The Salamander Club and the Glowing Creek

I was supposed to be writing about salamanders.

That's what my field journal said at the top of page seventeen—"June 12, Salamander Species of Fern Hollow"—right above my half-finished list of observations from the afternoon. I'd found two red-backed salamanders under a rotting log near the creek, plus what I was pretty sure was a dusky salamander, though I needed to check Mom's field guide to be certain. The page smelled like dirt and creek water because I'd been kneeling in the mud when I wrote it.

But now it was almost ten o'clock at night, and I was staring out my bedroom window at something that made salamanders seem boring, which I previously would have said was impossible.

The creek was glowing.

Not reflecting moonlight. Not catching fireflies. Glowing. Electric blue, bright enough to see from my second-floor window, like someone had poured a bucket of that glow-stick liquid right into the water.

I pressed my nose against the screen and blinked hard three times, which is what I do when I think my eyes might be lying to me. The glow didn't disappear.

"Wren?" Otis stood in my doorway, clutching his stuffed turtle. His pajamas had planets on them, which seemed appropriate somehow, because what I was looking at seemed more like outer space than North Carolina. "Why is the creek blue?"