Page 54 of Electricity

A fter I watched Lacey’s car drive away I sat down on my front porch.

I could feel the trailer, lurking behind me—not all of my powers were gone.

But like a battery running down, there was less and less charge.

It was like getting hit by lightning had opened up a door, and now I was watching it— feeling it —close.

I just hadn’t noticed until I’d asked more from it than it could give.

While I was pondering this, a familiar truck drove up. Liam got out and looked over both shoulders, before coming over to talk.

“Heard about your bag,” he said quietly, like someone might listen in.

“Oh you did, did you?” I hadn’t turned my phone back on yet, but I had no doubt pictures of my abandoned backpack were all over ZB.

He walked toward me, head bent, and I had to fight not to back away. I was scared. But there’d be no reason for Mason to send him over, when there was so still much carnage he could wreak himself.

“If I give you something, will they ever know it was me?” he asked, his voice low.

I swallowed my heart back down. “I’d die before I told them, Liam. And you already know how stubborn I can be.”

“I can’t give you anything on Danny. No one ever has anything on him, besides Mason. But Mason? He runs a cheating ring.”

“What? How?” We were almost close enough to kiss each other’s shoulders, without actually touching.

“You know how a lot of our teachers teach more than one of the same class? Mason finds kids who’re taking the same tests earlier on in the day, and bribes or bullies them into texting him the answers so that when he takes the same test in the afternoon he manages to pass.

He’s smart enough not to make A’s or anything, no one would believe that—but it gives him good enough grades to pass.

He already has scholarships lined up for baseball, he just needs to graduate. ”

“Do you have any proof?”

“Other than the fact that he told me? No. But you’re the hacker, right?”

I thought back to everything I’d siphoned off of Mason’s phone and pulled up perfect images of all his texts inside my mind. Sure enough, several of them were listings of numbers along with letters a-e, scantron ready. “Yeah. I am.”

“Good. Fuck his shit up,” he said, then turned to walk back to his truck. I couldn’t help myself, I chased after him.

“What changed?” I asked, as he hoisted himself up.

“You know how there’s no ‘I’ in team? Well there’s no rapist motherfuckers in team either,” he said, reaching out to firmly slam his door.

The second his truck drove off, I ran to Lacey’s.

I went through my neighbor’s yard, down a path between trailers, through another backyard, dodged around a beat-up truck on blocks, and ran up the hill to the back of her place. I shouted, “Lacey!” just as I started beating on her window. “Lacey guess what!”

She’d only dropped me off ten minutes ago, come on now— “It’s me!” I shouted, in case there were a panoply of other options.

The blinds zinged up, revealing my best friend through the screen’s tight woven mesh—with my other best friend standing beside her.

“Hey?” I said.

“It’s about time,” Sarah said, as Lacey pulled open the window and popped out the bottom screen with a well-placed punch.

“Come on in,” she said, and offered me a hand.

Two people pulling on a third made the trailer wall easier to scale, although I still landed like a brick inside. I looked between them afterward—the mood was somber, there were tears in both their eyes. “I’m sorry?” I guessed.

“I told her, Jessie,” Lacey said.

“And now I feel like the world’s shittiest friend,” Sarah said.

“That was the whole point of not telling you—I didn’t want you to feel bad.”

“Too late.” Sarah said. “Plus, I feel even worse now, that you thought you couldn’t tell me. I don’t need to live in a bubble. And then—I was such a bitch—oh my God. What the hell, L-bows, what the hell.”

“Hey,” I said, patting her.

“It’s just—if I’d known—I’d have—I can’t believe it!” she said, and Lacey’s eyes flashed with worry, until Sarah said the exact right words. “He just—does that, and then keeps acting normal? All the time?”

I settled in beside her. “Yeah. That’s kind of his thing.”

“I’m not even the first,” Lacey said, taking a spot on Sarah’s far side.

“It—fucking sucks. For me. I can’t even begin to imagine what it was like to be you.” She threw her arms wide in disbelief. “How have you—school—prom? Jesus!”

I met Lacey’s gently bemused expression over Sarah’s head.

“It hasn’t been easy,” Lacey said. “It’s been like—the worst thing ever, actually. Knowing that nothing bad was going to happen to him? That what he did to me doesn’t count? It’s made me feel pretty worthless, honestly.”

“That is not true,” I said, reaching behind Sarah to grab Lacey’s arm.

“No, I know. But—that’s how it feels inside, yeah? Which is why I changed my mind.”

Sarah raised her head again and smudged running mascara aside. “About what?”

“I’m going to the cops. For real. I’ll tell them everything that happened.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah. I’m done hiding. I can’t stand by while you take bullets for me, Jessie, that’s not fair. If the word gets out it happened, so be it—at least then people will know.”

“But why would they believe you now, when you said they didn’t want to before?” Sarah asked.

“It doesn’t matter if they believe me. What matters to me now is that I tried.”

