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Instead of taking my clothes off and dashing to the shower naked, I went into the bathroom this time to disrobe alone. If the marks were still there, I didn’t want Allie to see them.

And sure enough, they were. Just like the lightning I’d seen earlier, zapping a line down my back, bright-bright-bright red against my pale winter skin.

To think of all the times I’d stood in front of this mirror looking at myself, mad about things that were wrong with me—my boobs for messing everything up, too many moles, my assorted pimples and their subsequent scars. Now I really did have something wrong with me—legitimately wrong—but—it was cool. Kind of.

I turned around, brushing my hand past the awkward plug on the side of the wall that made my mother’s hot curling iron into a trip-trap, and felt a…a wave.

I repeated the motion, and felt the same thing. Pieces of my brain tried to parse it—when I did this, it was weird, and it did that to me—but I didn’t have any words for what was going on.

Other than Ifeltthat the plug was there. Like the slumbering beast of Darius’s engine—I could feel this plug in miniature, like I was pushing into a staticky softness that gave. I waved my hand in a circle. There was a tug both above and below the plug—where the wires behind it flowed out.

I wrapped a towel around myself and followed the wires—they went down, under the floor, or up too high for me to follow, but it didn’t matter—I could catch up with them again at the next plug, and the one after that in my bedroom, and then the ones after that in the kitchen—oh the kitchen, with its microwave and oven and refrigerator and can openers and tea kettle, everything with its own individual and then cumulative pulse.

I stood in the center of the kitchen. It was like I could feel the entire trailer’s circulatory system. Its power, pumped by an electrical heart. And if I closed my eyes and concentrated just right, I could see it beating.

“This…is awesome.”

“What is?” Allie asked, peeking out from around the corner. “Your new boyfriend?”

“Get to bed!” I shouted. She ran off with a snicker and I stomped back into the bathroom to shower.

CHAPTER 11

Without Lacey I took the school bus to school and I sat near the front like a chump. It’d been so long I’d completely forgotten bus etiquette, and even though I was older than most of the other kids trapped aboard, if I’d wanted to sit near the back of the bus I didn’t have much pull.

Not in that way, at least.

I sat by myself with Darius’s coat in a nondescript grocery bag beside me, and waved my hands back and forth. The bus’s engine was massive compared to Darius’s car and I could feel it thrumming in front of me. I waved my hands in front of myself like I was petting it, feeling the charging sensations ripple.

By the end of the route the bus was almost full and everyone else on it had someone else to talk to but me.

“Did you hear?”

“Of course I heard.”

“I didn’t.”

Three separate voices from not far behind me. I knew who they were without turning: Emily, Shannon, and Kortney.

“Uh, because you’re lame.”

“So shut up and tell me?—”

“Lacey Harper ruined Liam’s party.”

I stiffened in my seat.

“The bitch couldn’t handle her beer—she called the cops, got everyone busted?—”

I ground my teeth together as Kortney’s crew made appreciative sounds. That wasn’t what’d happened—but I couldn’t tell anyone the truth. We were almost to campus, I just had to hold on a little longer.

Then Emily said, “She’d better not be at school today.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I wheeled in my seat to look back at them. “Why?”

They were surprised by my interruption as the bus driver put the vehicle in park and shut the engine down. The sensation of power around me dropped, and watching them look at me like wolves surrounding a sheep, I felt my stomach drop too.

Kortney stood. “You know why,” she said, before stalking off down the aisle. Emily and Shannon laughed, following her.