Connection (Le Garde) (6 page)

Anna’s annoyance and amusement mixed together as she smiled. “Do you even listen in class? She’s reminded my period nearly every day last week.”

“
I don’t know, I think I have selective hearing.”

“
Well, let’s go to the computer lab, maybe they’ll have an open computer,” Anna said, picking up her bag again. “It’s supposed to be five pages, and it’s due Thursday.”

“
Right,” I said, packing my things up. We walked downstairs to the computer lab, where they’d squeezed a dozen black desktops onto two long tables. Only one was open, but Anna said she had to do her math homework.

I checked in for an hour long session, and she squeezed in next to me and the computer on the left. The old guy sitting there looked over at her, grumbling, but his voice died in his throat once he saw her. I thought about giving him a dirty look, then reconsidered. Anna was gorgeous. I wasn’t the only one who saw that. Her dark skin and bright smile and the way she wore her hair so it framed her face. Not to mention her body, which curved in all the right ways and—

Anna glanced at me, her brow furrowed, and I cleared my throat, turning to my computer as my face warmed up. She always knew when I was checking her out. I remembered more than once when she caught me in middle school. But her boobs came out of nowhere, and I was an unprepared twelve-year-old. It’d be less embarrassing if she returned the favor once in a while. Okay, probably not, but at least it’d be more balanced. Pretty impossible since I was not even on the same planet as her if we were in some kind of universe that ranked people by attractiveness.

She balanced the algebra book on her legs and put her homework on the table.

Right, Aaron, time to focus.
I pulled out the assignment for the quarterly paper, which was supposed to compare
1984
and
Brave New World
. I hardly remembered
Brave New World
when I wasn’t around Anna, but I managed to make an outline and start a paper in the hour slot.

Next to me, Anna worked on her math homework and she asked me a few questions, but then she’d realize the answer before finishing. Every time she leaned toward me, I could smell something fruity on her, some kind of spray or shampoo.

When the log-in window said I only had ten minutes left, I dug in my backpack for my flash drive. I saved the paper and glanced over at Anna. “I only got halfway through,” I told her. “Could we meet again tomorrow?”

“
I have practice with Melissa,” Anna said.

“
Maybe Wednesday?” I asked. “I need to finish this by Thursday.”

“
And that’s my fault?” She said it with a smile, and I could feel her playfulness. “Wednesday will work, but you have to pay attention more.” She paused. “Can I see what you wrote?”

“
Sure.” I was going to turn the monitor toward her, but it was a stubborn thing and it wouldn’t budge.

Anna reached over, brushing my hand as I struggled with the monitor stand. Her touch shocked me, and the computer suddenly shut off. People surrounding us cried out, and I looked around to see all the computers were off. All of them.

“
What the hell?” I said. I looked at Anna with wide eyes.

She looked down at her hand, then mine. “Maybe we should go,” she said quietly.

“
Yeah.” I pulled the memory stick out of the computer. “Good thing I saved.”

A librarian came over, a girl with curls that rivaled an 80s hair band. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I have no idea what happened.”

The old man turned his computer back on. No damage done. Had
we
done that? Anna thought maybe we should stick around so they didn’t suspect anything, but I just rolled my eyes. How were they going to blame that one us? We communicated silently, and she followed me out of the lab.

“
That was weird,” I said once we were in the elevator.

“
You don’t actually think.
 
.
 
.” Anna trailed off, chewing on her lip. “I mean, how.
 
.
 
.we only touched. It was.
 
.
 
.”

I looked at the elevator panel, then at Anna curiously. “No,” she said immediately.

As soon as the elevator door opened, she was out. I rushed to keep up with her. For having shorter legs than me, she moved pretty quickly when she wanted to. “Anna,” I said.

“
I’m going home,” she said. “We can still meet on Wednesday, but this is too weird.”

We walked through those magnetic detector things that led outside, but they started going off. Anna dug in her bag and found a library book. After hesitating, looking at me and then the book, she got in line. God, was I that horrible?

I stood next to her, contemplating what to say. “Look, I.
 
.
 
.” I trailed off. I couldn’t really say that I liked spending time with her. Not when she and Steven were so chummy, going off to San Francisco together and everything. “I haven’t even done my Government homework.”

“
We can do it on Wednesday,” Anna said. Her arms were crossed as she craned her head to look past the seven foot guy standing in front of us. “What is taking so long? There are three librarians, and only one of them is taking books.”

“
Don’t you want to know what happened?” I whispered.

“
It was just a power surge, that’s all.”

“
Oh, come on.” I thought about reaching out to touch her, but I didn’t want to freak her out, and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Last week, we’d shocked each other pretty hard. Had we not touched once since then? I thought of that picture, the one where we had our arms around each other. I was even going to show it to her before she reminded me about the paper. It was sitting in my Composition folder.

We were soon at the checkout desk. “Sorry it’s taking so long,” the librarian said as she took Anna’s library card. “All of our computers shut down a couple minutes ago except for this one.”

We stared at her in shock and dismay, and she gave us a curious look, like she didn’t know why we were so upset. Well, she definitely didn’t know. What if I tried to tell her we’d caused it? Would she call up the police? The mental hospital?

As soon as Anna got her book, she took off again. I followed behind her. “Anna, don’t you want to.
 
.
 
.I don’t know, try something?”

