Chapter 13: Made to Be Broken

Eliana woke up because the sun was in her eyes.

She was still in the kitchen chair. Her neck hurt, again, and her cheek was stuck to her own arm, and there was a throw blanket from the living room couch around her shoulders, tucked in at the back like someone had done it carefully. The chair next to hers was empty. The mug was gone.

Somewhere close by, something was sizzling.

“Morning, sweetheart,” Hannah’s mom said from the stove. She was in a robe with her hair clipped up, flipping pancakes, and she didn’t turn around. “There’s juice in the fridge. Hannah’s in the shower.”

“Thank you,” Eliana said. Her voice came out rough with sleep. “Sorry. For the chair.”

“You’ve slept in worse places in this house. Remember the bathtub?”

Eliana did not remember the bathtub. She decided not to ask.

Hannah came down ten minutes later with her hair wet, dropped into the chair beside her, and slid a plate across the table without a word. Three pancakes. Butter already on them. Syrup on the side, because Eliana hated it when it touched everything.

“Your mom called at nine,” Hannah’s mom said, setting down the pan. “I told her you were still asleep. She sounded relieved.”

“Thank you.”

“Mm.” Hannah’s mom looked at her for just a second, at her hands around the fork and the gray still under her eyes. Then she smiled and went to get the coffee. That was all.

They ate. Hannah stole a strip of bacon off Eliana’s plate without asking, and Eliana let her.

Afterward, Hannah drove her home with Tommy’s guitar laid across the back seat and the copper coil on the floor. Neither of them said much. Hannah turned the radio up when a song she liked came on and turned it back down when it was over.

When she pulled into the driveway, Eliana sat there a second longer than she needed to.

“Thanks,” she said. “For everything.”

“You still owe me credit,” Hannah said. “For not asking.”

“You have so much credit.”

“I know.” Hannah pushed her sunglasses up. “Go. Your mom’s in the window.”

She was.

Lexie got to Rodney’s at noon. The cousin’s van was already backed up to the garage, its rear doors open, and Rodney was standing in the bed of it with a PA speaker in his arms, singing to himself.

“There she is!” he yelled, when he saw her. “The legend! The woman who made a guy cry!”

Lexie gave him a thumbs-up. She didn’t try to talk. She’d tried that morning in the kitchen, and her dad had laughed so hard he’d had to put the spatula down.

They carried the gear down to the basement in pieces. The drums. The amps. The second PA speaker, which had a scorch mark on the grille that hadn’t been there on Friday and that nobody mentioned. Ryan was already down there, sitting cross-legged on the carpet with his bass in his lap and a fresh pack of strings open beside him, threading them on one at a time. He looked up when Lexie came down the stairs, nodded, and went back to the strings.

Meghan came down last, with her guitar case and her pedalboard, and set them both against the wall very carefully.

Then she turned around.

“So,” Meghan said. “Are we going to talk about it?”

Lexie set down the cymbal stand she was carrying.

“The front row,” Meghan said. “Eliana Barker. In the front row of our first real show. With a guitar case.” She folded her arms. “Is she joining the band, Lexie? Should I start learning Celeste covers?”

Rodney laughed, then saw Meghan’s face and stopped.

Lexie opened her mouth. What came out was a scrape of air.

“Oh, come on,” Meghan said. “Seriously?”

Lexie got her phone out. She typed, fast, and turned the screen around.

Meghan read it. Her mouth went tight.

“Since when?” she said. “Since the pool? Since she did that thing at the plaza where she pretended she didn’t know you?” She hadn’t been there. Somebody had told her. Of course somebody had told her. “You hate those people. You’ve hated them since freshman year.” Meghan’s voice caught, just slightly. “And now you’re picking one of them over us.”

Lexie typed.

“Then what is it like?”

Lexie looked down at the phone. She thought about the wisp, the copper wire, Mika’s camera, Cece’s notebook, nineteen hertz, and none of it would fit into a text message. None of it would fit into anything.

She didn’t type anything else.

Meghan watched her not type. Something in her face shifted, from angry to something worse.

“I made that setlist three weeks ago,” Meghan said, and her voice wasn’t quite steady. “I made the flyers. I called the guy about the PA. I was so excited, Lexie. It was our first real show. And you spent the whole first song looking at her.”

“Meg,” Rodney said. “Somebody cried, though…”

“I don’t care that somebody cried.”

Lexie stood there. Her throat burned. She had a hundred things to say and no voice to say any of them with, and even if she’d had a voice, she couldn’t have said them.

