Connection (Le Garde) (17 page)

“
No problem,” Kristina said.

“
Now we can tell the others we’ve met an electric,” Drew said with a thumbs up.

Kristina elbowed him in the stomach. “We’ll talk to you later.”

Aaron and I watched them walk out, and I turned to Aaron. “Wow.”

“
Wow is right.
 
.
 
.I can’t believe it.” He looked at me, grinning. “I’m sure Steven will love it when we hang out in abandoned buildings together.”

11. la vieille maison (the old house)

Aaron

The old house could have been something from a horror movie. It was three stories, Victorian architecture. The paint was peeling, the windows were all smashed out, and the roof in one area sagged in like a tree had hit it. The plants around the house had grown up around the path and the columns of the front porch. When I was young, my family used to pass the place on the way to our camping spot, and I’d stare at it with big eyes, wondering what could be inside. Then Mitch would scare me from behind.

I waited on the grass for Anna, fiddling with my phone. The house was on the outskirts of town, a mile from the shopping center and a field away from another house and its adjoining barn. I’d offered Anna a ride, but she said she wanted to walk there. I didn’t think she wanted anybody to see us together, especially Steven. Or Jordan.

I stood up and glanced around the property. I wondered who owned this place. Luckily, there weren’t any signs warning us away, although the general condition should have been enough.

I felt Anna get closer, and I turned away from the house. She was a hundred feet down the road, and I waved at her. I met her halfway, and she gazed up at the house. “This place gives me the creeps,” she said.

“
Yeah, I know,” I said.

As we walked up to the house, she asked, “How was your first day back at school?”

I shrugged, grabbing my backpack as we passed it. “Oh, you know. Monday after Spring Break.”

We walked through the weeds and plants on the pathway to the front door, which was hanging on by one hinge.

“
You think we could get in trouble if someone found us here?” Anna asked. Underneath the worry, I felt a spark of excitement from her, like the adrenaline made the risk worth it.

“
We’ll just tell them we’re practicing our superpower if they do,” I said with a shrug. “I mean, who could get us in trouble for that?”

Anna laughed, dropping her bag by the front door. Her smile faded as she looked around at the house.

There was a staircase just in front of us, but halfway up, the steps caved in. “Creepy,” I said, turning to the right to see what might have been a living room. An old couch sat underneath the broken windows. The upholstery was gray with age, the flowers faded to muted colors. Spiderwebs hovered in the ceiling corners, the wallpaper had peeled off, and the boards creaked everywhere we stepped. A strong smell of rotting wood hung in the air.

“
I wonder how old this place is,” Anna said as we walked into the kitchen. The sink was hanging down, the pipes rusted.

“
I don’t know. I wonder when the last time someone was here.”

Anna flicked a switch on the wall, but the light bulb on the ceiling didn’t turn on. Not that I expected anything else.

“
So, I’ve been doing some research on how electricity works,” Anna said, her voice all-business. “I forgot pretty much everything in eighth grade science, so I was reading through Ginger’s science textbook last night.”

“
Yeah?” I peered out the cracked window to the field stretching out behind the house. I felt around her mind, and I got the general sense of what she’d read. Hearing it out loud might help me understand it more, and I was about to ask her to explain it, but she started without prompting.

“
Well, basically, electricity is when charged particles like electrons move from one place to another. You need a certain amount of force to move electrons, and that’s voltage. It’s like the pressure behind the current. And you need a conductor like copper or aluminum for the electrons to go anywhere. The conductor is like a path. Once they start moving, you have a current, which is measured in amps. It’s kind of how fast they’re moving.”

“
Hmm.” I bit my lip, thinking back to the lightning storm, to the outage at school. We had that force, that voltage, to push them, and I knew I felt those electrons in the air. “I don’t get it, though. When we touch, the electrons went through us and the air, like they didn’t even need a conductor.”

“
I know, it doesn’t really make sense.” Anna bent down to look at an outlet. “I felt the flow going through us and to the lights. But how can electrons just go through the air? You need a conductor.
 
.
 
.”

“
Maybe.
 
.
 
.maybe we tricked them into thinking that the air was a conductor.”

Anna furrowed her brow. “What?”

“
Okay, you said electrons move more freely in conductors, right?”

“
I think so.
 
.
 
.and when you hook it up to a battery or manipulate the metal with a magnet or something, the electrons respond. I’m going to forget this by tomorrow, you should look into it.”

“
I will. But think about it, maybe we.
 
.
 
.changed the electrons in the air or something. Maybe we made them respond when usually they wouldn’t.”

Biting her lip, Anna straightened up. “Maybe. Conductors have less electrons than other materials, I think, so maybe we.
 
.
 
.what, we changed the atoms that weren’t conductors?” She shook her head. “No, that couldn’t be.”

“
Well, how else did it go through the air?”

She stared up at the light bulb. “But.
 
.
 
.well, there’s only one way to find out what’s happening.” She held out her hands. “You want to try it?”

“
Sure.” I approached her and glanced around at the shabby kitchen. “Do you think.
 
.
 
.I don’t know, I’m just thinking about how old these outlets and stuff probably are. What if they end up shorting out or something?”

Anna’s hands lowered a little bit, worry emanating from her, but then she brought them up again. “Like I said, there’s only one way to find out.”

