Page 35 of Electricity

I woke to the feeling of my bed moving. “Allie,” I muttered, putting out an arm to stop her from joining me, it was hot enough already?—

“Nope, me. How was tonight?”

I blinked awake. My mom was sitting on the side of my bed and my cat-clock said it was two AM. Perfect time for a mother-daughter chat.

“Okay?”

“Just okay?” The scent of cigarettes and beer wafted off of her like strong perfume.

I pushed myself up onto my elbows. “Parts were fun. I got to hang with Liam a little.”

“Good. I’m glad.” She leaned in, kissed my forehead, then stood.

I heard one of her knees pop, and suddenly she seemed more frail than she’d been the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that one.

I didn’t like this new knowledge I had of her, it made it harder to be angry and more frightening that someday she might leave me.

“Hey—Mom?” I called after her.

“Yeah?” She turned in the doorway.

“Can I go studying with some kids from history class tomorrow? At ten?”

“Sure. Get Allie breakfast before that though.”

“Will do. I—love you.” It’d been awhile since I’d said it, now I felt I needed too, just in case. We lived in Kansas. Tornados were a constant risk.

“I love you too. G’night sweetheart,” she said, then wandered down the hall.

I woke to something very small buzzing nearby. Like when a fly zips by your cheek—I jerked up, prepared to defend my ears and nostrils from assault, clapping my hands over anywhere a fly could land and lay eggs and initiate me into an urban legend.

But when I sat up in bed there was nothing—other than a vague recollection of almost being kissed, twice, plus a dead dog.

Then it buzzed again—my phone. I had it on silent, but it was still getting messages for me—I picked it up and ZB opened in my mind in all its multi-tentacled glory. Every photo my classmates had taken for the past twenty-four hours inundated me—plus a message tagged with my name.

Saw MizMarmelade almost make-out with Lefty last night.

And beside it, Emily’s nick and icon, a cartoon hand flipping the universe off.

Could she just not be a shit-stirrer? For even a day? I glowered at the message and saw it for what it was in Lightning Land—a shining line of code. It would be so easy to—I clenched my free fist, because the action seemed to require it, and just like that the offending message was gone.

I stroked my thumb across the screen to refresh ZB. Was it really gone, or just gone for me? The former, I hoped. I set my phone down and scrubbed at my face and?—

felt the buzz-sting again.

I grabbed my phone and found the same comment with a new timestamp and the addition of the word ‘slutty’.

Didn’t she have better things to do with her Saturday mornings? I deleted this one, too, and counted to sixty and?—

Saw slutty MzMarmelade almost let Lefty fingerbang her last night!

Okay. Clearly she wanted my attention—well now she fucking had it.

I sank into ZB, completely. Every second longer I took meant another classmate might see what she’d said, but I didn’t want to be fighting with Emily all day long—I wanted to cut her off at the source.

I found the thread of her nastygram to me and instead of cutting it off, I grabbed hold of it and pulled.

There was resistance—something internal to ZB fought me, like a tug-of-war—but then I felt it fall free and I spooled the message and everything else Emily’d put on ZB in the past day to me and then pulled, like I was yanking an extension cord out of a distant socket.

I heard-felt-saw the pop and then the light I held—Emily’s string of daily data—went dark.

I didn’t know if I’d deleted her ZB account or zapped her phone and truly I didn’t care. I counted to sixty, and when my phone didn’t get any new messages I hopped into the shower.

I got Allie breakfast and ate some myself.

Allie wanted to know what I was up to and didn’t believe me that mom knew I was going—I could tell from the way she looked at me—but she wasn’t about to wake up mom to find out, not if it meant watching cartoons unsupervised all morning.

I was pacing around the living room by 9:45 and went out to Darius’s car the second he drove up.

“Hey,” he said, as I opened the passenger door and dropped in.

“Hey,” I said back. He wasn’t wearing his jacket today, just a short sleeved black T-shirt with some band’s logo.

And for some stupid reason I wanted to grin around him even though I knew I shouldn’t, so I went for the most serious conversation topic I could.

“How’s your leg? Did you need stitches?”

“No. I had to break into Uncle Jimmy’s field first aid kit for betadine though—I think it’s clean, but it might scar, and I’ve got a hell of a bruise.”

