through me, around me.
“Die, you stupid shit!” I screamed.
I threw him back into the water, disappointed. So disappointed. I had finally gotten the nerve to try this, to prove it to myself. And nothing! I tried again and again, more fish. And nothing. I could not kill.
I grabbed the old fern on the windowsill. From what I could tell, I gave it the shock of its lifetime. The surge ran through me, out my fingertips. If anything, the leaves seemed to perk up, the stems seemed to stand a little taller, happier.
“What in the hell?”
I left the fish in the cooler on the counter, and I got on my bike and pedaled back to the pet shop. I had to do it before I lost my nerve. So I rode as fast as I could. The Garden District passed by me through an indigo lens. I blinked it back and watched the blue disappear gradually as I biked, like it was draining from my vision.
I didn’t want to have to do what I had to do, but there was no way out. I could think of nothing better.
The clerk with too many piercings gave me the skunk eye, and I knew that I must look like some kind of wild-eyed freak, but it was what it was.
When I got home, sweaty and crazy-haired, I placed the cardboard box on the table and pulled out the first small white mouse. “Forgive me,” I said to his little pink nose. Mia-Joy would argue that I didn’t really want to hurt the mouse, so of course it wouldn’t work. But I knew that logic didn’t matter. I never wanted to hurt Sophie either.
So I summoned it.
It came alive and forceful, from zero to eighty in my chest, out of nowhere. I cupped the mouse in my hands, his fur soft and warm against my palms. I knew now, after so much recent practice, how to help the surge through my body, sort of focus it with my muscles into my hands. I focused, and I pictured myself draining the life from this warm-blooded creature. I pictured Sophie in my arms on that rocky beach, that empty patch of time that I could never quite recall, and I tried to kill that mouse.
For so many reasons, I tried to kill that mouse.
And I fell to my knees with the exertion of it. I tried and tried, pushing and forcing the surge from my core. The mouse bit me then, and I let him go. He scampered away, underneath the table, his beady eyes staring me down. “You’re alive, you son of a bitch!” I yelled at him.
But then I thought of the missing variable.
Hadn’t it been raining when I hurt Sophie? Water conducted electricity, right? Leyden jars. I pulled myself up from the floor, taking care not to step on the mouse. The blue lens was still in front of my eyes. I walked to the kitchen sink and turned on the faucet. I grabbed the sprayer and just sprayed myself down until I was soaked, until I was standing in the middle of a huge puddle on our kitchen tiles. Then I took the rubber band from my hair and, with a few tries, rigged it onto the sprayer so it would keep spraying on its own. I balanced it against the faucet, backed away, and stood in an arc of kitchen sink rain.
My flip-flops slapped against the water as I went to get another mouse from the box. He looked pretty much the same as the first one, save for a tiny gray spot over his left eye. “Sorry, buddy,” I told him, and then I enclosed him in my hands.
I walked to the perfect spot in the kitchen puddle, let the water fall on me, around me.
The power revved like an engine, and I waited. I controlled it somehow, didn’t let it course out to my limbs until I thought it had reached its maximum potential. I was getting better at this. I concentrated, let the power work itself into a frenzy, and then I let it go, let it do its work. I focused. “Kill this thing!”
It shuddered through me. Harder, more forcefully than ever, racking my body, clanking my teeth together, making a terrible noise. I waited, let it play itself out.
But when I opened my hands, there was the mouse. Alive. Up on his hind legs, peering at me.
With that, I collapsed onto the kitchen floor, an exhausted heap. When finally I opened my eyes, I saw that the blue was gone. And the next thing I knew, my mother walked into the kitchen and screamed bloody murder. “A mouse!”
I held my head up, followed her gaze. There it was, the gray-spotted one, standing on its hind legs on the kitchen tile just inside the back door, looking as healthy as ever.
“Corrine, are you okay?” Mom bustled toward me, ignoring the spraying water, the mouse forgotten.
I collapsed again, exhausted. “I’m sorry,” I said. And I think that’s when she called 911.
When I woke up, he was next to me. I looked around. I was in the hospital, the room hushed and quiet, smelling like bleach and old people. It was late and dark, with only the blue-green glow of the monitors lighting up the room.
“Your mom and dad are talking with hospital security. There’s a bunch of press, and—”
“Rennick,” I said, my throat scratchy. His face looked haggard and worn, deep circles under his eyes, his hair everywhere.
“Corrine, why didn’t you ask me to help?” He gripped the handrail on the side of the bed, white-knuckled. “I should’ve been there. What if you had …?”
I sat up, barely noticing the bandage on my hand from a recent IV. I kept my eyes on him, the concern there. Had I almost used myself up? Was that what he was worried about? I watched the way his whole body arched toward me but also kept its distance. How hard was it for him not to touch me right now? I thought I knew.
“We can redo it all as soon as you get out. Set up controls. I’ll videotape it.” I was only half hearing him, mentally running my fingers over every plane of his face, the high cheekbones, that worried brow, the scruffy chin. “Will you let me? We can reproduce the results. Your mother is speaking to this university doctor—after the security thing—they want to assist our studies, you know, like—”
“I don’t want to,” I said, clearing my throat.
“Corrine.” He worked his jaw, his nostrils flared. He took a deep breath. “We are so close to … everything. And if we keep on it, you will eventually believe.”
I sucked in a deep breath and gathered my courage. I tried to become the Corrine that Sophie would want me to be. I tried to be the old Corrine. The one who jumped in. It was hard to believe all of it. My head believed what I saw, knew that the proof had scampered across my kitchen floor. My head knew this.
My heart might never give in.
But it was time to move on.
“I believe it,” I said. “Right now anyway, Rennick.” I reached my hand out, watching it slowly shake, and I placed it on top of his. He met my eyes—grateful, disbelieving—and he placed his other hand on top of mine. We sat that way for a long time, looking into each other’s eyes. And the heat registered, not from my chest, not from my power, but from his hands, and there was a different feeling below in my rib cage, warm in its own way. A different, comforting feeling, like coming home.
“Let’s leave,” I said finally. “Leave a note for my mom. There’s somewhere I gotta go.”
“Corrine.” Rennick shook his head, cupped my chin with one hand. “The doctors. I don’t know.”
“I’m fine. You know I’m fine. They didn’t find anything wrong with me, did they?”
“Just dehydration.” He squinted at me. “Hurry. Before I change my mind.”
In the bathroom, I changed into my clothes as quickly as possible, my heart leaping out of my chest. Rennick and I walked past the nurses’ station like it was nothing, but the nurses were the least of our problems. When we saw a bunch of reporters and cameras at the front entrance, he turned us the other way, and we went toward the cafeteria. Here, he yelled out that he had seen a cockroach at the salad bar. Pandemonium ensued, attention was diverted, and we snuck through the kitchen, out the back door near a loading dock. We stepped onto a dilapidated asphalt parking lot, the coolness of the night surprising me.
He picked me up then, arms around my waist, twirled me around, his face in my hair. When he put me down, I looked up at him, and the corners of his mouth turned up almost imperceptibly. He leaned in a fraction of an inch closer, and I closed the distance between us and pressed my lips to his. A quick kiss. An answer to a question.
Without saying another word, he led me to his Jeep and we drove quietly, with his hand in mine, lying there between us on the front seat like a promise.
The Kranes’ house was in the Upper Garden District, a really beautiful rehabbed place with a second-story
