by Nick Courage
I look over at Conor, blinking the sleep out of my eyes, and then rubbing them for extra effect. Outside of his sweat-stained shirt, he seems fine. Better than fine—he has a bounce in his step.
It’s been a rough couple of days, I think. Of course you’re tired.
It’s funny how much everything can change in less than a week. I go through the list again, counting on my fingers like before: Other Side, almost died, kissed a girl, night bike ride . . . I try to think of a change for my thumb, dirty and curled in my palm, and it comes to me as we walk through the gates into the front yard of the school: quit School . . .
It takes me by surprise, saying that—even just to myself. But Conor’s right: I guess I don’t really see the point of it anymore. Before it was all there was, and after the Charter, it’ll be an actual school again—an “institution of higher thought” and everything, but right now it’s just a place we go to keep out of trouble and grow a few crunchy vegetables. It’s actually kind of painful to imagine wasting time here hiding in attics and talking about nothing when there’s the Other Side, color-drenched and waiting for us. We could be . . . we could be starting a band, or learning how to paint, or doing anything.
Eating buh-scuits and drinking coffee.
I catch sight of Mr. Moonie in his baggy suit and dull red tie waving at us from the steps and feel a twinge of guilt. Some things, I think, don’t change.
“Hey there, Mr. Moonie,” Conor calls out, and I manage a half-hearted wave.
Mr. Moonie takes that as a cue to stop waving. “Ho, boys!” he calls out, tucking his chin into his many-folded neck and pursing his lips, waiting.
“How’s the . . . um . . .” My mind’s not working too quickly today. “How’s the Prince?”
He doesn’t smile, but his eyes light up as he canes his way down the stairs. “Oh, him,” he says with a voice so deflated it matches his neck. “His grandmama came by with a fruit plate.” Conor laughs, and I sort of shrug into myself. “S’alright, Hank,” Mr. Moonie says, allowing himself a crinkly smile. “Whatta you boys been up to, now?”
“Oh, you know . . .” Conor says.
“Nope.”
I pull myself together. If I’m going to be an adult, I guess I have to act like one. “We had a late night on the Other Side, sir.”
“Hey, now!” says Mr. Moonie, “L’autre côté!”
“G’bless you, sir,” Conor says, knowing full well that Mr. Moonie hadn’t sneezed.
“You know,” Mr. Moonie continues, unfolding a white pocket square and patting down his forehead. “I heard about that place, s’posed t’be a real nice time.”
“Oh, yeah, sir,” Conor says, sounding relieved at the unexpected direction our conversation has taken. “The best.”
Mr. Moonie squints at both of us and then scans the horizon. “Better’n here, anyway.” We look at him, just a little shocked. “Oh, y’all know—same old, day in, day out.” He leans on his cane. “Once we get ourselves fixed up it’ll be good again, but . . . it’s the waiting that’ll getcha.”
Conor says, “Yessir,” and I nod along.
Mr. Moonie gives us one last appraising look, touching his chin almost to his chest. “Well, you boys have fun, but you tell your Grandma next time, y’hear?” We both nod again, and he taps his cane and turns back to the School, waving behind him.
That’s when I see them, leaning over the wrought-iron railing of a second-floor balcony, looking at us. Scott’s in the center, scratching his chest and laughing—and the girls are on either side of him. I shade my eyes to get a better look.
The girl on the left is somehow familiar, and I only just recognize her as Alice, my supposed next-door neighbor. Mouse—balancing on her tip-toes, long blonde bangs perfectly framing her sharp, anxious face—is holding her shoulder for support. Then there’s Scott, pointing at us and saying something I can’t make out. Next to him, haloed in light auburn hair and meeting my gaze: Freckles.
I instinctively look down, and then—embarrassed about acting so totally embarrassed—look back up at her. Freckles is still staring at me, smiling.
“Hey,” I say. “Conor.” And then, whispering out of the corner of my mouth, “What’s that girl’s name again?”
“Huh. Alice? Again? She lives—Conor grabs me by my shoulders and shakes—“Right. Next. Door. To. You. Are you for real?”
“Oh, I know Alice,” I say. “I mean the other one. The girl with the . . . freckles.”
