In the Spotlight

  Also by Jackson Pearce

  The Doublecross

  The Inside Job

  Ellie, Engineer

  Ellie, Engineer: The Next Level

  For Blueberry, who is destined to have a great many engineering skills

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ellie Bell’s Guide to Electricity

  Atoms

  Types of Electricity

  Conductors and Insulators

  An Experiment with Electricity

  Short Circuits

  How to Make Insulating Dough

  Ellie Bell was standing at the very, very edge, looking over.

  It wasn’t a terribly high edge, but it was not something she wanted to fall off. It was definitely not something she wanted to skateboard off, even though she’d designed and built it for exactly that purpose—Project 71: Fold-up! Light-up! Skateboard Ramp!

  (She put lots of exclamation points in this project title, since she felt like it was extra exciting.)

  Ellie wasn’t the skateboarder, though—Kit was. And Kit looked very ready to skateboard right off the edge, down the ramp, then up the other side.

  “Here goes!” Kit said excitedly, rapping on her bright-pink helmet to make sure it was in place. Kit’s skateboard was pink, too, except for the purple otters she’d drawn on the underside, and so were her kneepads and wrist guards. Kit liked pink basically as much as Ellie liked purple, which was a lot. Ellie held a rectangle-shaped battery in one hand and the end of the wire of string lights in the other. The lights went all around the edges of the ramp and down the middle. It was the first time she’d ever built something with lights on it before! Ellie wrapped the end of the wire around the little circle on the end of the battery, and the lights instantly lit up.

  “If you fall, I know how to stabilize your leg until the ambulance arrives!” their friend Toby called from the far side of the driveway, looking very serious. Toby knew how to do all sorts of stuff like this, though sometimes it was more helpful than other times. He went on. “At least, I do if I can find a stick. Maybe you should wait to go until I can find a good stick?”

  “I think I’ll just risk it, but thanks!” Kit called back. And then with a clatter and a whoosh, she pushed off the edge!

  Kit flew forward, down the ramp, knees bent and skirt fluffing up in the wind. She reached the bottom of the ramp and then started back up the other side, toward the opposite edge. Ellie threw her hands in the air and whooped as Kit and her skateboard launched right into the sky. Kit grabbed hold of the edge and held it for a moment, then she released it seconds before the skateboard hit the ground again with her feet planted right in the middle. Kit skated back down the far side of the ramp, back toward the middle, up, and—­

  “Oof!” Kit said as she pitched forward.

  Ellie yelped.

  Toby shouted, “I’ll find a stick!”

  But Kit knew how to fall off a skateboard—she’d done it plenty of times, after all, since that was how learning to skateboard worked. Kit tucked her arms in and rolled. In a split second, she was on her feet without a single scratch. The skateboard whizzed back and forth as it slowed down, then it finally stopped right in the middle of the ramp.

  “Are you okay?” Ellie said, running up to Kit, even though she could already tell Kit was just fine.

  “Yep!” Kit said cheerfully. “I think my wheels got caught on the lights,” she added, then guided Ellie over to a spot near the top of the ramp. Her board had indeed gotten hung up on the string of lights and snapped it into two pieces. “Oh no! I broke them!” Kit realized, putting a hand to her mouth.

  “It’s all right,” Ellie said. “You just broke the road.”

  “That doesn’t sound all right,” Kit answered, shaking her head.

  “It is! See, look,” Ellie said, and pointed at the place where the string of lights was snapped. “To make the lights turn on, the electricity has to go in a circle—that’s why it’s called an electrical circuit. Circle, circuit, get it? Anyway—you just smashed up part of the road, like the Godzilla monster did in that movie we weren’t supposed to watch. All we have to do is fix the break in the road, and then the electricity can go round and round in the circuit again.”

  Kit didn’t seem convinced.

  “Watch,” Ellie said, and took the broken ends of the string lights. She carefully twisted the bits of broken wire back together and ta-da, the lights blinked back on.

  “I have a stick!” Toby said, panting up beside them. He was clutching a stick that was three times as long as Kit’s leg and still had a pine cone attached. “It’s long, but we can maybe cut it to fit your leg.”

