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My lips pulled into a thin line. I’d been waiting for my mother to get up, hoping that she’d take over kitchen duty tonight.

“I’m really hungry,” Allie complained, holding her stomach in an exaggerated fashion.

“I know.” I was, too. I hadn’t eaten much at lunch, since I’d been eating covertly in the library, alone, Sarah off in the bleachers watching Ryan practice and Lacey absent entirely. Mrs. Frost had better hearing than Allie did, she’d hear if you ate anything louder than a grilled cheese.

But—if I blew things up at home—nothing in here had an insurance policy half as good as Sarah’s phone plan. What the hell was happening to me? How could I figure things out safely, and control it? I needed to figure out a way, but until I could, I couldn’t imagine us getting by without a fridge or a stove. Which left me with?—

I turned back to the dining room table— “Hey, Allie, want to play a game?”

“What kind of game?” she said, looking coyly up at me from her coloring. Her reluctance was my own fault. You can only pretend the quiet game is actually a game so many times.

“Chef and waitress.”

Her eyes lit up. “I want to be the waitress.”

“No—I want you to be the boss?—”

“Then I want to be the waitress?—”

“The chef is the boss of the waitress.”

My little sister had been in so few restaurants it wasn’t like she could disagree. She gave me a look and I started selling.

“It means you’re going to get to cook everything,” I explained, adding, “with my help,” lest she get any ideas that turning on the stove while no one was home was a good idea.

“I guess?—”

“Come on,” I said, bouncing up. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

Under my expert tutelage, my little sister managed to make fish sticks and tater tots without burning the house down, and when we were almost done my mother joined us at the table. I, the dutiful waitress, put a plate in front of her.

“This? Again?” My mother pushed a tater tot around her place with a fish stick like it was a hockey puck.

“I made it, Momma!” Allie said, proud.

“Thanks,” my mother said dryly.

“You did a really good job,” I said. Allie bobbed her head up and down, pleased with herself, mouth full of warm potato, as I tried to shield her from our mother’s sour tongue.

It didn’t used to be like this. Mom used to be happy, sometimes, not just for a shining moment between just-drunk-enough and too-drunk. I could remember it from my childhood, from before dad had left. Could Allie? Or had she been too small? I wondered if she was luckier than I was—I was pretty sure knowing what we’d had and lost was worse than never having had it at all.

“I asked how school was,” my mother said in a sharp tone that let me know I’d already missed the question once.

I turned back from the sink and shrugged instinctively. “It’s fine.”

I washed dishes in the sink, ignoring the siren song of the microwave, fridge, and oven behind me, and my mother went off to work that night with a minimum of fuss, although I had no doubt that the car keys and my phone were still safely in her bag. I wouldn’t be able to use my phone if I had it anyhow—I had to figure out a way to control whatever this power was that I had. Someplace safe where I could practice and get control without hurting anything.

And that was if Icouldget control. I scrubbed at the brown stain that never moved on our baking sheet. What if I couldn’t? What if I was just a weird live current for the rest of my life?Come get zapped by the amazing Shock Girl!

But I’d held Lacey’s hand without hurting her. Which was good—Lacey didn’t need anyone else hurting her right now.

Which…might be another reason she didn’t want to talk to the police. I turned the water off and watched it circle down the drain.

Was she doing the right thing? That someone could hurt her so badly and just get to walk away with no repercussions and then send her notes like, like, he knew her or something, like it hadn’t mattered, like it’d been no big deal—because for him, it hadn’t been—I wrung the sponge out fiercely before setting it on its shelf.

“Jessie, what’s wrong with the TV?” Allie asked. I turned around and saw her shaking the remote—the characters on her favorite TV show were frozen.

That…was me.