Conor throws his head back and lets out a short bark of a laugh. “That’s the girl you kissed.”
“Well,” I say. “Just a peck.”
“You’re amazing,” he says, letting go of my shoulders to wave to the balcony crowd. “You know that?”
I look at Freckles one last time before we head inside and shake my head clear.
Upstairs, on the balcony, everything’s a little weird. Scott, in a wrinkled, water-stretched shirt, looks exactly the same as usual, but the girls are all flirtatiously angled behind him, which would make him look tough if he wasn’t fighting a blush and losing. Conor notices it, too, the red creeping around Scott’s ears and down into the stretched-out neck of his hard-luck shirt. The weirdness.
“So,” Conor says, hesitantly drawing it out. “What’s . . . um, what’re you guys up . . .”
“Hey,” Scott bursts out, awkwardly cutting Conor off.
“. . . to?” Conor finishes.
Alice and Freckles smile at each other, and I smile as well. Until I make accidental eye contact with Mouse, who’s smiling too . . . but differently. Like she’s going to bite me. I look away, jerking my gaze toward the city, which also seems strange. It’s like an overexposed photograph; there’s too much light.
“So,” says Alice, breaking the silence. “Where have you guys been?” I squint, refocusing on my shadowy friends in the foreground, trying to find something distinctive about Alice to latch onto.
“Us?” I ask, shading my eyes with both of my hands, trying to shut the light out and play it cool. “We were . . . up late.”
“On the Other Side!” Conor pronounces dramatically, like someone selling cars on the radio. I cringe. It’s not just Conor giving up on our secret so easily, although that is irritating. It’s his exuberance, the sudden volume of his voice reverberating inside my skull. That and the light.
The brightness.
I massage my temples with my thumbs and try to blink my eyes back into some semblance of normality while Conor brags about the Other Side to Alice, Freckles, Mouse, and Scott. I wish I could join in and not seem like such a spoilsport . . . but it’s too much. Every little sound is suddenly an earthquake; shivers follow my stiffening spine down to locking knees and into helplessly flexing toes.
Looking down, eyes squeezed almost completely closed, I start shuffling toward the open balcony door to darkness and quiet. It’s easier to sneak back in than to try to explain, I think, cringing again at the thought of having to actually speak.
But I’m walking on pins and needles, and then—reaching unsuccessfully for something to hold onto—falling. “Hey!” shouts Scott, catching me under the arm and getting shocked for his efforts. “Stop!”
I wish, I think, suddenly on the ground, surrounded by tittering silhouettes, my pulsing head tilted toward the sun I tried so clumsily to escape.
Buzzing.
“Inside,” Conor’s take-charge voice says. “We need to get him inside.” I let myself exhale, feeling secure on the warm concrete of the balcony and in Conor’s capable hands. But Scott, who’s obviously shaken, stops him before he saves me. “Careful,” he whines. “He . . . he burned me!” An urgent voice I don’t quite recognize—it must belong to Alice—says, “Come on, come on!” and someone grabs me under my shoulders, dragging me the few feet inside. Shielded from the searing light of the sun, I gingerly open my eyes.
A very concerned-looking Conor is the first person I see, flanked by two wide sets of eyes: Freckles and Alice. I can hear Scott whimpering
behind them, nursing his hand on the balcony. “Th-thanks,” I manage, trembling. Conor shakes his head and points behind me, but I can’t make myself turn around. “Julia . . .” he says.
Mouse.
I try to picture her picking me up, skinny arms straining, pulling me into the cool darkness of the Library with a few quick tugs. I want to turn around, to reconcile the Mouse I thought I knew with the Mouse who saved me from the sun. But I can’t turn, my body’s still stiff, locked from the neck to the knees . . . so I strain to hear.
And turn instantly cold.
It’s Mouse, sobbing quietly.
“Hey,” I say, looking at Conor and the girls but projecting backward with all my heart. “Julia . . .”
She doesn’t answer.
“Julia, please,” I call out, but her sobbing just gets louder.
“Mouse!”
