Page 1 of Electricity

I heard Lacey’s phone ding the second that I felt mine buzz in my back-pocket.

We gave each other a look —it was Friday night and despite its comparatively low rating on the Health Inspector’s website, the Snax Shax was full.Lacey and I both knew who the messages were from: Sarah, coming through on our party invites.

Thirty minutes too late.

I slammed the cash register closed more roughly than normal and heard the change inside it shimmy.

Up until half an hour ago, Lacey and I could have both called in sick, claiming to have ebola-cholera and gotten off somehow. But now? Hip deep in the weekend rush with the mist of grease from the Fryolater heavy in the air? Burton would never agree.

Lacey made a face in my direction, and I shot one right back at her.

This fucking sucked .

“Break time, my lovely ladies of the register,” Burton said, sidling up to me with Darius behind him.

Burton was our boss in name only—everyone that worked here knew how to run the place better than him, but our last name wasn’t the same as The-Absentee-Owner-Of-Shax, who could give two shits about what really went on here as long as the cash kept rolling in.

“Come on, come on,” Burton said, bumping me aside with his hips.

He liked to work the counter on the weekends so he could comp cute girls fries.

Made him feel generous, saving someone a whole buck-fifty.

I didn’t move quite fast enough. “Unless you want to stay? Because you like my company?” He was always leaving you these creepy openings to butter him up.

“No,” Lacey said, grabbing my arm and pulling me aside.

“No, thank you,” I said, giving him a smile wide enough to make up for the fact that Lacey had forgotten hers. I needed this job more than she did. Mad at myself a little, I turned away from him and trotted quickly with her back to our small break-room.

“I hate him,” she announced, the second the door was closed.

“Me too.” The break room wasn’t air-conditioned like the rest of the restaurant was, which meant that taking a break felt like you were running laps, minus Coach Stevens shouting at you.

I pulled my phone out to confirm what I thought I knew and saw Sarah’s picture—a goofy triple-chin one she’d unwisely sent me off of ZoomBoom years ago, that she begged me to delete anytime she remembered I still had it.

I got you guys invites! LOOK GOOD.

“World’s worst timing,” I said.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Lacey said with an angry sigh.

Sarah, Lacey, and I were the trailer park trio, plus or minus the trash depending on who was saying it and who else was in earshot—or we had been, until Sarah’s dad started making better money and they’d moved out last summer.

Then three months ago she’d started dating Ryan, a senior on the baseball team, and she’d almost disappeared, apparently sucked into the vortex his mouth created whenever they made out.

The only upshot was that for the first time in our entire high school career we—two relatively uncool sophomores—had an official invite to a senior party.

That we couldn’t attend. Because we were here.

“Look-good,” Lacey sing-songed. “Like she’d even see us if we were there. She’s probably already in some closet with Ryan.”

“I know.” But it was the principle of the thing. I swiped my thumb across Sarah’s face, sweeping her message away. She knew we had a time limit—she hadn’t waited until the last minute on purpose, had she?

“And Liam’s going to be there.”

“I know that, too.” I couldn’t help but know.

The party was going to be at his house and he was only fifteen lockers down from me.

Cooler kids than I had been herding around, talking about tonight all week.

And ever since he’d broken up with Hailey, there’d been a chance—a Powerball-lottery-ticket-winning-chance—that he might accidentally look at me.

Like we’d both happen to be after school for some reason, and we’d slam our lockers simultaneously, look up and over at each other, and just know.

From that day on, he wouldn’t mind that I was too smart for him, and I wouldn’t mind that his letter jacket I got to perpetually borrow was weighed down by so many red Rs. Somehow, we’d both manage to get by.

Lacey gasped.

“Jessie—Jessie Jessie Jessie—” She flapped her arms excitedly. I loved her, but when she did that she looked like a bird. Her pointy nose and glasses didn’t help.

“What?”

“I have a plan!”

I shoved my phone into my pocket and leaned forward. “I’m listening.”

“You know how when we’re good, we’re good? I mean, we’ve each run this place before.”

Her voice had a tone of hope and I latched on. “Yeah?”

“And you know all we have to do to get sent home is to start waving tampons around…”

“Yeah.” Burton apparently had no sisters and perhaps had never had a mom.

If someone told me he’d been spawned from the gunk that lives under a refrigerator I would politely nod and say, ‘Do go on.’ I could tell where she was going, however— “He’s not that stupid, Lacey. If we ditch now, he’ll fire us.”

