Page 23

Story: Electricity

“Also, we need to give a friend a ride home. No, she’s on the way.”

I’d been hit by lightning. It was the only explanation. Passing out, my back, my shoes, passing out again tonight, the headaches earlier—I looked at myself again, imagining myself like some cartoon character, flipping from black-to-white-to-x-ray and back again. Zapped by a million-jillion volts.

I had to tell Sarah and Lacey. They were the only ones that’d believe me.

Darius hung up and slumped back into his seat. “My uncle’s coming.”

“Awesome,” I said, flatly. All those times I’d wanted to be alone in a car with a boy, and here I finally was, only it was this one.

“I can’t believe you touched the cables like that. Why?—”

I cut him off. “You ever know something’s a bad idea, but you still want to do it anyways?”

“All the time.”

“Well, it was like that.” I wasn’t going to say anything about feeling like the cables wanted me to hold them. There was cool-insane and literally-insane and I wanted to stay on the right side of the line.

“Could’ve stopped your heart. And then you would’ve been shit out of luck. I haven’t done CPR since Boy Scouts.”

“Good thing it didn’t, then,” I said back with the same amount of attitude. I kicked off my shoes and pulled my feet up onto the seat with me, huddling inside his coat, arms tucked into their opposite sleeves. Between the earlier rain, the more recentrain, and having apparently fallen into some sort of puddle, I was freezing.

“No heater, sorry.”

“S’okay,” I said. My eyes fell on his phone, back safe in his console. I knew Lacey’s number, I could call her, but then he’d be listening.

“So what’s really wrong with her?”

“Who?” I said.

Darius made a face. “You know who. I heard Burton fired her.”

“Yeah, well—” Bile rose in my throat and I looked out the window, not at him. “She’s sick is all.”

“Uh, okay,” he said, clearly disbelieving me. “If you say so.”

“I do.” I huddled deeper into his coat. It smelled like him, like boy and deodorant and sweat, and the collar chafed up against my ears. My teeth began to chatter. “You sure the engine’s dead?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

But—it didn’t feel dead to me.

How did I even know that?

I yanked my arms out of his sleeves and looked at my hands. They looked the same as they always did, but there was some sense—with them, or inside them, or inside me—of where the power was inside the hood. Like I could reach out and stroke it, the fur of some exotic beast, that pressed back not with bristles but with charges.

It wasn’t gone. And it wasn’t dead. It was alive—as alive as I was.

“Try again,” I pleaded. “Please. I’m freezing.”

Darius sighed heavily, but leaned forward and twisted the key. His engine sputtered twice and then caught. The lights turned on, basking us in a soft golden glow, and the radio started blaring hip-hop.

He pumped his fist in the air, shouted “Yes!”, and then turned his radio down.

We idled in the lot for another minute while he called his uncle off, and while he was on the phone he cranked the heat up and pointed all the available heaters at me. “Yeah, Jimmy, no—I got a charge from someone else—I’m good now, I’ll be home soon.”

He put his cell phone away and we sat there idling, him revving the engine now and then, to make sure the charge would hold.

Somehow—holding my hands out to the engine like I was warming them—I knew that it would.