Zapped by Sherwood Smith Read Free Book Online

real power, one anybody can have.
    *   *   *
    When Kyle slammed his notebook onto his desk the next day, it was so easy to zap it I almost didn’t have to pull. But I did pull, hard, sending his papers spilling.
    Half the class thought it an excellent opportunity to get up and kick the papers all over the room, making noise chasing them. Safe in the bobbing, milling crowd, I nipped up two test papers that should have his scent on them, since I wasn’t sure who actually did his homework.
    I slipped them into a waiting folder, and the folder into my backpack as the teacher scowled everyone back into their seats. Mercy never looked my way—until after class, when our eyes met, I did a brief thumbs up.
    When the dismissal bell rang, there she was, waiting with her bike to ride with me to the park.
    She eyed me for about two seconds, then said, “Let me guess. Harper got her hate on, and you got to hear it.” She looked away, then back. “Well, I kinda asked for it.”
    â€œHow?” Zoom. There was the anger again. I tried to bat it down. “How could … making the decision you made be asking for it?”
    â€œIt is when you set fire to the school, and nearly kill someone’s brother,” Mercy said, and I shut up. “You really want to hear this?”
    I grimaced. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”
    â€œThen stop me if it gets too much.” She paused, as if hoping I’d say too much .
    But I didn’t.
    She said slowly, “I’d hoped to meet people as me . Now. But you don’t get to escape your past.” Mercy looked away again. “Dom and I knew we were two girls from the time we were born. The one difference didn’t mean anything to us. As soon as I noticed how clothes marked gender, I was always putting on hers. Why should she get to wear girl clothes when they made me wear boy’s? At first everybody thought it was cute. They said stuff like how it was good I was exploring my feminine side. But when I kept saying that I was a girl…” She shrugged.
    â€œDid they punish you for it?” I asked, slimily remembering my stupid comment about twins. Never again , I promised myself. Never.
    â€œNo. My parents aren’t like that, but, well, my grandfather is this important admiral. He kind of pressured them. ‘We don’t have any history of that kind of thing in our family,’ I remember him saying that. What kind of ‘thing’? Mostly they offered me bribes. If I did boy stuff, I got rewards. They signed me up for every kind of boy activity there is. I told you about the soccer.”
    â€œHow you could leap high and your sister couldn’t.”
    â€œI knew that had nothing to do with girls or boys, because nobody on any of the little kid teams could spring any more than Dom could. So I stopped doing sports. Then I stopped doing schoolwork. I almost stopped springing—you call yours the zap, I call mine the spring—but I really wanted to dance, to fly .”
    She pedaled faster. I kept pace, and she talked to her handlebars. “So one day I was alone at the palisades, springing as high as I could. I can get pretty high. Especially when I’m, um, intense. I was almost ready to spring right off a cliff, and end it all, and then I thought, why should I end me ? It was their fault. I was a girl, but they were making me be a boy because it was right for them , and so … well, I tried to destroy all their stuff.”
    â€œThat fire you mentioned?”
    â€œYup. I leaped up on the school roof with burning newspapers, starting with my classroom. Kyle Moore got the blame, at first. Even when I told them I did it. They didn’t believe me because Dom and I were such good kids. Kyle had been in trouble from first grade. So he got the blame, he even got stuck in juvie overnight, until they believed me.”
    A quick look, her earring hitting her cheek, then away.