Page 52 of Electricity

W hen I woke up and turned my phone on and discovered the only texts I’d gotten overnight called me a bitch/cunt/whore, I pulled up Lacey’s number in my mind and asked for a ride. I got Allie out the door and then I waited well away from the bus-stop for Lacey, and when she got there, I got in.

“So where’s Prince Charming?” she asked—then caught the look on my face.

“Not so prince or charming, anymore.”

“What happened?”

“In addition to threatening me pretty much constantly, Mason had a member of the team set him up.”

“He’s in jail?”

“No, thanks to me. But he’s worried for himself right now and so he ‘needs some time’.”

“Ugh.”

“Yeah. I can’t blame him. But it does make me sad.”

She made a few turns in silence—and my phone got its first new texts of the day. I hadn’t turned the volume down yet, so Lacey heard it go off. “More?”

“Yeah.”

She slowed as we neared campus. “I didn’t want my target to transfer onto you, you know.”

“I know.” I chewed on my lip as the road went by outside. “But none of this is your fault. It’s mine.”

“I still feel bad.”

“Don’t.” I picked at a loose thread on my jeans.

“I spent the whole walk home from the hospital—the non-lightning part of it—thinking that if only there was some way if I’d been there instead of you, I could’ve gotten out of it.

Like what happened to you was something you could escape from, like being tied to railroad tracks or sinking into quicksand, you know?

I have the escape plans for forty million different ways to die inside my mind.

Plague? I’ve got a plan. Zombie apocalypse?

I’ve got three. But there was nothing I could do—until the lightning hit.

So I’m glad I can do something now, even if it sucks for me. ”

Her voice was so low I almost couldn’t hear it. “I could’ve not been drinking.”

I turned in my seat to look directly at her. “Or, they could’ve not been raping, so fuck that.”

Her eyebrows rose into her bangs. “You do realize the awkwardness of putting the word rape in a sentence and telling it to fuck itself?”

“Yes. I am fully aware. I stand firm by my grammar choices.”

“This is why I love you.”

“And that is why I love you, and not Darius, who is currently kind of stupid.”

Lacey pulled her car into a spot and parked. “He’s a boy. He’s stupider than we are by definition.”

“Totally,” I agreed, and we both got out of her car.

After the weekend I’d had, school felt…surprisingly normal. No one had taken down the prom decorations, so signs urging us to Follow the Yellow Brick Road! were still hoisted overhead. Yay school, yay Redson, yay prom.

Lacey and I went to our lockers, and despite feeling like there was a target on my back, nothing was weird. Yet.

“You want me to walk you?” Lacey asked. Her class was at the opposite end of campus from mine. It didn’t make sense.

“No. I’ll be okay.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I won’t be alone all day. You’ll walk me in. You’ll walk me out. I’ll eat lunch in the library, Mrs. Frost won’t let anything happen to me there. I’ll only pee with hall passes during classes, not between.”

“You’ve put a disturbing amount of thought into this.”

“Maybe. But you saw what I did to your mom.” I rubbed sweaty hands against my hips. “I may or may not have accidentally killed a dog doing something similar a mere night before that, so I’m not real worried about them hurting me? But I don’t want to get cornered.”

“Yeah, I don’t know why I’m worried about you, not them.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said with false bravado. “Trust me.”

“Okay,” she said, slowly backing away, facing me in case I changed my mind.

“Really,” I said, and waved her off.

Shortly after that, the attacks began.

I took three steps out into the river of kids going to their first classes, and caught a backpack to my left shoulder.

I whirled a little, said I was sorry, and then walked on—and got hit by another.

Same shoulder. Then my right shoulder, coming the other direction.

“Hey!” I shouted, and Andrew walked on like he didn’t hear me—and then the next one landed, a messenger bag swung at my hip.

This one I danced away from in time, but I looked over, as Andrew stared right on by, like he didn’t see me at all—and I got clocked by another one from behind.

I turned. “Excuse you!” I shouted, but it didn’t matter—they were all so careful not to do anything that couldn’t be construed as accidents—just twenty accidents piling up here on the accident line.

I hunkered down and started stomping as quickly as I could to history, hoping none of them would hit my face, because if they did I didn’t know what I’d do.

