Page 32 of Electricity

I should have maybe worried harder about the parking thing—I wound up parking like three blocks away, although if I’d been blind I still could’ve echolocated the party, the music was already up.

Would all of the baseball team be there? Where else would Danny be? I pocketed my ID, keys, and phone, and walked up.

Two seniors I didn’t recognize were holding fort at the door.

“Who’re you?” one of them asked as I approached.

“A friend of Liam’s.”

“Sure,” he said, like he didn’t believe me, looking me up and down. I was cute, but not cute enough, this early in the night. And maybe after Lacey there was a general crack down on sophomores, no matter that Liam was one.

This twist hadn’t occurred to me, to get so close only to be denied, and I was fumbling to pull my phone out for proof when Liam arrived on the door’s other side.

“She’s with me,” he said, leaning forward to pull me through. Both of them grunted and went on staring at the lawn. “Sorry—can’t be too careful these days,” he said. “Too many people are too close to graduating, you know? Can’t blow any scholarships.”

“Of course,” I agreed, like the team getting off successfully to college was all that mattered.

His house, which’d seemed so empty when I’d last been there, was now filling—there were clusters of people over every surface, shouting into one another’s ears louder than the music. I kept following Liam and realized we were in his kitchen.

“Want something to drink?” he said and started pumping a keg.

“Yeah.” Without a cup in my hand, I’d stick out like a sore thumb. “Where are your parents?”

“What, you want to say hi to my mom?” he said as he handed me my beer. “They know better than that—they’re off at a casino for the weekend. Plenty of time to party hard then clean it all up tomorrow.”

“With a hangover?”

“Price of popularity, gladly paid.” He took a long swig of his own beer and I pretended to follow suit. “Good. Come on, Jessie—you’re going to have a good time here. I just know it.”

And then I heard my name shouted at high volume. “Jessica!” and Sarah flew into the room to hug me.

Half my beer wound up on the floor as I fought her off. She clung to me, spinning a little. “You’re here! You’re finally here!”

“Sarah, Liam, Liam, Sarah,” I said by way of introduction.

“See? You’re already having fun.” He gave me a grin and then a teammate wanted a beer and Sarah was dragging me away alone.

“Didn’t I teach you to put on make-up better than that?” she said, looking at me solemnly in the hallway to the living room.

“Yes, probably.” I was glad to see her, even if I could almost taste the alcohol on her breath. “How long have you been drinking?”

“Everyone smuggles in vodka to add to their sodas at the game. Come on, let me show you around,” she said, lunging forward like she owned the place.

“Uh, I think you’re forgetting that I’ve already 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 actually impossible because of how thick it was and the party-sounds outside—while I felt for people out there.

I knew from biology I was sensing faint things, the differentials between cells that made life life.

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.

“Aw, come on,” Sarah protested.

“Sure,” I said, and stepped up. I took the cup and Sarah’s eyes widened as I saluted the couch’s worth of seniors with the solo. “Be right back,” I said, and then turned to walk downstairs, listening to some of them laugh.

I shut down my mind to everything else, hoarding my power for later and letting my headache roam free, as I threaded through clusters of people, holding Danny’s cup out in front of me, clearly on a drink run.

When I got back to the kitchen Liam was still there, in deep conversation with Amy, a senior girl, and I pulled up short in the kitchen doorway.

He saw me looking at the two of them, said something disarming and funny, I could tell by the way she laughed, and then walked past her and toward me with a smile.

“Having a good time?” he asked.

“Yeah. You?” I asked, tilting my head in her direction.

“She’s—I dunno,” he said with a shrug.

“Gorgeous?” I filled in for him.

“Yeah, well—she’s not the only pretty one here tonight.”

My mother had wondered aloud more than once what it would take to make me shut up—well now I knew: Liam Lewis flirting with me.

“Uh,” I stuttered, unsure what to say back, flushed with appreciation built on years of silent pining and flooded with anxiety. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, still polite even halfway to wasted. “I’m glad you changed your mind about coming.”

“Me too.”

He leaned against the wall behind him and I was overly conscious of how close he was.

“We need these parties to blow off steam, you know? After the stress of a game—you don’t know what it’s like having a whole crowd shout down at you, rooting for you to win, ready to hate you if you fuck up. It’s crazy.”

“I bet.” Did the roar of the crowd feel like the static in my head?

“But,” he said, his grey-green eyes meeting mine, trying to say something with them I was sure. “It makes it hard to talk to people here, when you want to have real conversations.”

A-ha. I was an expert at translating drunkese. “You can always talk to me if you want, Liam.”

He gave me a slow sad smile. “I feel like you really mean that.”

“I do.”

“It’s just that—ever since Hailey,” he said, looking into his cup and breathing deeply, like he was about to fall into it.

“She,” he began, pressing an earnest hand to his chest—and then a crew of juniors stormed through the hall, breaking the moment between us, hollering in the kitchen, and Liam snapped back to host attention, our intimate moment gone.

“Do you need a refill?” he said, looking into my empty cup.