Struck (7 page)

Most of the classrooms were closed off with yellow tape. I peered through windows as I passed, and saw glimpses of disarray, shattered windows and desks lying on their sides and papers scattered everywhere. Why had Mr. Kale wanted to stay up here? It was creepy on this floor.

By the time I made it to room 317, the final bell for fourth period was a distant memory.

I turned the knob, ever so gently, and eased the door open …

“—
and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species
—”

Mr. Kale looked up from the open book perched in his hands. He saw me in the doorway and his voice cut off, but his face remained expressionless. I could tell when he was annoyed, despite his deadpan demeanor. Mr. Kale had eyes the color of crude oil. They matched his hair, which he wore one length to the nape of his neck, combed straight back. His cheeks were pitted with pockmarks, and the lines around his mouth looked like they’d been carved with a scalpel.

“Welcome back, Miss Price.” His gravelly voice put my skin on edge. Mr. Kale always sounded like he’d been gargling broken glass. When he read aloud, whether it was Dickens or Shakespeare, he made the prose seem like it came from a hard-boiled detective novel.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to inter—”

Mr. Kale bulldozed over my apology. “I assume you kept up with the reading while you were away, since I handed out a complete syllabus at the beginning of term.”

Seriously? What kind of teacher expected you to make homework a priority during a state of emergency?

Mr. Kale smiled thinly. He seemed to take particular pleasure in torturing me. “Can you tell us, Miss Price, how Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
relates to the Greek Prometheus myth.”

A blank stare was the best I could do. I’d seen every film version of
Frankenstein
ever made—the monster and I had a lot in common—and I still had no idea what Mr. Kale was talking about.

“
A Modern Prometheus
is the novel’s subtitle.” As much as I wanted it to be, the voice that answered wasn’t mine. For one thing, it was male. For another, it knew the answer. I searched for the owner of this voice and found a pair of the most beautifully tortured blue eyes I’d ever seen gazing at me through a pair of black-framed, Clark Kent glasses. And the face behind those glasses … angular, with a curvy, elegant mouth. And above those glasses … soft, dark hair.

Whoever this guy was, he hadn’t been in Mr. Kale’s English class before the quake. I would have noticed. Noticing would have been the only thing I
could
do. Like I noticed how perfectly healthy he looked, not skinny and malnourished. Like I noticed how neat and clean his clothes were, as though they’d been ironed. Like I noticed his manicured fingernails.

But if I just focused on the eyes, the tortured blue eyes, I saw someone who had suffered more than any of us.

As I had when I first encountered Katrina, I decided immediately that this guy did not fit. There was something off about him. Or something on.

Mr. Kale turned from me to the guy in the glasses. “Mr. Parish, is it?”

“Jeremy,” he said.

Jeremy
, a hungry little voice repeated in my mind.

“Jeremy,” Mr. Kale repeated. “I understand that you’re new to my class, and maybe your other teachers exercised a more liberal style of education, but in my classroom you will raise your hand before you speak.” Mr. Kale turned back to me.

“Take your seat.”

I beelined for a desk at the back of the room, by the bank of windows that looked west, toward the ocean. I had to pass by Jeremy to get to it, and when I did he locked those infinitely sad eyes onto mine. It was like he’d reached out and grabbed me, like his look was as good as a touch. My heart beat erratically, imitating the drum circles that used to gather on Venice Beach, a chaos of percussion. I reached my desk and folded myself into it, thankful that the window nearest me was open a crack, and I could feel cool air, damp from the ocean, drifting into the room.

I dared a glance at the back of Jeremy’s head. He had the kind of hair you wanted to touch without permission.

He turned slightly and looked at me.

I ducked my head like I was dodging a bullet.

When I peeked up again, Jeremy was facing front. I sighed and opened my notebook, poised my pen, and tried to look studious. Tried to look anywhere but at Jeremy. I could feel the pull of him like a freaking tractor beam.

Mr. Kale folded his arms and strolled back and forth in front of the class. Actually, a stroll might have been what he attempted, but it came off as more of a march. Mr. Kale seemed incapable of something so unmotivated as a stroll.

