Page 5 of Electricity

I waited a good thirty minutes, long enough for my mom to get to work and if she’d forgotten anything to have decided to go without. Then I reached under her bed and pulled out our laptop.

It was ours , no matter that she treated it like it only belonged to her. Our dad had gotten it for us last Christmas, but she hoarded it and wouldn’t let us see it unless we had school projects to work on, and then only while she was awake to watch us.

Allie danced up to me, sitting on Mom’s bed, with an, “Ummmmmmmmm.”

“Look, are you telling, or not?”

My little sister weighed her options. She could kick me while I was down, or trade for bigger things. “Can I watch pony videos when you’re finished?”

“Deal. Give me thirty-minutes, okay?” She nodded, and lingered. I gave her a look. “Shoo,” I said.

She stomped out to the living room and then called back, “I’m timing you!”

“I know!” I shouted back at her, tapping my fingers on the keyboard as I waited for the computer to boot.

It wasn’t top of the line, it was top-of-whatever-Dad’s-new-wife-would-allow-him-to-buy-us two years ago.

I’d only met her twice, but twice was enough to imagine the face she’d made seeing his credit card bill that January.

She wanted him to spend all his time and money on her kids—on their kids, now that they shared one.

Whereas for us? Well. I supposed parenting was a skill like any other that you could figure out how to get good at.

But no kid slept well at night knowing that they were just the practice ones.

The generic sunrise desktop my mother installed came up, and along with it all the tabs and folders and files. I pulled up a web browser and knew exactly where I was heading next.

ZoomBoom.

It’d started as some silly photo-sharing app and had slowly become something more—I had it installed on my phone, but I could log into it here under duress.

I typed in my info—I was MizMarmelade, named after the orange cat we’d had while growing up—and zany colors greeted me, along with the obnoxious ticking sound of photos expiring.

Everything on the site was only there for one day and it wanted you to know that.

If you weren’t constantly on it, you were guaranteed to be missing something.

I turned the volume off so I wouldn’t have to hear it countdown.

Since the party was last night, I only had a few hours left to see what there was to see—and that was limited by the number of connections I had at the party. Personally? Zero. But via Sarah’s newfound popularity, I could see some of her boom-buddies—the name was intentionally horrible, I was sure.

Even with only a day’s worth of time, there were at least a hundred crap photos, between her friends and mine. Dinners, shoes, dogs, cars, clouds, with witty comments and without. I swiped through them all until I finally got to Liam’s.

Apart from the generic herds of older classmates posing with red cups that could’ve honestly held soda, officer-sir, I knew I was in the right place when I found his couch—the one I hoped we would still someday make out on.

This was, um, not the first time that I had stalked Liam.

But now that I was at the right time, I was looking for Lacey.

Scanning the faces at the periphery of the photos, people who hadn’t been meant to be in focus.

I’d recognize even the back of her head instantly, I’d sat behind her on a bus often enough.

I glanced through clusters of people, the sports teams, the smart kids that still partied, the cheerleaders, the hangers-on, and Lacey was in none of them.

She’d clearly gotten grounded the second she’d come in her front door.

“Are you done yet?” Allie shouted from the living room.

“Aren’t you timing me?” I shouted back.

Liam’s face lit up the screen, in close up. His brown-blonde hair was roguishly ruffled, his eyes doing that green-gray-blue thing as the corner of his mouth pulled into a smile because of something said off screen.

And underneath, some semi-anonymous person had written, “Suck it, Hailey!”

If he only knew what he did to me. If I ever had the guts to tell him. If there was ever a point in sharing my feelings, which, clearly, there wasn’t.

I swiped past him, regretfully, knowing I’d never get to see that particular photo again, but having too much pride to save it—much less on my laptop, where there was a chance my mother would see.

And then I found her. Lacey, like Waldo, at long last.

She wasn’t the focal part of the picture—that would be Mason and Chase, in the foreground—but she was sitting on the same couch that I’d imagined making out on an embarrassing amount of times before.

She was clearly talking to someone off screen, with her mouth open and one hand out.

It wasn’t a great picture—her hair was flat and her face a little greasy, but it looked like she was having a good time.

She was wearing the least-worst of the shirts her mom had bought her recently—and hey, floral patterns were a little in this year—and there was a red cup in her right hand.

So why was she at the hospital?

Without warning, the photo ‘exploded’ while I was looking at it, in a shower of pixelated confetti.

“Your thirty minutes is up!” Allie said, dancing back into the room. “Pony time!”

“Hang on—” I rushed through another twenty photos. No Lacey. And—if she was in the hospital, it didn’t really matter what I saw on ZoomBoom, did it? I needed to see her in person.

Allie lunged for the computer, but I pulled it back. Her jaw dropped, and she inhaled to call me a liar.

“What if I said you could look at an infinity of pony videos?”

She made a shrewd face and waited.

“What if…I let you watch whatever you wanted on TV and on the internet, while I go to the hospital real quick and check in on Lacey?”

She gasped again. “Take me! Take me, take me!”

“It’s a really long walk, Allie. So far that I can’t carry you if it gets too long, you know? It’s like ten miles.” It was really like five miles, which was more than far enough.

She harrumphed, and her eyes narrowed, weighing me. “All the TV I want?”

“Yep. And computer. And no bedtime. You can stay up till I get back. Only?—”

“Don’t tell Mom,” Allie finished for me.

“Yeah.”

Allie pondered our deal for half-a-hot-second then said, “Okay,” and reached for the laptop again.

I almost felt bad about leaving her alone, but not as much as I was worried about Lacey. I smooched her forehead, and three minutes later I was out the front door.