Zapped Read Free Page A

your comments, and I am not taking questions. Now get out your homework…”
    I sat there, listening to my heartbeat whoosh in my ears. All I could think was, It’s my fault .
    I knew better. I kept thinking that as my body went through the rest of the school day like a robot. This was ten times worse than cheating at basketball.
    I knew what bullies were like. Dad had warned me in fourth grade that bullies were another name for angry people, and angry people just get angrier. It’s not like the movies, where they learn their lesson. “The only lesson they learn is how not to get caught,” Dad had warned, and he’d taught me bully-avoidance blending in.
    I fell into such a fog of gloom that I forgot to copy down the homework assignment in biology, ran back to snap it with my phone, discovered the teacher had already erased the whiteboard, so I had to chase a classmate, with the result that I was late to the one class where the teacher was a dragon about lateness.
    And so, I, Laurel Ibberts, the careful good student, landed in after-school detention.
    At least I got all my homework done, and when I left, the hot autumn winds had died down a little. I wasn’t used to the white-hot glare of a Southern California autumn.
    When I got to the top of the palisade where the bus bench was located, I turned to look at the hammered silver-blue glitter of the ocean as the sun began to set. I’d been told not to be out after dark, as the school was in an older part of the neighborhood and not all that safe.
    Movement caught my eye: somebody walking fast on the other side of the street, glancing over her shoulder. Fuzzy pale hair swung above an extra large sky blue t-shirt and baggy jeans: it was Mercy. She was being followed by a bunch of older teenage girls. I saw gang-banger tats on one girl’s arms, and another was swinging a crowbar.
    My stomach instantly started boiling. What should I do? But when I looked back, Mercy had ducked around the side of a pawn shop maybe fifty yards away from my bus stop. And then—from my angle, I was the only one could see her between the pawn shop and the liquor store next to it—a twinkle of light made me blink. Through that twinkle Mercy leaped about twenty feet, straight into the air. She landed lightly on the roof of the car repair shop.
    Magic? Energy torqueing weirdly? I knew that twinkle.
    While I goggled in total amazement, the gang-bangers rounded the corner of the pawn shop, looked around, and hustled down the street, right beneath Mercy, who watched them from above.
    She lifted her head, and I would have sworn she stared right at me, though it was hard to tell, the way her glasses flashed, reflecting the low sun. Another tiny flash and she leaped down from the roof, landed like she was a feather, and half-lifted a hand to me.
    Then she ran up the street in the other direction, until she was out of view.
    The bus rumbled up and stopped with a hiss. I climbed on like a robot.
    *   *   *
    People used to ask me these weird little questions about my parents, until I figured out that they wanted to know how it works, with three.
    Mom Gwen and Mom Tate have been together since they were roommates in college. If they could have gotten married back then, they would have. Mom Tate took art, and Mom Gwen studied pre-med, then went into the Navy so she wouldn’t end up with a student debt of a quarter of a million bucks. She liked the Navy, so she stayed in as a doctor, working Naval medical centers as a pediatrician.
    They met my dad when he was just getting out of the Navy—he also went in so he could go to college debt free—but when he finished his eight years, he quit the high-stress world of analysis to get a job as a math teacher.
    Around that same time, my bio mom dumped him and vanished when I was about a year old. Dad met Mom Gwen at the Navy base when he took me in for baby well care, they fell in love, and somehow the