Going Dark (2 page)

FOUR

I RAN BACK TO MY
aunt's house, flinging the back door open and rushing upstairs. She called to me, asking where I'd been and telling me that my mama would be angry. But I didn't care. I locked myself in the guest room, tears streaming down my cheeks.

I fumbled for the thermometer and shoved it in my mouth, under my tongue. I waited, nervous—petrified—as its timer clicked down. Finally it beeped, and I pulled it from my lips.

Ninety-nine.

What was happening to me?

I picked up the phone to call Celia. She didn't answer. She never had her cell on when she was working.

I tried to take slow breaths, pressed my fingers to my damp neck to feel my thrumming heartbeat.

I dialed Mama but stopped myself before I entered the last number.

What was I supposed to tell her? That I broke a boulder in half?

No. Telling Mama would be confessing to starting the fire at the house. And if I started the fire, then the insurance wouldn't pay. And if they didn't pay, then what did that mean? That the family would be destitute? Because their daughter was a freak?

“Krezi?” my aunt called from the hallway. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine,” I said, trying to make it sound like I wasn't panting for air.

“You shouldn't be outside, hon,” she said. “You need to rest. Cesar's taking a nap if you want to come down and watch TV.”

“I'll be okay.” I went into the bathroom and took a cold shower and hoped that the fever would never come back.

 

I called Celia, and left her a message that I needed to talk.
Now.
Afterward I lay in bed, all the blankets off, and tried to read a book.

I took my temperature every ten minutes.

101.

101.3.

101.7.

102.

School was supposed to start in two days. I couldn't go like this. But could I stay in my aunt's house? What if I burned it down, just like I'd burned down mine?

Had I really just done that? It seemed so obvious now, but impossible just the same.

I called Mama and told her about the fever.

“I'm sorry that I haven't been coming to check on you, Krezi. With everything else going on, I've just let your aunt take care of it. I love you, my baby. I'm praying for you.”

“I love you, too, Mama,” I said, not sure how much else I should say. I needed help, but I couldn't give any sign that I'd started the fire. “I'm just wondering if I should go to the doctor.”

“How high did your temperature get?”

“One hundred and five.”

“Was that while you were outside? Your aunt told me you went somewhere. You know it's too hot out there, and you're already so sick.” I could hear the exasperation in her voice.

“Yes,” I said. “But it's always high. I really think I should go in.”

“Is it still high?”

“One hundred and two.”

“What about the other warning signs they told you to watch out for? Seizures? Vomiting? Confusion?”

“Confusion, a little. But even if I didn't have a concussion, wouldn't a fever of one hundred and five be a reason to go to the ER?”

“Krezi, you didn't have a fever of one hundred and five. If you did, you would be dead. Saints save us.” I could picture her crossing herself on the other end of the line.

“Mama, I'm just telling you what the thermometer said.”

“It must have been broken. The best thing you can do right now is sleep. School starts in a couple days. Just sleep and rest and don't think too hard, and you'll be back with your friends soon.”

I told her I would, even though I was surprised. That didn't sound like something Mama would say. Usually she babied me and worried over me. She hadn't even invoked the name of the Blessed Virgin, which she did whenever I was the least bit ill.

I took my temperature again. 102.8. It was climbing too fast. What if . . . what if something happened again?

 

Celia came over that night, carrying three big bags of clothing for us from Walmart. They were nothing fancy, but she didn't have a lot of money, and I didn't complain.

“Did you have to buy a new uniform?” I asked, looking at the Luxor Hotel RealityFlux logo on her shirt.

“Ugh, yes,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Can you believe this awful shirt costs thirty-five dollars? And do you think they cared that my house had burned down, and it wasn't my fault that my other shirts went up in flames? Not a bit.”

Guilt raged inside me, but I tamped it down. I didn't know what to say. “You should find a new job.”

“It's not that bad. It's air-conditioned, and the pay is decent—better than I could get as a waitress—and I'm not really qualified for anything else. I get to watch the magic show every night—I'm six months into the job and still haven't figured out how he does anything.”

“It's magic,” I said with a nervous smile.

“Yeah, right,” she said, leaning back in the rocking chair in the guest room. “Your face doesn't look as awful.”

“Oh, thanks so much,” I groaned.

She giggled. “I mean it. In this light, it just looks like you have dark circles under your eyes, like you haven't slept well.”

“In this light,” I said. “I don't think the fluorescent bulbs at school will be as flattering. Plus I have this stupid brace taped to my nose. I'm going to be the hottest girl in high school.”

“High school isn't all people make it out to be.”

I sighed and flopped back onto the bed. “I love how people who aren't in high school always brush it off like it's no big deal.”

“It just seems like it while you're there.”

“Oh, you're so wise, Celia,” I mocked. “Share more of your wisdom.”

She laughed and threw a pillow at me.