“Don’t call me that!” she shouts, squeaky voice breaking, as she runs past me and out the door, cradling her electrocuted hands. There’s a moment of shameful quiet before Scott walks slowly into the room, still shaking the shock from his own hand. It’s only then—after Mouse is gone—that my body starts to unlock. “You okay?” Scott asks, and I nod with my chin like Mr. Moonie.
“I’m okay.”
“Well,” Conor jokes after a minute. “Now that everything’s completely back to normal . . .”
Alice looks at him and laughs. Scott and Freckles join in, and everything would feel back to normal if I wasn’t sprawled out on the floor.
If it wasn’t for poor Mouse.
“We should get Moonie, we need to get your parents,” Freckles says, the severity and the strangeness of the situation catching up with her. “We should . . .”
“Don’t,” I say, testing my legs. “Lemme . . . explain.”
It’s funny, telling everyone about my condition after trying to hide it for so many years. Not freeing, because I never felt trapped, but funny. I almost don’t believe myself, hearing it out loud:
Henry Long doesn’t have a heart.
“It’s really, um . . . it’s usually not a problem,” I hear myself saying, realizing as I stumble through my explanations that this conversation is comically overdue. Fittingly, a copper plate on the bookshelf behind Scott reads: “Biography, 921-928.”
“It’s not strange to be electric. Everyone has a charge—” I realize I’m directly quoting Dad and feel a creeping sheepishness, but carry on regardless—it’s just a hundredth of the charge it takes to power something like a remote control. The spikes are game-changers, though. I can be sitting quietly at the kitchen table, listening to fuzzy jazz on the radio, when a solar flare ninety-three million miles away will send me momentarily haywire, flipping the radio into white noise or shutting it down completely, leaving me sitting alone in shocked silence.
So I have my alarm clock and record player in an aluminum-lined closet, but ninety-five percent of the time I’m basically a hundred percent normal. Dr. Singh always downplays my condition by pretending I’m like an electric eel, which shock their prey into dinner with six hundred searing volts—a good five-hundred and eighty-eight more volts than I have running through my hands on a good day. “Oh, killer,” she’ll say, shaking a thermometer near my lips with feigned fear, “Please don’t . . . don’t . . .” Then she’ll roll her eyes back into her head and convulse like I’ve fried her up.
She hasn’t noticed any adverse effects on my health, though, and I see her pretty regularly, so I can’t complain. And the few times I’ve felt like complaining, Mom’s always been there to remind me that not being able to have a phone to text my friends is a pretty small discomfort compared to the discomfort of not being alive. One time I said that if I wasn’t alive, I wouldn’t feel anything, much less discomfort—but after seeing her face I decided not to ever point that out again.
“Wait,” Scott interrupts, his face stern with concentration. “When were you last in the Hospital?”
“Yeah,” I say, taking a deep breath and trying to tally everything up. “Technically . . . um, two days ago? And again—a day before that?”
“And your parents just left?” Freckles is outraged, her normally eggshell skin so red you can barely see her freckles. She’s shouting now: “They just left you here? Passing out? Alone?” Conor puts his hand on her shoulder to calm her down, but she shrugs him off and stares at me, expecting an answer.
“Well,” I say, wondering how to even start explaining the dam and its blown capacitors. I start making one of Dad’s illustrative hand gestures, trying to remember which way my fingers should bend, wishing I hadn’t tuned him out so completely. That’s when I realize that if I’m passing out, the problem must be not be fixed after all.
The spillway must still be open.
I look at Freckles, tired and scared, my hands limp at my sides. “I don’t know,” I say, and try to blink back the tears that surprise me by showing up in the blurry corners of my eyes.
“Hey!” Scott says. “Hey, hey, hey!”
Freckles, hugging herself, shoots him a withering look. “Really helpful, Scott.”
“I have to go,” I say weakly, forcing myself up on even weaker legs.
“Where to?” asks Conor, obviously unsure about whether he should help me or wait for some kind of adult supervision.
“Where the river meets the lake,” I say, steadying myself on the banister as I slowly make my way down the Library’s heavily worn wooden staircase. For some reason, this support, my hand sliding purposefully down the rail, makes my situation seem even more impossible than it did when I was upstairs on the floor. Mom must not have done enough to stop the dam since it’s running again so soon, I think, and I’m just a kid.
A broken kid.