“What else, then?” he asked. “Who was Prometheus?”

As if anyone cared. What did it matter who Prometheus was when half the people in this classroom were counting the seconds until their next meal, and the other half had joined a cult whose leader claimed the world was coming to an end?

No one said anything, and the vacuum of silence grew, sucking us in. I lowered my eyes as Mr. Kale scanned the room, searching for someone to call on. I didn’t think he’d
choose me again, even out of spite, but you never knew. Mr. Kale had never liked me. I wasn’t sure what it was about me that got under his skin. Maybe the way I ignored the reading and watched the film versions of books instead, something I was certain he’d caught on to after I handed in an essay on
The Scarlet Letter
that focused mostly on the sex scenes.

Mr. Kale didn’t get a chance to call on anyone. Jeremy answered again. He kept both hands planted firmly on his desk.

“Prometheus was one of the old gods of Greek mythology,” Jeremy said. “He displeased Zeus when he stole fire from the heavens and gave it to man. Zeus punished Prometheus by binding him to a rock, where every day an eagle came to eat his liver. But every day the liver grew back, trapping Prometheus in an endless cycle of torture. Dr. Frankenstein crossed a similar line. Fire from the heavens is lightning, which he used to bring his monster to life. But the doctor tried to play God, and in the end he was punished, destroyed by the monster he created.”

Okay. Wow. Smart and sexy. A dangerous combo. Jeremy sure didn’t look like a bookworm, except for the glasses. More like a European underwear model.

Jeremy’s answer should have more than satisfied Mr. Kale. He had obviously read the book and had actually understood it. But Mr. Kale only stared at Jeremy.

“Mr. Parish, the next time you speak out of turn, you will be asked to leave my classroom. This being your first day, I suggest you follow the rules if you want me to sign your ration card.”

His first day? School had been back in session for over a
week. I wondered why Jeremy had waited this long to start. The only reason Parker and I had delayed our return was because of Mom. But then we ran out of food and with that we ran out of options.

“Lightning,” Mr. Kale said, strolling to the other end of the room. “Fire from the heavens. The weapon that allowed Zeus to become king of the gods. That brought a monster to life. What is Ms. Shelley’s intent in relating the two stories? Is she saying that humans do not deserve such power? That we misuse it?”

I sank lower in my seat at the mention of lightning.

This time Mr. Kale didn’t have to wait for a hand to go up. A Follower named Lily raised hers.

“Prophet says lightning from God caused the earthquake.”

“Does he now.” There was a note of mockery in Mr. Kale’s voice that was impossible to miss.

Another Follower jumped in. “You said it yourself. Fire from the heavens. The weapon of God. It makes perfect sense. God sent lightning to break the sixth seal and cause the earthquake, to punish Los Angeles for its shameless depravity.”

“Well then,” Mr. Kale said coolly, “let’s hope the old saying is true and lightning never strikes twice in the same place. Moving on …”

Students shifted uneasily. It wasn’t mention of the earthquake that had my classmates on edge. It was the idea that it might happen again.

I didn’t know if lightning had caused the quake, but I wasn’t naïve, and I couldn’t deny certain facts. The day of the earthquake, lightning had
attacked
downtown Los
Angeles. There was no other word for it. I didn’t witness it firsthand (although I’d seen footage on the news a few hundred times since) but I felt the attack like a bomb went off inside me each time lightning touched down. Hundreds of people were struck as lightning hammered the ground. Many of them died instantly. And the lightning kept coming, as though the storm were searching for something.

There was a geological survey going on at the time—which, ironically, had something to do with earthquakes—and a crew had opened up a hole in the ground that went way down into the earth, supposedly for miles, all the way to the Puente Hills Fault that runs right beneath downtown. Lightning struck straight into the hole, and immediately afterward there was an 8.6 magnitude earthquake that lasted over three minutes.

The top seismologists in the world had formulated a theory that, hypothetically, the friction along the Puente Hills fault line might have acted like a beacon for lightning. When the fault was struck, it increased the pressure exponentially, setting off the earthquake like a nuke buried miles underground.

