On Monday, Sunny, Enid, and Ros sat at their usual place in the cafeteria, chatting over their lunches and comparing their deserts. Roslyn brought orange slices, not the fruit but the sweets, perfectly chewy and encrusted with tiny gems of sugar that crunched between your teeth, and after a show of protest, she promised to distribute them evenly.

The conversation turned to television, weighing the virtues of American Ninja Warrior against Glee, which Enid called emo candy, when Wil approached. They'd all been watching him, sitting alone on the far side of the lunchroom, and only Ros felt a little sorry. He'd left Sunny's house on Saturday with an attitude and though Audrey had salvaged the afternoon with knock-knock jokes and redcurrant jelly smeared over toast, none of them had spoken to him since.

"I'm..." he began, but Enid interrupted.

"How many windows? I know you counted."

He balked, then said under his breath, "Fourteen. And Mrs. Kolas' eyes are brown. I know you're mad at me, I just wanted to apologize."

He turned to go, but Sunny grabbed his sleeve, "Nobody hates you, Wil. I'm overprotective, and I'm sorry too."

Wil looked as shy, moody, and uncomfortable as he had the week before when he thanked Enid for sticking up for him in the classroom, but he also looked contrite and hopeful.

"Even if I was thinking it, I shouldn't have said."

"No, you shouldn't have, but everyone makes mistakes. It only starts to count against you when you make the same one twice." She gave him a forgiving smile and he returned it with gratitude.

Enid had her own concerns, eyeing Roslyn with horror as she took bites from a sandwich made with Braunschweiger and limburger on toasted rye.

"How do you even?" Enid said, "I can taste that funk from way over here."

"What?" Ros said with her mouth full, then chewed and swallowed with difficulty. "It's just like liverwurst."

"Is that supposed to make it sound better?"

"Braunschweiger is pretty good," Wil said, and Ros stuck out her tongue at Enid.

"That's it," Enid said, wadding up her napkin and dropping it into her brown bag, "you're both dead to me."

"Not everyone can live on peanut butter." Sunny told her, hanging on to Wil until he obliged her by sitting down, "And stop being so sensitive, Wil. When you have something to say come sort it out instead of staring at us from way over there. Ros is the only one who bites and I'm sure she's not poisonous."

"Hey!" Roslyn objected around her sandwich, and Wil grinned at her, but kindly, and just like that they were all friends again.

"So what happened with the sun?" Wil asked after they cleaned up their lunch and laid out an impromptu desert buffet.

"Mom was right," Sunny said and popped an orange slice into her mouth.

Will hesitated, afraid of saying the wrong thing, before finally asking, "How do you know?"

"The stick, duh," said Enid, and Wil gave her a suspicious look.

"I stuck it in the ground where the picnic table's shadow came to a point," said Sunny, "At two-thirteen yesterday the shadow was almost six inches away."

"Six? That can't be possible."

"I know."

"That's really bad," said Wil, eyes wide, "isn't it?"

"Doesn't that depend on what caused it?" said Roslyn eagerly, "I mean the whole sun can't just move, can it?"

"The sun's always moving." Enid mumbled, prying candy off her teeth with her tongue.

Roslyn gave her the stink eye, "I know, I meant it can't move to some place it shouldn't be."

"Probably not," Sunny said as she stood up, collecting her trash, "but if the sun didn't move, then the light from it did."

Wil frowned, "It'd have to be something huge. How do you bend that much light?"

"A really big prism?" Enid said, "Maybe it's just weird weather. Sunsets can look a billion different ways depending on what's in the air."

"But it didn't just look different, it was in a whole different place." Sunny said, and nobody had any better ideas.

"Nobody's gonna believe it," Roslyn pointed out, "If it's back where it belongs and nobody noticed, does it matter what you saw?"

They walked to class tossing ideas back and forth until Roslyn peeled off with a wave, but Sunny wasn't satisfied with conjecture. What they'd seen couldn't have happened without a reason.

The rest of that week the four met for lunch every day and spent their time not talking about the properties of light and misplaced shadows. Wil brought news on Friday that his dad said they'd be in Delphi for at least the rest of the year, which made him much less sullen, which in turn made him considerably more fun to be around. Hanging out with a boy who was at least four inches taller than the biggest eighth grader had side benefits too, not the least of which was that Phoebe and the bully squad were less eager to harass the three girls.

All things considered, Sunny thought to herself, the year was off to a great start.

At Audrey's insistence, Wil returned for lunch that Saturday. Sunny asked Ros, but her family was going on a weekend road trip and she couldn't make it. Enid was present as usual, and Sunny made chicken wings in the oven with green bean fries, followed by Mrs. Summers' favorite desert, frosted strawberry Pop Tarts. The day was unseasonably warm, so they ate around the kitchen table with Ruckus making his usual rounds.

