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“Uh, I think you’re forgetting thatI’vealready been here.” I teased, pulling her back.

“And now you think you’re cooler than me. I see how you are.”

With her by my side I felt safe, and we walked into the next room arm in arm.

We made a tour of the house anyhow. I ditched my cup on a table in the living room, and then followed her lead as she looked for someone. The lights were bright here—I wondered how much my fellow classmates would pay for the drugs that’d let them see the trip happening inside my head in Lightning Land. Everyone here had a phone, there were selifies and groupies galore, ZB was pinging, and everyone was surrounded by a swirl of green. Beyond that were the lines running up and down the walls, across floors and ceilings, and the incandescent glow practically pouring out of each light socket. I reached out for a green flash and Sarah swatted my hand down, laughing—she was drunk on vodka and I was drunk on power, ignoring the price it’d cost me later, my oncoming headache ticking behind me like Captain Hook’s crocodile.

“Want to see something cool?” she said, after we’d stumbled up stairs I hadn’t taken with Liam together.

“Uh, yeah?”

She pulled me aside and stood me in front of a door that had a kid-ish Do Not Enter sign on it. “Colton’s room.”

I looked at her blankly.

“Colton? Liam’s older brother? The famous one?”

“So?”

“So—no one’s allowed in there. Ever.”

Did ‘no one’ extend to all members of the baseball team? I put a hand out and tried the handle—it was locked.

“Stop that!” she said, trying and failing to slap my hand away.

“What? Don’t you want to see what’s inside?”

“It’s always locked?—”

But not locked very well—I felt charge build in my hand, pulling tumblers toward me—holyshitIwasamini-MagnetoDariuswouldbesoimpressed!—I turned the knob, and Sarah gasped as I shoved us both inside.

“We should not be here!” she said, the second I closed the door.

“You’re probably right,” I said, and hit the lights.

The room was almost like a shrine. There were baseball bats mounted on the wall, signed gloves inside glass boxes, baseballs lovingly displayed on tiny gold crowns. Bored fish circled lazily in an aquarium on one side of the room, and the other had a bed—with Redson Bison maroon-colored sheets that would look red under the light of a flash. I took a step toward it. Were there still clues here? Blood—or worse?

I knew the second before Sarah’s phone started to chime. “Oh my God, oh my God—” she fumbled for it, to turn it off before anyone caught us.

“Turn that off!” I hissed.

“Shhhhhhhhhh!” she said, louder in shushing me than I had been. She got to her phone, hung up, and then returned her attention to me. “We need to go.”

I looked at the bed one more time, anger rising just as my headache caught up and bit down. “Yeah, we do.

She wanted to bolt out of the room, but I made her wait—I pretended to listen against the door, which was actuallyimpossible because of how thick it was and the party-sounds outside—while Ifeltfor people out there. I knew from biology I was sensing faint things, the differentials between cells that made lifelife.People walking past felt like diffuse batteries, charges that occupied the space of where they really were. And when the hallway outside was clear, I opened the door and we both ran through. I twisted the knob so that Colton’s room would lock behind us—and I prayed that no one else would see the inside of it tonight.

Sarah grabbed my hand, yanked it, and I followed, until we were upstairs in the central den.

“Baby! There you are!” Sarah shouted, dragging me forward. Half of the baseball team was lounging across the infamous couch. There was a game of GTA going, and the sound of machine guns intermittently broke through everything else. The TV bathed everyone in light and I could feel the mesmerizing currents of the game behind it. I stood like a deer in headlights, and the temptation to kick all their asses at it loomed large.

“There you are,” Ryan said, gathering Sarah into his lap without looking away from the game.

“Make room,” Sarah said, swinging toward the rest of the guys. “Please,” she added, a pleading afterthought, as she was ignored.

“She can sit on my lap if she gets me a refill,” one of them said. I blinked back to awareness and saw him holding up an empty solo. Danny.

And there was my deer’s car.