Page 62 of Electricity

“ S orry Jessie,” Lacey said. I lurched upright when I could breathe.

“It’ll be okay. I’ll figure something out.”

“You can crash at my place tonight,” she went on.

“Let’s just get through the next few hours whole. Then we can worry, okay?”

“K.”

“How was today?”

“Normal. But I got your message on ZB—and Darius and I coordinated everything. I even messaged Mason, God help me.”

“That was super brave of you,” I said, finally fastening myself in.

“Not as brave as that,” she said, pointing back toward Ventana.

“My mom—she caught us last night. And before that she ran into Liam’s mother, who ratted us out about prom.” I leaned in between the front seats. “Sorry Darius, if she doesn’t like you now, it’s not racist, it’s just poorly aimed maternal instinct.”

He glanced over at me. “We’ll worry about that in a few hours too.”

The roads we drove on got more rural as time went by. Street lamps disappeared and headlights ruled, the moon was just a sliver when you could see it, mostly covered by scudding clouds.

“Are all the girls coming? Did you tell them about Mason?”

“No, I just said that we’d be formulating a plan. We meet the girls at eight, and then him at nine. That way, anyone who doesn’t want to talk to him can leave.”

“Okay.”

At a tree with a smiley-face of reflective lights embedded in its trunk we took a right, then the road wound left, paralleling the highway for a time before diving deeper into the woods and dead ending in a clearing with a shack.

“Are you sure your uncle’s not a serial killer?”

“Mostly,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

Darius popped his trunk first, so we could grab assorted flashlights and Lacey picked up a grocery bag of snacks.

“Way to think ahead.”

“There’s tissues too,” she said, ducking into the path of Darius’s flashlight.

The door swung forward with an ominous creak, but everything inside seemed normal. There was a pump sink from a sunken well and a pot-bellied stove, along with an unplugged radiator and some electrical blankets, folded up on a ratty futon that’d clearly seen most of its use as a bed.

“My uncle brings a genny up here for longer trips, but I didn’t know how to safely haul it in my car,” Darius said, knocking a layer of dust off a card table with his sleeve.

I swung my flashlight around and spotted a way out of date calendar on the wall, edges crinkled with time, and realized it’d been made in honor of Bison Baseball 1999 .

“Even here?” I said, and went over to tear it off and toss it in the sink, bison-side down.

Lacey pulled fake candles out of the grocery bag, the kind that looked like tea lights but with no real flames, and turned them on.

She put two more in each small window, which made the cabin look more welcoming and less murdery.

And then after that, we sat on the futon and waited.

Lacey checked the time on her phone—I grabbed some Doritos instead of attacking my fingernails—and we all heard the sound of a slow car driving up.

“What do we do?” I whispered.

“Just wait. We don’t want to scare her off.”

“Or him,” Darius said.

There was a foot on the stair as every urban legend I’d ever read downloaded into my head, and then the front door opened.

“Hello?”

It was a female voice—attached to a girl I recognized. “Hey—Shana, right?” She was wearing a hoodie from the college three towns away, baggy jeans and flip-flops, and her blonde hair was in a messy bun.

“Yeah.” She seemed surprised that I knew her. If only she knew how I knew her. “Is this the right place? My sister told me this was happening.”

“It is,” Lacey said, standing up. “Please, come in. We’re waiting for a few more to get here.”

Her eyes ran over Darius. “Who’s he?”

“I’m just a friend of a friend. But this is my uncle’s place.” He looked around between the three of us, the odd man out. “I can leave though, if you want me to.”

I wanted him to stay but— “That might be best,” Lacey answered him.

“Sure. I’ll just take a flashlight and go wait in the car.” He stood and turned, looking directly at me. “I will just be outside, if you need me. Don’t use this as an excuse to leave me out.” He grabbed a handful of chips on his way out the door.

Shana gave him a wide berth and then took his place on the futon. When the door closed she said, “I always knew there were more.”

“That’s why we’re doing this,” Lacey said. “We’ve got some evidence and we wanted to let everyone know.”

“Evidence?”

“Mason Green’s going to be here in an hour.” She winced as I said his name. “We got some leverage on him—he’s giving us the photos he took.”

“That lying sack of shit.” Her whole body tensed as she cursed.

“He took them of me, too,” Lacey said. “You’re not alone.”

I watched Shana grapple with what to say after her admission. “Thanks?”

“We’re gonna take the photos to the police tonight. And as many people who’d like to go in with us, if they do.”