  “I don’t think I’ll need it after all, but thank you, Toby,” Kit said politely.

  “Oh. Well, maybe we should keep it by the ramp, just in case,” Toby said, trying not to look too disappointed that Kit’s leg didn’t need stabilizing. Toby really liked putting his research to good use. “Anyway, what happened? The lights broke?”

  “Kit’s wheels caught the wire and snapped it, so the circuit broke. It’s fixed now, though—I think the light string was just too loose, so it got all snarled easily—we ought to tighten the string up so there isn’t any extra,” Ellie said. “And maybe the lights should go on the sides instead of the top? But . . . hmm . . . that’ll make it harder to fold up . . .”

  Kit frowned. “If it doesn’t fold up, it won’t fit in my mom’s car.”

  “Maybe I could put wheels on it, and we could attach it to your mom’s car, and then we can tow it to the Miss Junior Peachy Clean Pageant!” Ellie said, eyes going big like capital “O’s.” It wouldn’t be that hard to find wheels, would it? As long as Kit’s mom drove very slowly—­

  “I thought it was the Miss Junior Pecan Queen Pageant,” Toby said, interrupting her thinking.

  “It’s the Miss Peachy Keen Pageant,” Kit corrected them both. “And that’s a really good idea, Ellie, but I don’t think my mom will let us attach anything to her car again. She made a rule about it, remember?”

  “Oh. Right,” Ellie said, frowning. Kit’s mom made a lot of rules—there were the regular rules that most adults had, like the “inside voices” rule and the “no muddy shoes on the couch” rule, but then she also had a lot of rules that were made mostly for when Ellie was around, like the “butter is for bread not robot parts” rule and the “no jumping off anything higher than three feet no matter what sort of parachute / bungee cord / rope you have attached” rule. She’d made the “leave my car out of it” rule after Ellie and Kit had used her car to launch a kite into the air. Ellie thought it was pretty unfair, since the car had worked as a great kite launcher; it just turned out to not be such a great kite flyer when she drove under a stoplight, and the kite got caught and then fell onto the windshield, and Kit’s mom thought it was a parrot attacking the car, and—­

  Well. It really wasn’t all that bad in the end, but Kit’s mom seemed to think it was.

  “All right, let’s think,” Ellie said. “If we could put the lights on after we get to the pageant, that might work. But then they still have to get folded up to go to the stage, right? I wish they’d just let us put the lights together on the stage. That’d be best.”

  “Ooh, and if they did let you do that, that could be your talent, Ellie!” Toby said helpfully.

  Ellie shook her head. “I just don’t think that would be a good pageant talent.”

  Kit had begged Ellie to enter the Miss Peachy Keen pageant with her, and because Kit almost always did things that Ellie wanted, Ellie had agreed. Even better, Toby was going to come along with them, too. He wasn’t going to be in the pageant, but his mom thought a weekend at a pretty hotel with Kit’s and Ellie’s moms would be fun.

  The only catch was that this would be the very first time Ellie was ever going to be in a pageant, and she was pretty nervous. Fluffing her hair big and wearing lipstick didn’t worry her—she liked lipstick, after all, and the way it left kissy marks when you kissed your arm or your electric drill or the wall—but the talent part had her feeling squiggly. Ellie knew what her best talent was—it was engineering!—but after doing a little research, Ellie had decided that engineering wasn’t a good pageant talent. As best as Ellie could tell, pageant talents were supposed to be flashy and fancy and loud—like singing or dancing or, in Kit’s case, skateboarding.

  “Or maybe I can teach you to stabilize bones! If Kit breaks her leg, your talent will be really impressive,” Toby said.

  “I don’t want to count on breaking my leg, though, Ellie, if you don’t mind,” Kit said.

  “I don’t think I have permission to break mine,” Toby said with a shrug.

  “It’s okay. I’m just going to do my ballet routine,” Ellie said. “But maybe you can teach me how to stabilize bones, Toby, just in case. You’re right—that would be a really impressive talent.”