These were people who didn’t know me, who didn’t know anything other than the fact that Mason and Danny had said to gang-up on me—underclassmen I’d never met, upperclassmen who previously would’ve never given me the time of day—it was like I was one of those salmons swimming up a river in Alaska and all the bears had claws and tasers.

“Just—stop it—okay?” I said aloud between buffets, knowing none of them would, hearing the way the words come out of my mouth, knowing they made me sound weak.

I made it into history, ready to cry, and sat straight down. And just then a text flew in, source anonymous, as always.

Everyone hates you.

I stared blankly at the chalkboard. “Yeah. I know.”

Biology was just down the hall. I slunk there, doing my best to keep a wall to one side. Fifteen hits and a few near-misses later, I slid into the door with a physical sense of relief and then I saw Sarah, sitting at our lab-desk, doing a righteous imitation of my mom.

I couldn’t run out now, she’d seen me, and besides, where could I go to? Mrs. Frost would kick me out if she caught me in the middle of the day.

So I crept over to Sarah and sat down. “Hey.”

In response she crossed her arms, and didn’t say a word.

I don’t even know what Ms. Libel lectured us about.

All I could feel was the anger radiating off of Sarah—and I didn’t need my powers for that.

I spent most of the hour trying to become small, hoping she’d start ignoring me any minute now, or that I’d miniaturize and fall through the holes on my chair and scuttle out the door like the roach I’d apparently become.

When the ending bell rang, I expected to head out and run another gauntlet in the halls—but instead I found myself being dragged to one side.

“Sarah,” I protested, as she hauled me into the nearest bathroom.

“Everybody out!” she demanded, and the three freshman present followed her command. She then leaned against the door so that no one else could come in, and looked at me. “What the hell, Jessica.”

“What?”

“Ryan told me that the entire baseball team is supposed to send you threatening messages, because you’re some kind of master hacker, talking shit about Danny. I find that only slightly less believable than the bra-picture thing—but since everyone else believes it, you need to explain.”

There was no explanation. I shrugged. “It’s true.”

“So—you’re the one who ruined prom?” The expression on her perfect face curdled. “Do you realize that that was the only prom Ryan and I were going to get to have together?”

“You’ve still got two left.” As my mother was so fond of saying.

“I’m not an idiot, Jessica—Ryan’s hot. No matter how much we love each other now, he’s going to college half the country away. I’ll be lucky if he waits until Thanksgiving to dump me. So, yeah, thanks for ruining what should’ve been one of my most important memories for my entire life.”

“Are you kidding me? Did you even read the screen?” Kids were beating on the door outside the bathroom, trying to get in.

She stared at me, still pissed, and then realization seeped in and her voice dropped so low it was hard to hear. “He didn’t, did he? To you?”

“Not me?—”

“Then why the fuck did you do that, Jessie?” Back up to normal volume, even louder.

“Just because he didn’t rape me , doesn’t mean it’s not true!” I was shouting and I didn’t care.

“Let me in there now!” An adult voice shouted through the door. Sarah leaned forward, and then was shoved aside, as Mrs. Ellis pushed in to look around. “Is everything all right in here?”

“Yeah. Everything’s fine,” I said, and slipped past both of them to head back outside.

I made it to lunch, somehow, but I wasn’t hungry.

My arms were bruised from being hit, and my pride—well, I never knew just how much I’d had of it till then.

But seeing that Lacey’d saved me a seat in the back of the library to quietly ‘study’, choosing to spend her lunch hour essentially in detention in the library with me?—

“Thanks,” I said.

“Shhh!” Mrs. Frost said, from three stacks away.

Lacey pulled out a piece of paper and wrote on it before handing it to me—the original form of texting.

Danny’s not at school today.

How’s it been?

Bad.

Kids keep hitting me in the halls.

She scowled.

What?

Yeah.

And I’m pretty sure Robbie was going to spit in my hair, but I hit him with my backpack ‘accidentally’ first.

She stared pensively down, before writing:

This is why I didn’t want anyone to know.

I know.

Although—I almost told Sarah.

What??????

She dragged me into a bathroom.

Blamed me for ruining prom.

