Page 16 of Electricity

“I didn’t hear anything—they think you broke up the party by getting too drunk to go home—your mom’s a bitch who called the cops, that’s all.” I could see the muscles in her jaw clench and unclench. “Lacey, take this to the cops! This is a clue—let them figure it out!”

She turned and gave me a glassy stare. “Have you met any cops from Redson?”

Other than when one of them visited in 5 th grade with his partner McGruff the Crimedog, no. I shook my head.

“I have. They’re not exactly helpful.”

“What do you mean?”

“They haven’t started their investigation yet. I—when things happened—I wasn’t in a state to testify. They’ve called once a day since then, to see if I’m ready—but until I am, they’re ‘waiting on me’,” she said, doing an impersonation of a male voice.

“Fuckers,” I cursed. “You know what they’re doing, right? They’re being lazy assholes. They don’t want to do any work they don’t have to.” The humming of the powerlines seemed to pick up behind me.

“Yeah—but I know why. It’s me against him, Jessie. Whoever he is. They told me he wore a condom.” She shrugged helplessly again. “That was the first thing they told me—that they might never figure it out. They made it pretty clear they weren’t that interested in trying.”

I inhaled, pissed off at them, him and all of them—and the power-lines overhead took an alarming tone, like a plane was landing overhead, and suddenly I realized the connection.

Oh God—I bit down on the next thing I was going to say— “They won’t if they don’t start doing their jobs!

” —and tried to control my breathing while my heart raced.

“And my mom—she won’t stop crying,” Lacey said, then chewed the inside of her cheek contemplatively.

I thought of poor Ms. Harper crying—her mascara smearing each time she dabbed at her eyes—and the power-lines went back to their normal thrum.

“Dog butts I can take. But if word gets out—which it will if the cops start asking questions—I just—I don’t know.

” Lacey ran her hand through the grass beside her hip and pulled up a few long blades to pick at with over-bitten nubs of fingernails.

“I just want things to go back to normal. Back to the way things were.”

I didn’t know what to say to that—which didn’t stop me from talking. “But you’re different now, Lacey.”

She shrugged again, half-heartedly. “I know. But I don’t want to be.

” She sighed, and fell back to lay on the ground behind us.

I flopped back too and just lay beside her, watching cumulus clouds sweep overhead.

The powerlines intersected our view of the sky.

Quiet again, I could hear-feel-see the power travelling through them, their thrumming sound like spring cicadas, each line a streaming bolt of sunlight.

“You’ll love me no matter what I decide, right?” she asked beside me, her voice small.

My hand found hers in the grass. “Absolutely.”

We lay there quietly, listening to the power lines and the wind, until Lacey got up. “My mom’ll be home soon?—”

I got up and dusted myself off from laying in the dirt for the second time in a week. Lacey did the same, and we started walking back up the hill.

“I’m gonna just head out,” she said, veering off to one side to walk around my trailer, rather than get ambushed by Allie inside of it.

“That’s fine. You coming to school tomorrow?”

“Not sure yet.”

“K. I’ll wait by our lockers for you, just in case.”

“Thanks.”

She had a hard to read expression on her face, wistful, wise, and sad—and I realized she looked like my mother did, sometimes, smoking on the porch. I grabbed her into a fierce hug because I didn’t want that for her. No one should have to be that old this young.

She was startled, then hugged me back, just as tight. “Okay. See you soon, Jessie.”

“Always.” I waved, and watched her go, before heading back inside.

Allie looked around me and said, “Awwwww,” the second she realized Lacey had ditched her.

“You still have me,” I said.

The look she gave me then was withering.

We colored until Allie’s stomach rumbled. I glanced over my shoulder at the clock on the microwave. It was almost six-o-clock.

“Can it be dinner time already?”

My lips pulled into a thin line. I’d been waiting for my mother to get up, hoping that she’d take over kitchen duty tonight.

“I’m really hungry,” Allie complained, holding her stomach in an exaggerated fashion.

