Struck

by Jennifer Bosworth

  Looking at the sufferers turned my stomach, but seeing the Followers up close like this, in real life, not on The Hour of Light, made me feel like turning and running away. Running as fast as I could, and taking Parker with me.

  But we couldn’t run away, not either of us. Not unless we wanted to starve.

  The first bell warbled like a sick bird as Parker and I made our way through the crush of people and toward the main building. The bell system must have been damaged during the quake. One more thing that was off-kilter, knocked askew by our city being shaken like it was contained in a snowless snow globe.

  I thought of what Militiaman Brent had said. It’s time things got back to normal around here. Looking around at how many of the students wore Followers’ white, and how many others looked like they’d come from a refugee camp, so skinny their eyes were sucked into the sockets, lips cracked and skin chalky from dehydration, I had a sinking feeling I wouldn’t find anything close to normal at Skyline.

  Approaching the school, I heard raised voices and then a squawk of pain and surprise. Parker and I froze in place, earning growls and shoves from the students behind us. A group of boys with mean, feral eyes and dirty skin and clothes surrounded a much smaller, weaker-looking kid. One of the feral boys bent the smaller kid’s arm behind his back, and another jabbed a fist into his kidney. The kid cried out again. His backpack hit the ground.

  I searched the flow of students moving toward the school, hoping someone would step forward. Do something. I saw people watching out of the corners of their eyes, and people pretending not to see at all. I saw people walking faster, probably worried they might be the next victims.

  Heat pulsed in my chest, thumping like a second heartbeat. The sound boomed in my ears. I breathed deep.

  Keep it together, Mia. You made it through the last four weeks without imploding; you can make it through the next few minutes.

  The feral boys released the kid and shoved him away. He staggered and grabbed onto the flagpole to stabilize himself. Tears leaked from his eyes and he wiped at them angrily with his sleeve.

  Parker’s paralysis broke, and he started toward the attackers. I grabbed him back.

  “No,” I told him firmly.

  Parker’s eyes were livid. “They can’t get away with it.”

  “They already did.”

  The pack of boys tore open the kid’s backpack, scattered his books and papers, and took off with whatever was left inside, probably a bottle of water or an energy bar. The backpack looked close to empty.

  Parker wrenched away from me, and for a second I thought he would go after the pack. But he had acted too late. They were already gone.

  My brother rounded on me. “I could have done something.”

  “You could have gotten your ass kicked.”

  “Better than standing here watching!” His voice was rising, so I forced mine to sound calm even though I felt like I was boiling on the inside.

  The crowd parted around us, now pretending not to see my brother and me having it out.

  “What do you think would happen if you came home from school battered and bruised? Mom would go into free fall. Think about it, Parker. Think about her.”

  Parker glared at me. “Mom’s not the only one in the world who needs help.”

  Those were the words he left me with as he plunged back into the tangled procession of students.

  I turned once again to the kid still holding the flagpole. He had one hand pressed to his side where he’d been sucker punched, his mouth set in a grimace of pain and his eyes turned toward the sky, maybe so no one would see his tears; maybe to look at the flag that was at half-mast to honor the dead, where it would probably stay for a long, long time.

  A girl dressed in white approached the kid, holding out a tissue. She was smiling as though nothing could possibly be wrong in the world. She spoke softly to him, but I was close enough to catch her words.

  “Have you accepted the Word of Rance Ridley Prophet as the Word of God?” she asked.

  The kid shook his head but accepted the tissue.

  I moved on before I could hear more, but I glanced back once and saw they were still talking, and I felt a chill dance up my spine. I fell in with the rest of the disheveled, hollow-cheeked kids trudging into the school, keeping my distance from the Followers. When I reached the cement stairs, I saw that someone had tagged them in white spray paint. One word on each step.

  WHICH

  SIDE

  WILL

  YOU

  CHOOSE?

  My head pounded as I climbed past the question.

  I was heading through the door when a girl with long black hair veered in front of me, knocking me aside and sloshing half of her to-go cup of coffee onto my turtleneck.

  “Hey! Watch it!” I stood there with my arms spread, dripping.

  The girl stopped and turned slowly to face me. A line from some kid’s show I used to watch played through my head. One of these things is not like the others …

  The girl didn’t fit. Where nearly everyone else here looked like they’d been through a war, this girl seemed to think she was in line at a nightclub. She wore a tight black dress and tall black boots. Her lips were painted a shade of red that made me think of stop signs. I didn’t remember ever seeing her at school before the quake, and she was the kind of person you remembered. If she wasn’t registered at Skyline, she wouldn’t be eligible for aid. Maybe she thought she could seduce some food off the aid workers. The way she looked, it would probably work.

  I glanced around and saw the crowd had thinned. Now it was just me and the girl in black.

  “You could say you’re sorry,” I told her when she only stood there, saying nothing. The smell of her coffee soaking into my turtleneck made me salivate. I hadn’t tasted coffee in weeks.

  “Sorry,” the girl said perfunctorily, staring straight into my eyes in a way that was too direct; smiling the way people smiled when they had a secret they couldn’t wait to tell. “I didn’t see you,” she added. “What a klutz, huh?”

