Page 13 of Electricity

W ithout Lacey I took the school bus to school and I sat near the front like a chump. It’d been so long I’d completely forgotten bus etiquette, and even though I was older than most of the other kids trapped aboard, if I’d wanted to sit near the back of the bus I didn’t have much pull.

Not in that way, at least.

I sat by myself with Darius’s coat in a nondescript grocery bag beside me, and waved my hands back and forth.

The bus’s engine was massive compared to Darius’s car and I could feel it thrumming in front of me.

I waved my hands in front of myself like I was petting it, feeling the charging sensations ripple.

By the end of the route the bus was almost full and everyone else on it had someone else to talk to but me.

“Did you hear?”

“Of course I heard.”

“I didn’t.”

Three separate voices from not far behind me. I knew who they were without turning: Emily, Shannon, and Kortney.

“Uh, because you’re lame.”

“So shut up and tell me?—”

“Lacey Harper ruined Liam’s party.”

I stiffened in my seat.

“The bitch couldn’t handle her beer—she called the cops, got everyone busted?—”

I ground my teeth together as Kortney’s crew made appreciative sounds. That wasn’t what’d happened—but I couldn’t tell anyone the truth. We were almost to campus, I just had to hold on a little longer.

Then Emily said, “She’d better not be at school today.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I wheeled in my seat to look back at them. “Why?”

They were surprised by my interruption as the bus driver put the vehicle in park and shut the engine down. The sensation of power around me dropped, and watching them look at me like wolves surrounding a sheep, I felt my stomach drop too.

Kortney stood. “You know why,” she said, before stalking off down the aisle. Emily and Shannon laughed, following her.

I waited for five more kids before I grabbed my backpack and Darius’s coat and got off.

If Lacey was on campus today, it was going to be up to me to protect her—but how? I had to figure out a plan, and fast—I ran up the steps to the doors and?—

Everything felt different, the moment I stepped inside.

I stopped in the doorway, as students swirled around me.

I could feel it—there was power here, power everywhere.

Sharp boar-bristles reaching out from sockets in the walls, soft feather strokes charging the fluorescent lights above, scaled conduits running from room to room beneath the ground below, almost too deep for me to feel them.

I knew now what I hadn’t known before—there was no part of Redson High that wasn’t plugged in and charging.

And for a moment, standing there, I felt like I was a part of it.

A conduit. Charges jumped to me, flickered up and down and out through me and back again.

I felt like I was alive, no, double-alive—like radiant wings of light were cascading down from my back and arcing up from my feet simultaneously.

My classmates however saw none of this and someone’s backpack hit me accidentally.

I’d been standing in one place too long, my knees locked, so I stumbled forward and the moment was gone.

I blinked and ordinary Redson High was in full effect again.

There was no magic-electricity here—just brick walls, closer to a jail than any other building, except for the lockers and posters, cheering us on for the next baseball game.

I walked over to Lacey and I’s lockers feeling out of place and found Sarah already there, pissed.

“So when were you going to tell me?”

I relaxed a moment. Lacey’d confided in her too—with me offline me for a day, who else was she going to talk to?—and I wouldn’t have to fight this fight alone.

Then Sarah grabbed my shoulder and started dragging me down the hall.

“I got you invites. Invites! I promised you’d be cool!”

I dug my heels in. “What?”

“You know what. Lacey—at Liam’s party—blowing it for everyone.”

I shrugged her hand off of me. “Sarah, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m grounded, for going to breakfast with you. So explain what you think happened, nice and slow.”

Sarah’s face took that shrewish turn. As embarrassed as she was for her own sake, it was still really juicy gossip.

“At the party,” Sarah said, dropping her voice, like the whole school didn’t know already.

“She drank too much and started puking everywhere I guess—then someone called an ambulance and the cops showed up.”

Lacey’s story hadn’t included an ambulance. Was that because she was too drunk to remember it, or was her story already being embellished?

“They shut the party down, started asking everyone questions.” Her eyes went dark and serious. “It’s all her fault, Jessie. And the seniors blame me. They know I invited her—even though I wasn’t there.”

“What, didn’t Ryan vouch for your whereabouts?” In his truck? went unsaid.

She rolled her eyes. “In a manner of speaking, yes,” she said. “But this is serious. There’s going to be fall-out.”

“Like what?” The warning bell dinged. I looked over her shoulder toward my locker. Lacey hadn’t shown up yet, which meant she probably wasn’t going to today, thank God.

“I don’t know. I just know that they’re pissed.”

“When you say they, do you mean the entire senior class?”

“Just the ones of them whose parents got called that night—like half of the baseball team.”

“Which half?” I wanted to know who was still there at 2 AM?—

“It doesn’t matter which half, Jessie!” she hissed. “Parents know their kids party, but they don’t want to know-know, you know?”

“I know, sheesh.”

The halls around us cleared. “Maybe it’ll all blow over—but until then—I’m glad she’s not here.”

“Glad for her sake, or for yours?” I asked.

She pursed her lips like she was sucking sour candy. “See you in biology,” she said, and brushed past me.

I made it through history—my attention in class as perfunctory as Coach Stevens’s efforts in teaching it—and got back to my locker. No Lacey. I knew her locker combination. I was tempted to look inside, in case she’d shown up late and some jock-brute had origamied her inside.

I felt someone coming up behind me—the same way as I felt the charges in the walls. Like the pressure from a gentle hand. I whirled just as a familiar voice said, “Hey.” It was Liam. He’d come down all fifteen lockers to talk to me.

“Hey,” I said back, completely bewildered. How had I known he was there? Why was he there? How was this going to go? Why was this going at all?

“About the other night—” Which other night? Mine—or Lacey’s? “My friends can be real jerks,” he finished.

I asked the first thing that came to my head. “Why’re you friends with them then?”

He paused and looked at me with his currently green-ish eyes that played off the rust color of his polo shirt. “I don’t really have a good answer for that.”

“Yo—Jessica—you got my coat?” And all of a sudden Darius was looming beside both of us, like a lanky scarecrow.

Of course he’d interrupt this. The first time Liam had spoken to me, despite our having been in three consecutive years of English class together in middle school.

Darius’s presence proved the utter impossibility of what was happening to me—he was entropy in personified, the universe righting itself. There was no point in fighting.

“Yeah—I’ve got it right here.” I handed him the bag.

“You going to need a ride tomorrow night?”

I ignored Liam, the way he’d ignored me for the entirety of my life so far. “I don’t know—depends on my mom’s mood.”

“Want my number?”

“Sure.”

“What’s yours? I’ll call you.”

“I’m grounded—no phone.”

“Harsh.” He went through his backpack and pulled out a piece of paper, tearing it in two before handing me half. “Got another line?”

“Yeah, the old one.” I wrote it down for him, as he wrote his down for me.

“Let me know in time to get you, if you do,” he said, handing his number over.

“Sure.” I folded the paper up and shoved it in my pocket. He gave Liam a head-jerk of acknowledgment, who mutely returned it—everyone knew Darius—and walked on.

I returned my attention to Liam, who’d watched our whole exchange like we were a TV show. “You know him?”

“Yeah,” I said, shrugging one shoulder. Liam’s left eyebrow rose a little, as if his estimation of me had gone up as well.

Oh do not tell me that I was cooler than I had been prior for knowing Darius. As if I needed more examples that life was unfair.

The warning bell rang overhead and biology was three halls away. “Gotta go—see ya.” I said, shouldering my bag.

“In chemistry,” he said, like he had at some point actually noticed me there before.

“Yeah,” I agreed, trying to play it cool, then pretending to calmly walk down the hall.