The Power Read online

  Three weeks in, she gets a call from Bobby to say that Jocelyn’s been caught fighting.

  They’d separated the boys from the girls on the fifth day; it seemed obvious, when they worked out the girls were doing it. Already there are parents telling their boys not to go out alone, not to stray too far. ‘Once you’ve seen it happen,’ says a grey-faced woman on TV. ‘I saw a girl in the park doing that to a boy for no reason, he was bleeding from the eyes. The eyes. Once you’ve seen that happen, no mom would let her boys out of her sight.’

  Things couldn’t stay closed forever; they reorganized. Boys-only buses took them safely to boys-only schools. They fell into it easily. You only had to see a few videos online for the fear to hit you in the throat.

  But for the girls it has not been so simple. You cannot keep them from each other. Some of them are angry and some of them are mean, and now the thing is out in the open some are vying to prove their strength and skill. There have been injuries and accidents; one girl has been struck blind by another. The teachers are afraid. Television pundits are saying: ‘Lock them all up, maximum security.’ It is, as far as anyone can tell, all of the girls of about fifteen years old. As near to all as makes no difference. They can’t lock them all up, it makes no sense. Still, people are asking for it.

  Now Jocelyn’s been caught fighting. The press have it before Margot can make her way home to see her daughter. News trucks are setting up on her front lawn when she arrives. Madam Mayor, would you care to comment on the rumours that your daughter has put a boy in the hospital?

  No, she would not care to comment.

  Bobby is in the living room with Maddy. She’s sitting on the couch between his legs, drinking her milk and watching Powerpuff Girls. She looks up as her mother comes in, but doesn’t move, flicks her eyes back to the TV set. Ten going on fifteen. OK. Margot kisses the top of Maddy’s head, even as Maddy tries to look around her, back to the screen. Bobby squeezes Margot’s hand.

  ‘Where’s Jos?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She’s as scared as anyone.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Margot closes the door of the bedroom softly.

  Jocelyn is on her bed, legs stretched out. She’s holding Mr Bear. She’s a child, just a child.

  ‘I should have called,’ says Margot, ‘as soon as it started. I’m sorry.’

  Jocelyn’s near to tears. Margot sits on the bed gently, as if not to tip her full pail over. ‘Dad says you haven’t hurt anyone, not badly.’

  There’s a pause, but Jos doesn’t say anything, so Margot just keeps talking. ‘There were … three other girls? I know they started it. That boy should never have been near you. They’ve been checked out at John Muir. You just gave the kid a scare.’

  ‘I know.’

  All right. Verbal communication. A start.

  ‘Was that the … first time you’ve done it?’

  Jocelyn rolls her eyes. She plucks at the comforter with one hand.

  ‘This is brand new to both of us, OK? How long have you been doing it?’

  She mutters so low that Margot can barely hear, ‘Six months.’

  ‘Six months?’

  Mistake. Never express incredulity, never alarm. Jocelyn draws her knees up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Margot. ‘It’s just … it’s a surprise, that’s all.’

  Jos frowns. ‘Plenty of girls started it before I did. It was … it was kinda funny … when it started, like static electricity.’

  Static electricity. What was it, you combed your hair and stuck a balloon to it? An activity for bored six-year-olds at birthday parties.

  ‘It was this funny, crazy thing girls were doing. There were secret videos online. How to do tricks with it.’

  It’s this exact moment, yes, when any secret you have from your parents becomes precious. Anything you know that they’ve never heard of.

  ‘How did you … how did you learn to do it?’

  Jos says, ‘I don’t know. I just felt I could do it, OK. It’s like a sort of … twist.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  She looks through the window to the lawn. Beyond the high back fence, men and women with cameras are already gathering.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Margot remembers trying to talk to her own mother about boys or the stuff that happened at parties. About how far was too far, where a boy’s hand should stop. She remembers the absolute impossibility of those conversations.

  ‘Show me.’

  Jos narrows her eyes. ‘I can’t … I’d hurt you.’

  ‘Have you been practising? Can you control it well enough so you know you wouldn’t kill me, or give me a fit?’