I stop mid-step, picturing Mouse, shocked and flying down these stairs so fast she’s barely touching the threadbare carpet runners. Hurt and alone.
“Hey,” Scott says, startling me. He’s right behind me, alongside Freckles, Alice, and Conor. “Before we go to the lake . . . do we have time for me to get my swimsuit?”
Everyone smiles, me included.
“Going to get Mouse first,” I say, and we walk together out of the Library. I half expect to have another attack, but—to my relief—that doesn’t happen. It’s still bright outside, but the trees aren’t glowing anymore, and everything looks basically as it should, in the realm of the real.
Just very, very bright.
I shield my eyes again and take a look around. It’s the same beautiful day it was when I woke up, clear blue skies stretching without break in every direction. A big yellow crane trundles down the Avenue, clattering metal parts mixing with the excited mid-afternoon birdsong.
Nothing’s changed, but it all seems so strangely sinister now. Like even a day this perfect can’t be trusted. I turn around to my friends, still bunched up behind me, and thickly realize that they probably think I’m going to fall down again. “I’m—I’m okay guys,” I say. Freckles and Conor still look skeptical, so I continue. “Seriously, you don’t. . . . Thank you, but you don’t have to come with me.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, dude,” Conor says, theatrically confident, punching me softly in the shoulder. It doesn’t hurt, but I’m knocked off balance anyway and—to everyone’s horror—I teeter precariously on the steps.
“Sorry!” Conor says, less confident. “So, where are we going again?”
It’s a good question. I want to find Mouse, to see if she’s all right. But I’m going to have to get to the dam, too, and tell Guv there’s still a problem. It’s too far to bike, though, and I’m definitely not feeling steady enough to try. And then, what if the problems get worse as we get closer . . .
I take a big breath and scan the grounds for inspiration. A handful of kids are gardening, pinching dead brown leaves off of otherwise healthy plants and making quiet small talk amongst themselves, but other than that, not much is going on. Slouched up against the book drop, surveying the Avenue over a sheaf of notebook p
aper, is Mr. Moonie. I consider telling him about my . . . problem, but now that we have a plan, it doesn’t seem necessary.
“Hey,” he calls out. “If y’all are leaving, you gotta go tell your Gramama!”
I wave in acknowledgment, too tired to get into it, and Mr. Moonie nods back. “You know I love her, Hank, but she’s a lotta lady.” He holds out a spotted, quivering hand and continues. “Bad for the nerves.” Scott and Conor stifle laughs behind me, and I can almost hear Freckles glowering at them to stop. I wave again at Mr. Moonie, who says, “All right then,” cracks his papers by way of goodbye, and gets back to not really reading them.
“That’s actually a good idea,” Alice says. In all of the excitement, I’d forgotten she was with us—it’s like she’s a total blind spot.
“What’s a good idea?”
“We need to tell Mrs. Long about this,” Alice says, and Freckles and Scott look like they agree with her. Conor, who’s walking both of our bikes, says he’ll do whatever I want, and I appreciate the solidarity—but Alice is right: of course I should see Grammy. She’ll be able to take care of the dam. She’ll be able to take care of everything.
And just like that, the black curtain of hopelessness ascends and the day seems full of opportunity again. Grammy. I take a deep breath, quietly giving thanks to the hot summer air for filling my lungs, tickling my capillaries and buoying me back up into the afternoon. “Alice,” I say, full of affection for my alleged next door neighbor, “I love . . .”
Freckles, brows arched, catches my eye, stopping me midsentence.
“. . . that idea.”
On the way to Grammy’s, I fill everyone in on the whole Powerdown situation, why it’s aggravating my condition; why my parents had to go. They’re all aware of Zone politics in a vague sort of way, the way you know that other countries have presidents, but you don’t know their names. I’d be like that, too, if it wasn’t for Mom.
Mom, I think, please. Hurry home.
Living with the acting Mayor, or whatever she is, I hear about almost everything that happens behind the scenes; the compromises that are made and the deals that are cut. Not secrets, really, but not common knowledge either; boring stuff about the “unsustainability of monocultures” and more exciting stuff like the Other Side. The downside of being an insider, though, is that Mom’s helping salvage the Zone now when I need her.