Page 12 of Electricity

I woke to Darius. Shaking me. Because I was laying on the ground. “What happened?” I was breathing in sharp short bursts and sat up almost into him he was so close. “What happened to me?”

He looked at me, stunned and relieved fighting to be on his face at the same time. “I don’t know—I was dialing my uncle when I saw you go down.”

“Down?”

“Dropped. Like a bag of hammers. Heard it, too.” He reached out slowly, like I was something feral. I made a face but sat still as he patted the back of my head roughly, and he let out a held breath when he retrieved his hand. “No blood. Thank God.”

My head hurt again and I was dizzy. What’d happened to me? Why was this keeping happening to me? I tried to stand.

“Are you sure?” he asked, getting up by my side.

“Yeah.” I reached for the side of his car and held on. We were still in the Shax’s parking lot, his car’s hood still open. Not much time could’ve passed. I took a step and things spun.

“Whoa,” he said, catching me as I tripped over the end of the jumper cables. He set me straight as I stared down.

I’d been looking at them.

They’d…been calling to me. Hadn’t they?

They were glinting now. Like winks.

Darius tracked between me and the ground. “You didn’t touch them, did you?”

I opened my mouth to deny it, but it was too late.

“Don’t you know better than that? You could’ve died!” he shouted, blocking my view of the cables.

“Not all of us took shop, okay!” I shouted back, taking a step away, solidly on my own. I crossed my arms, aware of my hands finding the spots where he’d been holding me mere seconds ago.

“You’re freezing. Put this on, and get in the car.” He had his coat off, handing it over to me.

I was about to say something else when lightning cracked overhead with thunder close behind.

We jumped into his car as the skies opened up, me still holding his coat as he fished his phone out of the Corolla’s center console.

“Don’t argue,” he said, staring pointedly at the coat. “And be quiet,” he said, swiping his phone on. I put his coat on sullenly, watching the skies outside.

“No, I know the weather sucks Jimmy, I’m sorry—” He explained the situation, as lightning blossomed across the sky, one fat stem zig-ing and zag-ing out into a million smaller points. I’d seen that design before—I recognized it.

“I know, I know,” Darius repeated for his uncle.

“It’s just like my back,” I whispered. Darius twisted to give me a look, then returned to his call.

“Also, we need to give a friend a ride home. No, she’s on the way.”

I’d been hit by lightning. It was the only explanation. Passing out, my back, my shoes, passing out again tonight, the headaches earlier—I looked at myself again, imagining myself like some cartoon character, flipping from black-to-white-to-x-ray and back again. Zapped by a million-jillion volts.

I had to tell Sarah and Lacey. They were the only ones that’d believe me.

Darius hung up and slumped back into his seat. “My uncle’s coming.”

“Awesome,” I said, flatly. All those times I’d wanted to be alone in a car with a boy, and here I finally was, only it was this one.

“I can’t believe you touched the cables like that. Why?—”

I cut him off. “You ever know something’s a bad idea, but you still want to do it anyways?”

“All the time.”

“Well, it was like that.” I wasn’t going to say anything about feeling like the cables wanted me to hold them. There was cool-insane and literally-insane and I wanted to stay on the right side of the line.

“Could’ve stopped your heart. And then you would’ve been shit out of luck. I haven’t done CPR since Boy Scouts.”

“Good thing it didn’t, then,” I said back with the same amount of attitude.

I kicked off my shoes and pulled my feet up onto the seat with me, huddling inside his coat, arms tucked into their opposite sleeves.

Between the earlier rain, the more recent rain, and having apparently fallen into some sort of puddle, I was freezing.

“No heater, sorry.”

“S’okay,” I said. My eyes fell on his phone, back safe in his console. I knew Lacey’s number, I could call her, but then he’d be listening.

“So what’s really wrong with her?”

“Who?” I said.

Darius made a face. “You know who. I heard Burton fired her.”

“Yeah, well—” Bile rose in my throat and I looked out the window, not at him. “She’s sick is all.”

“Uh, okay,” he said, clearly disbelieving me. “If you say so.”

“I do.” I huddled deeper into his coat. It smelled like him, like boy and deodorant and sweat, and the collar chafed up against my ears. My teeth began to chatter. “You sure the engine’s dead?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

But — it didn’t feel dead to me.

How did I even know that?

I yanked my arms out of his sleeves and looked at my hands.

They looked the same as they always did, but there was some sense—with them, or inside them, or inside me—of where the power was inside the hood.

Like I could reach out and stroke it, the fur of some exotic beast, that pressed back not with bristles but with charges.

It wasn’t gone. And it wasn’t dead. It was alive—as alive as I was.

“Try again,” I pleaded. “Please. I’m freezing.”

Darius sighed heavily, but leaned forward and twisted the key. His engine sputtered twice and then caught. The lights turned on, basking us in a soft golden glow, and the radio started blaring hip-hop.

He pumped his fist in the air, shouted “Yes!”, and then turned his radio down.

We idled in the lot for another minute while he called his uncle off, and while he was on the phone he cranked the heat up and pointed all the available heaters at me. “Yeah, Jimmy, no—I got a charge from someone else—I’m good now, I’ll be home soon.”

