Connection (Le Garde) by Emily Ann Ward Read Free Book Online

Anna worked on her math homework and she asked me a few questions, but then she’d realize the answer before finishing. Every time she leaned toward me, I could smell something fruity on her, some kind of spray or shampoo.
    When the log-in window said I only had ten minutes left, I dug in my backpack for my flash drive. I saved the paper and glanced over at Anna. “I only got halfway through,” I told her. “Could we meet again tomorrow?”
    “ I have practice with Melissa,” Anna said.
    “ Maybe Wednesday?” I asked. “I need to finish this by Thursday.”
    “ And that’s my fault?” She said it with a smile, and I could feel her playfulness. “Wednesday will work, but you have to pay attention more.” She paused. “Can I see what you wrote?”
    “ Sure.” I was going to turn the monitor toward her, but it was a stubborn thing and it wouldn’t budge.
    Anna reached over, brushing my hand as I struggled with the monitor stand. Her touch shocked me, and the computer suddenly shut off. People surrounding us cried out, and I looked around to see all the computers were off. All of them.
    “ What the hell?” I said. I looked at Anna with wide eyes.
    She looked down at her hand, then mine. “Maybe we should go,” she said quietly.
    “ Yeah.” I pulled the memory stick out of the computer. “Good thing I saved.”
    A librarian came over, a girl with curls that rivaled an 80s hair band. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I have no idea what happened.”
    The old man turned his computer back on. No damage done. Had we done that? Anna thought maybe we should stick around so they didn’t suspect anything, but I just rolled my eyes. How were they going to blame that one us? We communicated silently, and she followed me out of the lab.
    “ That was weird,” I said once we were in the elevator.
    “ You don’t actually think.   .   .” Anna trailed off, chewing on her lip. “I mean, how.   .   .we only touched. It was.   .   .”
    I looked at the elevator panel, then at Anna curiously. “No,” she said immediately.
    As soon as the elevator door opened, she was out. I rushed to keep up with her. For having shorter legs than me, she moved pretty quickly when she wanted to. “Anna,” I said.
    “ I’m going home,” she said. “We can still meet on Wednesday, but this is too weird.”
    We walked through those magnetic detector things that led outside, but they started going off. Anna dug in her bag and found a library book. After hesitating, looking at me and then the book, she got in line. God, was I that horrible?
    I stood next to her, contemplating what to say. “Look, I.   .   .” I trailed off. I couldn’t really say that I liked spending time with her. Not when she and Steven were so chummy, going off to San Francisco together and everything. “I haven’t even done my Government homework.”
    “ We can do it on Wednesday,” Anna said. Her arms were crossed as she craned her head to look past the seven foot guy standing in front of us. “What is taking so long? There are three librarians, and only one of them is taking books.”
    “ Don’t you want to know what happened?” I whispered.
    “ It was just a power surge, that’s all.”
    “ Oh, come on.” I thought about reaching out to touch her, but I didn’t want to freak her out, and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Last week, we’d shocked each other pretty hard. Had we not touched once since then? I thought of that picture, the one where we had our arms around each other. I was even going to show it to her before she reminded me about the paper. It was sitting in my Composition folder.
    We were soon at the checkout desk. “Sorry it’s taking so long,” the librarian said as she took Anna’s library card. “All of our computers shut down a couple minutes ago except for this one.”
    We stared at her in shock and dismay, and she gave us a curious look, like she didn’t know why we were so upset. Well, she