I took a deep breath and took her small, dark hands in mine. We shocked each other, making both of us jump, and I could feel that surge of energy like I had at the concert. A tingling sensation spread through my arms, and I tried to concentrate on the light above us. Maybe we shouldn’t have stood right below it. We nonverbally agreed to send the current coursing through us to the lightbulb, and I clumsily tried to do just that. The bulb shattered, and Anna shot away from me. We both dodged away to avoid old, dusty glass falling over us.

“
Oops,” I said.

“
It was probably a really old bulb, anyway,” Anna said, brushing some glass off her hair.

I coughed from the dust and shook glass from my hair. I shifted my weight, full of energy now—not the actual energy like I was when touching her, but this desire to try again and visit a power plant or something. “We made that current! We generated the voltage behind it. And who knows why, but the air acted like a conductor. I wonder if we could send a current through anything.”

“
I was thinking about how many volts we’re sending.
 
.
 
.most appliances are equipped for a hundred twenty or two hundred forty. Who knows how many we’re doing?”

“
I never even thought of that. Well, I bought some light bulbs. Might have been smart to replace it first.”

I brought a new light bulb into the kitchen, but then we had to figure out how to get up to the fixture. We ended up dragging the old couch into the kitchen and when I tried to stand on it, my foot fell through a crack into the springs. Anna laughed as I stumbled around, pulling my ankle from the springs. I balanced on the arm of the couch, Anna’s hands on my legs as I replaced the bulb.

“
Hey, you should just touch my leg right now,” I said.

“
Are you sure?” She squinted up at me. “This doesn’t seem like a very safe position to do it.”

“
I’m fine. I won’t touch the light bulb.”

“
But your face is right next to it!”

“
Come on, maybe being closer will be better.”

With a sigh, Anna lifted my jeans up and touched my calf with both of her hands. That familiar tingling energy shot through me, making my heart skip a beat.

“
Let’s not do as much as we did last time,” I told her. As though we knew what the heck we were doing.

“
Don’t look at it, at least, just in case,” Anna said.

Glass in my eyes didn’t sound fun, so, as much as I wanted to watch it, I kept my eyes averted. We eased the smallest amount of power through the air as we could, and I could feel the coil in the bulb as though I were looking at it myself. The energy traveled up it, and Anna squealed. I looked up to see the bulb glowing, nearly blinding me at this proximity.

“
Nice!” I said. “Here, help me down.” I grabbed her hand as I stepped onto the ground, and we stared up at the lightbulb, our hands clasped.

“
What do you think will happen if we let go?” Anna asked.

I looked at her as she stared up at the light in wonder. Her mouth hung open in joy, and I had a compulsion to just kiss her right then, to hell with everything else. She looked at me suddenly and let go of my hand. The light above us went out.

“
Dammit,” I said, looking at the dead bulb. “Why do you think it did that?”

“
We weren’t giving it power anymore,” she said quietly.

“
But they stayed on at the school.”

“
Maybe the school’s lights caught on to the regular power.”

“
Yeah, maybe.”

We stood in silence for a moment. I felt a tiny bit of worry from her, but then this sense of delight washed over her, matching my own. This was
awesome.

“
Want to try it again?” I asked.

We stayed there for an hour, lighting the bulb up again in various rooms, trying to see how long we’d be able to keep the current going. After the initial flickering, we thought we’d be able to do it for a long time, but just standing there holding hands got boring. We played around with our iPods and cell phones, trying to charge them. We were afraid of blowing them out, or shorting them, or whatever it was called them you gave an electronic device too much power, so we didn’t do it for very long. We didn’t have to explain breaking a few light bulbs to our parents, but a ruined iPod or phone would raise some questions.

“
So, you haven’t told your dad you know yet?” Anna asked as she fished around in her backpack for more electrical things.

“
Nope. I don’t want to rat your mom out.
 
.
 
.and I don’t know what I’d say, either.” It was strange to think of Dad having a connection like that with Anna’s mom. He was impersonal most of the time, and I can’t imagine what it would be like to sense what he was feeling. I wondered how he treated Anna’s mom when he realized what they had. I wondered if he’d ever fought mine and Anna’s friendship without me realizing. He’d always been kind of cold to Anna, but he didn’t like most kids that weren’t his own, so I had chalked it up to usual behavior.

“
Well, I don’t know whether to tell my mom about Joseph Harwood and Kristina,” Anna said. “I think I’d rather keep it quiet, since Kristina said those things about people looking for us.
 
.
 
.”

“
That’s probably a good idea. I like your mom, but she might freak out a little bit.”

Anna half-smiled. “Has Kristina contacted you at all?”

“
No. You?”

Anna shook her head. “Well.
 
.
 
.” she trailed off, looking at her watch. “I should probably get home.”

“
Yeah.” I put my phone back in my hoodie pocket and stood. “You want a ride?”

“
Sure,” Anna said, swinging her bag onto her back. “Oh, dang it, we didn’t do any homework!”

I laughed. “Who needs homework? We’re walking power plants!”

We left the dilapidated house and walked to my car. I could feel Anna turning something over in her mind, hesitating and considering the options. I didn’t say anything as we got in the car, but as we were driving away, she asked if I wanted to come over to do homework. Of course I said yes. I felt like I couldn’t spend enough time with her.