  Jos takes a deep breath. Puffs her cheeks out. Lets the breath out slowly. ‘Yes.’

  Her mother nods. This is the girl she knows: conscientious and serious. Still Jos. ‘Then show me.’

  ‘I can’t control it well enough for it not to hurt, OK?’

  ‘How much will it hurt?’

  Jos splays her fingers wide, looks at her palms. ‘Mine comes and goes. Sometimes it’s strong, sometimes it’s nothing.’

  Margot presses her lips together. ‘OK.’

  Jos extends her hand, then pulls it back. ‘I don’t want to.’

  There was a time when every crevice of this child’s body was Margot’s to clean and care for. It is not OK with her not to know her own child’s strength. ‘No more secrets. Show me.’

  Jos is near to tears. She places her forefinger and her middle finger on her mother’s arm. Margot waits to see Jos do something; hold her breath, or wrinkle her brow, or show exertion in the muscles of her arm, but there’s nothing. Only the pain.

  She has read the preliminary reports out of the CDC noting that the power ‘particularly affects the pain centres of the human brain’, meaning that, while it looks like electrocution, it hurts more than it needs to. It is a targeted pulse which sets up a response in the body’s pain receptors. Nonetheless, she’d expected it to look like something; to see her flesh crisping and wrinkling, or to watch the arcing current, quick as a snake’s bite.

  Instead, she smells the scent of wet leaves after a rainstorm. An apple orchard with the windfalls turning to rot, just as it was on her parents’ farm.

  And then it hurts. From the place on her forearm where Jos is touching her, it starts as a dull bone-ache. The flu, travelling through the muscles and joints. It deepens. Something is cracking her bone, twisting it, bending it, and she wants to tell Jos to stop but she can’t open her mouth. It burrows through the bone like it’s splintering apart from the inside; she can’t stop herself seeing a tumour, a solid, sticky lump bursting out through the marrow of her arm, splitting the ulna and the radius to sharp fragments. She feels sick. She wants to cry out. The pain radiates across her arm and, nauseatingly, through her body. There’s not a part of her it hasn’t touched now; she feels it echo in her head and down her spine, across her back, around her throat and out, spreading across her collarbone.

  The collarbone. It has only been a few seconds, but the moments have elongated. Only pain can bring such attention to the body; this is how Margot notices the answering echo in her chest. Among the forests and mountains of pain, a chiming note along her collarbone. Like answering to like.

  It reminds her of something. A game she played when she was a girl. How funny: she hasn’t thought of that game in years. She never told anyone about it; she knew she mustn’t, although she couldn’t say how she knew. In the game, she was a witch, and she could make a ball of light in the palm of her hand. Her brothers played that they were spacemen with plastic ray-guns they’d bought with cereal-packet tokens, but the little game she’d played entirely by herself among the beech trees along the rim of their property was different. In her game, she didn’t need a gun, or space-helmet, or lightsaber. In the game Margot played when she was a child, she was enough all by herself.

  The
re is a tingling feeling in her chest and arms and hands. Like a dead arm, waking up. The pain is not gone now, but it is irrelevant. Something else is happening. Instinctively, she digs her hands into Jocelyn’s patchwork comforter. She smells the scent of the beech trees, as if she were back beneath their woody protection, their musk of old timber and wet loam.

  She sendeth her lightning even unto the ends of the earth.

  When she opens her eyes, there is a pattern around each of her hands. Concentric circles, light and dark, light and dark, burned into the comforter where her hands clutched it. And she knows, she felt that twist, and she remembers that maybe she has always known it and it has always belonged to her. Hers to cup in her hand. Hers to command to strike.

  ‘Oh God,’ she says. ‘Oh God.’

  Allie

  Allie pulls herself up on to the tomb, leans back to look at the name – she always takes a moment to remember them: Hey, how’re you doing there, Annabeth MacDuff, loving mother now at rest? – and lights a Marlboro.

