Page 36 of Electricity

“ W hat’s happening?” he asked. The road was empty for miles on either side, so he threw it into reverse, whipping us both back the way we’d come, then stepping on the gas.

“Shit,” he said, and pushed the car faster.

Our trailer park was on the outskirts where land was cheap—Darius decelerated and pulled us into the park as I shouted the directions for Lacey’s trailer. He parked outside and we both ran in—the front door was already open.

“Lacey!” I howled.

“Back here!” she shouted from the back. We raced in and she registered that we weren’t the cavalry she’d expected. “Jessie? Darius? Where’s the ambulance?” Her cheeks were stained with tears.

Ms. Harper’s room was just like the rest of Lacey’s house, all displays of glass kittens and lace doilies, a shrine to feminine fragility. In the center of it, Ms. Harper was sprawled across her bed.

“What’s wrong with her?” Darius asked, but I could already see it. She didn’t have the light that everyone else in the room did. I didn’t have a word for what it was that we had—but she didn’t have it —because inside her chest her heart was like an electrical storm in miniature, firing all wrong.

“Her heart’s not right,” I said without thinking, because it was.

Lacey fell to her knees and wailed, the kind of cry that dragged through your soul.

Darius whirled on me. “Do it.”

I opened my mouth to ask Do what? , but I knew what he wanted. He’d seen me charge a battery before—he was asking me to charge a heart. I backed up, shaking my head.

He rose up to his full height. “Fucking do it, Jessie.”

“But—Razor!”

“What’re you gonna do, make her deader?” He grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “Last time I checked, when your heart stops pumping you die!”

Lacey looked between us like we were insane, but then focused on me. “Jessie—if there’s something you can do—do it!”

I grit my teeth and mounted the bed, crawling over to Ms. Harper on my knees and straddling her.

It felt wrong, I didn’t think I’d ever touched her before or her me, there’d never been a reason, once I’d aged out of the spit-on-the-napkin phase.

But I opened up her shirt because that’s what it seemed like they did on TV, saw the dingy elastic of her well-washed bra, and put my hand on her chest on either side of her heart, like I could cup it through her skin and tell it what to do.

Her bouncing heart got worse every second I was scared.

“I’m so sorry Ms. Harper,” I said—and then I zapped the shit out of her.

I could see the passage of the light I gave her crackling through her body. Her back arched beneath me and her arms rolled away and Lacey was shouting, “What’d you do?” in my ear.

I concentrated, seeing Ms. Harper for what she truly was, an organic battery, created by life and electrical currents. Inside her chest her heart still beat too fast, out of phase—so I did it again. Outside, sirens came in and stopped right outside the trailer doors.

In the real world, I stared down at her, panting, praying. “Don’t make me,” I begged.

And her hand came up to swat me back.

“Mom?” Lacey shouted. “Momma?” She crawled onto the bed beside me, as the paramedics brought their clattering gurney in.

Ms. Harper’s eyes fluttered open. “Lacey?” she asked, reaching out for her with one weak hand.

Darius grabbed my shoulders and pulled me across to the bed’s far side, trapping us inside the room.

We watched the paramedics do their thing, loading her up as Lacey cried, then wheeling her out with us close behind.

She wouldn’t look back at me, which made sense, her attention was on her mother, but—I kept hoping to make eye contact, to let her know that I wanted things to be OK.

We lingered, standing there, Darius’s arms around me, and one of the paramedics looked back instead.

“Next time—if there is one—drag the patient onto the floor first. It makes the CPR more effective.”

“Thanks,” I said, just as he slammed the door.