Struck (6 page)

It’s not fair
…

The heat began to gather in my chest again, and the sound of forks scraping on plastic faded until the only thing I could hear was the rush of hot blood parading through my veins, pounding in my ears.

Let it go
, I told myself.
It doesn’t matter. Let it go
.

But it wasn’t fair … Parker was right. People shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever they wanted. To take whatever they wanted simply because they were bigger and stronger and ran in a pack.

Fire crackled like static in my heart, and I felt myself
reaching for Pitcher, even though the more rational side of my mind had questions.

What do you think you’re going to do to her? The same thing you did to that man back in Lake Havasu City? He didn’t deserve it and neither does this girl. Let. It. Go
.

I sighed, knowing the voice was right. The crackling fire in my heart stilled. I let my arm drop as I was distracted by motion in my peripheral vision.

About half a dozen kids approached the line-cutters. The group was random, made up of guys and girls ranging in age from freshmen to seniors, popular kids to geeks like Andrew “Schiz” Buckley. Schiz as in paranoid schizophrenic, not that he was one, as far as I knew. Paranoid for sure, but maybe not schizophrenic. Schiz was a major conspiracy theorist and notorious blogger on the subject. I used to see flyers advertising his blog, Shoot the Messenger, posted around school.

And there was someone else I knew, a tall, slender black kid Parker hung out with on occasion. Quentin something. I couldn’t remember his last name. He’d been to our house a couple times, but I hadn’t said more than five words to him. Still, something about Quentin was changed from the last time I’d seen him. It was his eyes. There was a stillness in them, a watchfulness. It was almost predatory.

And every single one of the kids in his group had the exact same look.

It was creepy, and what was creepier was the way they seemed to move as one, like they were connected somehow, joined by invisible puppet strings, like birds in formation.

Quentin spoke to the line-cutters, his voice coming out
loud and strong, more adult than I remembered it. “Go to the back of the line.”

Pitcher stiffened at the sound of his voice and turned slowly, holding her food tray in front of her like a shield. “Why should we?” she challenged, but her voice no longer carried the note of arrogant assurance it had when she’d spoken to me alone.

Quentin spread his hands, as though in a show of helplessness, but the gesture seemed anything but helpless. My eyes homed in on the center of his palm, on the perfect ring of red scar tissue, about the size of a golf ball.

A scar like Katrina’s.

Quentin smiled with his mouth only. “Go to the back of the line,” he said again.

Schiz added, “You and your friends are out of order.” Schiz smoothed his Dracula-esque widow’s peak. He wore a black T-shirt with bold white letters on the front that spelled: TYRANY.

The softball players shared a round of nervous glances, and I thought they would stand their ground. Then Pitcher shrugged and lowered her head, a clear sign of defeat. She stepped out of line and the rest of her gang followed her to the end.

Quentin’s eyes made their way to mine, which were about as wide open as they would go.

“Nice to see you back at school, Mia,” he said. And then he held out his scarred hand to me.

I shook my head like he’d offered me a loaded bear trap. I wanted to back up, but I was already against a wall.

Quentin frowned. I thought he would drop his hand, but instead he reached out to me, and his long fingers
circled my wrist. He held on gently for only a split second before grimacing and letting go. He and his group shared a look, and Quentin nodded. Then they turned in what looked like a military formation, it was so synchronized, and took their seats at an empty cafeteria table where their trays of food saved their places.

I loaded up my tray and found a seat on the other side of the cafeteria, as far as I could get from Quentin and his motley crew. Still, I saw them glancing my way more often than was warranted. I tried to ignore them as I ate. Tried to pretend I was still hungry, but my stomach was twisting and tying itself in knots. Double knots, in fact. Or maybe hangman’s nooses.

Parker still hadn’t shown up. I had barely touched my food when I stood abruptly and decided to go look for my brother.

“You want the rest of this?” I asked the skin-and-bones boy sitting next to me. He didn’t hesitate to take the food off my hands. Couldn’t even say thank you, he was so busy stuffing rehydrated mashed potatoes in his mouth.