I should tell her. I will tell her.

But—what if this happens to her, next?

She drew an arrow pointing toward my phone. Its screen lit up, like it’d heard us and delivered the latest text:

U should just kill yourself bitch.

And someone rapped on one of the windows behind us.

We both jumped and turned, and Mason was there, alongside Bruce.

Lacey turned back to the desk immediately, going pale, but I couldn’t look away.

There was a phone in Bruce’s hand and Mason was smiling wickedly—Bruce was to Mason as Mason was to Danny—and he mimed hanging himself with a noose.

I flipped the paper Lacey and I had been using over and wrote on it quickly and in all caps:

THIS HAS TO STOP.

Then I walked over to slam it up against the window where they could see.

Mason read it, and shook his head, walking backwards away from me, flipping me off with both hands.

I could hear his laughter through the windowpane.

When he turned the corner, I sat back in my chair and was so stunned I almost didn’t notice Lacey taking the note away from me.

She wrote underneath:

It really does. But how?

“I don’t know,” I said. “But there has to be a way.”

“Shhhhh!” Mrs. Frost demanded, and we sat in silence for the rest of the period.

I spent the rest of the day in classes ignoring lectures as I considered my options. What would it take to end things?

The easiest way would be to prove that Danny was a rapist—only I didn’t know how much proof was out there anymore—or if Lacey would let me do anything if it was. And it wasn’t like proving that was going to make me a ton of new best friends.

How could I turn the tide? Was it even possible?

I couldn’t see a way. After what I’d done for Darius I was fairly certain I could smear Danny’s name up one side of Redson and down the other, maybe even make the local paper print his name—but without something other than me just shouting, no one was ever going to believe what’d happened.

It was like he was getting away with it. Again.

“Fuck,” I muttered to myself.

“Excuse me?” Mr. Young looked over. I glanced up at him, and the clock. I really had to pee—and it wouldn’t be safe after class.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Young. My period just started. Can I go to the bathroom?”

Classmates tittered and Mr. Young seemed taken aback, but then strode over to his desk to hand me a green laminated piece of paper. “Sure. Here’s the pass. Maybe next time keep the news of your bodily functions to yourself?”

“I will, sorry.” I rustled through my backpack, pulled out my purse as pretense, and walked to the nearest bathroom.

My hand was pulling on the handle of the door when I heard, “Hey, Jessica,” from halfway down the hall. I turned and saw Darius there, and he jogged up to meet me, his own hall pass in hand. “How’s it going?”

Seeing as I probably had a bruise from how hard Chase’s backpack had hit me in the kidneys? “Pretty bad.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry that you almost got caught doing illegal things you shouldn’t have been doing in the first place.”

“Jessica,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like when cops see me. It’s some scary shit, all right?”

“I know.” I didn’t really, but I could imagine.

It was hard to look at him knowing there was a space between us, one that hadn’t been there before. And I wanted to ask him how much time ‘time’ was, but was too afraid of the answer. I didn’t want to get hit by anything else today.

“So, uh,” he said, flashing his hall pass, and edging past me for the boy’s restroom.

“Yeah,” I said, and slunk into mine.

I was in the same bathroom Sarah’d accosted me in this morning, and the mirror showed me my haggard reflection. I was really going to have to up my game, if I wanted my mother to keep believing I was seeing Liam.

I splashed my face with water and went into the last stall. If I heard anyone outside, I’d have plenty of time to yank my legs up. But I did have to pee—I sat down, listening to myself, nervous that someone else would come in, and looked around.

The light this side of the bathroom was always dim and no matter how often our janitors painted over things there were words etched in, messages from bygone classes about how awesome they were, or people’s names written in equations like Janie plus James really would equal forever.

But when I reached to my right for toilet paper, I saw something new, written in fresh sharpie.

Danny is.

It was the period that let me know it was a complete sentence, not a mad-lib left by another girl waiting for a verb.

Someone had agreed with me.

And below that was:

He is.

I KNOW.

Everyone knows.

Fuck baseball!

Each line’s handwriting was different with different inks. I put my hand to the stall’s cold metal as if I could reach through to them. Then the bell rang overhead and I realized I needed to get back to class.