Zapped (2 page)

I showed up after school the next day, nervous and scared, and Coach Albert put me into a one on one with that fierce redhead, who everyone called Ginger. I already knew she was the star player of the varsity team.

At first it was self defense to use my zap power to pull the ball to me, and then to send it to the basket, in spite of the fact that she could run circles around me. Ginger turned into a kind of human machine, bouncing, bobbing, weaving, trying even harder, but as soon as that ball was in the air, I yanked it and zap!

When the teacher blew the whistle, Ginger hadn't scored once. She came up to me, breathing hard, and stuck out her hand. “You're really good, Laurel,” she said, wheezing from her efforts. I looked into her face, and saw a kind of hurt in the way her eyebrows puckered. There was even a little sheen in her eyes, like tears that weren't going to fall. You've seen people trying hard not to cry, right? “Will you practice with me, and show me some stuff?” she asked.

That look whomped me right in the guts. I knew I wasn't any good moving on the court. I scored because I cheated.

“I think I was just lucky,” I said, edging away.

“Lucky? You're
hot
,” Ginger said. “Hotter than both my brothers in college. Would you come over to my place on Saturday? We turned our backyard into a court.”

“I'll ask at home,” I said, feeling like the slimiest worm who ever slimed.

After a sleepless night, I made a resolution: no more basketball star. This resolution was hard to keep, especially after I threw the ball normally the next day, and of course missed by a mile. My team groaned and shrieked in disbelief. I zapped the next shot, but then made myself throw the third normally. Miss. Then the fourth.

And so it went, for the rest of the week. The guilt turned to a kind of sick boil in my stomach when Ginger's disbelief turned into lip-curled contempt. Did she think I was screwing up on purpose?

The next time I zapped the ball, not into the basket, but just above it, then zapped it again so it ricocheted into the coach's chair, knocking it over. After that, I did two more ricochet zaps, thumping the ball out of bounds both times. People stopped throwing it to me as often, but when a third throw came my way, I ricocheted it off the rim and made the ball crash onto the table holding people's water bottles.

“You're trying too hard, Ibberts,” the coach said kindly. “We'll bench you for a few days. Rest your arms.”

I nodded, but the next week, did even worse, and gradually they forgot about me.

Or so it seemed.

I meant to keep my head down, my attention on my schoolwork, but I couldn't help noticing that skinny little nerd from math—Mercy Lund, I learned when the teacher called roll—scurrying from class to class, her big eyes goggling frog-like behind those glasses, her yellow-white hair fluffing out like duck down around her head. Mercy clutched her books tight against her skinny chest with her knobby hands, like some kind of armor.

A couple months into the year, it was time for auditions for the holiday assembly. I had signed up for art as an elective, which, I found out, meant set painting for the productions. So I was there for the auditions, as we measured and cut and hammered to build flats. The auditions started out with the usual sort of stuff I'd seen at every school: terrible garage bands who thought if you played loud enough, no one would notice you'd never taken any lessons, lip-synching to popular songs while hip-bumping around the stage, the stand-up comedians who repeated jokes they got off the comedy channel.

I froze when Mercy walked out, wearing a baggy, faded pink track suit with this white tunic thing over it that looked like a pillowcase with armholes cut out. She'd taken off her glasses, which made her eyes look like pale marbles. The kids in the audience waiting for their turns to try out rustled even more than usual; a bunch of boys started a coughing context, and giggles and laughs came from the back row.

The music started, something classical, the noise from the audience almost drowning the speakers. But then Mercy lifted her arms, twirled around on one foot, took a few light steps and leaped high in the air, toes pointed, arms arched. She floated down like a swan in flight, the tunic rippling almost like feathers.

“Whoa!” someone in the front yelled, followed by laughter. My stomach clenched, my toes bunched up in my shoes, and I nearly dropped my paintbrush, I felt so sorry for that girl. Why did she have to try out? It was like she was inviting the mean kids to be mean.

But as the music rose, Mercy danced on, twirling faster until she was a blur of pink and white, her leaps high, landing as lightly as a bird. The auditorium had gone quiet.