“This was supposed to be ours,” Meghan said quietly. “The band. It’s the one thing that’s just us. Not for some crowd, not for her. Just us, being stupid in Rodney’s basement.” She swallowed. “And on the biggest night we’ve ever had, you weren’t even really there with us.”

Over on the carpet, Ryan set his bass down.

“She can’t talk, Meg,” he said.

It was the first thing he’d said all day. Meghan turned and looked at him, and for a second she looked like she might cry, which was somehow worse than the yelling.

“Yeah,” Meghan said. “I noticed.”

She picked up her guitar case and went back up the stairs.

Eliana got to school forty minutes early on Monday with Dylan’s clamp in her bag, and the robotics lab door was already open.

She smelled it from the hallway. Burned plastic, sharp and chemical, and under it something else, clean and electric, like the air before a thunderstorm.

She stopped in the doorway.

Alfred Esquire the Third was slumped sideways on the front bench. His chest panel was off, the way it had been all week, and everything inside it had gone black. A thin curl of smoke was still rising out of him. The outlet on the wall behind the bench had a scorch mark spreading up from it like a dark flower.

Emma was standing three feet away from him with her soldering iron in her hand, unplugged, held up like a weapon. Her face was white.

Dylan was sitting on the floor against the whiteboard with a Monster he hadn’t opened.

“What happened?” Eliana said.

Emma didn’t lower the soldering iron. “A light came out of the outlet,” she said. “It floated across the room and went into him.”

“It was an arc flash,” Dylan said from the floor.

“It was not an arc flash.”

“Old wiring. Power surge. The outlet arced, the board took the hit.” He stared at the Monster. “It happens. It’s happened, like, twice this year.”

“Did it float, the other two times?”

Dylan didn’t answer that.

“You saw it,” Emma said. “You yelled.”

“I yelped. Arc flashes are bright.”

“It turned around, Dylan.”

Dylan opened his mouth, closed it, and cracked the Monster open instead.

Eliana stood very still in the doorway. The pressure was there, faint, in the back of her chest. It was fading as she stood there, like the last hum of a guitar string, but it was there.

She knew what it was. It was small, one of the little ones, the kind that had come out of Tommy’s amp. And it hadn’t come here by accident.

Louder = further. On Saturday night they had been the loudest they had ever been. And now things were coming.

She made herself step inside and held up the clamp. “I came to return this. To Dylan.”

Dylan looked up from the floor. “The good clamp.”

“The good clamp.”

“Thank you.” He made no move to get up. “Put it anywhere.”

Eliana set it down on the end of the bench, as far from the outlet as she could get, and looked at Alfred. Up close, she could see that the solder on his board had melted and run, beading up in little silver drops.

“His competition is in twenty days,” Emma said. Her voice cracked. “I’ve been working on him since August.”

“I’m sorry,” Eliana said, and she meant it more than Emma could possibly know.

“Good thing I built a backup board,” Dylan said from the floor.

Emma turned around. “You built a backup?”

“I built three.” He leaned his head back against the whiteboard and closed his eyes. “Boards fry all the time.” He opened one eye at her. “Why do you think I sleep so little?”

Emma stared at him.

“Anyway.” He closed his eyes again. “Twenty days. New board, rewire, recalibrate. So now I’m going to sleep negative amounts. I’m going to owe sleep to the government.”

Emma looked at him for a long second. Then she let out a breath that was almost a laugh, and put the soldering iron down.

When she turned back around, she was looking at Eliana. Her eyes narrowed, like she was putting something together.

“Last week,” she said slowly. “You came in here and asked Dylan what to do if something electrical got loose in a room. And you couldn’t just turn it off.”

Eliana said nothing.

“And then you came back and asked for grounding stuff.” Emma looked at the scorch mark climbing up the wall behind Alfred. “And now a light came out of that outlet and floated across the room.”

“That was for a project.”

“What project?”

Eliana didn’t have an answer ready. She hadn’t thought she’d need one.

“Science,” she said.

Emma looked at her a moment longer. Then she turned back to Alfred and put both hands flat on the bench like she was trying to keep it from moving.

Eliana left before anyone could ask her anything else.

Lexie saw Eliana between second and third period, in the main hall, walking with Hannah and Tessa and a girl Lexie didn’t know. Tessa was talking. Hannah was laughing at something on her phone.

Eliana saw her too. For a second, her face did something small.

Then she nodded. Just once, barely, the kind of nod you could pretend was a twitch.

Lexie nodded back. They passed each other and kept walking, and nobody noticed a thing.

Civics was fourth period. Mr. Anderson was talking about the Fourteenth Amendment, and Lexie had her phone under the desk before he’d finished writing the date on the board.

