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I waited for five more kids before I grabbed my backpack and Darius’s coat and got off.

If Lacey was on campus today, it was going to be up to me to protect her—but how? I had to figure out a plan, and fast—I ran up the steps to the doors and?—

Everything felt different, the moment I stepped inside. I stopped in the doorway, as students swirled around me. I could feel it—there was power here, power everywhere. Sharp boar-bristles reaching out from sockets in the walls, soft feather strokes charging the fluorescent lights above, scaled conduits running from room to room beneath the ground below, almost too deep for me to feel them. I knew now what I hadn’t known before—there was no part of Redson High that wasn’t plugged in and charging.

And for a moment, standing there, I felt like I was a part of it. A conduit. Charges jumped to me, flickered up and down and out through me and back again. I felt like I was alive, no, double-alive—like radiant wings of light were cascading down from my back and arcing up from my feet simultaneously.

My classmates however saw none of this and someone’s backpack hit me accidentally. I’d been standing in one place too long, my knees locked, so I stumbled forward and the moment was gone. I blinked and ordinary Redson High was in full effect again. There was no magic-electricity here—just brick walls, closer to a jail than any other building, except for the lockers and posters, cheering us on for the next baseball game.

I walked over to Lacey and I’s lockers feeling out of place and found Sarah already there, pissed.

“So when were you going to tell me?”

I relaxed a moment. Lacey’d confided in her too—with me offline me for a day, who else was she going to talk to?—and I wouldn’t have to fight this fight alone.

Then Sarah grabbed my shoulder and started dragging me down the hall.

“I got you invites. Invites! I promised you’d be cool!”

I dug my heels in. “What?”

“You know what. Lacey—at Liam’s party—blowing it for everyone.”

I shrugged her hand off of me. “Sarah, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m grounded, for going to breakfast with you. So explain what youthinkhappened, nice and slow.”

Sarah’s face took that shrewish turn. As embarrassed as she was for her own sake, it was still really juicy gossip. “At the party,” Sarah said, dropping her voice, like the whole school didn’t know already. “She drank too much and started puking everywhere I guess—then someone called an ambulance and the cops showed up.”

Lacey’s story hadn’t included an ambulance. Was that because she was too drunk to remember it, or was her story already being embellished?

“They shut the party down, started asking everyone questions.” Her eyes went dark and serious. “It’s all her fault, Jessie. And the seniors blame me. They know I invited her—even though I wasn’t there.”

“What, didn’t Ryan vouch for your whereabouts?”In his truck?went unsaid.

She rolled her eyes. “In a manner of speaking, yes,” she said. “But this is serious. There’s going to be fall-out.”

“Like what?” The warning bell dinged. I looked over her shoulder toward my locker. Lacey hadn’t shown up yet, which meant she probably wasn’t going to today, thank God.

“I don’t know. I just know that they’re pissed.”

“When you say they, do you mean the entire senior class?”

“Just the ones of them whose parents got called that night—like half of the baseball team.”

“Which half?” I wanted to know who was still there at 2 AM?—

“It doesn’t matter which half, Jessie!” she hissed. “Parents know their kids party, but they don’t want to know-know, you know?”

“I know, sheesh.”

The halls around us cleared. “Maybe it’ll all blow over—but until then—I’m glad she’s not here.”

“Glad for her sake, or for yours?” I asked.

She pursed her lips like she was sucking sour candy. “See you in biology,” she said, and brushed past me.

I made it through history—my attention in class as perfunctory as Coach Stevens’s efforts in teaching it—and got back to my locker. No Lacey. I knew her locker combination. I was temptedto look inside, in case she’d shown up late and some jock-brute had origamied her inside.

I felt someone coming up behind me—the same way as I felt the charges in the walls. Like the pressure from a gentle hand. I whirled just as a familiar voice said, “Hey.” It was Liam. He’d come down all fifteen lockers to talk to me.