I let out my breath and turned on my stool so I could watch her, and noticed that everybody else backstage was also watching. I'd never seen anything so graceful, not even the girls who had been taking ballet since they were five. This was different from ballet, it was a wild kind of dance, strong and free. She reminded me of the egrets and cormorants I'd seen along Coronado Beach, the ones diving out of the sky, then snapping out broad wings before zooming up against the clouds, so graceful that your heart catches at the sight.

When the music ended, Mercy took a quick little bow, skinny and knobby again, but there was loud, genuine applause.

“You are in,” said the teacher in charge.

Mercy ducked her head, and though I was barely twenty feet away, I scarcely heard her “Thank you.”

“You'll need a costume,” the teacher said.

“I know. I'll have one,” Mercy replied.

“Good. Next!”

The next day in math class, Kyle acted the way the really angry bullies act, like it's a personal insult when someone they've pushed to the bottom doesn't stay there. He walked by Mercy's desk and knocked all her books to the floor, then kicked her notebook to the back row.

The teacher looked up sharply, and Kyle said in a fake voice, “Sorry,
Mercy
.” He sneered her name, then said with exaggerated politeness, “I'll pick it up.” He bent to pick up her notebook, managed to open it so all her papers spilled all over, and with his back to the teacher, hawked a loogie into the papers.

His buddies in the back row nearly died with laughter. Half the class looked like they were going to laugh. Some looked away. He set the mess down on Mercy's desk with exaggerated care, and turned away, smirking and making a covert thumbs up.

Instinct made me act. I zapped a pencil to the floor just before he took a step. His foot came down on it, and he began to slide. I zapped the pencil my hardest, which was just enough torque to turn the slide into a total pratfall.

Everyone in the class burst out laughing.

“Whose pencil is that?” Kyle muttered as he got up. “I'm gonna kill you.”

“Care to speak up, Kyle?” the teacher asked. “Have you any more entertainment for the class, or may we get to work?”

Kyle looked around furiously. I sat where I was, feeling his gaze go right past me. At the end of class, he said to the boy who sat behind me, “Michael, you suck-meister—”

Michael cut in. “Wasn't me. I never use anything but these.” At the edge of my vision, I saw a scrawny hand holding out a mechanical pencil.

Kyle loomed over him. “You were laughing the loudest.”

“Because it was funny,” Michael said. “Everybody else thought so, too.”

Kyle shoved past Michael and practically leaned across my desk to glare at the blond boy with the peeling nose who sat at my right. Before Kyle could even speak, the kid protested, “Hey, it wasn't me. I was texting under my desk.”

Kyle grunted. “Did you see who did it, Jason?” And when the blond kid shook his head, Kyle finally moved away from my desk to glower at the rest of the boys in the back. “Who saw? Anyone?”

I got out of there. Obviously girls were invisible in Kyle-Land, except as targets.

I gloated to myself the rest of the day. Until the next morning, when I got to math class, and there were two empty seats: Kyle's and the seat right behind mine. The atmosphere in the room was really creepy, kind of tense, with people whispering excitedly the way they do when something terrible happens.

Mercy sat at her seat, her head so low it was like she was bowed over her notebook, as behind me, someone whispered to the kid I'd followed in, “Did you hear what happened to Michael Abrams?”

“No.”

“Someone jumped him after school. He's in the hospital.”

“In a coma, that's what I heard,” someone else put in.

One of the boys said, “And Kyle is in juvie, being questioned—“

The door opened, and the teacher walked in. Everyone fell silent.

She looked around, then said in a terse, low voice, “If any of you witnessed the altercation, please go to the office, or you can call the police directly. No! I don't want to hear your comments, and I am not taking questions. Now get out your homework…”

I sat there, listening to my heartbeat whoosh in my ears. All I could think was,
It's my fault
.

I
knew
better. I kept thinking that as my body went through the rest of the school day like a robot. This was ten times worse than cheating at basketball.