Shana’s looked away, as though she were more intimately concerned with the cobwebs on the walls than either of us.

“You know I told myself I wouldn’t think about it anymore.

You think it didn’t happen—you wish it didn’t happen, so you pretend it didn’t happen, you know?

I was so messed up in the head I even went out on a date with Danny afterwards.

Because some part of me wanted to make what’d happened normal again.

If we were dating, then he couldn’t have raped me, right?

Then that messed me up even more and I just left. For college.

“I thought everything was behind me but—my sister—she’s beautiful.

And one of the guys on the team started asking her to parties.

” Shana put a hand to her mouth. “I couldn’t not let her know.

But it—it was so hard. The hardest thing I’ve ever done.

And then I got mad, at myself, that I was letting some asshole from a year ago have so much power over me. ”

We’d been listening so closely everyone jumped when the door re-opened. And this time a familiar face walked in. “Emily?” I said.

She stared like she’d been caught. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“You’re in the right place,” Lacey said, standing again to welcome her in.

“Thanks,” she said, folding down to sit beneath a window.

I had to reassign everything in my head now. Here I was thinking Emily was just an awful person. Little did I know that the reason she was awful was because Danny had gotten her too. Which might explain why she was so keen on ‘outing’ Liam and me, and then me and Danny. Maybe.

“We were just talking about what happened to us,” Lacey went on. “And, fair warning, Mason’s going to be here in a bit. You can totally leave before then.”

At that, all the color drained from Emily’s face. Perhaps for her it was Mason, not Danny, who had something to answer for.

“I don’t want to talk about things,” she said, squeezing her knees in tight.

“Okay. That’s fine too,” Lacey said. But she couldn’t leave Shana’s confession hanging, so she didn’t, explaining everything that’d happened to her just two and a half weeks ago too. She skipped prom and electric-me, but left in the hospital.

“Jesus,” Shana exclaimed when she got to that point. Then Jenny walked through the door and joined the crowd.

I don’t want to say that it was like a party, because it wasn’t—but it did have a mood to it.

Maybe it was closer to a good funeral—what’re those Irish-things called, wakes?

Where everyone felt safe enough to cry and commune and be angry or still and by the time I’d ridden an entire rollercoaster of emotions alongside them.

My mother’s phone buzzed at eight-fifty PM.

I pulled it out of my pocket to flash it at them.

“He’s gonna be here in ten minutes, if anyone wants to go.”

Everyone looked from side to side. Alone, any one of them might’ve run away, and rightly so—but side by side on the couch, four of them against one of him?

“I’m good,” Jenny said first, and then everyone else quickly nodded.

“Okay,” I said. Then the door opened for one final time as Mason stepped in.

“All right. I brought it. I saw the cars. I’m not interested in talking to anyone.

” His voice was robotic, he’d clearly practiced both his words and his poker-face on his way up the stairs.

He saw me, and he pitched the USB over. I caught it, and then he deigned to look around the room. When he saw Emily he frowned.

“Why is she here? We never did anything to her.”

We all turned. She’d been quiet, but it’d felt like her right to be, not anything suspicious. And then whooping sounds and metal banging metal started outside.

“Shit!” Mason said, running for the door. It burst open as he reached it, revealing Danny right outside, shoving Mason back.

Danny took in the room. “You’re having a slumber party? And you didn’t invite me?”

Other voices laughed from outside on the cabin’s small porch.

Everyone else went jack-rabbit still. I thought we outnumbered them—and Darius was still outside, I knew it, I was sure he was weighing his options—when Emily jumped up.

“They were going to go to the cops! Mason gave her pictures!” she said, pointing at me. Then she ran to Danny’s side.

“Good work, baby,” he said, leaning in to grab her for a dramatic kiss.

Emily danced back. She hadn’t been running for him—she’d been running for the open door. She flashed us a fearful look, then sidled out.

Emily believed us now. Hoorays.

Danny chuckled at her fear, as though it gave him power, and then lounged in the door jamb, contemplating all of us. “All right. Whatever you’ve planned isn’t happening anymore.”

“Says who?” I said.

“Says me. Give me the photos.” He stuck his hand out, and all the girls looked to me.

“No!” I looked at them. “We’re the right ones. They’re the crazy ones. We can’t let them win!”

Lacey stood and walked over to my side. “Give them here,” she said.

A slow smile crinkled Danny’s face. The same greasy smile I bet he got every time things went his way.