  Cigarettes being among the four or five thousand pleasures of this world that Mrs Montgomery-Taylor considers abhorrent in the sight of the Lord, just the glowing embers, the inhalation, the stream of smoke from her parted lips would be enough to say: Screw you, Mrs Montgomery-Taylor, screw you and the ladies of the church and Jesus fucking Christ, too. It would have been enough to do it the usual way, impressive enough and a sufficient promise to the boys of things that might come to pass right soon. But Allie doesn’t care to light her cigarette the usual way.

  Kyle gestures with his chin and says, ‘Heard a bunch of guys killed a girl in Nebraska last week for doing that.’

  ‘For smoking? Harsh.’

  Hunter says, ‘Half the kids in school know you can do it.’

  ‘So what?’

  Hunter says, ‘Your dad could use you in his factory. Save money on electricity.’

  ‘He’s not my dad.’

  She makes the silver flicker at the ends of her fingers again. The boys watch.

  As the sun sets, the cemetery comes alive with crickets and frogs calling, waiting for rain. It’s been a long, hot summer. The earth yearns for a storm.

  Mr Montgomery-Taylor owns a meat-packing company with centres here in Jacksonville, and up in Albany and as far as Statesboro. They call it meat-packing but what they mean by that is meat-producing. Animal-killing. Mr Montgomery-Taylor took Allie to see it when she was younger. He had that stage when he liked to think of himself as a good man educating a little girl in the men’s world. It’s a sort of pride to her that she watched the whole thing without wincing or looking away or carrying on. Mr Montgomery-Taylor’s hand was on her shoulder like a pair of pincers throughout the visit, pointing out to her the pens where the pigs are herded before their encounter with the knife. Pigs are very intelligent animals; if you frighten them, the meat doesn’t taste so good. You’ve got to be careful.

  Chickens are not intelligent. They let her watch the chickens being uncrated, white and feather-fluff. The hands pick them up, turn them over to show their snowy behinds and shackle their legs into the conveyor which drags their heads through an electrified water-bath. They squawk and wriggle. One by one, they go rigid, then limp.

  ‘It’s a kindness,’ said Mr Montgomery-Taylor. ‘They don’t know what’s hit them.’

  And he laughs, and his employees laugh too.

  Allie noticed that one or two of the chickens had raised their heads. The water hadn’t stunned them. They were still awake as they passed along the line, still conscious as they entered the scalding tank.

  ‘Efficient, hygienic and kind,’ said Mr Montgomery-Taylor.

  Allie thought of Mrs Montgomery-Taylor’s ecstatic speeches about hell, and about the whirling knives and the scalding water that will consume your whole body, boiling oil and rivers of molten lead.

  Allie wanted to run along the line and pop the chickens out of their shackles and set them free, wild and angry. She imagined them coming for Mr Montgomery-Taylor in particular, taking their revenge in beaks and claws. But the voice said to her: This is not the time, daughter. Your moment has not come. The voice has never led her wrong yet, not all the days of her life. So Allie nodded and said: ‘It’s very interesting. Thank you for bringing me.’

  It wasn’t long after her visit to that factory that she noticed this thing she could do. There was no urgency in it; it was like the day she noticed her hair had gotten long. It must have been happening all that time, quietly.

  They were at dinner. Allie reached for her fork and a spark jumped from her hand.

  The voice said: Do it again. You can make that happen again. Concentrate. She gave a little twist or a flick of something in her chest. There it was, a spark. Good girl, said the voice, but don’t show them, this is not for them. Mr Montgomery-Taylor didn’t notice, and Mrs Montgomery-Taylor didn’t notice. Allie kept her eyes down and her face impassive. The voice said: This is the first of my gifts to you, daughter. Learn to use it.

  She practised in her bedroom. She made a spark jump from hand to hand. She made her bedside lamp glow brighter, then dimmer. She burned a tiny hole in a Kleenex; she practised until she could make that hole a pinprick. Smaller. These things demand constant, focused attention. She’s good at that. She’s never heard of anybody else who can light their cigarettes with it.

  The voice said: There will be a day to use this, and on that day you will know what to do.

