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“Okay, later,” he said, shrugging and turning away.

I turned back, and Lacey, still kneeling, looked up at me. My best friend had just run the gauntlet of everyone—knowing that the person that attacked her could be one of them, lying in wait.

But what’d broken her was my betrayal. What I’d done. I could see it shimmering in her eyes, she thought I’d joined the other side.

“It’s not like that,” I started to explain. She slammed her locker shut so hard I jumped, then started running for the back doors.

A bitter taste flooded my tongue and my heart beat like a hummingbird. “Lacey!” I shouted, running after her—then light bent again. I was in that other world, half-a-step away from our own, seeing people as colors, feeling phones as sounds, the conduits in the walls like snakes with power, seeing heat trails, and electromagnetism, my eyes burning with colors they were never meant to see. “Lacey!” I shouted, blind—when I opened my eyes to reality, everyone was looking at me. “Goddammit!” I shouted, angry at myself and with her for assuming the worst—and a second later the fire alarms clanged on.

CHAPTER 15

Ilost Lacey not because of the subsequent chaos—although there was chaos, as everyone who wasn’t in a class yet headed toward the nearest exit, and none of our fire drills had ever covered an ‘before classes start’ experience without teachers to be inmate-counters.

No, I lost Lacey because she wanted to be lost. I started running again, but there were even more kids in the halls now. “No no no no no!” I shouted at her, at everyone, trying to weave through them to get to the parking lot where I thought she’d gone, but then Coach Stevens was there and started whistling in the halls, directing the flow of students a different way.

“Oh, come on!” I said, fighting with him, him blowing his damn whistle in my face, until I finally gave up and walked in the direction I was supposed to go, outside.

The morning was ruined. How was I going to make it up to Lacey? How could I get her to believe that I was on her side? Why had I ever thought it’d be a good idea for me to branch out on my own? Who did I think I was, Nancy Drew?

I skulked around our lockers as long as I could in between every period, and never saw her again—she’d gone home without me, I knew it.

“I didn’t see any smoke signals,” Sarah said, sliding in beside me in bio, oblivious to all that’d come before.

“He just wants someone to study with is all.” I shrugged and turned her way. “Lacey was here this morning?—”

“I heard her locker got egged. Gross. Where is she now?”

“I’m pretty sure she just left campus again. During the fire alarm.”

Sarah’s lips took a prudent turn. “She’s going to have to face the music someday. She can’t hide for forever.”

“She wasn’t exactly hiding before that,” I said, my voice drifting.Until I ruined it all.I inhaled to defend her and explain, but then Ms. Liebel did her irritating clap-thing to quiet the room.

By lunch, the word on the street was that Lacey’d pulled the alarm herself after talking to Liam. No matter that he hadn’t said a word to her, and that it was physically impossible for her to’ve pulled it, since she was running down the hall away from me at the time.

The janitors were still stalking around, trying to figure out which switch had been flipped, so they could backtrack to find a guilty party. I was the only one who knew there wasn’t one. It’d been me. I hadn’t been able to control myself. Startled and angry and upset—somehow I’d lashed out and set the sirens blaring. I even had the headache to prove it, my own personal fire alarm sounding inside my head.

I crouched in the back of the library, the only place I felt safe from my powers, since the only thing electronic in here was the air conditioning system overhead. I was sitting in a U-shapedbend between Religion and Philosophy, sucking on chips so that they wouldn’t crunch when I chewed them.

What the hell was wrong with me? And would I ever get Lacey back? I looked down at myself and my orange-stained fingers. My powers were useless until I could control them—and I had to figure out a way to do that without hurting anything—or anyone—else.

The next class bell rang, and I rolled my bag of chips up without making any sound.

I made it to chemistry first, the library being closer to the science hall than the cafeteria, and sat down.

“So, about studying,” Liam said, making a bee-line for my desk when he got there. I stared up at him darkly. Everything was his fault. For being popular, for having famous older brothers, for being on the baseball team just like them, for having parents that didn’t care about drinking—my hands curled underneath my desk, and that halo-light thing started happening around the edges of my eyes.

I inhaled and exhaled deeply. I couldn’t do this, not twice in one day.

He tilted his head, looking down at me. “What’d I do?”

The look he gave me was blank, puppy-like-and-innocent. Was he that dense? Did he not know anything? Or could he really act that well?

“Nothing,” I said, and turned back to face the chalkboard.

Our lecture today was on noble gasses and Boyle’s law. I wrote down notes, trying to keep my mind on the lecture and not other things. I usually liked math and science—they always had to make sense.

But I knew Liam was behind me, just like yesterday—just like he’d been all year. What was I going to do?