  She didn’t seem like a klutz. She seemed like the kind of person who could walk on ice in her spike-heeled boots and never slip.

  “Which side will you choose?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “The question on the steps. Which side will you choose?”

  “What are my options?”

  “Us,” she said, putting a hand to her chest. “Or them.” She nodded at the Follower still talking to the boy near the flagpole.

  “How about neither.”

  She laughed. “But you haven’t even heard my sales pitch. It’s a good one. I think you’ll like it.”

  The second bell warbled then. Perfect. I was officially late for my first day back at school. The girl in black better hope that didn’t disqualify me from getting what I came for.

  “Not interested,” I told the girl. Her mysterious smile dropped, and she opened her mouth to say something else, but I didn’t give her the chance. I weaved around her and into the school.

  And stopped.

  My mouth fell open. I heard a sound in my throat like air leaking from a punctured tire.

  The whole length of the entryway, about thirty feet, was completely wallpapered in photographs and flyers from floor to ceiling, and the tile along one side of the floor was littered with bouquets and stray flowers. The air was heavy with their mingled perfumes. I resisted the urge to cover my nose and mouth like I’d caught a whiff of garbage. The whole place reeked of funeral.

  I stepped to one wall and examined a collage of photographs. Faces. So many faces. Adults. Children. Elderly men and women. Babies. Dogs. Cats. And captions, most of them handwritten on scraps of paper, pinned beneath the photos.

  We miss you so much.

  I will love you always.

  We’ll never forget you.

  I know you’re in a better place.

  There were poems, and longer notes, and obituaries, and I felt my eyes burning.

/>   “This wall is for the dead.”

  I jerked in surprise. I hadn’t noticed the girl in black come up beside me.

  I blinked the tears out of my eyes before looking at her. “Yeah, I figured that out.”

  She turned around and faced the opposite wall. Her sharp heel speared a white rose petal. “That wall is for the missing, people who disappeared after the quake. People who have not been found.”

  I thought of my mom, buried in the Waste with the rest of the dead, waiting for her air to run out. What if she’d never been found? Would I have posted her picture on this wall, hoping that someone had seen her? Hoping she was still alive, lost in the shuffle at some hospital or clinic?

  I felt panic rising inside me. I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t seem to get any oxygen to my lungs. The heat that lived in my chest flared, like a hot coal that never quite went out.

  The girl in black tilted her head and watched me curiously, a dreamy sort of expression on her face. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I bolted. I needed out of that hallway, with all those dead and missing people gazing at me from their photographs. With its stench of flowers that belonged in a funeral home, not a school.

  And more than anything, for reasons I didn’t understand, I had to get away from the girl in black.

  4

  I COULDN’T GO to class. Not yet. I needed a moment alone to get myself under control. I was already late, so what was another few minutes?

  I found myself in the ladies’ lounge on the first floor. I wasn’t sure who had started calling the girls’ restroom “the lounge,” like you’d step inside and be greeted with velvet sofas, blood orange martinis, and downtempo remixes, but the name stuck. Still, it was just a school restroom, like any other. Gray walls. Gray tile floor. Gray-painted stalls. Even the light humming from the flickering fluorescent tubes overhead had a grayish hue. If a person wanted to know what she’d look like after being embalmed, all she had to do was check herself out in the lounge mirror.

  It was silent inside except for the drip-drip-drip of a leaky faucet, but I peered beneath the stalls to make sure I was alone before removing my gloves. People probably wondered if I had scales under my clothes. Nope, just Lichtenberg figures. That’s the technical name for the lightning scars, which are supposedly caused by electron showers through the skin. For most people struck by lightning, the marks fade within a few days. Mine never did. They kept growing every time I was struck. Only my face had been spared, and I had to be thankful for that. It wasn’t a bad face. Big gray eyes. A kiss-shaped mouth. Round cheekbones. But if I were to be struck again … the lightning scars would almost certainly grow, and they had nowhere to go but up.

  I ran the water until it was ice cold and then splashed it on my face. That’s what movie characters always do when they’re feeling overwhelmed. Splash a little water on the face, right? But somehow the women manage to do it without messing up their makeup. There must be some trick to it, because I ended up with heroin-addict eyes. I tried to rub off the mascara stains drizzling down my cheeks and only smeared them around, staining my hands.

  This day just kept on getting better.

  I squirted soap into my cupped palms and rubbed them until they were frothy, used a foamy fingertip to scrub the mascara from my eyes, leaving them red and irritated and a little gray around the sockets. Then I felt the sting of soap in my eyes and squeezed them shut.

  “Excuse me. May I ask you a question?” The voice was polite, inquisitive, and it immediately put me on high alert. I peered up with my face dripping water to discover who had crept up behind me and was now trespassing on my personal space.

  Her long-sleeved white shirt was buttoned so tight at the neck it was a wonder she could breathe, and her hair was pulled back severely enough to make her eyes bulge from their sockets. But even without the masochistic ponytail and strangulating collar, I imagined her eyes would bug out. She had that kind of intensity about her. That fervor the Followers of the Light, the Followers of Rance Ridley Prophet, seemed to possess.