Across the room, third row on the left, Eliana didn’t move. But a few seconds later, Lexie’s phone buzzed against her leg.

Lexie stared at her phone. On the board, Mr. Anderson wrote EQUAL PROTECTION and underlined it.

The dots came up. Went away. Came back.

Lexie looked up at the back of Eliana’s head, three rows over. Eliana was looking down at her lap, very still.

“Ms. Calloway. Ms. Barker.”

Lexie’s head came up. So did Eliana’s.

Mr. Anderson was standing at the front of the room with the marker still in his hand. He didn’t look angry. He looked pleasant, the way he always did.

“Phones,” he said. “Please.”

Lexie put hers away. Across the room, Eliana did too.

Mr. Anderson turned back to the board. And as he did, Lexie could have sworn he smiled, like a man who had just caught two of his favorite characters passing notes.

At lunch, Eliana walked past the library’s glass door on her way to the vending machines, the same way she had walked past it two weeks ago with Vivian’s ring light in a tote bag.

The table by the window was full again.

Ajax was lying across two chairs with his eyes closed. Lisa was at the end with a problem set, the way she always was. And Anthony was at his usual seat with his laptop open, but he wasn’t alone at his end of the table this time.

Emma was sitting next to him.

She had her own laptop open beside his, and she was leaning in, pointing at something on her screen and then at something on his. Anthony was nodding. Anthony, who hated being talked to, who had once put his headphones back on in the middle of Lexie’s sentence, was nodding, and typing, and then turning his laptop so Emma could see.

Eliana slowed down without meaning to.

Through the glass, she could just make out the shape of the spreadsheet on Anthony’s screen. The clean columns. The rows of small, wrong things. Emma reached over and pointed at a cell, then held up her phone, where Eliana could see a photo of a blackened outlet.

Anthony typed something new into the bottom row.

Two weeks ago, Eliana had walked past this door and heard about lights behind the bleachers and thought it was a stoner joke.

Now she knew exactly what they were looking at.

At the end of the table, Lisa looked up from her problem set and found Eliana through the glass, the way she had last time. Last time, neither of them had waved.

This time Lisa lifted two fingers off her pencil, just barely.

Eliana kept walking. But she lifted her hand back, before she turned the corner.

Lexie got home a little after seven. The kitchen smelled like onions and the heater, and her dad was at the stove with his phone wedged against his shoulder again, stirring something and arguing with someone about a parking ticket.

Her mom was at the table with a mug she wasn’t drinking from. She was wearing a gray hoodie Lexie didn’t recognize at first. It was too big for her, and the sleeves were shoved up to the elbows.

Lexie dropped her bag on a chair. She went to the counter to get a glass of water, and she was reaching for the faucet when the outlet by the toaster went tick.

She stopped.

It was the same outlet the envelope had leaned against for six days, back before any of this. The same counter. She had stood right here and opened it with a butter knife.

A light was coming out of it.

It was tiny. Smaller than the ones from Tommy’s amp, smaller than a marble, a pale blue speck no bigger than a firefly. It slid out between the prongs of the toaster plug like it was squeezing through a crack in a door, and hung there in the air above the counter, turning slowly, crackling so softly she could barely hear it over the stove.

Lexie didn’t move. She didn’t breathe.

It does not burn out on its own.

Behind her, her dad was still arguing about the parking ticket. He had his back to the room. He hadn’t seen.

Her mom had.

Lexie could feel it before she turned her head. The room had gone a particular kind of quiet, the kind that only happened when her mom stopped moving. When Lexie looked, her mom was sitting at the table with both hands around the mug, perfectly still, staring at the little light.

Her face had gone the way it went when she saw the bracelet. Like someone had hit pause.

The light turned, slowly, like it was looking back at her.

“Cece used to say,” her mom said. Her voice was very quiet, and very strange, like it was coming from somewhere a long way off. “If they come in through the walls, you don’t…”

She stopped.

She stopped like she’d walked into a wall herself, mid-sentence, her mouth still open. She blinked. For a second she looked confused, the way you look when you walk into a room and forget why.

The light flickered. Then it slid back into the outlet, the way it had come, and was gone.

The kitchen was just a kitchen again. The stove hissed. Her dad laughed at something on the phone.

Lexie stood at the counter with the empty glass in her hand and stared at her mother.

Her mom looked down at her mug. Then up at Lexie, and her face had closed up again, the way it had been for weeks.

“Did you eat?” her mom asked.

“Yeah…” she rasped.

“Okay,” her mom said, and pulled the hoodie sleeves down over her hands.