He put his cell phone away and we sat there idling, him revving the engine now and then, to make sure the charge would hold.

Somehow—holding my hands out to the engine like I was warming them—I knew that it would.

How the hell did I know that? The more I thought about it, the more it scared me. Maybe I was going crazy. I pulled my hands back and twisted in my seat, determined to act like a normal person. “You really can’t afford a battery?”

“Dealing looks a lot more glamourous on TV,” he said, and ran a hand over his head, feeling the short nap of his hair, and nodded at his hood. “And I have other things to save up for.”

“Like what?”

“Getting the hell away from here.” He made a swirling gesture in-between us that was clearly meant to include not only me, the Shax, the parking-lot, Redson, and the entire state of Kansas.

“Yeah. Of course.” I turned to look back out the window, as he put his car into reverse. Normalcy accomplished.

We drove in silence. The Corolla’s heater didn’t do much to dry me off, but it didn’t matter, I was just minutes away from a shower once Darius took me home and he didn’t need directions tonight. He stopped the car outside my trailer but didn’t cut the engine. “Can’t lose the charge,” he said.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said, getting out.

“Thanks for not dying,” he said. I made to slam the door shut but he leaned down to look at me before I could. “Hey—when are you on next?”

“Tuesday.”

“Are you going to keep needing rides? Now that Lacey’s fired?”

I couldn’t imagine working at the Shax without Lacey—but I couldn’t quit till I managed to find another job. “Maybe?”

“Cool. Let me know. You’re on the way and all.”

“Sure.” I nodded and shrugged at the same time, and closed the door.

It wasn’t until I was safe inside my house that I realized I still had his coat on.

Allie, still up like she was supposed to not be, noticed it immediately, just as I heard Darius drive off.

“Where’d you get that from?”

“Oh, this?” I said, trying to play it off. “No one,” I said, taking it off, but she saw through my lies like she always did.

“Is it a boy? Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked, and then started dancing wildly around me like she was worshiping a pagan god. “It’s a boooooooyyyyy, it’s a boooooooooyyyyy.”

“How much sugar have you had today?”

She jazzed handed out, scurrying to one side of the hallway like a crab, before scurrying back, and slowing down long enough to inspect me.

“Why’re you wet?”

“It was raining outside. And yes, a boy lent me this coat.” Which I now had to figure out how to get back to him at school tomorrow without letting anyone else know or see.

I went into my bedroom to hang it up in my closet and Allie followed me, bouncing slightly less.

My sister was tired, whether she liked it or not.

“How was Lacey?”

I inhaled and exhaled. I didn’t know. I wanted to know. But I said, “She’s just sick is all. Appendicitis.” Might as well stick with the same lie.

“Is she better now?”

“I don’t know. Mom still has my phone and I’ll probably never be ungrounded.” I could walk over in the rain—but tomorrow was a Monday, and if I somehow got caught out again—my mom’d put my phone in the microwave.

“I didn’t want to tell her! She made me!” she lied.

“It’s OK. I would’ve told her, too.” I rubbed my hands across my face. “It’s a school night, Allie. Time for bed. For both of us. I’m just gonna take a shower first is all.”

“K. G’night, Jessie.”

“G’night.”

Instead of taking my clothes off and dashing to the shower naked, I went into the bathroom this time to disrobe alone. If the marks were still there, I didn’t want Allie to see them.

And sure enough, they were. Just like the lightning I’d seen earlier, zapping a line down my back, bright-bright-bright red against my pale winter skin.

To think of all the times I’d stood in front of this mirror looking at myself, mad about things that were wrong with me—my boobs for messing everything up, too many moles, my assorted pimples and their subsequent scars.

Now I really did have something wrong with me—legitimately wrong—but—it was cool. Kind of.

I turned around, brushing my hand past the awkward plug on the side of the wall that made my mother’s hot curling iron into a trip-trap, and felt a…a wave.

I repeated the motion, and felt the same thing. Pieces of my brain tried to parse it—when I did this, it was weird, and it did that to me—but I didn’t have any words for what was going on.

Other than I felt that the plug was there. Like the slumbering beast of Darius’s engine—I could feel this plug in miniature, like I was pushing into a staticky softness that gave. I waved my hand in a circle. There was a tug both above and below the plug—where the wires behind it flowed out.

I wrapped a towel around myself and followed the wires—they went down, under the floor, or up too high for me to follow, but it didn’t matter—I could catch up with them again at the next plug, and the one after that in my bedroom, and then the ones after that in the kitchen—oh the kitchen, with its microwave and oven and refrigerator and can openers and tea kettle, everything with its own individual and then cumulative pulse.

I stood in the center of the kitchen. It was like I could feel the entire trailer’s circulatory system. Its power, pumped by an electrical heart. And if I closed my eyes and concentrated just right, I could see it beating.

“This…is awesome.”

“What is?” Allie asked, peeking out from around the corner. “Your new boyfriend?”

“Get to bed!” I shouted. She ran off with a snicker and I stomped back into the bathroom to shower.