  Usually, she’d let the boys touch her if they wanted. That’s what they think they’ve come to this graveyard for. A hand sliding up the thigh, a cigarette popped from the mouth like a candy, held to one side while there’s kissing. Kyle props himself up next to her, puts his hand on her midriff, starts to bunch the fabric of her top. She stops him with a gesture. He smiles.

  ‘Come on now,’ he says. He tugs her top up a little.

  She stings him on the back of his hand. Not a lot. Just enough to give him pause.

  He pulls his hand back. Looks at her and, aggrieved, at Hunter. ‘Hey, what gives?’

  She shrugs. ‘Not in the mood.’

  Hunter comes to sit on the other side of her. She’s sandwiched between them now, both their bodies pressing in on her, bulges in their pants showing their minds.

  ‘That’s fine,’ says Hunter, ‘but see, you brought us here and we are in the mood.’

  He lays an arm across her midriff, his thumb grazing her breast, his hand large and strong around her. ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘we’ll have some fun, just the three of us.’

  He comes in for a kiss, his mouth opening.

  She likes Hunter. He’s six foot four; his shoulders are broad and strong. They’ve had fun together. That’s not what she’s here for. She has a feeling about today.

  She gets him in the armpit. One of her pinpricks, right into the muscle, precise and careful, like a fine-bladed knife up through to his shoulder. She increases it, like making the lamp glow hotter and hotter. Like the knife is made of flame.

  ‘Fuck!’ says Hunter and jumps backwards. ‘Fuck!’ He’s holding his right hand into his left armpit, massaging it. The left arm is trembling.

  Kyle’s angry now and pulls her towards him. ‘What did you make us come all the way out here for then, if you –’

  And she gets him at the throat, just under the jaw. Like a metal blade slicing across his voice-box. His mouth falls slackly open. He makes choking sounds. He’s still breathing, but he can’t speak.

  ‘Fuck you, then!’ shouts Hunter. ‘You don’t get a ride home!’

  Hunter backs away. Kyle gathers up his school bag, still holding his throat. ‘Uck! Ou!’ he shouts as they walk back to their car.

  She waits there for a long time after it gets dark, lying back on the grave of Annabeth MacDuff, loving mother now at rest, lighting cigarette after cigarette with the crackle from her fingertips and smoking them down to the hilt. The noise of the evening rises up around her and she thinks: Come and get me.

  She says to th
e voice: Hey, mom, it’s today, right?

  The voice says: Sure is, daughter. You ready?

  Allie says: Bring it.

  She climbs up the trellis to get back into the house. Her shoes are slung around her neck, shoelaces tied together. She digs her toes in, and her fingers hook on and grab. Mrs Montgomery-Taylor saw her once when she was younger scaling a tree, one, two, three, up she went, and said, ‘Would you look at that, she climbs just like a monkey.’ She said it like she’d long suspected this would be the case. Like she’d just been waiting to find out.

  Allie reaches her bedroom window. She’d left it open just a crack, and she pushes the jamb up, takes her shoes from around her neck and throws them inside. She levers herself through the window. She checks her watch; she’s not even late for supper and there’ll be nothing for anyone to complain about. She lets out a sort of laugh, low and croaking. And a laugh meets her in return. And she realizes there’s someone else in the room. She knows who it is, of course.

  Mr Montgomery-Taylor unfolds himself from the easy chair like one of the long-armed machines from his production line. Allie draws breath, but before she can form half a word he’s hit her very hard across the mouth, back-handed. Like a tennis swing at the country club. The pop of her jaw is the thunk of the ball hitting the racket.

  His particular kind of rage has always been very controlled, very quiet. The less he says, the angrier he is. He’s drunk, she can smell it, and he’s furious, and he mutters: ‘Saw you. Saw you in the graveyard with those boys. Filthy. Little. Whore.’ Each word punctuated with a punch, or a slap, or a kick. She doesn’t roll into a ball. She doesn’t beg him to stop. She knows it only makes it go on longer. He pushes her knees apart. His hand is at his belt. He’s going to show her what kind of a little whore she is. As if he hadn’t shown her many times in the past.