The Fierce Reads Anthology(31)

On Sale May 2012 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers





Prologue




When you’ve been struck by lightning as many times as I have, you start to expect the worst pretty much all the time. You never know when that jagged scrawl of white fire, charged with a hundred million volts of electricity, might blaze down from the sky and find its mark on you; sear a hole like a bullet right through you, or turn your hair to ash; maybe leave your skin blackened to a crisp, or stop your heart; make you blind, or deaf, or both.

Sometimes lightning plays with you a little, lifts you into the air and drops you twenty yards away, blows your shoes off, or flash-fries the clothes from your body, leaving you naked and steaming in the rain. Lightning could wipe the last few hours or days from your memory, or overload your brain, short-circuiting your personality and rendering you a completely different person. I heard about a woman who was struck by lightning and cured of terminal cancer. A paraplegic who was given the ability to walk again.

Sometimes lightning strikes you, but it’s the person standing next to you who ends up in the hospital. Or the morgue.

Any of that could happen, or none of it, or something else no one’s ever heard of. The thing about lightning is you never know what it’s going to do to you. Lightning could turn you into some kind of freakish human battery, storing up energy, leaving you with the persistent feeling that any day now you’re going to spontaneously combust. Like a bomb is going to go off inside you and do, well…what bombs do best.

Or maybe that’s just me.

My name is Mia Price, and I am a human lightning rod. Do they make a support group for that? They should, and let me tell you why.

My name is Mia Price, and I am a lightning addict.

There. Now you know the truth. I want the lightning to find me. I crave it like lungs crave oxygen. There’s nothing that makes you feel more alive than being struck. Unless, of course, it kills you. It does that to me from time to time, which is why I moved to Los Angeles. As the song says, it never rains in Southern California. But the song also says when it pours, it pours.

The song is right.

My name is Mia Price, and it’s been one year since my last strike, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped expecting the worst. Lightning only strikes in L.A. a handful of times every year. The problem is, I traded thunderstorms for earthquakes, one earthquake in particular. The one that changed the city, and my life, forever.

That day, the day of the worst natural disaster to hit the United States, oh, pretty much ever…it rained.

Actually, it poured.





Part I


Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

Proverb





April 14

Three days until the storm…





1




I don’t sleep much. An hour here. Two hours there. Chronic insomnia, it’s one of my more tolerable lightning strike aftereffects. Not as bad as the veiny red scars that cover me from neck to toes, or the burning in my chest that flares hotter when I get a little emotional. Insomnia? Eh. It could be worse (and usually is). Most people wish they had more hours in the day. I keep almost the full twenty-four.

When I go to bed at night, it’s not with the intention to sleep. If sleep happens, great. If it doesn’t, well, that’s something I’ve gotten used to.

So when I opened my eyes and saw a guy standing over my bed, I had to assume I’d finally fallen asleep. And when I noticed the shiny silver knife gripped in his hand—the kind of pretty, decorative blade that has no practical application but murder—I decided this was not a dream I wanted to see through to the end. It would have been nice to stay asleep a bit longer, but now I was going to have to wake myself before Nightmare Boy used his knife to gut me.

“Wake up, Mia,” I told myself in a voice that came out hoarse and scratchy, like it would have if I’d actually awakened.

The guy startled back from my bed. He dropped the knife and it fell straight down and stuck in the wood floor with a thunk. Must be sharp. He scrambled to yank it free, but looked unsure what to do with it after that. His face was in shadow, but his wide, white eyes and jerky movements told me he was as scared as I was supposed to be. As far as nightmares went, he wasn’t too bad. I decided to stay asleep.

I closed my eyes, hoping I’d open them to a new dream.

But there were no more dreams that night, only Nightmare Boy’s soft, retreating footsteps.

When I opened my eyes again, feeling as though I hadn’t slept at all, it was the morning I’d been dreading. The morning when my brother, Parker, and I would return to school for the first time since the quake.

We had a dream dictionary kicking around the house somewhere. If I consulted it, I was pretty sure it would confirm my suspicion that a knife in your dream was a bad omen. Not that I needed an omen to give me the heads up that this day was going to suck.

As I dragged myself out of bed, I noticed a small split in the floor, right about where Nightmare Boy’s knife had lodged itself in the floorboards. Strange. Then again, there were plenty of other little cracks and splits on the old floor of my restored attic bedroom.

I put thoughts of the dream away. I had bigger problems—real problems—to worry about. I didn’t know what to expect back at school, but if the changes that had taken root throughout the rest of the city were any indication, I should probably give in and expect the worst, as usual.