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“It’ll be fine. They’re not gone-gone.” I could still feel the energy pulsing around her trailer. “I just think I have to be careful is all. Besides—this went better than you thought it would, huh?”

“Yeah. Even though talking about things isn’t fun.”

I swung my legs out the window.

“Aren’t you scared though?” she asked me as I jumped down. “What if no one comes forward? And you’ve just pissed more people off at you?”

“It’s okay,” I said, popping her screen back into place, tapping down each corner. “That’s what superheroes do.”

I raced back to my trailer and opened the door, out of breath, to the aroma of hotdogs being microwaved—my mother’s go-to dish.

“Oh, Mom, I’m sorry I’m late.”

“I saw you and Liam, out in the yard,” my mother said.

“You did?” I said, my voice high.

“Love birds!” she said, then cackled. “That’s why you had to go off and talk to Lacey, wasn’t it? Did he ask you out again?”

I flushed bright red. “Not yet.”

“Well don’t worry, he will. Here you go dear,” she said, stabbing a hotdog and offering it up on a bun. “Eat up.”

I took the most phallic edible we had in our house from her, waved it, and ran off to my room shouting, “Homework!”

The hotdog sat uneaten on my nightstand while I listened at my door, waiting for a swell on the TV. Someone said something funny to someone else and I bolted for the bathroom then locked the door. I sat on the counter and hitched my shirt up in an instant.

The Lichtenberg figures were still there. But faint now, oh so faint.

Shit.

I grabbed the laptop out from underneath the toilet paper rolls and hustled back to my room.

CHAPTER 49

Ispent the rest of the night staring at a piece of paper with a pencil in my hand, pulling up every text I’d downloaded from Mason’s phone inside my mind, one at a time. I didn’t think pulling them up was using any powers. I thought they were just sitting there inside, like the War of 1812. I wondered what other actually important knowledge they’d replaced, like Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. By the end of it I was exhausted and pretty sure I couldn’t remember the state flower, but I had him. I’d found evidence of at least three months of tests, from two different classes based on their different dates and times, and I was right—one of them was every first Tuesday, and I knew the time, 10:55, I had the time-stamps. I just didn’t know where Mason would be, and without knowing that, I had no way of getting between him and a cell phone tower.

I didn’t have any other homework—well, I’d had some, but it’d gotten left in my locker at school, what with my bag trauma—I lay down on my bed and held my phone on my chest like a corpse in a cartoon holding a flower. Then I turned it on.

Texts hadn’t eased up and someone had put a photo of my bag on ZB. The subsequent captions were charming.But interspersed with all the other useless data were three anonymous private messages:

starlightpixel333:

Hey

TheDramaLlamaThatsYourMama:

Are you for real?

1IcecreamIncident2:

I hate those fuckers!

from entirely different accounts. I concentrated on them to the exclusion of all else, and sent back,

To starlightpixel333:

I’m here