“Oh.” My urge to stupidly grin at him felt even more inappropriate. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be—if you’d been a second slower, I’d be walking with a limp for life.”

A small part of me deep inside leapt a little. “But if you hadn’t been at my house?—”

“Eh. It was my choice to be there.”

It had been. Which was…discomfiting to me. In a good way. “So—where are we going?”

He looked out my window to check for oncoming traffic and flashed me a grin. “You’ll see.”

We drove out of Redson. Old Jessie, who maybe watched too many horror films and had an overactive imagination might have been scared by this turn of events—but New Jessie just really wanted to see where this drive was headed.

I rolled down the window halfway and made my hand dance in the air outside.

Darius looked over and I felt the car surge forward and I laughed.

There was no way we could talk with the air blowing but we didn’t need too—we were driving, away, away, away, with Redson in our rearview mirror.

It felt right—and when the car started slowing down, I was sad that our old lives were catching up.

I rolled the window up before he pulled the key out of the ignition, and got out.

My hair looked wild in my reflection in the window and I liked it.

Everything around us was flat in all directions.

A few fields over I could see a water tower with Home of Bison Baseball!

and State Champions curved around its sides. Bisons were everywhere, even out here.

“What now?”

“See that tree out there?” he asked, pointing. One field over had a lone tall tree in the middle, oddly geometric, none of its branches waving despite the wind.

“Yeah?”

“That’s where we’re headed,” he said, and then hopped the fence. I followed, glad I’d worn jeans.

There were no cows here currently, but cow-patties were scattered everywhere, like dropped punctuation marks: exclamation points, commas, and periods.

“Okay—what now?” I said as he pulled up short.

“You tell me?—”

I was concentrating so hard on the here and now, on the way he moved in front of me, how I liked that he knew what he was doing, and that he wanted to hang with me, dealing with the fact that I knew I had a crush even though it was a stupid-bad idea, unless it wasn’t and then I didn’t know and I really didn’t want to step in any cowshit—I didn’t feel it till we were half-way out.

“Oh. My. God.” I said, and stood still.

“Yeah?” he said, turning, with a grin.

He was haloed by a beaming torch of data flowing behind him.

The tree wasn’t actually a tree—it was an information transfer system of some sort—I could feel the weight of everything passing through it, felt the pull of it bringing data in, like a yawning vortex, and then the shove of it pushing it out again.

I felt trapped in between the two extremes, wavering, liminal.

“You okay?” he said. I couldn’t see him anymore, not really.

“I think so. It’s just—so—bright.”

“It’s a cell phone tower. I thought it’d be a good place to try some things. But if you’re not okay?—”

I heard the concern in his voice and tried to make my voice steady. “What’d you want to try?”

“Here.” I saw him turn with the remnants of my normal-sight, heard-felt him take a picture of something, and then heard-felt-saw him send it. “Fetch.”

The information from his phone zipped up into the tower and was about to get away—I lunged for it with my mind and got sucked in.

It was like being a kid again, lost in a big electronic store, one of those huge ones with the blasting air conditioning.

I wandered down an endless aisle of floor to ceiling screens, all the TVs shouting down with skipping channels, image after image, crashing like waves on a shore.

Sports, elephants, people, naked flesh—the moment I figured out what anything was, it changed again, and my ears echoed with dissonant sounds: the cheers of crowds, a blare of trumpets, canned laughter, a grunt of pain, the softest moan—and at the bottom of all of these, the image I’d gone searching for—Darius’s photo.

I swayed with the effort of catching it.

“Don’t fall,” he said.

I blinked my eyes open and I was back to the field with a killer headache. “I’m trying not to.” I felt like I’d taken a sip from a firehose—and it’d almost blasted my lips off. But I knew what it was that he’d sent. “You took a picture of your hand, holding out three fingers.”

“Yeah.” He beamed at me and held out his hand in real life. “Time to do science. Gimme your phone.”

I handed it over, and he told me to go long.

Over the course of the next hour, we discovered the limits of my range—I had to be between the phones and the tower to get information faster than the phones, and I could swat texts out of the air like flies, or just read them and let them flow on, as long as I was in the right place at the right time.

None of what we found out explained how I was doing any of it, but it was nicer than I cared to admit to be working with him.

At the end of things, when my headache won, I lay down on a safe patch of grass trying not to let it show.

