The Leap Year Kids

Every four years, something rare happens. Most people know about the extra day — February 29th, slipped into the calendar like a secret. What most people don't know is that children born on that day are different. Not different in the way people sometimes say when they mean strange or difficult. Different the way a shooting star is different from a regular star. Different the way a four-leaf clover is different from the three-leaf kind. Ellie Park found out on the morning of her ninth birthday — which was, technically, only her second real birthday. She was trying to zip up her backpack and running late for school, and the zipper was stuck, and she was getting frustrated, and then — very suddenly, with no warning at all — the backpack zipped itself. She stared at it. The backpack looked innocent. Backpacks are good at that. Ellie tried it again: she unzipped it, looked away, thought hard about it being zipped — and it zipped. She screamed. Very quietly, into her pillow, so her parents wouldn't hear. Then she picked up her backpack and walked to school, because there was a math test and she was already late. What Ellie didn't know yet was that across town, three other kids were having equally confusing mornings. Marcus could hear what his dog was thinking. (The dog was thinking about cheese. It was always thinking about cheese.) Priya had woken up able to see exactly ten minutes into the future, which seemed amazing until she realized she could only see her own future, and her immediate future was almost entirely composed of boring school hallways. And Tobias — Tobias had it the strangest of all — Tobias had woken up able to understand every language in the world. Which was impressive in theory, but mostly meant he now knew that his goldfish had been deeply unhappy with the water temperature for the last six months and he felt terrible about it. By lunchtime, someone would send them all the same message. It arrived in the way that important messages always arrive — not by phone, not by email, not by anything ordinary. It arrived as a folded note tucked inside each of their identical library copies of The History of the Calendar, a book none of them had chosen or wanted. The note said four words. Find the others. Now. In the back of the cafeteria, Ellie looked up from her peanut butter sandwich, saw a boy she'd never talked to reading the exact same note with the exact same expression — and she understood, in the way that you understand things in your bones before your brain catches up, that her life had just fundamentally changed. She folded the note. Put it in her pocket. "Hey," she said. "Are you a February 29th kid?" The boy looked up. "Are you?" She nodded. He slid the note across to her, and she slid hers across to him, and they sat there reading each other's copies of the same four words. "Okay," Ellie said. "Who else?"