The girl shrugged, put the tray down on the table, and left.
Almost without thinking, Jonah stood up and walked over to the table. Food … When was the last time he’d eaten? Breakfast yesterday—well, yesterday more than five hundred years in the future. Mom had made French toast and bacon, one of Jonah’s favorite meals, as a special treat because she thought he might be nervous about going to an adoption conference.
If only I’d known what was really going to happen to me that day, Jonah thought, I would have eaten six slices of French toast instead of only four!
He looked down at the food on the tray—two mugs, two bowls of something that looked like oatmeal, two bowls of something that might be stewed dates, a charred hunk of something that might be meat, and a loaf of bread that looked hard enough to break a tooth on.
It all looked disgusting, but Jonah’s stomach growled anyway.
Nobody would be able to tell if I just took a bite or two of the oatmeal, Jonah thought.
He reached for one of the spoons and scooped up a tiny amount of the runny, grayish cereal. It steamed as he brought it up to his mouth and hesitantly maneuvered it toward his tongue. He closed his lips around the spoon. …
And immediately began coughing.
Did they use a whole jar of cinnamon in this one bowl? And then a whole jar of cloves, too?
He coughed, gagged, coughed again. He spit the oatmeal back onto the spoon.
When he finally stopped choking, he realized that Katherine, Chip, and Alex were all awake now, and staring at him.
“What are you doing?” Katherine demanded.
Jonah felt a little bit like Goldilocks, except he’d gotten caught eating the porridge, instead of sleeping.
“I just took one bite,” he defended himself. “I was hungry, and I didn’t think anyone would notice. I just didn’t know it’d taste so awful.”
Chip stood up, stretched, and wandered toward the table.
“I bet it’d taste okay to Alex and me,” he said. “You’re right—nobody would miss just a bite or two.”
“Plus,” Alex said, joining them as well, “it’d be an interesting experiment. Visible food being eaten by an invisible kid—can you see the food all the way down the digestive tract? Or does it disappear once it’s in your mouth?” He looked over at Jonah. “I don’t see the food in your stomach.”
“Didn’t swallow,” Jonah muttered.
Chip reached for the spoon in the other bowl of oatmeal.
“One small bite for man, one giant science experiment for mankind,” he said, dramatically lifting the spoon toward his mouth.
As soon as his lips closed around the spoon, he began gagging too.
“Ugh! That’s nasty!” he screamed, spitting even more emphatically than Jonah had. “Water! Must have …”
Jonah lifted a mug from the tray.
Chip took a huge gulp—and then spit that out too.
“That’s beer! Beer and oatmeal—blech!”
“The king of England drinks beer for breakfast?” Jonah asked curiously.
“Ale,” Alex corrected him. “Everyone drinks a lot of ale, even kids. The water isn’t always safe.”
Jonah shook his head in amazement. Chip was still spitting and moaning.
“Are you guys crazy?” Katherine demanded, coming over to the table to join them. “Making all this noise, spitting things everywhere—do you want someone to catch us?”
Chip stopped spitting long enough to say, “Well, we are invisible. They have to see us before they can catch us.”
“That’s not invisible,” Katherine said, pointing at the tray, with its pools of beer and oatmeal spittle.
“Sorry,” Chip said meekly.
Katherine swayed, then dropped down into a chair beside the table.
“I just want to go home,” she moaned. “It feels like the whole room is spinning, my stomach hurts, my head aches—and I bet no one’s invented aspirin yet!”
“Well,” Alex said, “people do know that they can chew on the bark or leaves of willow trees, which contain salicin, which is related to aspirin, so—”
“Shut. Up,” Katherine said fiercely.
Alex did.
This was Katherine at her worst: Katherine grumpy, Katherine embittered, Katherine mad at the world and ready to blame everyone else for her problems. Jonah’s usual strategy when Katherine was like this was to avoid her like the plague.
(The plague! Oh, no—had that happened yet? Was it happening now? Were they all going to get bubonic fever because JB had refused to let them go home?)
To Jonah’s surprise, Chip and Alex weren’t rushing to get away from Katherine in her venom-spewing mood. Chip actually went over to stand beside her and pat her shoulder. Alex picked up the loaf of bread.
“You would probably feel better if you ate something,” he said in a low, comforting voice. “We’ve already messed up the breakfast tray, so we might as well get some good out of it.”
He pinched a piece of bread from the bottom of the loaf, where it wouldn’t be so noticeable, and handed it to Katherine.
She put it in her mouth—Jonah saw that it disappeared instantly, as soon as her almost-invisible lips closed around it. But he decided this wasn’t the right moment to point out the results of that science experiment.
Katherine chewed, swallowed, and then managed a weak smile.
“That wasn’t too bad,” she said. “Not as good as Panera or Einstein Bros., but edible at least. Just a little hard and salty.” Alex handed her another chunk of bread, but she hesitated before putting it in her mouth. “Maybe we should all eat? So we can keep our energy up and think straight?”
They ended up hollowing out the loaf of bread, so that, on the tray, the crust still looked domed and firm and whole. They also cleaned up the beer and oatmeal spills.
“Okay, so we changed time, but there aren’t going to be that many people who notice,” Katherine said. “Not because of this tray, anyway.”
She sneaked a doleful glance at Chip and Alex. She didn’t have to say it out loud, that hollowed-out bread didn’t matter when a king and a prince had vanished.