Darius lay down beside me an arm’s length away, propped up on his side, and put our phones between us. I reached out for mine and rested it on my stomach, staring up at the clouds billowing overhead, like massive ships sailing across the sky.

“Kansas has clouds like God meant man to have them,” he said, after his gaze followed my own.

“Who said that?”

“I did. Just now.”

I made an agreeable sound. “It’s poetic.”

“Thanks.”

The world felt like it was slowing, or maybe I just wanted it to be.

The headaches I felt seemed to be commensurate with the effort I put out—the harder I tried, the worse I hurt later.

With everything I’d attempted and failed at last night, I was lucky I didn’t have a headache-hangover this morning—but right now it felt like someone was learning how to play maracas inside my skull.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. It’s just—any time I do my thing, I pay for it in here,” I said, rubbing my temples.

“That makes sense. In comics, powers always have a price. If they don’t, you turn into a villain.”

I pushed myself up on one elbow, facing him. “What about Superman?”

“His price is he can never have a normal relationship.”

“Huh.” Who knew Superman and I had so much in common. I pushed myself up on one elbow, facing him. His phone was still between us. “You realize I could read your whole phone right now?” I asked.

“Yeah—after you confessed, I deleted everything off of it that might’ve been questionable.”

“Like what?”

“Some porn. And a Taylor Swift album.”

I laughed. But if he was that smart—I’d seen Amy’s message go through to him last night. And he himself had been going to Liam’s party. In a work capacity, but still—he knew other girls.

“Do you go to all the parties?”

“Only ones I’m invited to.”

“I never pegged Liam for a stoner.”

“Are you kidding me? Half the team would kill and eat each other if they didn’t smoke pot—it smoothens out the ‘roid rage. I’m practically doing a public service.”

“But—why?” I’d seen his Uncle’s house. It was plenty nice—and he’d had a job, until the incident at the Shax. It wasn’t like he desperately needed money.

“Because I want to go back to California.” He gestured at the world behind me. “Nothing personal,” he added, apologizing to me and Kansas simultaneously.

“Yeah, of course.” I knew all about wanting to be somewhere else.

The cell tower kept blossoming like a volcanic eruption behind him, all the data swooping in and pouring out, every time I closed my eyes. Images flickered in the flow before they were swallowed in or rushed away, twinkling like sunlight off a fast-moving stream. “I just don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“How come I can see all of this—but I couldn’t get what I was looking for the other night.”

Darius looked behind himself at the cell tower, and then again at me. “Maybe…because it wasn’t there?”

I rocked back. Why wouldn’t it be there, on Danny’s phone?

Because the pictures were on someone else’s.

Someone else had been in the room. And someone else had all the photos. Who? Which member of the baseball team would I vote Most Likely to Document a Crime?

Danny’s perpetual side-kick, Mason.

I turned to Darius, my jaw dropped. “Oh my God, Darius. You’re a genius.”

He gave me a mockingly profound look. “I like to think so.”

Without thinking, I leaned in and kissed him.

I meant to kiss him like I kissed Allie sometimes, a fast smooch to show how much I cared. But when I pulled back, our faces were so close, and our lips even closer.

“I’m—sorry?” I stuttered.

“Don’t be,” he said, and leaned in.

His lips touched mine and I didn’t know if I was good at it, or if he was, but everything about it felt right, the way his tongue pushed into my mouth as our heads tilted perfectly.

Electricity raced up and down my entire body, turning me into a creature of heat and light and for the first time since the power started flowing through me, I wasn’t scared of losing control.

Then I heard an echo of Lacey’s voice.

I pushed Darius away, coming abruptly back to reality.

“I’m—sorry?” It was his turn to guess.

“Shhhhh.”

“What?” he asked, looking worried, breathing hard.

“I—”

Had I really heard her? I looked up at the cloud of data roiling behind him.

Please.

I heard her voice echo like a ghost’s in a horror movie, words stretching out, rising and falling as if from a great distance.

It’s my mom. You have to save her.

I gasped and sat straight up.

“Jessie?” Darius’s voice had a note of concern.

“We have to go. Now.” I got up on my feet, and then grabbed him—we were on a touching basis now, right?—to haul him up behind me. “You have to take me to Lacey’s right now. Something’s wrong.”

He glanced up at the cell tower and then again at me, holding my hand out, pulling away. He took it and we raced together across the field.