I pushed myself up onto my knees. “What if there was a way you wouldn’t be going to the cops alone?” I had Lacey and Sarah’s full attention.

“You could ask other girls to go in with you!” Sarah shouted.

“I can get Mason to turn in Danny!” I said, at nearly the same time. “Wait—what?”

“If there’s other girls,” Sarah said, looking between us, “why not ask?”

Lacey’s brows furrowed. “What’s your Mason thing?”

“We know Mason has pictures—and we know he didn’t delete them all. I think I have something that’ll make him turn in Danny. I just need a day.”

Lacey’s eyes locked with mine. She knew what I was capable of—and things about me that Sarah didn’t know. “You’re sure?”

I nodded strongly. “Yeah. I’ve got him.” I just needed to get between him and a cell phone tower tomorrow.

“If you’re gonna turn in pictures, they’ll have other girls in them by default. All the more reason to ask them first,” Sarah said.

It made sense, but, “How?”

“How we do everything, silly,” Sarah said, pulling out her phone.

We crafted the ZB message together, under my login, since I was already the most hated of the group—and because no one sane would respond to a completely anonymous request.

“It doesn’t sound like me,” I complained.

“It sounds like an infomercial,” Lacey said.

“Don’t worry, it’ll do,” Sarah said, and hit send. Then she and Lacey went and boosted it, so within seconds everyone in two-friends-length of reach on our network saw:

Been harassed by a member of the baseball team?

Want to talk about it in a safe setting?

Informal support group forming.

Message me here for details. Anonymous messages OK.

I set my phone down in between all three of us, like it was an Ouija board. I knew we’d just done the right thing, I could feel it in my bones, but said, “There is like no way that this can end well.”

“Maybe it’ll end a little less badly?” Lacey said.

Sarah’s phone buzzed and she turned on her screen. “Uh oh. Ryan wants to have a chat with me.”

“Sorry Sarah.” Lacey began.

“Don’t be. I’d rather have him pissed at me then lose you.” But she did stand up, as her phone got a fresh text, and then another. “I should go now—homework.”

“Dinner,” Lacey said, offering her another excuse.

“Dinner—shit—I gotta get home!” I looked out the open window, praying my mom was still asleep. I swiped my phone up and then all of us were standing. My phone started buzzing, but I didn’t dare use my powers to look—if they were fading, I needed to save them for tomorrow.

Lacey took both our hands. “Thank you two for joining me in the ranks of the soon to be really unpopular.”

“Speak for yourselves. Somehow, I will weather this and rise above,” Sarah said, swanning her neck before pretending to notice us again. “And then take you two with me.” She went back to normal, show over. “Just don’t hide anything from me anymore, okay?”

We all hugged in agreement.

Sarah went out the front door for her car while I got ready to make my peace with the window, so I could help Lacey put the screen back.

“What dirt did you get on Mason?” Lacey asked as I rested on her windowsill.

“He’s a cheater. I think I can bust him tomorrow. There’s some details to sort out first.”

“Holy shit,” she said. Redson High fancied itself an honor system campus. To get caught cheating was to get expelled—and not graduate. “How’d you find that out?”

“Can’t tell you. But it’s legit, I swear. I just need to figure out where he’s going to be tomorrow.” Which was going to be harder than I wanted to let on. “My powers—when I was getting bullied today, they stuttered.”

“What?”

I tried to play it off. “I was going to zap Mason or something—and when I went to reach for them, they weren’t there.”

“Oh my God.”

“It’ll be fine. They’re not gone-gone.” I could still feel the energy pulsing around her trailer. “I just think I have to be careful is all. Besides—this went better than you thought it would, huh?”

“Yeah. Even though talking about things isn’t fun.”

I swung my legs out the window.

“Aren’t you scared though?” she asked me as I jumped down. “What if no one comes forward? And you’ve just pissed more people off at you?”

“It’s okay,” I said, popping her screen back into place, tapping down each corner. “That’s what superheroes do.”

I raced back to my trailer and opened the door, out of breath, to the aroma of hotdogs being microwaved—my mother’s go-to dish.

“Oh, Mom, I’m sorry I’m late.”

“I saw you and Liam, out in the yard,” my mother said.

“You did?” I said, my voice high.

“Love birds!” she said, then cackled. “That’s why you had to go off and talk to Lacey, wasn’t it? Did he ask you out again?”

I flushed bright red. “Not yet.”

“Well don’t worry, he will. Here you go dear,” she said, stabbing a hotdog and offering it up on a bun. “Eat up.”

I took the most phallic edible we had in our house from her, waved it, and ran off to my room shouting, “Homework!”

The hotdog sat uneaten on my nightstand while I listened at my door, waiting for a swell on the TV. Someone said something funny to someone else and I bolted for the bathroom then locked the door. I sat on the counter and hitched my shirt up in an instant.

The Lichtenberg figures were still there. But faint now, oh so faint.

Shit.

I grabbed the laptop out from underneath the toilet paper rolls and hustled back to my room.