“Only if both of us go. Which is why one of us should go.” She held up a dramatic hand. “If the other stays and covers for them?—”

“He’ll never know,” I finished. I was smart—but Lacey was a goddamn super-genius. Which was why she was my best friend, now that Sarah wasn’t around. “Same way we choose everything?” I said, making a fist and bouncing it on my other open hand.

“Of course!” She made the gesture back.

“One, two, three—go!” we said in unison. I kept my fist in my hand, and she shot hers flat.

Without a word, she reached over and put her ‘paper’ on top of my ‘rock.’

“Winner winner chicken dinner!”

“Ugh, you sound like Coach.”

She’d already danced up and was reaching for her bag. “Don’t be a sore loser, Jessie.”

“I’m not, I’m not. I’m more jealous that you get to leave here, honestly, even though I’m sure the party will be fantastic. I hear Liam’s brothers installed a unicorn with a beer tap in its horn that trots out at midnight.”

Lacey beamed at me, Snax Shax cap doffed. “If he does, I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

“You’d better. I want details. Excessive details. Who gets drunk, who pukes, who makes out with who—everything. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“And if you start dating Liam somehow at the end of this, I’m going to have to hate you forever. I just want you to know.”

She punched the paper with her name in and out of the time-clock. “Just try to keep me from getting fired, will you?”

“I’ll do a good job.”

She gave me a hug, and then ran down the hall for the Shax back exit.

“Don’t forget to look good!” I yelled after her as sarcastically as possible.

She laughed and turned around to shout, “I love you!” at the same time as she flipped me off.

I waited the precise two minutes I had left on my break and then went back out onto the floor. Burton was there, his grin as greasy as the fries he was pushing across the counter.

“There you are—they’re in the weeds on the drive-thru—” He started talking and then blinked. “Where’s Lacey?”

“About that—” I make sure I took on a worried look, the kind of look that said ‘I don’t want to tell you this in front of the customers but we may have just fried a rat accidentally-on-purpose.’ He keyed onto that and stepped behind the side wall with me.

“What’s up?” he said, doing his best to look managerial.

“Lacey—she—it was bad, Burton, it was really bad—like you know how sometimes you just get that awful feeling inside of you like your period’s going to be massive, like your vagina’s holding back a Red Sea?

And then all of a sudden it comes out? In a tidal wave of blood and chunky things?

We’re talking a three-tampon situation, Burton, at least, like—I don’t know—I went into the bathroom with her and I took one look and I was all, ‘Lacey, you’ve got to go home.

You’ll be anemic at the least, and at the worst, shit, that could’ve been a baby-arm’.

I dunno.” I shook my head, horrified. “We flushed it too fast. I just don’t know. ”

The look on Burton’s face then—it was better than Sarah’s three-chin photo. His head was pulled so far back I think he had four. “Get back out on the line, Jessica.”

“Yessir,” I said, and trotted to do as I was told.

The rest of the night was the same as every other Friday night at the Shax.

Incompetent coworkers, deliberately so or otherwise, idiots queued up out the door for their pre-made-pre-cooked-recooked slabs of beef.

People who wanted no salt on their fries, like that was going to be the difference between them and their incipient heart attack, who didn’t understand that that meant waiting at least an extra seven minutes for new ones because somehow we hadn’t hired any pixies or other wee folk capable of individually dusting salt off our current regulation fries.

College kids stumbling in drunk and puking into our trashcans, people getting into fights in the parking lot, someone loudly claiming they got shorted change—it was Darius behind the counter, and if he had, I wouldn’t blame him—in short, the glorious regular weekend shitshow.

What made it tolerable most weekends was Lacey’s close proximity. Knowing I could look over at her—no matter where she was in the restaurant—and give her a glare, and she’d nod and know exactly what I was thinking and who about and why, was priceless.

The whole Snax Shax experience was a hell of a lot harder to put up with, without her.

I pulled my phone out a few times, just in case.

There was the chance she’d take a picture of what she wore to LOOK GOOD to show me, or something would happen that would be so amazing she’d have to instantly inform me, her either first or second best friend.

But no. Nothing. I counted the minutes, how long it’d take her to get home from here, to shower the grease out of her hair, blow-dry it, and then get dressed again to go out.