  “Yes!” Toby said, cheering.

  “But before we start fixing bones—maybe I can try the ramp again? It’ll get dark soon,” Kit said. “I want it to be perfect for the pageant!”
r />   Ellie gave her a thumbs-up. “Don’t worry at all, Kit—the pageant people aren’t going to know what hit them!”

  “Look at what I added!” Ellie’s mom said that night, holding up a dress that was very purple and very fluffy. It took Ellie a minute to figure out what her mom was talking about, but then she saw it—a new ruffly bit right by the bottom of the skirt.

  “That looks great!” Ellie said. Ellie’s mom knew how to sew but didn’t really know how to stop sewing. Last week, she announced that she’d “officially finished” Ellie’s dress, but every night since then she’d been adding ruffles and straps and skirts and beads and sequins. Ellie didn’t mind, though, since she liked all those things and hardly ever got to wear them all at once.

  “You know what, though? Now this area looks sparse. Doesn’t it look sparse?” Ellie’s mom asked, waving her hand around the middle of the skirt.

  “Very sparse,” Ellie agreed. Her mom grinned, then grabbed some giant sequins off a nearby Styrofoam plate. Ellie took the plate, emptied the rest of the sequins off onto the bed, then grabbed for another Styrofoam plate—it was already empty. Ellie didn’t know what had originally been on it, but based on how many ruffles were on the pageant dress, she guessed ribbons.

  Ellie put one plate facedown on the floor, then used a scrap of fabric to rub the top of it. Then she put the second plate up against it—­

  The second plate swooshed away! Ellie grinned, then did it again. Each time, the second plate swooshed off, like it couldn’t stand to be so close to the plate on the ground.

  “Look!” Ellie called to her mom. “I have magic powers!”

  “Magic powers?” Ellie’s mom said without turning around. “What sort of powers?”

  “I can make these plates angry with each other, see?” Ellie said. Her mom turned to look just as one plate swooshed away. Ellie grinned. “It’s not really magic. It’s just the static electricity.”

  “Rats. I was hoping for magical pizza-conjuring powers. Or at least cold soda–conjuring powers,” Ellie’s mom said, pretending to be disappointed.

  “It’s static because it stays still—the electricity stays right here between the plates,” Ellie said. “It’s different from the electricity that goes through wires, like the ones for the lights on Kit’s skateboard ramp, because that’s electric current. It moves through the wires. Kinda like a river has a current, you know?”

  “Or like how a can of soda could currently be on its way to me,” Ellie’s mom said.

  “It’s the same as when you rub a balloon on your head,” Ellie went on. “All the electricity just sits in one place and makes your hair stand up all crazy.”

  “You know what would be crazy good? A can of soda,” Ellie’s mom said.

  Ellie blinked. “Would you like me to get you a can of soda?” she asked.

  “How did you know?” Ellie’s mom said happily. “Yes, please.”

  Ellie went downstairs and got her mom the soda. When she returned, all the sequins that had been on the bed (and the Styrofoam plate before that) were now on her pageant dress. That one area definitely didn’t look sparse now.

  “Perfect!” Ellie’s mom said, and opened the soda before giving Ellie a sip. “Hey, maybe you could tell people about static electricity for your talent! That is, if you still aren’t sure about doing your ballet routine from the spring recital?”

  Ellie sighed and flopped onto the bed, sending bits of thread and sequins into the air and back down, like glitter rain. “I like my ballet routine; I just know it isn’t my best talent. Engineering is!”

  Ellie’s mom frowned. “Well, that’s true—you are very good at engineering. But you are a very good ballet dancer, too! Do you know many of the other contestants’ talents? Maybe looking at those will give us some new ideas.”

  Ellie knew only that lots of contestants sang and danced, so she and her mom looked at the Miss Peachy Keen Pageant website and found the page where all the contestants were listed. There were twenty-five girls entered in the category that Ellie and Kit were in—Miss Junior Peachy Keen—and each had a few pictures and some things about them written on the page. Lots of the girls—like Kit—had very fancy pictures of them wearing real lipstick and dangly earrings. Ellie’s entry didn’t have much written about her, but she liked her picture—it was right after she’d lost a tooth, and it made her smile look funny strange and maybe a little funny ha-ha.