The scientists handing out their educated guesses during news interviews were divided. No one could prove the lightning theory, but no one could disprove it either. One thing I had learned firsthand, though, was that you should never underestimate lightning, or what it was capable of. Lightning was the ultimate trickster. Among those who’d been struck, it never affected two people the same way.

The only thing you could be sure of when it came to
lightning was that the whole “lightning never strikes twice” theory couldn’t be more wrong. Once an object had been struck, it was that much more likely to be struck again. It had to do with an exchange of positive and negative energy. Something positively charged on the ground reaches out to the negative charge in the clouds. The two charges meet, and you get lightning. So the reason I was struck again and again was because of my overwhelmingly positive energy. Funny, I’d always thought of myself as a pessimist.

When the bell rang thirty minutes later, students crowded around Mr. Kale, thrusting their ration cards in his face for him to sign. If we didn’t have signatures from all of our teachers, we wouldn’t get our ration from the aid workers.

Katrina had told me to meet her in room 317 after school, and although I was anxious to get out of Mr. Kale’s classroom before she showed up, I stayed in my seat, waiting for Jeremy to join the rest of the students so I wouldn’t have to pass by him again. But Jeremy remained seated, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. His head was bowed, hands covering his face, and his whole body was trembling. I wondered if he was sick. He looked like he was having a seizure.

Then a flicker of motion caught my eye. The door had opened, and Katrina stepped inside.

I slumped lower in my desk, but there was no one for me to hide behind. The room had already started to clear out.

Katrina saw me and smiled.

Then a lot of things happened at once.

Katrina stepped to Mr. Kale’s side. They leaned their heads together, and she whispered something to him. His
usual stoic expression was replaced by one of unmasked surprise. Then both he and Katrina were staring at me as I sat frozen in my seat.

Jeremy stopped shaking and abruptly rose to his feet, turning to me. As he did so a breeze pushed its way into the room, through the windows at my back, and my skin began to tingle, like my whole body had fallen asleep and was now waking up to thousands of tiny pinpricks.

A storm.

There was a storm coming.

And Jeremy was walking straight toward me.

7

“I NEED TO
talk to you,” Jeremy said. From the grim tone of his voice, it sounded like he was about to tell me he’d run over my dog. Not that I had a dog.

“One second.” I tore my eyes from Jeremy and about-faced in my seat, pressing my hands against the window-pane. I searched the hazy horizon line where the sky pressed against the Pacific. But there was not a breath of white in all that blue. If clouds were gathering, they were beyond my range of sight.

Not
if
. Clouds
were
gathering somewhere. I could feel it. The storm would be here tomorrow. Maybe the day after that. I couldn’t say for sure, but I knew it was coming. Knew it in my warming blood and my tingling skin.

I swiveled back around in my seat.

Jeremy stood at the foot of my desk, gazing down at me. I swept my books into my bag and accordioned myself out of my seat. Over Jeremy’s shoulder I could see Katrina and Mr. Kale watching us. Katrina had hoisted herself up to sit on Mr. Kale’s desk, and was swinging her booted legs rhythmically.

The rest of the students had cleared out, but Mr. Kale’s
door was still open, and two more students walked in. Schiz and Quentin, from the cafeteria.

“Kale, we might have a lead on—” Quentin began, but both he and Schiz froze when they saw me. “Never mind,” Quentin finished.

“
I
found her first,” Katrina said. “Me.”

“No one’s giving out awards,” Schiz told her.

“But if they were, I’d win.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Jeremy said to me, keeping his voice low. “You don’t know me, Mia, but I need you to trust me. You do not want to get involved with these people. They’re dangerous.”

He had me at
Let’s get out of here
.

“Miss Price,” Mr. Kale said, “a word, please.”

I don’t know why I did what I did next, but I did it. Call it lack of impulse control, or temporary insanity, or both.

As I slid past him I grabbed Jeremy’s hand to pull him along after me.

A wave of heat washed through me, starting in my hand and coursing up my arm, through my shoulders, boiling up my neck and into my brain.

I had a moment to think,
This can’t be good
, before my mind went white. And then dark.