Page 11 of Electricity

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 TVandon 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.

CHAPTER 5

Iknew the way to the hospital because it was on the same route as the elementary school bus, and because of the time that Sarah’d been in a car accident in fourth grade. Her dad’d gotten side-swiped by a drunk driver at an intersection, and the collision broke her leg when it crunched her door in. She still had scars from where the pins were—we’d spent that summer doodling between them, thinking we were cool, pretending that someone had given our under-aged friend an illegal tattoo.

I reached the entrance to our trailer park and took a right. The roads here were one-lane in both directions with wide shoulders and then swathes of gravel and grass on either side, until the grass won and led up to people’s houses again. I walked in the gravel zone, with the flashlight I’d brought off—the moon was almost full—and a raincoat tied around my waist. The night was as hot as it was humid, and I hoped I wouldn’t need it.

I couldn’t believe Sarah’d slept with Ryan. Slept with—was such a weird phrase. It wasn’t like they’d been ‘sleeping’ in the cab of his truck. Or maybe in the back of it, I hadn’t super pressed. Making love as a phrase was absolutely repulsive—but fucking sounded worse than what it was. So what word could I used to describe it, if I had to? I knew Sarah didn’t want me totell Lacey, but come on, I had to tell someone—if not Lacey, then who?

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