Chapter 11: Static Feedback

Eliana went back to the robotics lab on Thursday, after school. The whiteboard said COMPETITION IN 24 DAYS. Emma was at the front bench with Alfred Esquire the Third tipped over on his side and his chest panel off.

Dylan was where she’d left him, at the back bench, with a fresh Monster.

He looked up. “You again.”

“Me again.”

“You’re talking,” Emma said, without looking up. “I’m mid-solder.”

“Sorry.” Eliana lowered her voice and sat on the stool across from Dylan. “The grounding thing. If I wanted to actually do it. For a project. What would I need?”

Dylan looked at her for a long moment, like the question was loading.

“What kind of project?”

“A school one.”

“For what class?”

“Science.”

He kept looking at her. Then he seemed to decide that whatever this was, it was less effort than asking more questions. He rolled his stool backward to a shelf of plastic bins, dug through one, and came back with a coil of thick copper wire and a heavy metal clamp, like a big hose clamp with a screw on the side.

He set them both on the bench in front of her.

“Wire,” he said. “Ground clamp. Clamp goes on something metal that goes into the ground. A cold water pipe, usually, in an old house. Not the gas.” He pointed at her with the Monster can. “Never the gas.”

“Not the gas,” Eliana said.

“The wire goes from the clamp to whatever you want to give it somewhere to go.” He yawned so wide his jaw clicked. “And don’t electrocute yourself. I am not filling out the form.”

“There’s a form?”

“There’s always a form.”

Eliana picked up the coil. It was heavier than she expected, cold and bright under the lab lights.

“Thanks,” she said. “Really.”

Dylan had already turned back to his board. “Return the clamp,” he said. “I gave you the good clamp.”

Eliana found Hannah in the student lot, leaning against her car with her sunglasses on even though the sun was almost down. She straightened when she saw Eliana coming.

“Need a ride?”

“Yeah.” Eliana got in. The tote bag with the copper coil in it went at her feet, and it clunked against the floor when she set it down. Hannah glanced at it and didn’t ask.

They were two streets from Eliana’s house before Eliana got the words out.

“Can I tell my mom I’m sleeping over at yours on Saturday?”

Hannah kept her eyes on the road. “Are you sleeping over at mine on Saturday?”

“No.” Eliana hesitated. “Well. I don’t know. Maybe? After?”

The turn signal ticked. Hannah made the turn, slow and careful, the way she drove everywhere.

“Is it Lexie?” she asked.

Eliana looked at her hands. She thought about saying no, about the dentist, about a dozen things that would have been easy.

“Yes,” she said.

Hannah nodded, like she’d expected that, or at least like she’d decided not to be surprised. She pulled up in front of Eliana’s house and put the car in park.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell my mom too. In case yours calls.”

“Thank you.”

“Text me when you’re on your way,” Hannah said. “I’ll leave the side door unlocked.”

“I will.”

Eliana got out with the tote bag. When she looked back from the front steps, Hannah was still sitting in the driveway with the engine running, watching her get inside. Eliana couldn’t tell if she looked worried or something else.

That night, her phone buzzed on the pillow next to her head.

The dots came up. Then they went away. Then they came up again.

The dots came up one more time and stayed there for a long while. Then they went away, and nothing else came.

Eliana lay there with the phone on her chest until the screen went dark. She fell asleep before she thought to plug it in.

On Friday, Eliana carried the guitar case on two buses and down four blocks of warehouses, and by the time she reached the gray door her shoulder ached from the strap. Lexie was already there, sitting on the curb by the sixth pipe with her hood up.

“You look like you’re running away from home,” Lexie said.

“I took two buses with this thing.” Eliana set the case down on the sidewalk, rolled her sore shoulder, and crouched by the pipe to find the key on its hook.

Inside, the studio was exactly the way they’d left it.

The blanket was still on the floor where the blast had thrown it. The amp was still dead. When Eliana tried the light switch out of habit, nothing happened. She looked up. Every bulb in the row had gone cloudy, the glass blackened at the base, like something had burned its way out from inside.

“We need new bulbs,” Lexie said.

“We need new everything.” Eliana looked at the outlets along the wall and decided not to think about them. “Later.”

The cracked window let in a thin stripe of afternoon. They worked by that and their phone lights.

Up on the shelf, the salamander was awake. One crack along its back glowed when they came in, and kept glowing.

“Hi,” Eliana said to it, before she could stop herself.

Lexie looked at her.

“What? It lives here now.”

Eliana opened the case on the workbench. The guitar inside was old and scuffed, with a crack in the finish near the bridge and a faded sticker on the body that had once said something. A strip of masking tape on the headstock said T.B. in marker.

Lexie leaned over and looked at it for a while. She didn’t say anything about it, which Eliana appreciated more than she could have explained.

