Elias fell to the floor with his back against the desk, and for a moment Kess saw him in too much detail—his shoulders pulled back so that his chest curved out oddly, the muscles in his neck strained and red and bulging, his face frozen around terrified eyes.
She jumped back, her hands pulling defensively into her chest. She felt the buzzing in her palms again, and a flash of blue-white light sparked between her hands.
Electricity.
That’s what was wrong with Elias. It was her, her hands. She’d… tased him.
She drew in a hot, sharp breath of air, then pushed it out so fast her throat hurt, then in and out again too fast, too fast. Her lungs were a runaway machine, and she couldn’t get control of them. The rest of her felt wrong, too. She was tired, body-tired as if she’d run a long, long way.
Elias groaned and stirred on the floor. Then he started to get up.
He was okay. He was okay! But if he was alright, what would happen next?
Something terrible. Something impossible to bear.
She ran out of the room.
#
Eventually Rod left to, in his words, “entertain a girl who’s pretty easily entertained,” and Connor took his place on the couch next to Priya. When Danny left for the bathroom, Connor said, “I want to apologize for Rod. He just likes pushing people’s buttons.”
“Why do people say that like it’s an excuse? Pushing buttons for no good reason is a bad thing.”
Connor shook his head. His orange-red hair made him look like somebody’s best friend. “You’ve only seen this one side of him because he’s in an obnoxious mood tonight. Once you get to know him you’ll see his positive qualities. He’s the most loyal person you’ve ever met, for one thing. We met playing pee-wee soccer when we were eight years old, and he’s never let either me or Danny down since.”
“Loyalty is overrated.”
He raised an auburn eyebrow. “What does that mean?”
“Loyalty divides people up. It says ‘You’re mine, so I’ll be good to you. Everyone else is not mine, so screw them.’”
Connor laughed. “Of course you care about your friends more than everyone else. If you didn’t, they wouldn’t be your friends.”
“You can do good things or you can do bad things,” said Priya. “It shouldn’t matter which people you do them to.”
He looked taken-back and amused at the same time. “Look, let’s say your sister does something wrong. Would you stand by her? Would you help her out?”
“What exactly did she do? Did she murder someone?”
“You would. You would stick by her no matter what. You can’t do that for everybody, but everybody needs someone to do it for them. Like… like a lawyer, you know. Like an advocate. That’s loyalty, and that’s what Rod has.”
Just then, Kess came stumbling through the door from the next room. “Priya,” she said, “we have to go.”
“I’ll be ready—”
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
“Now, Priya. Please.” Kess glanced over her shoulder like she was being chased by something.
“Alright. As soon as Danny gets back.”
“No! No, no right now.”
“Danny invited us, Kess. We can’t leave without telling him. You know that, right?”
“Text him on the way out, please. Tell him anything. Tell him it’s your crazy-stupid sister’s fault, because she’s being so crazy-stupid.” Kess’s eyes were wide, her pupils huge and round and black as bullet holes.
Priya kept herself from sighing. “I won’t say that. But we can go now if you really want.”
“I really want.”
They slipped through the clumps of partiers and out the front door into darkness. The party was at somebody’s parents’ “cabin,” which to a Greenlake kid meant a very nice house that happened to be in the woods. As they drove away, the house behind them shrank down to a splotch of yellow light against the black and then nothing. Kess drove, and for a long while they didn’t talk. Priya leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the passenger-side window and watched the car’s headlights cut through the trees, casting long shadows that swung across the world as they drove by. Deep in the woods something moved. A deer.
And for maybe the first time, Priya understood why Kess hated parties so much. Priya loved people and laughter and conversation, but this, this quiet, was nice too—and much, much simpler.
The inside of the car was dark except for the backscatter from the headlights. Kess was mostly a black shape, but Priya could make out a hunk of hair falling over one eye. Kess sucked in a long, audible breath as if she were holding off tears. Oh, darling.
“Why did you need to get out of there so fast?” Priya asked.
Kess answered quickly, as if she’d been waiting for Priya to ask and had her wording all prepared. “There was a boy. We were talking and I really thought he liked me but I guess he didn’t. I tried to kiss him, and he, um…”
“I’m sorry,” said Priya.
“People shouldn’t say sorry when something isn’t their fault.”
“It just means I love you. That’s all.”
If Priya could, she’d change the world around her sister. She’d make people less mean. She’d make them get Kess’s humor. She’d make every guy Kess ever liked like her back. But since she couldn’t do that, she’d have to change Kess instead.
Movies always said loving someone meant never trying to change them. But that was a lie. The people you love are the ones you want to change the most. You want to keep all the good, important parts of them while tweaking them into a happier person. It was a good sign that Kess had made a move on a boy. Taking her to this party had been the right decision.
“It was good, though,” Priya continued. “That you tried.” Kess didn’t say anything, so Priya reached out and brushed her sister’s hair away from her eye, tucked it behind her ear, the springy curls twisting around Priya’s fingers. “Can I tell you something weird and embarrassing?”
“I just told you my embarrassing story,” said Kess. “Maybe it’ll make us even.”
“You know how Mom’s been missing her wedding ring?”
“Did you lose it somehow? You could have just told her to stop her freaking out.”
“Kess,” said Priya, “I ate it.”
“What?”
“I saw it on the kitchen counter. I guess she’d taken it off to knead dough or something. And suddenly it was all I wanted. It was like sugar, but not even sugar now. Sugar when I was six. So I ate it.”
“Priya…”
“The Internet says people with pica will eat dirt or sand because of nutrient deficiencies.”
“I don’t think you can be diamond-deficient.”
“Maybe it’s something else then. I don’t know.”
“Priya, did it… um… Mom lost her ring a week ago, so you should, you know, have it back by now.”
“Nope. Which is one of the reasons I thought maybe it didn’t actually happen. Like maybe I dreamed it. But it happened, I’m pretty sure. And another weird thing is I had this feeling like I shouldn’t tell anyone. That it was the most important thing in the world that I not tell anyone. Because I couldn’t trust them.”
“Then why did you tell me?” asked Kess.
“I don’t know, I just felt—” Comfortable, and calm, and close to you, here in this car in the dark. “I just felt like I could tell you.”
###
TRUEWORLDORDER.NET, FORUM POST BY USER CLEVERHANDLE:
I’ve posted here before, and I know some of you could tell I was making fun of you. I’m really sorry about that. That was jerkish of me. I thought of making a new account so you wouldn’t know it was me, but I decided it would be less jerkish to be straightforward and apologize. So, sorry. Again.
I need your help.
I don’t believe in ghosts or aliens or conspiracies or basically anything. But something happened to me tonight I can’t explain. And maybe one of you knows something about it. If there really is something strange going on, there would be rumors, right? And you guys would have heard them.
Tonight I think I met a superhero.