I knew what bullies were like. Dad had warned me in fourth grade that bullies were another name for angry people, and angry people just get angrier. It's not like the movies, where they learn their lesson. “The only lesson they learn is how not to get caught,” Dad had warned, and he'd taught me bully-avoidance blending in.

I fell into such a fog of gloom that I forgot to copy down the homework assignment in biology, ran back to snap it with my phone, discovered the teacher had already erased the whiteboard, so I had to chase a classmate, with the result that I was late to the one class where the teacher was a dragon about lateness.

And so, I, Laurel Ibberts, the careful good student, landed in after-school detention.

At least I got all my homework done, and when I left, the hot autumn winds had died down a little. I wasn't used to the white-hot glare of a Southern California autumn.

When I got to the top of the palisade where the bus bench was located, I turned to look at the hammered silver-blue glitter of the ocean as the sun began to set. I'd been told not to be out after dark, as the school was in an older part of the neighborhood and not all that safe.

Movement caught my eye: somebody walking fast on the other side of the street, glancing over her shoulder. Fuzzy pale hair swung above an extra large sky blue t-shirt and baggy jeans: it was Mercy. She was being followed by a bunch of older teenage girls. I saw gang-banger tats on one girl's arms, and another was swinging a crowbar.

My stomach instantly started boiling. What should I do? But when I looked back, Mercy had ducked around the side of a pawn shop maybe fifty yards away from my bus stop. And then—from my angle, I was the only one could see her between the pawn shop and the liquor store next to it—a twinkle of light made me blink. Through that twinkle Mercy leaped about twenty feet, straight into the air. She landed lightly on the roof of the car repair shop.

Magic? Energy torqueing weirdly? I knew that twinkle.

While I goggled in total amazement, the gang-bangers rounded the corner of the pawn shop, looked around, and hustled down the street, right beneath Mercy, who watched them from above.

She lifted her head, and I would have sworn she stared right at me, though it was hard to tell, the way her glasses flashed, reflecting the low sun. Another tiny flash and she leaped down from the roof, landed like she was a feather, and half-lifted a hand to me.

Then she ran up the street in the other direction, until she was out of view.

The bus rumbled up and stopped with a hiss. I climbed on like a robot.

*   *   *

People used to ask me these weird little questions about my parents, until I figured out that they wanted to know how it works, with three.

Mom Gwen and Mom Tate have been together since they were roommates in college. If they could have gotten married back then, they would have. Mom Tate took art, and Mom Gwen studied pre-med, then went into the Navy so she wouldn't end up with a student debt of a quarter of a million bucks. She liked the Navy, so she stayed in as a doctor, working Naval medical centers as a pediatrician.

They met my dad when he was just getting out of the Navy—he also went in so he could go to college debt free—but when he finished his eight years, he quit the high-stress world of analysis to get a job as a math teacher.

Around that same time, my bio mom dumped him and vanished when I was about a year old. Dad met Mom Gwen at the Navy base when he took me in for baby well care, they fell in love, and somehow the three of them worked it out so they had a handfasting marriage on the summer solstice.

For legal purposes Mom Gwen and Dad married so we kids would have coverage, as she was pregnant with Josh by then. Mom Tate gave up her crummy job behind a counter and took over childcare during the day, the others covering at nights so she can paint. They never celebrate that courthouse wedding for only two, which they call the ‘signing.' Their anniversary is the summer solstice.

“Mom,” I said that evening. “I have a question.”

They were both there, Mom Tate cooking dinner and Mom Gwen sorting the mail, but somehow they always know who we mean. Or else they both answer. “Yes?”

“So there's this assignment. A kind of what if scenario. Like, what if people turned out to have powers?”

“Powers?”

“Like…” My voice slid around my zap. “Like the X-Men, or Harry Potter.”

“Nobody has any kind of powers. There are a lot of frauds out there, and seriously disturbed people.”

“But
if
they did. What would happen to them?” And when Mom Gwen looked at me as if I'd painted my face green and began hooting like an owl, I said quickly, “For this what-if essay.”