  But she hadn’t always looked this way. Squinting at her reflection in the mirror, I recognized her. It was like looking at one of those optical illusions where a 3D image pops out of a pattern. The image that popped out at me now was of a girl named Rachel Jackson who sat a few seats in front of me in biology, only the Rachel Jackson I remembered had blue streaks in her goth-black hair, and a tattoo of a Celtic cross on the back of her neck. And now she was a white-is-the-new-black Follower? Maybe the world was coming to an end.

  I wondered how long she’d been standing behind me. Had she seen the lightning scars on my hands? No, they were still covered in lather. I didn’t rinse, just shut off the water and slid my soapy hands into my gloves, grimacing at the squish.

  “Excuse me. May I ask you a question?” Rachel said this like it was the first time.

  “You know, there are about ten other sinks you could use.” Gloves securely in place, I turned from the sink. Our noses were two inches from an Eskimo kiss.

  “My name is Sister Rachel,” she began.

  One of my eyebrows went way up. “Yeah, I know who you are,” I said. “Biology, remember? We have it together.” Apparently I was invisible. But that was fine with me. After the way I’d left things in Lake Havasu City, I was perfectly happy to live out the rest of my high school career in anonymity.

  Rachel blinked once, slowly. “Is it Maya?”

  “Mia.”

  She smiled. The Rachel Jackson I’d known never smiled.

  “Well, Mia …” I guessed the next words out of her mouth before she spoke them. “I was wondering, have you embraced the Word of Rance Ridley Prophet as the Word of God?”

  “No,” I said, “and I’m not—” She went on as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “Then I’d like to invite you to attend a midnight revival at the Church of Light this evening held by Rance Ridley Prophet himself.” She conveyed the scripted words in a single breath.

  Before the quake, there had been maybe three students who wore the white of the Followers. Back then, most sane people still considered the Church of Light to be one more group of extremist evangelical whackos. Then Rance Ridley Prophet accurately predicted a few natural disasters and world crises on The Hour of Light, and people across the globe started taking him and his church seriously. When he predicted the Puente Hills Quake, right down to the minute, people in Los Angeles started taking him seriously. Too seriously.

  I didn’t get it. So Prophet had predicted the earthquake before it hit. California was earthquake country! Everyone knew we were overdue for “The Big One.” Prophet probably had a pet scientist locked up in the basement, calculating earthquake probability and feeding him information. The idea that God told Prophet the exact dates and times cataclysmic events were to happen was not on my list of logical explanations.

  Aside from that, I had a special dislike for any organization, religious or otherwise, that pointed their finger at this person or that person and condemned them as evil, maybe because I’d had that finger of condemnation pointed at me in the past. A lot of people back in Lake Havasu City knew about my human lightning rod weirdness and avoided me, but some went out of their way to let me know being struck by lightning was a punishment from God, and that I must have done something terrible to deserve His wrath. My own grandmother had been one of those people.

  My skin itched from the soap drying inside my gloves.

  Rachel was still waiting for my response.

  “You know … thanks for the offer,” I told her, “but revivals … they’re not my thing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure. Very sure. One hundred percent, actually.”

  “Sister Mia—”

  “Just Mia is great.”

  “We’re all brothers and sisters in the eyes of the Lord,” Rachel said.

  “Uh-huh.” I preferred a less incestuous worldview, but I kept that thought to myself.

  Rachel cocked her h
ead and studied me. “Mia, can I tell you what I see when I look at you?” She didn’t wait for my answer. “A girl with the troubled countenance of someone in search of something.”

  Way to keep it nice and vague, I thought. But I couldn’t help myself. I took the bait. “Something?” I said, daring her to convince me of “something.” Anything.

  “Truth. Purpose. Comfort.” She smiled. “Light.”

  “All four, or is this multiple choice?”

  “In these dark times, we are each in need of something,” she said. “Whatever it is you seek, Prophet can provide it. You only have to ask.”

  I’d had enough. “You know what I want? I want you Followers—and I mean this in the nicest way—to leave me alone. I didn’t come to you looking for answers to my problems, and I never wear white, so you’re wasting your time with me.”

  “I think you should reconsider,” Rachel said, but now her voice was cold, nearly threatening. She still had not moved out of my way. The feel of the soap drying inside my gloves was getting to be unbearable, and the heat inside me, flickering in my chest like one of those birthday candles that won’t blow out, was waking up, starting to pulse again, to cook my blood. I needed to get out of there. Was no place in this school safe?

  I tried to ease past her, but suddenly Rachel’s hand was on my arm. Her smile was gone, but her teeth still showed, as did the white around her muddy irises. Her lips peeled back from her teeth like strips of dried fruit. The lighting in here really was terrible.

  “You have something Prophet wants. You will come to him, or you will die when the storm arrives and the sixth seal is opened completely. You will suffer and die with the rest of the unbelievers, and then you will burn in hell forever. When you deny the Word of Rance Ridley Prophet, you deny the Word of God!”