“I know.” I was, too. I hadn’t eaten much at lunch, since I’d been eating covertly in the library, alone, Sarah off in the bleachers watching Ryan practice and Lacey absent entirely. Mrs. Frost had better hearing than Allie did, she’d hear if you ate anything louder than a grilled cheese.

But—if I blew things up at home—nothing in here had an insurance policy half as good as Sarah’s phone plan.

What the hell was happening to me? How could I figure things out safely, and control it?

I needed to figure out a way, but until I could, I couldn’t imagine us getting by without a fridge or a stove. Which left me with?—

I turned back to the dining room table— “Hey, Allie, want to play a game?”

“What kind of game?” she said, looking coyly up at me from her coloring. Her reluctance was my own fault. You can only pretend the quiet game is actually a game so many times.

“Chef and waitress.”

Her eyes lit up. “I want to be the waitress.”

“No—I want you to be the boss?—”

“Then I want to be the waitress?—”

“The chef is the boss of the waitress.”

My little sister had been in so few restaurants it wasn’t like she could disagree. She gave me a look and I started selling.

“It means you’re going to get to cook everything,” I explained, adding, “with my help,” lest she get any ideas that turning on the stove while no one was home was a good idea.

“I guess?—”

“Come on,” I said, bouncing up. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

Under my expert tutelage, my little sister managed to make fish sticks and tater tots without burning the house down, and when we were almost done my mother joined us at the table. I, the dutiful waitress, put a plate in front of her.

“This? Again?” My mother pushed a tater tot around her place with a fish stick like it was a hockey puck.

“I made it, Momma!” Allie said, proud.

“Thanks,” my mother said dryly.

“You did a really good job,” I said. Allie bobbed her head up and down, pleased with herself, mouth full of warm potato, as I tried to shield her from our mother’s sour tongue.

It didn’t used to be like this. Mom used to be happy, sometimes, not just for a shining moment between just-drunk-enough and too-drunk.

I could remember it from my childhood, from before dad had left.

Could Allie? Or had she been too small? I wondered if she was luckier than I was—I was pretty sure knowing what we’d had and lost was worse than never having had it at all.

“I asked how school was,” my mother said in a sharp tone that let me know I’d already missed the question once.

I turned back from the sink and shrugged instinctively. “It’s fine.”

I washed dishes in the sink, ignoring the siren song of the microwave, fridge, and oven behind me, and my mother went off to work that night with a minimum of fuss, although I had no doubt that the car keys and my phone were still safely in her bag.

I wouldn’t be able to use my phone if I had it anyhow—I had to figure out a way to control whatever this power was that I had.

Someplace safe where I could practice and get control without hurting anything.

And that was if I could get control. I scrubbed at the brown stain that never moved on our baking sheet. What if I couldn’t? What if I was just a weird live current for the rest of my life? Come get zapped by the amazing Shock Girl!

But I’d held Lacey’s hand without hurting her. Which was good—Lacey didn’t need anyone else hurting her right now.

Which…might be another reason she didn’t want to talk to the police. I turned the water off and watched it circle down the drain.

Was she doing the right thing? That someone could hurt her so badly and just get to walk away with no repercussions and then send her notes like, like, he knew her or something, like it hadn’t mattered, like it’d been no big deal—because for him, it hadn’t been—I wrung the sponge out fiercely before setting it on its shelf.

“Jessie, what’s wrong with the TV?” Allie asked. I turned around and saw her shaking the remote—the characters on her favorite TV show were frozen.

That… was me .

I inhaled and exhaled firmly, and as I calmed down the show jumped back to where it was supposed to.

I was so angry at him, whoever he was. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. And because of how awful and unfair life was, he might just get away.

What if Lacey wasn’t the only girl? Or—what if she were just the first?

She had to do the right thing for her. I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to involve the cops, not when doing so would essentially alert the entire school.

But Lacey wasn’t the only one who’d changed.

I carefully dried my hands and joined Allie on the couch. During the next commercial break, I nudged her.

“What?”

“Go get the laptop.”