  “Let’s see—singing, singing, singing,” Ellie’s mom said, reading up on each contestant. “Ooh, this girl juggles! That’s a fun talent.”

  “Ooh, I bet I could build a machine to toss her those clubs, so she doesn’t have to have someone else do it!” Ellie said, pointing to someone she guessed was the girl’s mother—who was mid–club toss—in the photo.

  “That would be a very nice thing to offer, but perhaps there’s not enough time for this pageant,” Ellie’s mom said. “This girl plays the violin, and oh—this girl plays the flute while she dances!”

  “Whoa!” Ellie said. “That’s such a good talent!” She grabbed one of her pigtails and pulled it. How was she supposed to go on after jugglers and singers and Kit’s skateboarding and flute playing while dancing? She had to come up with something amazing!

  “This girl does a magic act,” Ellie’s mom said, scrolling along.

  “Hey, I know who that is!” Ellie answered, pouncing toward the computer screen. “That’s Melody Harris!”

  “Does she go to your school?” Ellie’s mom asked, tilting her head at the girl’s picture. Melody Harris had dark-brown hair and big eyes. She was wearing a sparkly necklace and sparkly earrings and a sparkly bracelet, which you could see because she had her chin propped up on her hand for her picture. She was even wearing nail polish, and Ellie would have bet her favorite hammer it wasn’t the peel-off kind.

  Ellie shook her head. “Nope. I don’t really know her—I just know her name. She and Kit are always in pageants together.”

  “Oh, that’s nice!”

  Ellie kept shaking her head. “Nope again. Melody and Kit don’t get along because Melody doesn’t like it when Kit wins.”

  “What about when Melody wins?”

  “Melody probably really likes that.”

  “I meant what does Kit think when Melody wins, Ellie?” her mom asked pointedly.

  Ellie shrugged. “I don’t think losing the pageant bothers Kit as much as people not getting along does.” Kit hated fights and arguing and people being left out, even if they weren’t actually being left out but were just trying to sneak up on a lizard, and Kit accidentally scared it away by shouting, “Hello! I’m Kit! What’s your name?” (This happened to a new boy at school. He forgave Kit, but it took a little while, since it’d been an especially big lizard.)

  “Well, Melody’s magic act does look very impressive. I can see why she wins a lot of pageants,” Ellie’s mom said, looking back at the screen. There was a picture of Melody Harris in a shiny magician’s tuxedo with a red bow tie. She had a top hat in one hand, and popping out of it was a real live rabbit with white fur.

  Ellie thought hard. “Maybe for my talent, I can build a rabbit tunnel, except one that’s like an ant farm. You know, where you can see in one side? And then the audience can watch the rabbit crawl through the tunnel!”

  “That sounds very cool, but it doesn’t sound like Melody would let you borrow her rabbit. Besides, you only have two and a half minutes for your talent,” Ellie’s mom reminded her in a gentle voice. “And you know what takes exactly two and a half minutes? Your ballet routine,” Ellie’s mom said with a grin, then turned back to her sewing machine.

  “Ilove pageants!” Toby said. Or at least, that’s what Ellie guessed he said—his mouth was full of chocolate candy.

  “Me too!” Ellie answered. Or at least, that’s what she tried to say—her mouth was also full of chocolate candy.

  “Be careful—the judges are already watching! They’re always watching,” Kit told them both. Her mouth was not full of candy; she ate the M&M’s in her palm one at a time, looking very pretty as she did so. Kit was always better at these types of things than Ellie.

  Ellie swallowed her candy and tried to stand up a little straighter; Kit gave her a thumbs-up. They were at the hotel, and at the Miss Peachy Keen Pageant check-in desk, there was an enormous table covered in candy. It was arranged in pretty rows of dishes that sat on top of mint-green cardboard heart cutouts, and almost all the candy was peach or white or mint green. Even the M&M’s were those colors, even though they still all just tasted like regular chocolate.