It didn’t take long to find Parker. Maybe I’d known where he’d be all along.

“Hey,” I said softly, coming up beside him.

He didn’t take his eyes from the wall of the missing.

Have you seen this person?
the wall asked a thousand times.

I felt a crawling sensation and glanced behind me, feeling as though the eyes of the dead on the opposite wall were glaring at my back.

“You’re going to miss lunch,” I said.

Parker looked at me. “They’re gone,” he said.

“Who’s gone?”

“Jake. Kadin. Asher. They left the city. Last time I heard from Asher he said his family might take off, but …” He shrugged as if he didn’t have the energy to elaborate on how his friends had disappeared without so much as a farewell text.

“Are they coming back?” I asked.

Another shrug, and then his shoulders slumped. “Would you?”

I didn’t answer, because the answer was no. We might have left, too, if it weren’t for Mom’s condition. Travel was not advisable for people with her disorder. Besides, we didn’t have anywhere else to go.

I hadn’t seen Parker this dejected in weeks. I racked my mind for words of comfort, but came up short.

I hadn’t made anything more than acquaintances since moving to L.A. Friendships were complicated, and I didn’t need any more complications in my life than I already had. But Parker had made three good friends—or so he’d thought—since moving here. I’d actually felt a little jealous of how close they’d become. Parker and Mom were the only people in L.A. who knew my secrets, and that made them my only real friends. The only two people in the world I could trust.

“I’m sure they would have called to say goodbye if they could have,” I told Parker.

“Doesn’t matter. They’re gone now.” The carefully controlled tone of his voice told me that it did matter very much to him.

I considered mentioning that I’d seen Quentin in the
cafeteria. Knowing that one of his second tier friends was still around might cheer my brother up. I opened my mouth and then closed it again, thinking of that weird look in Quentin’s eyes, and the strange, synchronized way he and Schiz and those others had moved together.

And that scar.

“Did you see this?” Parker pointed to a flyer tacked in the center of the wall.

EARTHQUAKE SURVIVORS’ GROUP

MON–FRI, 6–8 PM

SKYLINE HIGH SCHOOL, ROOM 317

Room 317. Why did that strike a chord?

“Maybe something like that could help Mom,” Parker said.

“She won’t even leave her room,” I reminded him. “You think we could get her clear to the school?”

“We could at least try. Nothing we’ve done so far has worked.” There was tension in his voice. I could tell he was still irritated with me for getting in the way of him playing hero that morning.

There were plenty of other copies of the flyer pinned to the wall. I pulled free the one Parker was looking at. “We’ll show it to Mom, see what she thinks.”

I folded the flyer and tried to stuff it into my pocket, but it caught on something. I drew out the tarot card Katrina had given me. I’d forgotten about it.

Meet me in room 317
.

“Is that a tarot card?” Parker asked.

I stared at the image of the stone tower perched on the
lip of that cliff. The jagged yellow lightning. The falling, screaming people, their eyes open as wide as their mouths. It was unnerving how those eyes seemed to point right at me, like the eyes of the dead on the memorial wall.

“Yeah,” I said distractedly.

“Where’d you get it?”

I didn’t want to tell Parker what happened in the lounge with Katrina. Didn’t want to burden him with another helping of crazy.

“Found it.” I stuffed the card, along with the folded flyer, back into my pocket. What I wanted to do was toss the card in the trash and hope I never saw Katrina again. But it looked like an antique. I couldn’t just throw it away.

“Mia?” Parker said, his voice somber. “You think Mom’s okay alone?”

“I’m sure she’s fine.” As his older sister, it was my job to lie to him in the name of easing his troubled mind.

“Liar,” Parker said (apparently I sucked at my job), and shook his head at me. His heavy blond hair swept the arches of his eyebrows. Probably anyone who saw Parker and me together had no idea we were brother and sister. My hair—which I’d finally grown to the nape of my neck after my last lightning strike seared every strand from my head—was one stop away from black. Parker’s eyes were bottle-glass green. Mine were cloudy gray. He looked like our mom. I looked more like our father, who had died of stomach cancer so long ago his face wouldn’t stay in my memory. I had to keep referring to the photo albums to remind myself what he looked like, and I always got a little jolt of surprise when I saw my own eyes staring out at me from the pages.