I had the sudden sensation I'd had at the rock, a brief flash of that something inside me that wanted to get out.

“Can I ask you something?” My stomach was churning with nervous energy.

“What?” she asked, pulling a shirt from the Walmart bag and holding it up.

All this time I'd been waiting to tell her, but no. I couldn't. It was too stupid—too crazy—to explain. Crazy Krezi—that's what Celia used to call me. It had been a joke for years, but I started to wonder if it was true. Was the fire inspector right? Was the fire in my hand all a figment of my imagination? Was the broken boulder just a hallucination from a high fever and a concussion?

“What is it?” Celia asked, folding the shirt and setting it on the bed.

“Can you do me a favor?” I asked, and dug in my pocket. “Can you get me a new thermometer when you go to the store? Mama doesn't trust this one.”

She smiled. “Already trying to fake sick to get out of school?”

“Whatever. Can you do it? I swear, my fever has been through the roof.”

Celia stood and put her hand on my forehead and then my cheek. “You feel hot to me. Maybe you shouldn't have walked all the way to the house when you're sick.”

“I'll be more careful.”

FIVE

TWO DAYS LATER I MOVED
back in with my family.

We had an apartment now. Just a little place, with hardly any furniture, but at least the family was together again.

“Finish your cereal,” Mama told me as I was rushing through my meal. “You're still healing.”

I didn't know what Froot Loops were going to do to help my broken nose, or the never-ending bruises under my eyes, but I tried to eat anyway.

I must have lost at least five pounds since the car accident. I didn't know if it was the concussion or the fever, but I always felt like I was on the verge of throwing up. Of course, all of me felt like something wasn't right—it wasn't just my stomach.

Mama put her hand on my forehead and then told me to take my temperature.

“I just drank milk,” I said. “I think I'm supposed to wait.”

“Take your temperature. You'll be late for the bus.”

I put the thermometer under my tongue and stood up from the table. My backpack was waiting on the counter, and I pulled it on as my brothers scrambled around me.

“Thith apartment ith too thmall,” I said out of the side of my mouth, keeping the thermometer in place.

“It's the best we can do under the circumstances,” Mama said, obviously frazzled.

I tried to watch the ticking numbers with crossed eyes, and I moved to the door to get out of the way. After twenty more seconds it beeped.

“One hundred and one,” I read to Mama. “I need to go to the doctor, not to school.”

She put bowls in front of the boys and poured out cereal. “You need to go to school, Krezi.”

“One hundred and one!” I said again, holding out the thermometer. “That's not normal. That's, like, supersick.”

“Do you have any other symptoms?” Mama asked, shoving the Froot Loops box back on the shelf and reaching for the milk. “Anything else the doctors told you to watch out for?”

“I have a headache,” I said. “And doesn't a high fever count as a symptom?”

“Krezi,” she said, slamming the milk jug down. “Do you want to know why I'm not taking you to the doctor? Because our house just burned down. Because we're still paying our mortgage and also paying rent for this apartment that you think is too small. Because your papa has to work double shifts to try to put food on the table. Because the insurance company doesn't want to pay for the house, because they think you girls must have had something in your room that started the fire.”

I didn't say anything. Everyone was quiet except for Cesar, who was slurping his cereal.

“I love you, baby,” Mama said. “I'm praying for you. I pray for you every minute of the day. But go to school.”

I nodded. She turned back to the sink, and I opened the door and walked slowly to the bus stop.

 

First period was boring. I sat next to a girl I'd known from middle school, but we didn't talk. I was too busy thinking about everything Mama had said. The teacher was going over vocabulary words and I was mindlessly writing them down and doodling on the page as she defined each one and used it in a sentence. When she got to the third, I felt my heart drop.

“Insolvency,” Mrs. Romney said. “An inability to pay a debt. Of, or relating to, bankruptcy.”

The kids around me were scribbling down the word, but I just stared at the teacher and the list she was reading from.

“The man's small business was failing, and he was in insolvency,” she said, giving an example sentence.

Were my parents going to go bankrupt? I'd read Charles Dickens's
Great Expectations
in eighth grade, so I knew about bankruptcies in the old days. They used to send people to prison if they couldn't pay their debts. I was sure they didn't do that anymore, but what did they do?

What was my family going to lose besides the house? What were they going to lose because of me?

I'd get a job. Even if it was something terrible, even if it was just working at the Pollos Hermanos on the corner. I could earn money. Maybe I could get a job with Celia—how hard was it to be an usher at a dumb casino magic show? We used to joke that Celia got the job because it was at the Luxor Casino and she was so pretty, but it wasn't like her uniform was revealing or anything like that. A fifteen-year-old could take tickets just as well as a nineteen-year-old.

After class I went to the computer lab and started searching for minimum-wage after-school jobs. There seemed to be plenty of them, though most wouldn't hire anyone under sixteen.