After lunch, Audrey insisted on cleaning up, shooing the three teens into the front yard where they continued talking on the porch. The trees had begun to blush bright oranges and reds, and they sat with Autumn jackets draped over the railing, except for Wil who hadn't worn one.

Sunny endured twenty minutes of casual conversation between Enid and Wil before giving in and showing them what she'd been itching to share.

"Follow me, I want you to see something."

Wil and Enid exchanged looks, but neither objected as Sunny led them around the house to the back yard. A dozen popsicle sticks were jammed into the ground and linked to one another with red and blue yarn around a tall tomato stake.

Enid appraised the sculpture with a hand on her chin. "I'm guessing this is not your plan to build a replica of Stonehenge on the football field."

"That's not a bad idea," Sunny said, "but no. I've been marking the position of the sun every morning before school and every afternoon when I get home."

"I thought we were over this," Said Wil, but Sunny ignored him.

"The blue ones are morning positions and the red ones are evening. Everything is fine when I leave the house; the changes are small, like where they should be."

"And the red ones aren't." Enid knelt to examine Sunny's experiment, "These three look okay."

"That's Monday and Tuesday, then this one," she pointed to one almost a foot away from the others, "is Wednesday at the same time. Thursday comes back in line, then yesterday it moved again."

Wil scratched his head, "What does it mean though?"

"So far, only that what we saw last week wasn't a fluke. I've been checking the weather too because I wondered if barometric pressure could do this. That's the top number on the sticks."

"They look pretty close, twenty-nine point six seven, twenty-nine point six five..." Enid scanned each one in turn, "What are the numbers below it?"

"Well, the pressure was a dead end, it's all pretty normal, but on Tuesday I thought to record other things like humidity and cloud cover. Nothing stands out except for temperature. Yesterday and Wednesday it was more than ten degrees above average. I looked it up."

"That doesn't seem like a big deal," Wil said, "it might not mean anything."

"If it's connected," Sunny waved a hand at her crude sundial, "then it's important. According to the news, the high today is supposed to be seventy-two degrees. I checked the almanac, and that's two degrees cooler than average for today." Sunny pointed to a thermometer hanging on the side of her house, "It's already eighty, and look," she pointed to the tip of the tomato stake's shadow, "it's just after one and you can tell it's out of place. Whatever it is, it's happening again."

Wil and Enid squinted up at the sky, which appeared normal to anyone less attentive than Sunny's mom, or less diligent than a teenager who couldn't stand to leave a question unanswered.

"Even if this is right, and I'm not saying it isn't," Wil held up his hands when Sunny's expression cooled, "Roslyn is right, no adult is going to believe it. We're just kids."

"Kids with evidence," Enid said, taking Sunny's side. They were besties after all.

"I was hoping you could ask your dad about it," Sunny said, "or your mom. If she's a mathematician and a theorist, this might be the kind of thing that interests her. Maybe it's nothing, but if anyone around here would know for sure they probably would, right?"

The two girls looked at Wil who looked suddenly extremely uncomfortable, "I don't know. My parents already think I'm kind of an idiot, how would that sound? Hey dad, the sun is two inches to the left today." He pulled a derp-face while he said it and Sunny bit her lip to keep from giggling. She inherited that trait from her mom: the best humor was the simplest.

"Just tell him the truth and you can blame me if you want. I think it's important. If something's bending light and making it ten degrees warmer, someone should know about it. Maybe they do, but we wouldn't have noticed if not for mom, and I don't think this is the kind of thing other adults would check for."

Wil first objected, then debated for several minutes, hearing arguments from Sunny and Enid, who thought it was a great idea, before submitting to their demands.

"Fine," he said, "I'll bring it up to mom tonight and see what she says, but I'm not going to tell her about all this yet. I'll just ask if it's possible, and what might cause it."

Sunny frowned, "But this is important, it's not just a theory, something's really happening."

"You don't know my parents," he said, "If I go to them with some wild idea they'll just reject it. If I want them to take it seriously, I have to prove I've thought it through first, and that's going to take time."

"But..." Sunny began.

"He's right," Enid said, and Sunny stopped, feeling a little betrayed, "Wil knows how to talk to his parents, and anyone else will just laugh at us."

Sunny gestured at the house behind her, "Mom said..."

"Everyone loves your mom, Sunny, but they don't know how special she is. They won't believe her either without some proof. Better proof than all this. I don't think the world is going to blow up in the next few days, and if it's something that big it's probably too late to do anything about it anyway."

Sunny didn't change her mind, but she relented, "Okay. I see your point, but please do it tonight Wil. I'm not afraid of this," she nodded at her popsicle sticks, "I'm afraid whatever is big enough to cause this can do a lot worse."