“We should go home and check on her,” Parker said. “If we hurry, we’ll be back in time for fourth period.”

“Parker … no. She has to get used to us not being home every second. It might be good for her to have some space without us hovering over her.” I tugged on his shirt and started toward the cafeteria. “Come on, you might still have time to get lunch.”

Parker followed, but stayed one step behind me.

At the end of the missing persons wall, the twin of the flyer I’d helped myself to caught my eye. At least, I thought it was the twin. There was a slight difference that, when I noticed it, made my stomach drop.

LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS’ GROUP

MON–FRI, 8–10 PM

SKYLINE HIGH SCHOOL, ROOM 317

6

I SHOULD HAVE
eaten more of my lunch. By the time last period rolled around, my stomach was hollow and I was so exhausted I could barely drag myself to the commons to check the schedule of relocated classes. Electives had been canceled until further notice, but everyone had to show up for daily math, science, English, and history if we wanted to finish the school year and, in my case, graduate. Classes had been rearranged and consolidated on the first floor, partially due to a shortage of teachers and the drastically reduced student body, but also because the upper floors had sustained more damage during the quake than the lower.

All I had left today was English lit with Mr. Kale, the same teacher I’d had before the quake, and also my least favorite. He acted like he was schooling us in military strategy, not flowery nineteenth-century prose and poetry. And he always knew when you studied the CliffsNotes instead of reading the actual book he’d assigned.

There was a disorderly line to check the schedule. I queued up and watched as aid workers in bright orange T-shirts set up tables and organized the mountain of ration boxes they’d be handing out in an hour. Some of the aid
workers wore Tasers on their belts, like Militiaman Brent’s, or canisters of pepper spray. With several hundred half-starved teenagers to feed, they were smart not to take chances with letting the crowd get out of control.

As the line moved forward, the girl and boy in front of me stepped in sync, their fingers threaded, heads together, whispering intimately.

“So what did you decide?” Boyfriend said into Girlfriend’s ear. “Do you want to go?”

Girlfriend’s answer was hesitant. “I don’t know … I want to, but don’t you need a password or something to find out where it’s gonna be? It moves every night.”

I realized they were talking about the Rove and leaned closer to eavesdrop. I thought the Rove, an ultra-exclusive, traveling party that moved to a different location in the Waste every night, was a rumor, something Rance Ridley Prophet concocted to make Los Angeles sound even more corrupt, more worthy of Old Testament–style annihilation. But apparently these two thought it was real.

“My brother’s friend is an usher,” Boyfriend said. “He gave me the inside info so we can find it. Check it out.”

Boyfriend pulled a thin book with a well-worn cover from his backpack. I tilted my head to read the title.
The Waste Land
, by T. S. Eliot. My brows drew together. How was a book of poetry supposed to get you into the Rove?

The couple must have sensed my spying. They glanced back at me with narrowed eyes, and Boyfriend slipped
The Waste Land
back into his bag. “We can talk about it later.”

The two of them checked the schedule and left, hands still locked, like they were afraid to let go.

I frowned at their retreating backs, feeling a pinch of
envy. I’d never had a boyfriend, and didn’t think I ever would. My freakishness was written all over my body, and I couldn’t imagine letting anyone—any
guy
—see that part of me. But it would be nice to have someone to care about … someone to care about me. Especially now.

I put the couple and their talk of the Rove out of my mind. I hoped they were wrong and the Rove didn’t exist. And if it did … if there really was a group of people partying in the Waste where so many had died, where my mom had almost died, I couldn’t help but agree with Prophet. Maybe Los Angeles did need to be taught an Old Testament–style lesson.

I checked the schedule and was surprised to see that Mr. Kale was in his usual room on the third floor. He was the only teacher who still had a room up there.

Room 317.

The empty third-floor hallway was covered in a thin layer of plaster dust that had shaken from the ceiling. I hoped it wasn’t mingled with asbestos.