I took my temperature.

103.

I wiped sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand, and then headed to math, money still weighing heavily on my mind. Minimum wage was $8.25. I worked through the budget on my notepad while the teacher droned on about something. It was a review of what we learned last year, and I knew all of that stuff.

$8.25 times twenty hours per week, times four weeks in a month: $660. I could work twenty hours a week—that was what all of the jobs I saw online offered. Evenings and weekends. I could do my homework late at night, or when I wasn't working on Saturday and Sunday.

Maybe I could be a waitress and work for tips. I'd seen some of those jobs posted, too, and that might bring in even more money.

Would an extra six or seven hundred dollars a month help keep my family from going bankrupt?

“Miss Torreón?”

I looked up from my notebook to see Mr. Vargas standing a few feet in front of my desk. The whole class was looking at me.

“I hate to interrupt, Lucretia,” he said, “but do you want to join us?”

“I'm sorry,” I said, wiping again at the sweat on my face and temples.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“I'm fine.” I knew I could go to the nurse and be sent home, but I also knew what Mama would say—she'd said it all this morning.

“Then would you like to show the class how to factor this polynomial?”

My stomach fell. I wanted to get out of that room—to be anywhere besides standing at the board. I still felt like I was burning up, sweat dripping down my back and plastering my hair to the sides of my face. The last thing I wanted was attention.

“Don't worry,” he said. “This is all catch-up from last year.” He turned my notebook and inspected it. “And it looks like you've been doing math, even if you haven't been following along.”

He handed me a green dry-erase marker and pointed to the whiteboard.

An equation was written in red.

x
2
-2
x
-15

Factoring. I knew how to do this. I'd done it a hundred times last year. Probably more than that.

I held the green marker in my hand tightly and pressed its tip to the board.

Why hadn't I been paying attention?

I drew two pairs of parentheses. That was how you always started.

A drop of sweat broke free from the back of my neck and dribbled down my spine.

Did factoring even matter? Papa didn't factor at his job; I was sure of it. Celia didn't have to factor to take tickets at the RealityFlux show at the Luxor.

Focus. I needed to start with the fifteen.

I wiped the side of my face. The marker felt wet and slippery in my hand.

Fifteen was divisible by what? One and fifteen.

I should just hand Mr. Vargas this marker and go back to my seat, or leave. Go home. Go to my aunt's house. Go to the fire department and tell them what actually happened at the house. Go to a doctor and ask how my hand could have been in the middle of a fire—holding a piece of burning wood—and not get a single blister.

“We're waiting, Lucretia,” Mr. Vargas said.

Fifteen is divisible by what? Three and five.

I felt a drip on my arm, and for a moment it stung. I looked at my hand.

The marker was melting, dripping plastic over my thumb and down my forearm.

I shrieked and dropped it.

And then it felt like I was flying forward, like all the weight of my body was hurtling through my arm and hand and out of my fingers, like a stopper had just been pulled from a drain. Like the gates at a horse race had snapped open, releasing the tensed energy of a dozen raging thoroughbreds. A blast of light burst right in front of me, arcing from my hand and across the wall.

I fell backward into the desks, pain bouncing through my still-healing head as I hit the floor. There were screams all around me and I struggled to stand.

Smoke was billowing up to the ceiling, and a moment later the fire alarm sounded.

I put my hands over my ears and felt cold sweat on my face. Everyone around me was screaming and running.

The whiteboard was split in two, charred black in a jagged curve. The left side of the board sagged, now held in place by only a single screw, and then it finally gave way and clattered to the floor.

The brick behind it was cracked, exactly where the board had been cut.

Someone grabbed my arm, and I turned to see Mr. Vargas pulling me up from the carpet.

“Get out,” he shouted, and then left me to help another kid.

Instead of running, I stood and stared at the devastation—the papers floating through the air, the crumbling brick clattering down from the black scar on the wall.

“Lucretia Torreón,” Mr. Vargas shouted. “Evacuate. Just like a fire drill. Are you hurt?”

I started to walk toward the door, and I looked down at my hand. Melted plastic had dripped and wrapped around my forearm, and it had hardened into a latticework that I quickly tore away. The plastic was cool now, and brittle, and it flecked off into bits. There was no burn underneath it, no blister or rash.

I stepped into the hallway, where the usual chaos of a fire alarm was underway. Students were filing out of the building, talking and spreading rumors about the explosion. I heard someone say it was a fire, and I heard someone else say it was in one of the chemistry rooms.

I didn't see any of my friends—this school was so much bigger than my last one—and I sat down in the sparse shade of a tree.

What had just happened? It wasn't like the boulder—there had been no blast of heat then. And it wasn't like the house—that had been a small fire in the palm of my hand. But it was all coming from me. Whatever it was, I had done it. There was no question anymore.