They had decided not to plug anything in. The amp was dead anyway, and neither of them wanted to find out what else was living in Tommy’s wiring. Eliana sat on the arm of the couch with the guitar across her knees and the pick in her fingers. Lexie stood in the middle of the floor, on the tape.

“Quiet this time,” Eliana said. “Like, really quiet. Last time we cracked a window.”

“And passed out on the floor,” Lexie said. “Yeah. Quiet.”

She picked out a coffee can on the shelf, the one marked ???, and pointed at it.

Eliana played the first chord quietly, unplugged, all downstrokes. The pick felt warm. Lexie sang the first line under her breath, so low it was barely more than talking. She didn’t look at Eliana. She looked at the can.

back up, back down

Nothing happened on the first line. On the second, Eliana stopped thinking about the chord and just thought about the can, and the space it was in, and how it shouldn’t be there.

this ain’t your town

The can slid an inch along the shelf, all on its own, and stopped.

They both stared at it.

“Okay,” Lexie said quietly. “Okay. So it works without the amp.”

“The pick,” Eliana said. She looked down at it. “It must be the pick.”

Her fingertips stung. Not as badly as last time, but she could feel it. She flexed her hand and set the guitar down. A little of the heaviness from last Friday crept back into her arms, just a little, like the edge of a wave.

“Quieter costs less,” she said.

“Quieter does less,” Lexie said. “That thing moved an inch.” She sat down on the floor with her back against the couch. “So. Saturday.”

Eliana took the coil of copper wire and the heavy clamp out of her bag and laid them on the floor between them.

“Dylan says it has to go on a cold water pipe. Old houses have them in the basement, usually near the washing machine or the water heater. Then you run the wire to wherever you want it to go.”

“So it’s a lightning rod,” Lexie said. “For a ghost.”

“For a ghost made of lightning.”

“Sure.” Lexie picked up the clamp and turned it over in her hands. “And if it comes out of the wall in the middle of a song, it goes into this instead of somebody’s face.”

“That’s the idea.”

“That’s a hope, not an idea.”

Eliana didn’t argue.

“I told the band a friend was coming,” Lexie said after a minute, not looking at her. “Meghan asked which friend. I didn’t say.”

“Is she going to be mad?”

“Oh, she’s gonna be livid. I kinda wanna see how mad she gets.”

They sat there a while longer in the stripe of daylight. Up on the shelf, the salamander turned slowly in its jar.

“So what’s the plan?” Lexie said finally. “Like, actually.”

Eliana counted it on her fingers. “The clamp. The guitar. And we see what happens.”

“That’s not a plan.”

“It’s three whole things!” Eliana said, and held up the three fingers again, like that proved it.

Lexie looked at her, and for the first time all afternoon, she almost laughed.

Eliana left Hannah’s at a quarter to eight with the guitar case on her back and the tote bag over her shoulder. Hannah walked her to the side door and leaned against the frame in her socks.

“Text me,” Hannah said.

“I will.”

Hannah pressed something into her hand. It was a little portable charger, still warm from her pocket.

“So your phone doesn’t die,” she said. “Again.”

The address had come in that afternoon from STRICTLY BUSINESS, with no hello:

The house was easy to find. It was old and narrow, and every light in it was off except the basement windows, which glowed purple and pulsed. Kids were sitting on the front steps and the lawn, some she recognized from school, most she didn’t. Somebody was smoking by the side gate. A bass line was coming up through the ground, so low she felt it in her teeth before she heard it.

Nobody stopped her. A few people looked at the guitar case, and one boy said, “Oh, are you playing?” and she said, “No,” and he looked confused, and she went past him and down the stairs.

The basement was smaller than she’d pictured. The ceiling was low enough that the taller kids had to duck, and the whole room was hazy with fog from a machine in the corner that hissed every few minutes. Purple and blue string lights were stapled along the beams. At the far end, the band was set up on a square of old carpet: Rodney’s drums, Ryan’s bass amp, Meghan’s amp, and a PA speaker on either side as tall as Eliana’s shoulder. A subwoofer sat on the floor between them like a crate.

Along the wall behind the stage, a power strip was plugged into another power strip, which was plugged into an outlet that had gone black around the edges.

Eliana stood at the bottom of the stairs and made herself breathe.

She found the laundry corner on the other side of the furnace, behind a curtain someone had hung to hide it. There was a washer and dryer and an old water heater, and coming out of the wall beside it were two pipes. One was yellow, with a valve shaped like a little lever. She left that one alone. Never the gas. The other was copper, cold and sweating a little under her hand.

