirted out gallons of purple suds.
    Chet and Robert’s room, neat and orderly on Chet’s side, somewhat messy on Robert’s side, was now covered in bubbles, floor to ceiling. Robert stood there in the doorway. He, too, was covered, head to toe.
    We stared at each other. I couldn’t make out the look on Robert’s face because it was, you know, obscured. I still had my hands raised, ready to give him more of the same if he took a step towards me. We might have stood there all day, but Mom broke the spell.
    “What was that?” she bellowed, her footfalls heavy on the stairs. Robert blinked, retreated, and slammed his door shut.
    Suddenly, the very near future was very clear to me. Mom would come upstairs. She’d yell at me for yelling. She’d hammer on Robert’s door. He’d open it. There would be the suds. He might tell Mom that the bubbles were my fault. She wouldn’t believe him and Robert would get in trouble. I could even say that I’d yelled because I saw the foam in Robert’s room. Another opportunity to pay my brother back for all of the times he’d gotten me into trouble…
    No.
    Mom was almost to the landing. I cupped my hands around my mouth, pressed them to Robert’s door and sang as loud as I could, practically willed the jingle into his room. “Use Bubble-Bubble and the dirt goes down the drain!”
    Mom turned the corner, all red-face and hands-on-hips. “What in the world are you doing?”
    I stepped back, dropping my hands. “Nothing,” I said, clearly lying. I had obviously been doing something, but I had no explanation that I