It was pouring rain outside, so Anna jerked her hood up over her curly hair. I followed suit before we went outside, but I was still soaked within a couple seconds. “Try what, to take out the electricity again?” she asked over the rain.

“
Let me give you a ride,” I said.

Anna hesitated. The rain would drench her on the way home, and neither of us were smart enough to have an umbrella. I held out my hand, a mix of an invitation to see if anything else would happen and an offer to let me take her home.

She stared at my outstretched hand, her curiosity rising. She looked back at the library, biting her bottom lip. She caught my eyes on her mouth and blushed. I knew she was thinking about my curiosity about her relationship with Steven.

“
Come on, Anna,” I said, taking a step forward.

I’d hardly realized she was reaching for me when her hand met mine, and then my entire body was buzzing. My arm hair stood on end, and I could feel currents in the air. I could practically see them they were so real. It was like nothing else I’d ever experienced. The electrons, the charges, the concepts in eighth grade science that had always been abstract—it was all right here, around us,
inside
us.

A flash of lightning lit up the sky, lit me up. We both jumped—not from the flash of light, but from the reaction that went through us, like the lightning was calling out to us. I could feel it crackling in the air. The sky filled with white lines of lightning, jagged streaks of light that were nearly blinding. They lit up the bellies of the clouds, and then the rumble of thunder surrounded us.

I realized I knew when it was coming. I could predict it. The lightning was getting closer, the strikes were growing larger and brighter, the thunder echoing only seconds later, until it was almost simultaneous, and then Anna broke away.

The air whooshed out of me, like someone had punched me in the stomach. I gasped for breath as the sky went dark again. There was no sound but the pounding rain. White flashes were imprinted on my vision, and I blinked rapidly.

Anna started to back away, staring at me and shaking her head.

“
Wait, Anna,” I called, but she turned around and started to jog off.

I stood there for a moment, stunned by her sudden absence and all that our touch had done.

5. la varicelle (the chickenpox)

Anna

I didn’t even bother with the bus. I ran until my legs were aching and my throat was burning. When I got home, I was drenched. I jogged past Ginger and Allie, who were huddled around the TV, and went straight to my room. I stripped off my sweatshirt and blouse. My skin was damp; even my bra was wet. I peeled off my jeans and threw everything into a pile in the corner.

I wished I could throw away the memory of what had just happened. I wished I could strip off my connection with Aaron.

I started the shower and sat on the toilet, shivering as I waited for the water to warm up. I looked at my hands and my long, dark fingers. How could they have the power to shut off dozens of computers? How could they cause lightning over and over again?

Maybe it was just a coincidence. I jumped under the warm water, trying to tell myself we hadn’t caused the power outage
or the lightning. I tried to lie to myself, but I knew the second my hand took Aaron’s. I knew by the way the world came alive, how everything, each electrical charge in the air, even in us, was like a part of us. Not me.
Us
. When the clouds crashed and the lightning struck, I’d felt it go through every fiber of my being.

After my shower, I dried myself off and got dressed in dry, warm clothes. Downstairs, Ginger and Allie snacked on jelly beans while they searched for something to watch.

“
It’s pouring out there,” I said needlessly as the rain slashed against the windows.

“
I hate the rain,” Allie said. “I was going to go to the park with Mackenzie.” She pouted and started complaining about Ginger flipping the channels. Ginger ignored her, alternating between a Lifetime movie and a raunchy MTV show.

“
You’re not supposed to be watching that,” I told Ginger as I walked into the kitchen, which was a small room off to the side.

Ginger huffed. “Mom is way too strict. All my friends watch this.”

“
Just change it. Allie’s only eight.”

Ginger glared at me, but she changed the channel. I opened the fridge and closed it just as quickly. I wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t even think about food after what just happened. I looked at Ginger and Allie for a moment, wondering if anything odd had ever happened to them. I was eight when I met Aaron. Would Allie meet someone like him soon? Someone whose feelings she’d know even though he didn’t speak them, someone whose knowledge she gained just by standing next to him, someone she could speak French with?

Whenever Mom was home, we spoke in French instead of English. When my dad left seven years ago, Mom went through a small phase where she spoke strictly English, saying she needed to perfect it to get a better job. We eased back into French a few months later, though.

She also taught us bits and pieces of Lingala, but it’d been more than a decade since she’d spoken it since my dad only knew French and English. She hadn’t spoken to her family in years. She left before the violence started, but for a little while she was trying to raise money to bring them over from DR Congo. Her parents died in the first war when I was only two, and she lost contact with her sister a couple years ago. Nobody knew if she was alive or if she’d just been displaced.

That was why Mom was so protective over us—we were really the only family she had left. Whenever I talked about going over to Central Africa to help teach French or English or help with literacy projects, she asked me why I couldn’t be a teacher here in America.

I left the kitchen with a sigh. I needed to do my homework. Anything to get my mind off of Aaron.

Mom got home an hour and a half later, and she told my sisters to turn off the TV and do their homework while we got dinner ready. “Will you start peeling the yams?” she asked.

I went to the kitchen and started. Mom joined me a few moments later, changed out of her work clothes. She worked at the DMV, and she hated the blouses she had to wear. She sighed as she took out the rice.

“
How was your day?” I asked in French.

“
Okay,” she said. “Yours?”