She knelt, wrapped Dylan’s clamp around the cold pipe, and turned the screw until it bit. Her hands were shaking, and it took her three tries. Then she uncoiled the wire along the floor behind the furnace and under the edge of the carpet, all the way to the back corner of the stage, near the blackened outlet, and left the bare end tucked under the leg of a chair.

It looked like nothing. Just a wire on the floor of a basement full of wires.

When she came back around the furnace, Narnia was standing there with a cup in each hand, watching her.

“I’m not going to ask,” Narnia said. “I’m just going to remember.”

“Thanks.”

“Mm.” They handed her one of the cups. “It’s soda. Probably.”

The crowd had filled in while she was gone. Mika was up near the front, crouched on a folding chair with her camera, trying out angles. In the very back, against the wall, stood Sean, alone, in his blazer, arms folded, with the expression of a man attending a funeral for someone he respected.

He saw Eliana. He nodded at her, gravely, like they were both there for the same cause.

Eliana took her cup and the guitar case and pushed through to the front row, right up against the edge of the carpet, and stood there.

Rodney saw her first. His face lit up like Christmas, and he hit his crash cymbal once, for no reason at all.

Ryan saw her next. He didn’t smile. He just gave her a small nod from behind the bass, like he’d been expecting her.

Meghan saw her last. She was tuning, head down, and she looked up to say something to Lexie and found Eliana standing three feet away. Her face went through several things in a row, and none of them were good.

“You’re kidding me,” Meghan said.

And then Lexie stepped up to the mic.

She looked at the crowd, and then down, and found Eliana right in front of her with a guitar case and a cup of probably-soda. Something happened at the corner of her mouth. She didn’t stop it this time.

Then she leaned into the mic, and Rodney counted them in.

Eliana stopped worrying by the second song.

The band was good. She hadn’t known that. Rodney hit the drums like he was trying to break through them, and Ryan stood perfectly still and played like the bass was the only thing holding up the ceiling, and Meghan bent over her guitar like she was arguing with it and winning. And Lexie stood in the middle of all of it with both hands around the mic, her voice rough and enormous through the PA, and sang like she meant every word she had ever said to anyone.

The crowd pressed in around Eliana, jumping, shoving, yelling the words. Somebody spilled a drink down her back. She didn’t care. For three whole minutes she forgot about the copper wire under the carpet.

It was the third song when it happened.

Meghan stepped back toward her amp for the bridge, too close, and the guitar let out a squeal of feedback that went up and up, thin and high and painful, until half the room flinched and covered their ears.

Eliana didn’t cover her ears. She felt something else.

It started in her chest. A slow, heavy pressure, like a bass note too low to hear, like the moment before a thunderstorm when the air goes thick. Then a feeling crawled up the back of her neck, the certainty that someone was standing right behind her, watching.

She turned around. Nobody was there. Just the crowd, jumping.

Out of the corner of her eye, something gray moved along the wall by the furnace. She looked straight at it. There was nothing there.

Nineteen hertz.

The feedback cut off. Meghan swore and stepped away from her amp, and the song stumbled back together. But the pressure in Eliana’s chest didn’t go away. It got heavier.

The string lights along the beams flickered. All of them, at once, purple and blue, off and on. Somebody in the crowd cheered like it was part of the show.

Behind the stage, the power strip plugged into the power strip plugged into the blackened outlet began to glow.

It came out slowly, the way the little ones had come out of Tommy’s amp. But it wasn’t little. It pushed out through the outlet like something squeezing through a gap that was much too small for it. It was the size of a basketball, blueish white and crackling, and the air around it shimmered. The fog nearest it lit up from the inside.

It drifted up above the stage, behind Lexie’s head, and turned slowly in the air.

Lexie was still singing. She hadn’t seen it.

Eliana opened her mouth to scream, and then the crowd went quiet.

Not all at once. It spread out from the stage like a ripple. The jumping slowed. The yelling stopped. One by one, the people pressed up against the carpet lowered their arms and went still, faces tipped up toward the light, mouths a little open. The band kept playing, but nobody was listening anymore.

Then they started walking.

Slowly. Calmly. Toward the back of the stage, where the power strips were, and the blackened outlet, and the bare cables running behind the drum kit. A boy in a denim jacket stepped right up onto the carpet without looking down. Behind him, a girl Eliana knew from science.

And there, at the front, the camera hanging forgotten from the strap around her neck, was Mika. She was walking toward the light with a small, happy smile on her face.

Eliana felt the pull too. It was warm and sweet, like the moment before falling asleep. She wanted to see it up close. Just to see.

Her hand found her pocket, and the pen inside it. She pulled the cap off and pushed it back on, hard, then again, then again, until the click was the only thing she could think about.

People want to reach for it. She didn’t.

Up on the stage, Lexie’s voice cracked in the middle of a line, and stopped.

She had finally turned around.